H-France Review Vol. 5 (September 2005), No. 97
Response to Daniel J. Shermans’s review of Matt K. Matsuda, Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific.Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. viii + 232 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $65 U.S., £39.50 (cl.). ISBN 0-19-516294-3; $21.95 U.S., £13.50 (pb). ISBN 0-19-516295-1.
By Matt K. Matsuda, Rutgers University.
Thanks to Professor Sherman for his insightful observations about the main lines and many of the details of Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific. One could hardly have asked for a better lead-in for a critique than to draw on the recent and continuing political affronts between Oscar Temaru and Gaston Flosse about the history and future of French Polynesia. Professor Sherman’s focus not only draws attention to the timeliness of the subject at hand, but neatly underscores a point that shapes Empire of Love and may not be readily apparent to a wider audience: despite growing post-colonial research in global history, much of the “French Pacific” is still engaged in colonial questions and relationships. Professor Sherman’s underscoring of Jacques Chirac as “friend” to the political establishment in Papeete, and the continuing and controversial French military and administrative presences in Polynesia are excellent examples of these struggles over “autonomy” and “independence.” Interested readers are invited to search out the multiple works of Jean-Marc Régnault on these questions; the works of Frédéric Angleviel are recommended on New Caledonia.[1]
It is very much the articulation of such forces, oppositions, and presumed affinities that interests me. As such, a dialogue about Empire of Love engages multiple historiographies--some of more recent provenance (attempts to work through representational, emotional, and performative strategies), and others which straightforwardly draw on now more “traditional” political culture studies of “resistance” and moments of violence.[2] Professor Sherman finds some of these cases evocative, some unconvincing. What has interested me--to take two examples he cites--are the ways the stories can address and complicate particular historiographies. The Tahitian study, framed by narratives and images so overdetermined by Bougainville, Loti, and Gauguin and the splendid cultural works of art and literary historians, draws me “back” to Colin Newbury and some of the same Oceanic archives, seeing tales of violence, guerilla warfare, and an attempt to reconfigure “political history” (warfare, queens, admirals) as a way of defining the French presence.[3] Reading the two narratives against each other is what I seek, to create a dialectic that is, I hope, contemporary, but in an unsettlingly familiar way.
Panama, equally, regularly presented as a tale of cupidity and greed for the French, and as the triumph of technology, medical science, and gunboat diplomacy for the Americans, needed a new reading. To do the archaeology of the Saint-Simonian ideology of love and utopian engineering behind canal projects allowed what I propose as an original view of the significant sentimental registers behind capitalist and colonial ambitions. The work done here by affective emotional force is, I think, not overstated in suggesting how the Pacific would become part of the Atlantic, and thus part of a continuous French domain through greed (no argument there)--but also many other intentions and of many emotions registered as political force.
Professor Sherman’s focus on the possible permutations of how “love” might be rendered is also engaging. I am pleased that he recognizes attempts to decipher unequal and conflicting narrations from perspectives of both colonists and colonized, from the Catholic “theocracy” of Wallis and Futuna to the treaty ports of Meiji-era Japan. Readers will have to decide whether they agree or not with my referencing and translations and interpretations of terms and phrases in their contexts. Some readings, like Professor Sherman’s discussion of immémoriaux, are richly instructive: how one renders the term plays out the very tensions between peoples putatively “without” or “before” history--that is, invented as “timeless,” and those struggling with historical loss under colonialism as erasure, eradication, and oubli.
Professor Sherman’s emphasis on the manifold possibilities of amour or désir is even more to the point; one of the narratives that probably need more discussion will be the comparative context. For example, how does the use of particular terms come to be understood by French audiences and scholars, and in what ways do such terms act, particularly in the logic of framing questions of empire between collaborators and resisters, and British, American, Japanese, German, and French interests in the Pacific?
What I find most exciting in Professor Sherman’s commentary is his interest in “love both for and against empire,” particularly the latter. The notion of Empire of Love (capitalized, as Professor Sherman notes) is unquestionably a sort of provocation. But what sort? Certainly, it illustrates and critiques what many of my historical sources maintained--that France had built a global imperialist system of affection and gratitude of conquered peoples. Yet it is not intended to be ironic, only playing up a self-delusion. Rather, it ponders both the attractions and repulsions of empire, collaborations, intimacies, and violent ruptures between multiple actors. As Professor Sherman puts it, it is indeed not only physical want that marks desire (his splendid patisserie example), so the work does not maintain that. Rather,.the Kanak example, for instance, looks at the ways the registers of language are indeed prone to slippage between the formal and artful, just as naval documents of the 1880s often drew on Loti’s fiction in their “factual” reports to the Ministry of the Navy. In this, the vocabulary of “love” is not assumed, but pursued in many registers and differently defined: spiritual for religion, carnal for bodies, humanist for utopian socialism, revolutionary for resistance, martial and patriotic for the military, sentimental and conjugal in family metaphors, as both expression and as imposition.
One of the points the work aspires to is to see Pacific empire as having no territory, only multiple locations and encounters. What makes the empire is narration, points d’appui, and the struggles over the control of those points in temporal and spatial depth and extensity. With the luxury of more pages it would be engaging to take on questions Professor Sherman’s critique suggests to my reading: how spatial and imperial dynamics (Epeli Hau‘ofa’s work) play into the affective research of Luisa Passerini, Ann Stoler, William Reddy and others, or how the gender and romantic storytelling strategies in the examples play out, especially in trying to imagine writing critical history as romance in trope and genre.[4] Professor Sherman’s insights capture the essential points, in some ways underscored much more cogently in his commentary than in the work itself. His attention to specific points will send me back to my notes. For all this I can be genuinely grateful and also appreciative--not, thankfully, only along the lines of Flosse’s flattery.
NOTES
[1] See especially the regular political reviews contributed by Angleviel to The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs (University of Hawai‘i Press); also his Frédéric Angleviel, “Micro-histoire électorale en Nouvelle-Calédonie: Les elections provinciales de 2004 ou l’autopsie d’une défaite impossible,” Revue Juridique, Politique, et Economique de Nouvelle-Calédonie, 4/2(2004), and Angleviel, ed., “Franconesia: Contemporary Aspects of Francophone Presence in Oceania,” The Journal of Pacific Studies, 27/1(August 2004); Jean-Marc Régnault, Te Metua: L’Echec d’un nationalisme Tahitien (Papeete: Polymages, 1996); Régnault, Oscar Temaru-Gaston Flosse: le pouvoir confisqué (Papeete: les Éd. de Tahiti, 2004; new edition July 2005).
[2] Catherine A. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Kareva Mateata-Allain, “Ma‘ohi Women Writers of Colonial French Polynesia; Passive Resistance Towards a Post-Colonial Literature,” Jouvert: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 7/2(2003); Alice Bullard, Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific, 1790-1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Colin Newbury, “Resistance and Collaboration in French Polynesia: The Tahitian War, 1844-7,” Journal of the Polynesian Society, 82(1973):5-27.
[3] Debora Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (New York: Farrar, 2000); Elizabeth C. Childs, “The Colonial Lens: Gauguin, Primitivism, and Photography in the Fin de siècle,” in Lynda Jessup, ed., Antimodernism and Artistic Experiencing: Policing the Boundaries of Modernism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Robert Nicole, The Word, the Pen, and the Pistol: Literature and Power in Tahiti (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000); Stephen Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997); James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); Colin Newbury, Tahiti Nui: Change and Survival in French Polynesia, 1767-1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980); Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the Colonial Order (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina, 1979).
[4] Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6/1(1994):148-61; for extended commentaries, A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau‘ofa (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1994); also Arif Dirlik and Rob Wilson, eds., Asia-Pacific as Space of Cultural Production (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Julia Clancy Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia,1998).
Matt K. Matsuda
Rutgers University
matt_matsuda@hotmail.com
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H-France Review Vol. 5 (September 2005), No. 97
ISSN 1553-9172
