Bruyère, Vincent (2009) Ouvrir l'archive: rituels historiographiques et critique postcoloniale. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This research examines the proliferation of discourses associated with the development of Postcolonial Studies in the field of historical and philological sciences. The principal objective of the thesis is to describe this cultural phenomenon as a discursive event in the history of critical practices. Analyses developing Michel Foucault's work on regulations of discursive practices and Michel de Certeau's work on the historiographical operation are organised around three sites. The first site features Jean de Léry's Histoire d‟un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1575). The purpose of the work on this ethnographic document is not to reconstitute its early modern context, but first to interrogate this documentary relation when Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau rediscover the text. In this perspective, the text functions as the archive of an inaugural moment referring to the exclusion of the 'Savage' from the making of history. To that extent, the first part of the thesis focuses on the illegible/inaudible part of Jean de Léry's text, in order to question what postcolonial readings try to circumscribe in the colonial corpus, and which historiographical rituals make this reading possible in the case of Histoire d'un voyage. The second site is constituted by the formulation of Gayatri C. Spivak's famous question: 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' and her archival work endeavoured to attempt to answer the question. This foundational intervention in the field of Postcolonial study pertains at the inclusion/exclusion of the historical positivity of the discourse of the Other. Building on this proposition, this second part of the thesis reinscribes the historicity of postcolonial criticism in the project of a cultural history of the hermeneutic listening. The third site addresses the historicity of haunting in a series of Patrick Chamoiseau narratives dealing with ghosts of the Caribbean past: Lettres créoles (1991), Ecrire en pays dominé (1997), L'Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997), and Biblique des derniers gestes (2001). This part of the thesis examines rituals that enable Chamoiseau to convert the return of the repressed into a historiographical operation. Following this, it appears that the development and proliferation of postcolonial scholarships cannot be properly explained by the crisis of a historiographical paradigm, but has to be referred in the first instance to a ritual dimension of the making of history in the Western modernity.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration D History General and Old World > D History (General)
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984, Certeau, Michel de, Postcolonialism, Politics and culture, Historiography
Date:	February 2009
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of French Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Fraiture, Pierre-Philippe ; Hand, Seán
Extent:	238 leaves
Language:	fre
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/2267

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