“Every Discipline […] is a Lineage of Begetting”: The Generation(s) of Francophone Caribbean Studies in the UK and Ireland

Abstract

The article explores the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies in Great Britain and Ireland. It focuses on the first generation of scholars—Richard D.E. Burton, Bridget Jones, Roger Little and others—who were in the vanguard of this opening up of teaching and research in French studies towards the literatures and cultures of the region. The aims of the article are four-fold: (i) to understand these developments biographically, and to consider the professional factors (notably early-career postings to universities outside Europe and early engagement in doctoral research with examples of French literature and culture that spill beyond the Hexagon) that shaped these challenges to the disciplinary status quo; (ii) to situate the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies in relating to what Christophe Campos dubs a wider “cracking of coherence” in the study of French; (iii) to explore the ways in which historically existing disciplinary infrastructure—taking the example of the journal French Studies—adapted with varying degrees of enthusiasm to these changes; and (iv) to analyse the emergence and consolidation of a new disciplinary infrastructure in the 1970s–1990s—in Caribbean studies and Francophone literature more broadly (e.g., ASCALF, with its annual conference and publications)—to support these developments

Keywords:

• Generations
• Francophone Caribbean studies
• biography
• disciplinary infrastructure
• journals
• associations
• Tim Ingold

Published in 1972, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s call for the “abolition of the English department”—a response to an internal paper produced in 1968 relating to the future of the Department of English at the University of Nairobi—is a key intervention in the decolonization of the ways in which we study literature and culture and build the disciplinary frames in which this activity occurs. In this text co-authored with his then colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Henry Owuor-Anyumba, Ngũgĩ reacts to a proposal for light post-independence diversification of the curriculum, including variously the integration into his unit of language and linguistics, a recasting of the relationship to Modern Languages (notably French), a nascent recognition of the role of African languages (such as Swahili) and a seemingly reluctant acknowledgement that there might be a need to consider the introduction of a parallel Department of African literature and culture. The reaction in this document by Ngũgĩ and his peers constitutes the purposeful intervention of a new postcolonial generation of scholars willing to disrupt the perpetuation of colonial patterns of education and knowledge production. Their principal frustration is that the academic and epistemological assumptions underpinning the plans for renewal of their department remain fundamentally Eurocentric if not more specifically Anglocentric: “the English tradition and the emergence of the modern west are the central root of our consciousness and cultural heritage” (Ngũgĩ 1995 [1972], 439).

In place of such an additive approach, their aim was to rethink the curriculum in situ, challenging the biases that, in post-independence contexts, were freighted by inherited disciplinary structures, highlighting the epistemicide in which they risked complicity, and then proposing an alternative model that replaced an English department with a Department of African literature and languages. In the context of the postcolonial nation-state, and deploying terms that we may argue had (and indeed continue to have) much broader resonance, Ngũgĩ and his co-authors claimed: “The primary duty of any literature department is to illuminate the spirit animating a people, to show how it meets new challenges, and to investigate possible areas of development and involvement” (1995 [1972], 439). Their vision was that of a recentring of African cultural production and a parallel relativization of a canonical West, represented notably by a canon disseminated in dominant colonial languages. Ngũgĩ’s plan was far from exclusively nationalist. His interest extended to diasporic literatures, including notably those of the Caribbean, and he acknowledged European literatures as just “one source of influence on modern African literatures” (439). The result, nevertheless, in terms of the disruption to inherited modes of literary criticism and cultural analysis, was a Copernican revolution, potentially provincializing the pedagogies of the former colonial powers: “With Africa at the centre of things, not existing as an appendix or a satellite of other countries and literatures, things must be seen from the African perspective” (441).

The departmental memo, of which “On the abolition of the English department” is a striking example, remains an unappreciated genre quite rightly associated with ephemerality and customarily consigned to the archive. This particular text was, however, included in Ngũgĩ’s 1972 collection Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics and has subsequently been widely anthologized elsewhere. Now considered one of the founding statements of postcolonial criticism, it has been instrumental—beyond the immediate context of its origin—in both highlighting the complicity of academic disciplines in the persistent dynamics of (neo)colonial power and indicating alternative configurations of knowledge creation in the wake of empire. While not often acknowledged, the approach proposed by Ngũgĩ depended on an actively multilingual critique of a subject area that had previously been stubbornly monolingual, establishing in “On the abolition of the English department” a critique that has continued into his most recent writings on multilingualism and translation such as The Language of Languages (Ngũgĩ 2023):

For the purposes of the Department, a knowledge of Swahili, English and French should be compulsory. The largest body of writing by Africans is now written in the French language. Africans writing in the French language have also produced most of the best poems and novels. In fact, it makes nonsense to talk of modern African literature without French. (Ngũgĩ 1995 [1972], 440)

Such a recognition of the importance of postcolonial literary production in French—centred notably around the Negritude movement, which saw Senghor’s prominence in African literature complemented by an equally high visibility of Césaire’s work, much of which (e.g., Une saison au Congo, 1966) spoke directly into contemporary African contexts—raises the question as to whether there were parallel calls, in newly independent states and elsewhere, for the “abolition of the French department” (Forsdick 2010). The hegemony of the French language together with the persistence of French literature as a national literature with universalist pretentions meant that such a development did not occur in any sustained way in French-speaking universities in Africa and the Caribbean, with the result that the impetus for reform in France itself was also reduced. Moreover, French-language publishing has always lacked the polycentrism associated with its English-language equivalent, creating centralizing tendencies reflected also in the uncanny power of French literary institutions such as the Académie française to recuperate and neutralize difference. In French academia, while the importance of an emerging so-called “Francophone” tradition was slowly acknowledged by pioneering scholars in France such as Jacques Chevrier, Lilyane Kesteloot, Alain Ricard, Bernard Mouralis and Daniel Delas, the tendency was often to locate the study of this body of writing in the field of comparative literature, meaning that the analysis and associated consecration of French literature seen as a canonical, universal tradition remained intact and immune to the provincialization or decentring that Ngũgĩ’s “abolition” implied.

The relationship of French studies in the English-speaking world to these patterns of engagement with literature in France was, for many years, mimetic, replicating notions of French-language canonicity, incorporating the assumptions of methodological (and often ethnolinguistic) nationalism, and resisting the implications of integrating writing (and indeed broader cultural production) from other parts of the Francosphere. In this disciplinary context, Christophe Campos (1989) describes, however, the way in which coherence “cracked” in the post-1968 period, not least with the growing recognition of the importance of literatures in French originating from outside France—designated at the time (and indeed often into the present) with the problematic label of “Francophone”—playing an increasingly important role. Over five decades on, with the growing normalization of approaches to French studies that are gathered under the broad umbrella of the “global” (Denié-Higney and Klekovkina 2023), the need to add “and Francophone” to the field’s title (i.e., in “French and Francophone studies”) is seen as increasingly questionable: “This explosive concept,” as noted Julien Suaudeau recently, “needs to be defused” (2023, 618). The commitment is increasingly to exploration of the Francosphere in its transnational complexity (Hargreaves, Forsdick and Murphy 2010; Forsdick and Launchbury 2023), acknowledging diasporic and translingual dimensions, and accepting—in Glissantian terms—that France itself is associated with an actually-existing set of hybridized, hybridizing cultures, identities and communities. These are the result of what Patrick Chamoiseau, in Frères migrants, has dubbed “rencontres multi-trans-culturelles” (2017, 79), and what may be seen as such a Caribbeanization of the study of France—beginning with the fundamental assertion of the existence of a “république métisée” (Dubois 2000)—reflects an approach to world cultures already proposed by James Clifford in The Predicament of Cultures in 1986. In exoticizing France and de-exoticizing the Caribbean (with the “exotic” here understood in the defamiliarizing ways that Victor Segalen suggested), there is an invitation to follow the relativizing logic of Édouard Glissant who, in a bold statement for the 1950s, claimed to his French readers: “Vous dites outre-mer (nous l’avons dit avec vous), mais vous êtes bientôt outre-mer” (1956, 21).

The disciplinary, methodological and epistemological impacts of such approaches are manifold, and need at the same time to be located in relation to broader genealogies of the ways in which France, French and Frenchness have been studied, not least by those in the English-speaking world whose external, ethnographic perspective permits what Michael Kelly has dubbed the “regard de l’étranger” (2014). While underlining the very different dynamics of the study of postcolonial literatures in English on the one hand and in French on the other, as the discussion of Ngũgĩ suggests above, this article considers these genealogies by exploring the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies in Great Britain and Ireland.¹ It focuses on a first generation of scholars—Gertrud Aub-Buscher, Richard D.E. Burton, Bridget Jones, Roger Little and several others—who operated in the vanguard of this opening up of teaching and research in French studies towards the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean region.

The aims of the article are multiple. First, it seeks to understand these developments biographically, and to consider the professional factors (notably early-career postings to universities outside Europe and early engagement, especially in doctoral research, with examples of French literature and culture that spill beyond the Hexagon) that shaped these challenges to the disciplinary status quo. Then, it situates the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies in relating more broadly to what Campos—in terms already noted above—dubs a wider cracking of the coherence of the ways in which “French” was studied. The article then goes on to explore the ways in which historically existing disciplinary infrastructure—taking the specific example of the journal French Studies—adapted with varying degrees of enthusiasm to these changes. Finally, it analyses the emergence and consolidation of a new disciplinary infrastructure in the period from the 1970s to the 1990s—in Caribbean studies and Francophone literature more broadly (notably ASCALF, the Association for the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French, with its annual conference and associated publications)—in support of these developments. The article concludes with a brief discussion in the context of the topic of this special issue of Tim Ingold’s recent work on generations, underlining the need for engagement, in the present, with the legacies of earlier cohorts of scholars as well as for an emphasis on the possibility of dialogue between researchers in the present and these earlier disciplinary histories. As Ingold notes, this implies an approach to generations as phenomena that wrap around one another, not stacked but resembling a rope in which “each strand must find purchase in the world by binding with others” (2024, 96).

Disciplinary Histories, Individual Lives

French studies has been more reluctant than other fields to embrace any acknowledgement of the biographies of the prominent researchers and teachers involved in the disciplinary field in its disciplinary formation and development. There are some notable exceptions, such as individual autobiographies by scholars (including Kaplan [1993] and Susan Suleiman [2023]) and the special issue of French Cultural Studies devoted to “the hidden selves of scholars and teachers” (Rigby 1999), the majority of which focus nevertheless on their subjects’ relationship to France itself. Historians such as Herman Lebovics and Tyler Stovall, both of whom have made a major contribution to understandings of the afterlives of French colonialism in contemporary France, provided “ego-histories,” a genre in which scholars of French history have been active, for the volume Why France? (Downs and Gerson 2011).² There is lack of such attention, however, to the lives of that generation of scholars at the core of this article who actively sought to integrate cultural and literary production of the French Caribbean into French studies in the English-speaking world. In a relatively short article such as this, there is a need to be selective, both in terms of contributions evoked and details studied, meaning that a much broader survey is required. This would include an approach that distinguishes between curriculum innovation and research, explores in greater detail motivations and resistance of change, draws on interviews, oral histories, ego-histories and more extensive interrogation of the archive, and acknowledges wider collaborations and other contributions from beyond academia.³ At the same time, there is a need to situate these developments within broader patterns of expansion of the field to include the arguably more dominant integration of French-language literature from Francophone Africa itself. Key figures such as Clive Wake, based for most of his career at the University of Kent in Canterbury, are known for their promotion of authors—in Wake’s case (as was the case of many other discussed in this article) through translation, often in Heineman’s African Writers Series for which he collaborated regularly with John Reed—such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Sembène Ousmane, Malick Fall and Williams Sassine. Wake was also, however, a scholar of Francophone Antillean writing, for instance giving a talk on “Aimé Césaire and the French Caribbean” at the second conference of the Caribbean Artists Movement in August 1968 and supporting a process described by John La Rose as that of “the Caribbean breaking out of its imprisonment in a single language—whether Dutch, French, Spanish or English—and reaching out to itself across language barriers” (Walmsley 1992, 239).⁴

In the first instance, members of the generation of scholars and teachers who challenged the methodological nationalism of French studies and its associated (and often unquestioned) focus on a French national canon emerged, on the whole, individually. While structures would develop relatively rapidly, as I discuss below, to federate this activity, the interest in the literature and culture of the French Caribbean was primarily a result of personal trajectories. A common experience was that of teaching Modern Languages, often at an early-career moment, in universities in newly independent countries in Africa and the Caribbean, in the period associated with Ngũgĩ’s intervention with which this article began. Clive Wake himself, born in Cape Town, taught at the University of Rhodesia before moving to the University of Kent. While initially appointed to the University of Southampton following doctoral study in Durham, Roger Little, who would become a prominent advocate for the inclusion of French-language literatures of Africa and the Caribbean in the broader curriculum while Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin, spent a period in the early 1970s as professor and chair of the French department at the University of Sierra Leone.

For this generation, the University of the West Indies played an important role too, as is exemplified by the career of one of the most prominent scholars of the Francophone Caribbean in the United States, the Trinidadian J. Michael Dash. For those in Higher Education in the UK and Ireland, Richard D.E. Burton, who while at the University of Sussex would go on to make a major contribution to understandings of the culture and society of the Francophone Caribbean, also taught in the Department of French and German at UWI (Mona) from 1970 to 1972, and Gertrud Aub-Buscher, a member of this generation of scholars who would subsequently move to the UK and direct the language centre at the University of Hull, describes in her obituary of Bridget Jones the existence at UWI from the 1960s of “a team of young academics adapting syllabuses more closely tied to the Caribbean than had been possible when the institution was a college of London University” (Aub-Buscher 2000). Jones’s interventions in the curriculum at UWI were exemplary of the diversification of French studies, in which she would also subsequently play a key role back in the UK. Inheriting a programme that was exclusively European—Baudelaire, Sartre, Ionesco…—she responded to a student appetite to study texts in French from outside France by introducing options in Caribbean and African literature. Her own research followed these curriculum developments as she began to write on Léon Damas, René Depestre and Simone Schwarz-Bart. She also encouraged engagement with the still underexplored literary production of French Guiana as well as the French-language theater of the wider region. Aub-Buscher and Beverley Ormerod Noakes note that Jones, in the absence of suitable teaching materials, developed with novelist Merle Hodge a “much-needed anthology of five francophone Caribbean poets” (2003, xv).⁵ This was, they add, “much admired by the publishers to whom it was submitted, but was returned with regrets, no doubt because it was ahead of its time.”⁶

This sense of belonging to an unacknowledged vanguard generation is underlined by the fact that this counterflow, i.e., the debt French studies in the English-speaking world owes to the teaching experiences of some of its pioneering figures in Higher Education in newly independent states in Africa and the Caribbean, remains largely unexplored. What is also striking among this generation is the extent to which their work already transcended any divide between the “French” and the “Francophone” that would later emerge. In an early intervention in postcolonial literary criticism in France, Les Contre-littératures (1975), Bernard Mouralis assembled a range of authors from inside and outside France to explore the policing of definitions of “Literature” and of the mechanisms adopted to include certain texts in the category and exclude others. His essay, which draws on the work of Victor Segalen, is fundamentally a reflection on alterity, and it is striking that the work of the generation of researchers and teachers active in the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies implies a similar approach, identifying a defamiliarizing otherness always already present within French literature itself that would serve in many ways as a connection to works they studied from the Antilles. By way of example, Bridget Jones wrote an unpublished Ph.D. thesis (at KCL) on the outsider figure Antonin Artaud (Aub-Buscher 2000); Richard D.E. Burton alternated throughout his career research on the Caribbean with his expertise on Charles Baudelaire (including contributions as a particularly astute reader of poems such as “Le voyage”); and Roger Little’s Ph.D. (1969), from Durham under the supervision of Louis Allen, was on the theme of exile in the poetry of Saint-John Perse, and provides early acknowledgement of the traces of Creole in the poet’s work and the impact of his (then largely ignored) Caribbean origins on his literary creativity.⁷ The author of books on Perse, Rimbaud and Apollinaire (among others), Little went on to develop an inclusive approach to poetics in French-language literature, building on this expertise to integrate the work of Aimé Césaire alongside writers from Francophone sub-Saharan Africa and developing an approach situated—in the title of a festschrift edited by his former students David Murphy and Aedín Ní Loingsigh (2002)—at the “threshold of otherness.”

These examples of the trajectories that led scholars from this generation to research and teach the literatures of the Francophone Caribbean help us understand more clearly what Christophe Campos (1989), in one of the few histories of French studies, perceived to be a cracking of disciplinary coherence in the 1970s and 1980s. This was, in fact, characterized not only by a diversification of subject matter and a rethinking of the topics of research and teaching, but also by a radical revisiting of the methodological framing of analyses of the French-speaking world. Through the work that emerged around several new journals—including Modern and Contemporary France (launched in 1980), Paragraph (in 1983) and French Cultural Studies (in 1990)—there was a significant recasting of the ways in which France itself was studied, in terms of an opening up of what were perceived to be legitimate objects of analysis (in the light of engagement with area studies and cultural studies) as well as an elaboration of new approaches to them (notably in the light of critical theory). The conventional emphasis on canonical literature was increasingly tested, not least with a commitment to extending the curriculum to include women’s writing and forms previously dismissed as “paraliterary” such as detective fiction and comics. Many of these developments retained, however, the national frame of the Hexagon. Moreover, they did not understand disciplinary diversification in terms of any broader decolonization that extended across the French-speaking world, anticipating connections that are both postcolonial and transnational. The extension of the field to encompass the French Caribbean was a key part of this process, underlining not only the centrality of the region to an emerging understanding of the French Black Atlantic (Stafford 2001), but also asserting the importance of French in a hemispheric grasp of the Americas (Marshall 2009). The implications of these developments were also interdisciplinary, permitting French studies to contribute to comparative, multilingual understandings of Caribbean studies, linking island spaces often divided along linguistic lines. At the same time, given the extensive connections with institutions such as UWI discussed above, the pioneering generation of scholars were instrumental in early forms of co-creation of knowledge, exemplified by Bridget Jones’s close collaborations with playwrights and directors in the region that culminated shortly before her death in the publication with Sita Dickson Littlewood of Paradoxes of French Caribbean Theatre (1997), a major checklist of 400 plays in French or Creole written since 1900 by writers from French Guiana, Guadeloupe and Martinique.

Disciplinary Reconfigurations

The introduction of Francophone Caribbean texts to the curriculum from the 1970s onwards, as well as the growing interest in them as objects of research in their own right, involved in the first instance the diversification of French studies rather than the more active decolonization that engagement with Césaire, Condé, Fanon, Glissant and others has more recently encouraged. These developments nevertheless required significant shifts in disciplinary infrastructure as well as a prizing open of the national if not nationalist assumptions that limited French studies to the study of France itself. One of the most striking ways to study these developments is to explore the extent to which they were reflected in the evolution of one of the principal journals in the field, French Studies. This was established in 1947 and then published from 1961 on behalf of the Society for French Studies as a place not only for the study of canonical French literature from across a range of centuries (articles in early issues were dedicated to Mallarmé, Molière, Vauvenargues, Montesquieu, Laforgue and Sainte-Beuve, showing an apparent commitment to chronological “coverage”), but also for “an active and well-informed critical response in the English-speaking world to recent cultural developments in France” (Bowie and O’Brien 1997, 385). Although in the article quoted here (marking “French Studies after fifty years”) the authors note many ways in which the opening half century of the journal is “the story of initiatives and opportunities undertaken to keep the study of French constantly healthy and dynamic” and go on to celebrate contributions from “foreign scholars, from France, America, Australia or wherever the study of French constitutes a vital intellectual principle” (393), it is striking that in their national emphases they fail to acknowledge at all the existence of objects of study beyond France. There is special mention made of Richard D.E. Burton’s work, in a 1996 article not on Martinique but on “the significance of Dambreuse’s funeral in L’Education sentimentale” (1997, 392).

Closer scrutiny of the journal reveals, however, evidence of Campos’s cracking of coherence in terms of an opening up to the Francosphere, including slowly to the Caribbean region. More broadly, French Studies provides evidence from the 1950s of an awareness of the study of literature in French from outside France, as a 1957 article by David M. Hayne on “Recent aids to French-Canadian literary studies” makes clear. From the 1960s, a focus on authors who would be known subsequently as écrivains d’outre-France was evident in studies of translingual authors such as Eugène Ionesco (Greshoff 1961; Knowles 1974), and these were complemented by an interest in the colonial dimensions of more canonical French literature (G. Hainsworth, for instance, on “West-African local colour in Tamango” [1967], a text to which Roger Little also devoted a study in 1992; Yves Giraud on the formation of the myth of Tahiti [1977]; or J.A. Ferguson on “the identity and function of the negro” in Rimbaud [1985]). It was not until the 1990s, however, that articles on Francophone Caribbean subjects began to appear, with Roger Little’s study of “Questions of intertextuality in La Tragédie du Roi Christophe” (1994) and Celia Britton’s article, the following year (1995), on “Opacity and transparence” in Butor and Glissant (bringing together her twin interests of the nouveau roman and Caribbean literature in French, and drawing on a keynote at the Society for French Studies annual conference the previous year).

To detect traces of the slow emergence (and even slower acceptance) of an interest in the Francophone Caribbean, there is a need to look elsewhere, notably among book reviews, always a strength of the journal, where emerging trends become apparent even if they are not overt among actual contributions to the journal. Already in 1964, French Studies had included the modern French poetry specialist Percy Mansell Jones’s review of a 1962 study by G.R. Coulthard published by OUP “under the auspices of the Institute of Race Relations,” on Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature.⁸ Mansell Jones acknowledged the importance of Caribbean literature, noting in particular the Haitian tradition, but his observations suggest a lack of sympathy to authors such as Césaire, whom he saw as “imitative” (1964, 89): “apart from vague dreams of a recovered primitivism in an Africa pictured as a ‘Negro Arcadia’,” he claims, “most of the West Indian writers have not gone far beyond the stage of flagellating white civilization with the thongs of rhetorical abuse” (90). These inauspicious beginnings reveal the mix of unfamiliarity and reluctant engagement with which Caribbean literature in French was initially acknowledged. Evidence of a slow Caribbean turn in criticism is evident in a review in 1974 by Roger Little of Emile Yoyo’s Saint-John Perse et le conteur (1974). The reviewer notes the “Européo-centrisme” of earlier criticism, and while taking exception to the detail of argument about the Creole background of poems written after Eloges, approves the core observation that “Perse is French plus” (1974, 347; emphasis in the original). The impact of attention to the Caribbean elsewhere, on French linguistics, can be seen in a 1983 review by Glanville Price of the four volumes of Trends in Romance Linguistics and Philology, edited by Rebecca Posner (who incidentally had been appointed Professor of French and Head of Modern Languages at the University of Ghana in the early 1960s) and John Green. Singling out Auguste Viatte’s chapter on “French outside France,” Price comments that it is “wide-ranging but in some respects unbalanced (more on Haiti and the Caribbean than on Canada)” (1983, 118), and this emerging tendency to prize open fields to include reference to Francophone Caribbean material can be seen the following year in a 1984 review by Michael Sheringham of Michael Bishop’s edited collection on The Language of Poetry: Crisis and Solution, in which the reviewer notes in particular a chapter by A. James Arnold on Aimé Césaire.

In 1987, David Bradby provided a review of Perspectives on Language and Literature. Essays in Honour of William Mailer, edited by J. Michael Dash and Bridget Jones. (Mailer was a classical theatre specialist, educated at Edinburgh and the Sorbonne, who had founded the Department of French at UWI [Mona] in 1951). Bradby notes the range of skills required by specialists in the French Caribbean since they need to “show proficiency not merely in the language and literature of France, but also that of francophone territories whose concerns are often very different” (1987, 243), and concludes his overview of chapters by contributors including Gertrud Aub-Buscher (on French syntax in the Caribbean), Richard D.E. Burton (on Baudelaire) and Clive Wake (on Mongo Beti) by noting “the vigour of French studies in the Caribbean” (244), a judgement reflected in the review that immediately followed, by Rosemarie Jones (1987), of Beverley Ormerod’s Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel. The steady emergence of the region’s visibility was matched by shifts in other publications, not least in The Year’s Work in Modern Languages, published by the MHRA, which from its forty-ninth volume in 1987 at last included a section, prepared by Belinda Jack, on “Caribbean and African Literature in French.” The emphasis was more on the latter than the former, and much of the material included on the Caribbean—a book by Ronnie Scharfman on Césaire, Bernadette Cailler on Glissant—was produced by scholars based in the USA. Back in French Studies, by the middle of the next decade, inclusion of the Caribbean had—as noted above—become more normalized, with Peter France—the subtle shift in whose title for The Oxford Companion to Literature in French (1995) enshrined a significant evolution in understandings of the field—critiquing with characteristic diplomacy Béatrice Didier for a half-hearted acknowledgement of African and Caribbean writing in French in a new edition of her Que sais-je volume on Les Grandes Dates de la littérature française. “Chronologies are of course not neutral,” France comments, “and different readers will react differently to the canon proposed here” (1996, 240). By 1994, the French Studies conference, held at the University of Liverpool, also reflected this growing confidence of French Caribbean studies (French Studies 1994). In addition to a keynote by Celia Britton on Glissant (noted already above), Bridget Jones had proposed a panel on “Black Africa and the Caribbean” (the first of two on “Francophone Literature,” meaning that two out of nine sessions were devoted to the area), including a paper by Mary Gallagher on “The Revaluation of the Plantation in Twentieth-Century Caribbean Writing in French.”

The Emergence of New Disciplinary Infrastructure

The shifts evident in this close analysis of the content of the journal French Studies—from begrudging acknowledgement in the mid-1960s to more active integration three decades later—conceals significant efforts by the generation of teachers and researchers discussed above to develop a subfield.⁹ Such a process depends on recognition of shared interests and a search for structures in which these are permitted to converge and be amplified. The inauguration of ASCALF in 1989, in which researchers such as Bridget Jones played a key role, was a major landmark in these developments, but its emergence occurred alongside a series of associated debates relating to the acknowledgement in formal education and more broadly of Caribbean literature across multiple linguistic traditions as well as of post-independence (notably “Commonwealth” or “Francophone”) writings more generally. The repercussions of these processes are to be seen as much in university syllabuses as they are in the activity of publishers committed to developing new series, in the circulation of mimeographed bibliographies as in scheduling of film screenings, in the launch of subject groupings and the development of pedagogical materials, in the organization of workshops and the establishment of journals.

Initially key to this work was the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean and African Literature (ATCAL), a pressure group founded in 1978 at a conference at the University of Kent by activists associated with the Caribbean Artists Movement (Schwartz 2003, 225). Attended by writers including Chinua Achebe, James Berry and John Agard, the inaugural event triggered extensive activity, including the establishment of regional groups, delivering the objective, stated in a 1979 press release, of promoting the value of “teaching Caribbean and African literature in educational institutions in this country as a means of extending students’ awareness of other cultures, and its particular relevance in multi-racial schools.”¹⁰ Committed primarily to the diversification of literature in English taught in secondary schools, ATCAL published booklets for teachers, lobbied exam boards and launched the journal Wasafiri. The involvement of Clive Wake, of dix-neuviémiste Colin Smethurst (then at the University of the Liverpool) and of others ensured that Anglophone emphases were tempered and there was an openness to other languages, notably French.

In parallel to ACTAL, in a Higher Education context, the Society for Caribbean Studies was founded in 1976 at a conference at the University of York, following initial discussions held at the Institute for Latin American Studies at the University of Liverpool in 1974. In this context also, through the activities of SCS members such as Gertrud Aub-Buscher and Bridget Jones (the latter following her return to the UK in 1982), the Society actively sought to include Francophone topics, but by the late 1980s, there was sufficient impetus to create an independent group dedicated to the French Antilles (very little attention was paid to Haiti at this stage). ASCALF was founded following an initial conference at the Institut français in London in 1988, with the equal importance of the Caribbean in the association’s broader “Francophone” activities regularly asserted by Bridget Jones and other specialists in the region—as Mary Gallagher noted in her obituary of Jones: “It is undoubtedly true that, were it not for Bridget, the ‘C’ of ASCALF would have been either completely absent or utterly nominal” (2000, 62). A publication, initially entitled Feuille à palabres (“following a witty suggestion by Roger Little” [Hawkins 1989, 1]), was published in September 1989, but after some members criticized the title as “too old-fashioned, heavy with associations of nostalgia for an African past that is no longer a reality,” it reverted to the more anodyne ASCALF Bulletin. By the second issue, in September 1990, the publication had developed into a more significant publication edited by Mary Gallagher (then at Maynooth College), including information on the Association’s dedicated French Caribbean seminar (at whose inaugural session in London Richard D.E. Burton spoke on “assimilation and opposition in contemporary Martinique”) and details of the activity of linked groupings such as the Society for Caribbean Studies. The issue also contained details of Belinda Jack’s defence, in Oxford in Michaelmas term 1989, of her thesis on “The autonomy of a literature: major theoretical issues in the history and criticism of Negro-African literature in French,” clear evidence of the progressive consolidation of Francophone Caribbean studies in French departments in the UK and Ireland (with a strikingly clear concentration in Scotland and Ireland thanks to key individuals in post there).

By the third issue in 1991, the Bulletin had begun to publish more substantial articles and provided an account of the increasing expansion of the annual conference, which had welcomed Roger Toumson as its keynote speaker the previous year as part of a series of regular invitations to prominent scholars and authors from the French-speaking world. Throughout the 1990s, the bulletin served as an invaluable source of information on conferences, performances, exhibitions and recent publications. It included Richard D.E. Burton’s insightful personal reflections on Vincent Placoly following the author’s death in 1992 (Issue 5, 1992), Peter Hawkins on Césaire’s eightieth birthday (Issue 7, 1993), Mary Gallagher on the future of the créolité movement (Issue 9, 1994). The personal dynamics of the emerging field emerge on the page, with Clive Wake for instance, in a review of Protée noir (the proceedings of the inaugural 1988 ASCALF conference), describing Roger Little and Peter Hawkins as “patronizing” in their attitude towards Black writers (1993, 38)—a reminder that while a generation might be associated with shared purposefulness, exemplified by qualities admired in Bridget Jones of being “simply passionate about Caribbean literature and genuinely anxious to develop its study” (Gallagher 2000, 63), it is to be identified at the same time with fundamentally human characteristics that belie any sense of homogeneity and often generate divergences of opinion and approach. The conference reports that form a key part of the ASCALF Bulletin until its replacement by the publications of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies in 2002 give a clear sense of the conviviality with which this activity was often accompanied, but also reflect the creative tensions that allow a field to evolve, not least between generations as they grapple with the implications of new ideas and new methods—and as they reflect on what these mean for reckoning with disciplinary histories and for imagining disciplinary futures.

Conclusion: Towards “Intergenerational Coexistence”

The motivations for writing an article of this type, exploring the contributions of previous generations of scholars, are multiple. On the one hand, on a personal level, the recognition of the contributions of a number of those discussed above is an act of gratitude towards colleagues who generously shared knowledge, contacts, feedback and more general encouragement when I was beginning my career and exploring the possible directions it might take or the contributions I might make. On the other, on a collective level, considerations of disciplinary (and sub-disciplinary) histories should always be part of regular business as each generation of scholars considers the practices and approaches they have inherited, and then seeks to discern what they should retain and what they would be advised to replace. Some would argue that it is the failure to conduct such systematic self-reflection that has generated some of the challenges faced by Modern Languages in the early decades of the twenty-first century. It is the process of critical, selective retaining and letting go of aspects of the past that permits the types of progress that draw on that past in order to imagine sustainable disciplinary futures. In a recent study, Tim Ingold warns against the existence of a “Generation Now,” rooted in the dangerous, often target-driven belief in a self-sufficient present that relegates previous generations to the past and pays little attention to those to come. Ingold’s anxiety relates to a sequential understanding of progress, according to which “[w]e are quick to treat each generation as its own layer, in command of the present, having supplanted its predecessor but destined to be supplanted in its turn” (2024, vii–viii), an approach that he juxtaposes with the view that “life is not confined within generations but forged in the collaboration of their overlap” (viii); this sense, not of continuity but of a series of episodic replacements, is encapsulated by Ingold in the image of the stack, which—unlike the continuous, overlapping threads of the rope—sees “the life of each generation […] confined to its own layer” (9). His preference is for a Bergsonian model that rejects such neat accumulation and the dislocation it implies and posits instead an understanding whereby “we see ‘each generation leaning over the generation that shall follow’” (Ingold 2024, 16; emphasis in the original).

Part of Ingold’s reflection—drawing on his earlier work on what he calls the “life of lines” (2015)—focuses on tracks and trails, with the latter privileged for their collective, continuous nature, the ways in which it designated “intergenerational coexistence” (2024, 103): “the trail is formed along with the beings that walk it, the places they inhabit and the landscape in which it is inscribed, as the crystallization of a collective life process. As such, it may be carried on through generations, as descendants follow in the footsteps of their ancestors” (38–39). The stories—individual and collective—I have gathered in this article relate to the emergence, over the past half century, of Francophone Caribbean studies as an area of research and teaching that has acquired a degree of visibility and autonomy but that depends nevertheless on its connections with a range of broader disciplinary fields, notably but not exclusively French studies (with its emphases on the languages, cultures and societies of the French-speaking world), Caribbean studies (with its focus on the broader region) and postcolonial studies (with its commitment to understanding the persistence of the colonial in the present). Narrating these stories involves reflection on personal trajectories, but also obliges us to consider how these trajectories converge in various institutional initiatives essential for field-building. Unlike the “abolition” proposed by Ngũgĩ in the text discussed at the beginning of this article, the stories reveal instead an evolutionary process associated with initial resistance and marginalization in the context a scholarly establishment associated with Eurocentric national models and canonical objects of study. They involve a persistent commitment to fostering the credibility and visibility—in an academic context and beyond—of the literary and cultural production of the French Caribbean, and the resulting creation of a critical mass (of researchers and students, of research and teaching activity) in the field. Any understanding of the current mainstreaming of literature and thought from the French-speaking Caribbean—evident, for instance, in the growing influence of Édouard Glissant as a theorist of the “Tout-Monde,” in the recognition of the importance within the context of World Literature of authors such as Maryse Condé, in the flourishing over the past two decades of interest in Haiti (a remarkable phenomenon in its own right, following in the wake of the earlier pioneering but undervalued contributions of scholars such as J. Michael Dash)—needs to be rooted in the work of the pioneering researchers and teachers discussed in this article. An approach that, in Ingold’s terms, stacks up generations and fails to acknowledge their overlaps obscures the ways in which varying generational approaches to the French-speaking Caribbean—“Francophone,” “postcolonial,” “decolonial”…—are in fact entangled and far from mutually exclusive. Thinking about generations in these terms reveals continuities as much as discontinuities. It urges us to nurture a disciplinary memory that eschews nostalgia and instead, in Ingold’s terms, transports us into “a landscape of inquiry, stretching as far as the eye can see, and beyond, along paths already trodden by illustrious predecessors” (2024, 112).

Such a focus on generations—past, present and future—has the potential, in this way, to become generative: “Every discipline […] is a lineage of begetting, wound like a rope from the overlapping scholarly lives of its numerous practitioners. And, as a result, your task is to carry it on” (Ingold 2024, 112–113).

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Charles Forsdick

Charles Forsdick is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge. He is a specialist on francophone postcolonial writing and world-literature in French, French colonial history, and postcolonial memorialization. Recent publications include the co-edited Transnational French Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2023). He is British Academy Lead Fellow for Languages and a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Notes

1 The article aims to complement Martin Munro’s work in this special issue on “The Other Americans: Michael Dash and the UWI Generation.” As the examples of interventions by scholars such as A. James Arnold (2024) and considerations of the contributions of J. Michael Dash (Dize 2023) make clear, a parallel discussion is to be had on the emergence of the study of Francophone Caribbean studies in North America, with the acknowledgement that a different institutional and cultural context allowed the earlier emergence of pioneering scholars such as Mercer Cook who, at Howard University and Atlanta University in the interwar period, was already integrating Haitian literature into the programme (see Ní Loingsigh 2018). Attention might be paid in Australia to the work of or Beverley Ormerod, born in Jamaica, who introduced French Caribbean literature courses at the University of the West Indies where she lectured in the 1960s before moving to the University of Western Australia.

2 See also, in the very specific context of the Second World War, Braganca and Louwagie 2018.

3 For instance, the Guyanese author Roy Heath, an active member of the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures, or ATCAL, studied French at the University of London and spent much of his career teaching Modern Languages in secondary schools in the city.

4 For further details, see Bruening 2006, 78–79.

5 Hodge, who was then a colleague in French at UWI, had completed an MPhil at the University of London on Damas in 1967 (“The Writings of Léon Damas and Their Connection with the Négritude Movement in Literature”) and also translated the poet’s Pigments into English.

6 This seems to refer to a proposal to Heinemann Educational’s Caribbean Writers series in 1976. For details, see “Correspondence relating to the proposed publication of two anthologies compiled by Bridget Jones in the Caribbean writers series,” Heinemann Education Books archive, University of Reading, HEB 50/1.

7 Little’s remarkable contribution to readings of Perse across six decades is reflected in the collected interventions published by the Institut du Tout-Monde, Approches de Saint-John Perse (Little 2024).

8 Gabriel R. Coulthard was an English academic who spent much of his career at UWI (Mona), notably as Professor of Latin American Literature, with an interest also in French literature of the Caribbean (of which he translated a number of texts). Reflecting on his contributions to UWI, his colleague Bill Carr, in an obituary note, describes Coulthard’s “de-Anglicisation” (1975, 158).

9 Dorothy Blair, a key figure in the integration of Francophone African writings into French studies, describes in the ASCALF Bulletin the ways in which her “enthusiasms were long either openly disparaged or the target of covert snide allusions” (1997, 57). She drew encouragement not only from the increasing recognition of the importance of this work, but also by the cross-generational engagement it permits: “This rich treasure-trove, which a few pioneers began tentatively to explore in the fifties, is far from exhausted. On the contrary, it is being added to by generation after generation of new literary talents, and studied and researched by new generations of scholars” (1997, 58).

10 I am grateful to my former colleague at the University of Glasgow Colin Smethurst for sharing with me extensive materials (including this 1979 press release) relating to the launch of the Association.