Taking the postcolonial lead: Decentering the metropole through Martinican literature

This dissertation seeks to deconstruct the eurocentric idea that metropolitan literature always takes the lead over postcolonial literature. Instead, this work chooses to reposition the said "text of reference" from France to Martinique by claiming that Bataille's continental philosophy Heterologie and Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit are Francophone expressions that take after the Martinican concepts of Creolization developed by Glissant and of Creolite introduced by Chamoiseau and Confiant. To operate this reversal, the dissertation relies on several tropes, such as the concept of "postcolonial lead" inspired both by Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "line of escape" and by the history of the watchdog during slavery. In the tradition of marooning, the master's dog was used to run after the fugitive slave but, in a perverse twist of events, the slave would eventually take the "lead" in this line of escape since the master and the dog were forced to run behind. Today, the presence of Creole dogs in Antillean novels not only account for the traumatic past of slavery but also offers a model for a postcolonial lead in literature. The dissertation also argues that this postcolonial lead---the repositioning from French studies to Francophone studies---is often obtained, in minor literatures, through a work of revision. The study especially focuses on the master-slave dialectic in African American and Franco-Caribbean practices of revision. The dissertation demonstrates that the African-American tradition of revision named "Signifying" (Gates) does not offer a possibility for a postcolonial lead the way its Creole and Francophone alternative does. Finally, the study offers a close reading of the Antillean concept of debrouillardise discussed by Chamoiseau in Chronique des sept miseres and by Confiant in Le negre et l'amiral. It argues that the kind of Creole accommodation that the Martinican people used to fight western oppression during the Vichy occupation provides a model today for poetic resistance in Antillean literature.