In Experiments with Empire Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of knowing the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods and modes of thought, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire's political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris and filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, and others, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. It also, Izzo contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Ethnographic Fictions in the French Atlantic
- 1. Ethnographic Didacticism and Africanist Melancholy: Leiris, Hampâté Bâ, and the Epistemology of Style
- 2. The Director of Modern Life: Jean Rouch’s Ethnofiction
- 3. Folklore, Fiction, and Ethnographic Nation Building: Price-Mars, Alexis, Depestre, Laferrière
- 4. Creole Novels and the Ethnographic Production of Literary History: Glissant, Chamoiseau, Confiant
- 5. Speculative Cityscapes and Premillennial Policing: Ethnographies of the Present in Jean-Claude Izzo’s Crime Trilogy
- Conclusion: Empire, Democracy, and Nonsovereign Knowledges
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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