From Hainteny to Negritude

In literary history, the study of the relation between the colonial worlds and their metropoles tends to follows unilateral trajectory. For instance, while the influence of French literature on the cultural productions of its colonies has been widely studied, less has been said about how works produced by colonial subjects have bent the arc of metropolitan French literature. Entitled “From Hainteny to Negritude: Analysis of the Transnational Flow of Literary Currents between “Indocean” and Francophone Literatures,” this dissertation looks at the ways in which indigenous poetic genres from the Indian Ocean, such as hainteny or sirandanes, have repeatedly influenced French literature, from the moment of first contact between Malagasy and French peoples in the seventeenth century to the contemporary postcolonial era. I analyze how Malagasy and Indian Ocean literatures fit into the broader sphere of sub-continental literatures in French, paying particular attention to the triangular exchange of aesthetic practices between the Indian Ocean, continental Africa and the French metropole. My research spans over many centuries of literatures in French, and over two continents. The corpus includes Chansons Madécasses (1787), by Reunion-born writer Evariste-Désiré Deforges-Parny (1753-1814); Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (1857) and Le Spleen de Paris (1868); and the complete oeuvre of Malagasy writer Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo (1903-1937). Read in concert, these texts highlight the influence of autochthonous literature from colonial spaces at the main turning points of modern Francophone literature (both metropolitan and [post-] colonial), namely Romanticism, Symbolism, and Negritude. Specifically, I argue that because of the movement of authors between France and its Indian Ocean colonies, Indian Ocean folkloric productions introduced thematic and aesthetic innovations that helped propel French literature into modernity. The dissertation takes a genealogical approach to disentangle the bilateral exchanges between the “minor literature” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986) of the Indian Ocean and other canonical genres of Francophone literature. I am interested in the connections between and among literary forms, their currents, movements, and transformations. I therefore apply a trans-historical and transnational approach to Malagasy writing in order to embrace the Édouard Glissant’s ideal of “relation,” which is the aggregation of all the cultural particularities that occurs at the point of contact between communities. My approach that will contribute needed scholarly attention to the Indian Ocean islands (the Mascarenes and Madagascar) as an important and often understudied place of literary innovation.