Cannibalizing Utopia: Suzanne Césaire’s Ecofeminist critique of Colonial Discourse of the Tropics
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Corresponding Author:
Emily Eyestone
Princeton University United States of America
eyestone@princeton.edu
Author(s):
This paper considers the ecofeminist geopoetics of Suzanne Césaire, developed over the course of seven essays that appeared in Martinican literary journal, Tropiques. Although her work has to date received far less critical attention than that of her husband, Aimé Césaire, I suggest that her essays offer a incisive critique of colonialist travel narratives that reify tropical space according to the categories of utopia/dystopia. I suggest that Césaire’s imagery of an incendiary, unstable, disorderly nature represented through natural hazard explodes gendered narratives of the islands in the French colonial imaginary. In travel narratives, Guadeloupe and Martinique, France’s “twin sister islands”, are frequently described in terms of their fertility and submissiveness, which help to justify their perceived need for colonial control. On the other hand, Césaire also contests the dystopian version of the islands, a rendering frequently deployed by French policy-makers during the twentieth century in an effort to characterize the Antilles as geographically different, and fundamentally not French, thus not entitled of the same rights as European French citizens.
I argue that Césaire enlists the chaotic, often destructive forces of Caribbean climate to create a resistant geopoetics that opposes both paradisal and sexualized visions of the tropics in French discourse. Yet, rather than simply activating the dystopian and disastrous antipode of Edenic paradise, Césaire diffuses the dialectical tension between utopia/dystopia, instead grounding the emergence of an unassimilated identity in the region’s geo-climatic dynamism. I argue that Césaire’s valorization of instability as a defining feature of Caribbean culture and geography impedes the reification of islands as either utopic paradises ripe for consumption or as dystopian hotspots in need of technological rationalization. While Césaire’s work has been largely left out of studies on postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, and Caribbean women’s writing, I suggest her essays demonstrate a latent ecofeminism, allowing her to subvert gendered, exoticized representations of Caribbean islands used to justify continued environmental exploitation, development, and neocolonial control.
Post-apocalyptic dystopias and disaster studies: Crossdisciplinary perspectives on environmental challenges today