Abstract
Opposing the mythology of the “civilizing mission” of colonial France, Marguerite Duras and some other novelists from French Indochina (Daguerches, Dorgelès, Farrère) show in their works that one of the main aims of colonialism was to develop new areas for expanding capitalism, and then indebted to economic factors. This economic dimension that was deliberately hidden by colonial discourse is made prominent by Un Barrage contre le Pacifique through the extended metaphor of vampirism. The paper aims to examine which literary means are implemented to express the criticism of the spread of western capitalism–arbitrarily regarded as the arising of modernity–within a body of anticolonial works about a former French colony.
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Yves Clavaron
Yves Clavaron is Professor of Comparative Literature at Saint-Étienne University (France). He is currently working on Francophone and Postcolonial Literatures and has recently published the first monograph in French on Edward Said (Edward Said. L'intifada de la culture, Paris, Kimé, 2013). He's also the co-editor of Orientalisme et Comparatisme, Publications de l'Université de Saint-Étienne, « Voix d'ailleurs », 2014.