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Fort-de-France: Pratiques Textuelles et Corporelles D’une Ville Coloniale

Emory University, vloicho{at}emory.edu

Interweaving Patrick Chamoiseau and René Ménil’s representations of the city of Fort-de-France, Martinique, with notes and photographs from my personal peregrinations in the city, I show that the urban space, like a resisting text, cannot be seized, fixed, and ultimately read by the alien walker. It is precisely through the polyrhythmic movements of the urban dwellers, which Chamoiseau calls ‘djobeurs’, that the city resists and escapes the grid and other colonialist marks imposed by Metropolitan France on the cityscape. These perambulations, I argue, create an ‘oralcity’ contrasting with the city written by colonialism.

I complement Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre’s theorizing of the city by Frantz Fanon and Jamaica Kincaid’s postcolonial texts, which help articulate gendered and racialized body constructions and positioning within the space of the postcolonial city.

Key Words: Antilles • Certeau, Michel de • Chamoiseau, Patrick • Chronique des sept misères • City • Colonialism • Martinique • Ménil, René

French Cultural Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 48-60 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/0957155804040408


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