‘The Writing of the Empire’: Economies of Writing and ‘Otherness’ in Henri Fauconnier’s Malaisie

Abstract

The development of colonial and postcolonial literatures usually follows a tripartite periodization: (1) a phase during which works are produced by ‘representatives’ of the colonial order, those able to represent this order by virtue of being white and European; (2) a succeeding phase in which texts are produced under the auspices of the colonial order by culturally incorporated natives who are bound by the hegemonies of this order as a condition of undertaking literary production; (3) this phase is then overtaken by one existing after the Second World War—here independent postcolonial literatures arise in which the cosmography of Western superiority is supplanted. However, there are texts produced in phase (1) that do not possess the allegedly typical features of the works belong to it. My claim resides in the possibility that such periodizations do account for a kind of ‘Western’ text in which the author risks being changed, as he/she submits her/himself to worlds of possibility displacing authorized notions of ‘being Western’, etc. Using de Certeau and Edward Said, I provide a reading of Henri Fauconnier’s Prix Goncourt-winning 1930 francophone novel Malaisie that develops the concept of a ‘paracoloniality’, where I show what tends to be overlooked in most discussions of colonial and postcolonial literatures.