Reviews
This is a very important and exciting book. Extending to the whole of the French Caribbean his previous work on the philosophical bases of the Haitian Revolution, Nesbitt has produced the first ever account of the region's writing from a consistently philosophical, as distinct from literary or historical, standpoint. -- Celia Britton As Nick Nesbitt notes, approaches to Caribbean writing in French to date have tended to follow a few familiar modes: writing as poetics, as literature, or as history. The great originality of Nesbitt's book is to propose a new mode: to conceptualize all such writing as 'critique', a model that, he says, permits the reader to grasp the essential characteristic of a diverse range of works; that is, the way in which they 'cry out in insubordination and aversion to the state of the world' and 'seek to articulate the promise that another world is possible' (p. xi). As such, the book fills an important gap in francophone Caribbean studies, which has always had a strong theoretical component but, arguably, has not previously been subject to such a rigorously philosophical critical treatment. What drives Caribbean Critique, and indeed Nesbitt's own critical engagement, is an enduring sense of outrage at Caribbean plantation slavery and colonialism, the lingering effects of which render this project all the more significant and timely. Much of the righteous energy of Nesbitt's own critique derives from his reading of the Haitian Revolution, which is seen rightly as a foundational event in the history of Caribbean anti-colonialism, and also as a seminal moment for Caribbean Critique, in that it marked the beginnings of written responses to colonialism and slavery. For Nesbitt, such written responses - letters, memoirs, essays - demonstrate that from its beginnings Caribbean Critique was concerned less with the fate of particular human groups than with that of humankind more generally, and with the universal concepts of rights, freedom, equality, and justice. In Nesbitt's reading, subsequent French Caribbean writing has remained attached to these principles, even as postcolonial history has complicated the idea of resistance and has perpetuated certain colonial modes of being and thinking, most notably those related to colour and class divisions. The further definition of critique as a mode that refuses the abstract separation of theory and practice leads to a particularly committed form of analysis and a singularly energetic engagement with the dizzying array of works and thinkers addressed in the various chapters: Nesbitt weaves a particularly rich set of references, from Victor Schoelcher and Tocqueville through Aime Cesaire, Maryse Conde, Edouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Rene Menil, Baron de Vastey, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide. To his credit, Nesbitt does not shy away from controversial topics or figures, such as the role of violence in the colonial and postcolonial history of the region, or the complex figure of former Haitian president J.-B. Aristide. Certainly, some of his arguments are contentious, but they are the signs of a particularly engaged and erudite critic whose latest study will prove to be a landmark, indeed seminal, work in Caribbean Critique. French Studies, Vol. 68, no 2 ... the book fills an important gap in francophone Caribbean studies, which has always had a strong theoretical component but, arguably, has not previously been subject to such a rigorously philosophical critical treatment. ... latest study will prove to be a landmark, indeed seminal, work in Caribbean Critique. French Studies, Vol. 68, no 2 Nick Nesbitt's third book might also be named Theorizing a Politics of Principle - The Twinned Dialogues of the Francophone Caribbean and Europe: From Toussaint to Glissant, from Kant to Hallward. Nesbitt sheds light on his previous work: from the start, he has deliberated what in Caribbean Critique he designates as the troubled domain of a politics of principle, which at once binds theory to practice, and as such finds itself constantly at a crossroads of disjuncture, between the theorization of democratic principles and how such principles are to be promoted, upheld, and/or imposed (15). It is thus not surprising that a great part of Nesbitt's meditations include a sustained discussion of the role of violence as a means to enforcing democratic principles, and complements the work of Denis Hollier, for example in Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War (1993), or the large corpus of research around Fanon. The Caribbean and its most renown thinkers are front-and-center in Nesbitt's discussion, not because he is a Francophonist or a Caribbeanist, but because, as he illustrates, without a doubt, the Caribbean has nourished a centuries-long critical dialogue with the European Enlightenment's project to put into play the Kantian and neo-Kantian 'universalisability' of the principles of justice and equality (264). Nor is the dialogue only Caribbean, it is particularly French Caribbean, in that the most brazen attempts to veritably implement a politics of principle would take place in France's varying grapplings with democracy-making: from its revolution, through its terror with Robespierre, and on into its empire under Napoleon. To follow Nesbitt's oeuvre is to realize that a European philosophical tradition can only fully be apprehended if it is accompanied by its parallel Caribbean critique. If Nesbitt's first book is on how memory is articulated in Caribbean literature, and his second, informed by Jonathan Israel's work on Spinoza, argues that the Haitian Revolution is the mise-en-oeuvre of a Spinozan radical Enlightenment, then this third confidently asserts that Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Balibar may only be fully understood if read side-by-side with Cesaire, Fanon, Conde, and Glissant; and that, conversely, to better elucidate the contradictory nature of Robespierre's Reign of Terror (meant to undergird the Jacobins' aspiration towards democracy), one cannot but read through the critical corpus of literature produced by the Caribbean theorists (163). In other words, without Caribbean theory, the varying moments of the European Enlightenment, especially its more violent and radical iterations, cannot be fully apprehended. In the same vein, it is impossible to under- stand the actions of Toussaint, Fanon, and Aristide without comprehending that they were informed, of course, by a legacy of colonial and neocolonial oppressions, but also, in the case of Fanon, Conde, Glissant, and Aristide, by a sustained and intentional dialogue, which actively considers the philosophical undergirdings of both the French and the Haitian revolutions (224). In line with the work of Susan Buck-Morss or Sibylle Fischer, Nesbitt argues that thinkers such as Hegel or Spinoza wrote in active awareness of the injustice of slavery, and, in the case of Hegel, of the insurrection of the slaves in Saint-Domingue. Nesbitt's contribution to current scholarship on the Caribbean Enlightenment is to read the Caribbean as a discursive and engaged space that has maintained a centuries-long dialogue not just with European thought, but with how this thought will, should, and might (or might not) be put into veritable practice. In a Caribbean constantly under the control of international colonial and later neocolonial powers, the question of 'What is to be done?' subtends all forms of Caribbean philosophy: in short, for Nesbitt, Caribbean critique is to grapple with the problem of decolonization as a politics of principle (156). The artfulness of Nesbitt's book is how it may be read. For the most part, each chapter clearly identifies the theorists and agents with whose writings and lifework he engages: Jacobins, Black Jacobins, the Baron de Vastey, Schoelcher, Tocqueville, Cesaire, Conde, Sartre, Fanon, Glissant, and Aristide. Although unmentioned in the chapter titles, G.W. Friedrich Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Leon-Gontran Damas, Rene Menil, and Peter Hallward also weave themselves into the theoretical fabric that informs the actions especially of Cesaire and Glissant. As such, the book serves as a survey of both Caribbean and European thought since the implementation of slavery in the Americas. It quietly reminds that slavery and colonialism are the pillars of many of the major sources of wealth of Europe and North America, that to philosophize Europe is to undoubtedly contend with a less than enlightened past. Yet, while Nesbitt's book may be read as a survey, it also offers extremely succinct, complex, and compelling new perspectives on polemical issues that inhabit our work as professors, pedagogues, and intellectuals today: notably, the viability of the postcolonial as a veritable prism of analysis as regards the legitimacy of doing away with the notion of Universality in favor of specificities and the role of violence in realizing democratic principles. Another of Nesbitt's provocative arguments is to refute Cesaire's supposedly compromised role in acquiescing to a French neocolonial order, in his choice to encourage Martinicans to opt for departmentalization. While Nesbitt's work deals primarily with Caribbean and European political philosophy, his interrogations apply to more far-reaching questions involving a contemporary world order, complementing the recent scholarship around the history of human rights by Peter de Bolla, Samuel Moyn, Martha Nussbaum, and Eric D. Weitz. While he explains that issues such as the Arab Spring are beyond the reach of this book, it only takes noting the prominent role that Samia Kassab-Charfi's and Mohamed Bahi's edited volume Memoires et imaginaires du Maghreb et de la Caraibe (2013) gives to Fanon and Glissant to ascertain that the interrogations that Nesbitt's work leads us through, as well as the deliberations of these questions by some of the most prominent writer-poet-political philosophers of the production of knowledge in French, are of utmost currency in our work as scholars of the contemporary world. Contemporary French Civilization, Vol. 39, No. 3 Nesbitt's book may be read as a survey, it also offers extremely succinct, complex, and compelling new perspectives on polemical issues that inhabit our work as professors, pedagogues, and intellectuals today ... Contemporary French Civilization, Vol. 39, No. 3 The founding assumption behind Nick Nesbitt's extensive survey of French Antillean writing is that the diverse range of texts he analyzes all possess a unifying characteristic, namely their status as works of critique-as writings, that is, that cry out in insubordination and aversion to the state of their world (above all, that of plantation slavery and colonialism), and seek to articulate the promise that another world is possible (p. xi). Thus Nesbitt attributes a fundamental unity to the numerous political and intellectual figures he considers, from Toussaint Louverture and the Baron de Vastey through Victor Schoelcher to Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Conde, and Edouard Glissant. He maintains that each elaborates a distinctly Caribbean mode of critique (p. xiii). Although distinctly Caribbean, this mode of critique rests on a politics of principle that appeals neither to community nor to ethnic difference but to a universal axiom of justice as equality (pp. 14-19). As such, Caribbean critique is understood to be in a symbiotic relationship with what might be termed a Western tradition of Critical Theory running from the thinkers of the radical Enlightenment (Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel) to those in a broadly Marxist tradition (Marx himself, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou). In seeking to establish the validity of this specifically Caribbean mode of critique, Nesbitt engages in some spirited defenses of the legitimacy of political violence in certain specific circumstances, finding support in the work of Immanuel Kant. He argues that Kant defended the legitimacy of revolutionary Jacobinism as a necessary step in the establishment of a democratic state in circumstances where the ancien regime simply refused to recognize workers or slaves as equal human beings at all (pp. 50-59). He extends this model to argue that political violence was thus legitimate in cases such as revolutionary France and Saint-Domingue, French colonial Algeria, or Aristide's Haiti, where the very existence of democracy was at stake. By contrast, in France's Antillean possessions, whose black inhabitants enjoyed democratic rights, negotiated, nonviolent solutions were available and hence preferable (pp. xii-xiii). This, in turn, allows Nesbitt to present Cesaire's advocacy in 1946 of departmentalization for the French Antilles as entirely consistent with the violent struggle of the Haitian Revolution or with Fanon's insistence on the necessity of anticolonial violence in Les Damnes de la terre; all can be accommodated within the unified category of Caribbean critique since all are motivated by the single aim of achieving justice as equality (p. 84). On one level, this represents a justified rebuttal of all those who claim that any recourse to political violence must inevitably lead to totalitarianism. However, Nesbitt surely risks effacing here the significant political differences between Cesaire and Fanon on the question of revolutionary violence. Moreover, his account rests on a rather selective presentation of the facts. Thus he makes no mention of the influence of the French Communist Party's official line on Cesaire's advocacy of departmentalization, despite the fact that, as a Communist deputy, Cesaire was bound to obey that line, a line that, in 1946, was set against more radical or nationalist solutions in France's colonies. Further, in defending Cesaire's choices here, Nesbitt feels obliged to dismiss Leon Gontran Damas's opposition to departmentalization by unjustly caricaturing the latter as a producer of pro-colonial propaganda (p. 91). When discussing Cesaire's shift, in 1949, to a more critical position on departmentalization (p. 107), Nesbitt also neglects to mention that this coincided with a shift in the Party line toward a more overt, if qualified anti-imperialism. Nesbitt's desire to maintain the unity and integrity of Caribbean critique as an analytical category thus sets in motion a questionable dialectic of absorption and expulsion that sometimes operates on highly partial and tendentious grounds. On a more positive note, through his trenchant defenses of a radical Enlightenment tradition and the universal principles it mobilizes, Nesbitt distinguishes himself from what both Peter Hallward and Chris Bongie see as the dominant tendency in Francophone postcolonial studies toward a depoliticizing emphasis on the interstitial, the indeterminate, the hybrid, and the singular, alongside a persistent conflation of the cultural or aesthetic with the realm of politics proper. Caribbean Critique bears witness to Nesbitt's critical engagement with both Hallward's and Bongie's work, an engagement that sees him taking on board some of their criticisms of the depoliticizing tendencies in postcolonial theory, while mounting qualified defenses of the value of a politics of culture and identity in certain circumstances (pp. 141, 249). Nesbitt concedes that Hallward's and Bongie's criticisms of the allegedly depoliticizing aestheticism of the later Glissant have some validity. He thus distinguishes between that strand of Caribbean critique, epitomized by the late Glissant, that lapses into a Nietzschean antipolitics of epicurean delight and those figures, from Vastey to the early Glissant, who elaborate a Caribbean materialist dialectic that aims at the constitution of a militant subject (pp. 231-32). The importance of Nesbitt's book thus rests on its attempts to mediate between postcolonial theory, as conventionally practiced, and the universalist axiomatics advocated by Hallward and Bongie in opposition to that discipline. Inevitably, this attempt raises a series of theoretical, political, and historical questions that would require far more detailed treatment than the limitations of the current review allow. What is certain is that Nesbitt has made an important and highly original contribution to such debates. New West Indian Guide 88 Nesbitt has made an important and highly original contribution to such debates. New West Indian Guide 88
This is a very important and exciting book. Extending to the whole of the French Caribbean his previous work on the philosophical bases of the Haitian Revolution, Nesbitt has produced the first ever account of the region's writing from a consistently philosophical, as distinct from literary or historical, standpoint. As Nick Nesbitt notes, approaches to Caribbean writing in French to date have tended to follow a few familiar modes: writing as poetics, as literature, or as history. The great originality of Nesbitt's book is to propose a new mode: to conceptualize all such writing as 'critique', a model that, he says, permits the reader to grasp the essential characteristic of a diverse range of works; that is, the way in which they 'cry out in insubordination and aversion to the state of the world' and 'seek to articulate the promise that another world is possible' (p. xi). As such, the book fills an important gap in francophone Caribbean studies, which has always had a strong theoretical component but, arguably, has not previously been subject to such a rigorously philosophical critical treatment. What drives Caribbean Critique, and indeed Nesbitt's own critical engagement, is an enduring sense of outrage at Caribbean plantation slavery and colonialism, the lingering effects of which render this project all the more significant and timely. Much of the righteous energy of Nesbitt's own critique derives from his reading of the Haitian Revolution, which is seen rightly as a foundational event in the history of Caribbean anti-colonialism, and also as a seminal moment for Caribbean Critique, in that it marked the beginnings of written responses to colonialism and slavery. For Nesbitt, such written responses - letters, memoirs, essays - demonstrate that from its beginnings Caribbean Critique was concerned less with the fate of particular human groups than with that of humankind more generally, and with the universal concepts of rights, freedom, equality, and justice. In Nesbitt's reading, subsequent French Caribbean writing has remained attached to these principles, even as postcolonial history has complicated the idea of resistance and has perpetuated certain colonial modes of being and thinking, most notably those related to colour and class divisions. The further definition of critique as a mode that refuses the abstract separation of theory and practice leads to a particularly committed form of analysis and a singularly energetic engagement with the dizzying array of works and thinkers addressed in the various chapters: Nesbitt weaves a particularly rich set of references, from Victor Schoelcher and Tocqueville through Aime Cesaire, Maryse Conde, Edouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Rene Menil, Baron de Vastey, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide. To his credit, Nesbitt does not shy away from controversial topics or figures, such as the role of violence in the colonial and postcolonial history of the region, or the complex figure of former Haitian president J.-B. Aristide. Certainly, some of his arguments are contentious, but they are the signs of a particularly engaged and erudite critic whose latest study will prove to be a landmark, indeed seminal, work in Caribbean Critique. ... the book fills an important gap in francophone Caribbean studies, which has always had a strong theoretical component but, arguably, has not previously been subject to such a rigorously philosophical critical treatment. ... latest study will prove to be a landmark, indeed seminal, work in Caribbean Critique. Nick Nesbitt's third book might also be named Theorizing a Politics of Principle - The Twinned Dialogues of the Francophone Caribbean and Europe: From Toussaint to Glissant, from Kant to Hallward. Nesbitt sheds light on his previous work: from the start, he has deliberated what in Caribbean Critique he designates as the troubled domain of a politics of principle, which at once binds theory to practice, and as such finds itself constantly at a crossroads of disjuncture, between the theorization of democratic principles and how such principles are to be promoted, upheld, and/or imposed (15). It is thus not surprising that a great part of Nesbitt's meditations include a sustained discussion of the role of violence as a means to enforcing democratic principles, and complements the work of Denis Hollier, for example in Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War (1993), or the large corpus of research around Fanon. The Caribbean and its most renown thinkers are front-and-center in Nesbitt's discussion, not because he is a Francophonist or a Caribbeanist, but because, as he illustrates, without a doubt, the Caribbean has nourished a centuries-long critical dialogue with the European Enlightenment's project to put into play the Kantian and neo-Kantian 'universalisability' of the principles of justice and equality (264). Nor is the dialogue only Caribbean, it is particularly French Caribbean, in that the most brazen attempts to veritably implement a politics of principle would take place in France's varying grapplings with democracy-making: from its revolution, through its terror with Robespierre, and on into its empire under Napoleon. To follow Nesbitt's oeuvre is to realize that a European philosophical tradition can only fully be apprehended if it is accompanied by its parallel Caribbean critique. If Nesbitt's first book is on how memory is articulated in Caribbean literature, and his second, informed by Jonathan Israel's work on Spinoza, argues that the Haitian Revolution is the mise-en-oeuvre of a Spinozan radical Enlightenment, then this third confidently asserts that Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Balibar may only be fully understood if read side-by-side with Cesaire, Fanon, Conde, and Glissant; and that, conversely, to better elucidate the contradictory nature of Robespierre's Reign of Terror (meant to undergird the Jacobins' aspiration towards democracy), one cannot but read through the critical corpus of literature produced by the Caribbean theorists (163). In other words, without Caribbean theory, the varying moments of the European Enlightenment, especially its more violent and radical iterations, cannot be fully apprehended. In the same vein, it is impossible to under- stand the actions of Toussaint, Fanon, and Aristide without comprehending that they were informed, of course, by a legacy of colonial and neocolonial oppressions, but also, in the case of Fanon, Conde, Glissant, and Aristide, by a sustained and intentional dialogue, which actively considers the philosophical undergirdings of both the French and the Haitian revolutions (224). In line with the work of Susan Buck-Morss or Sibylle Fischer, Nesbitt argues that thinkers such as Hegel or Spinoza wrote in active awareness of the injustice of slavery, and, in the case of Hegel, of the insurrection of the slaves in Saint-Domingue. Nesbitt's contribution to current scholarship on the Caribbean Enlightenment is to read the Caribbean as a discursive and engaged space that has maintained a centuries-long dialogue not just with European thought, but with how this thought will, should, and might (or might not) be put into veritable practice. In a Caribbean constantly under the control of international colonial and later neocolonial powers, the question of 'What is to be done?' subtends all forms of Caribbean philosophy: in short, for Nesbitt, Caribbean critique is to grapple with the problem of decolonization as a politics of principle (156). The artfulness of Nesbitt's book is how it may be read. For the most part, each chapter clearly identifies the theorists and agents with whose writings and lifework he engages: Jacobins, Black Jacobins, the Baron de Vastey, Schoelcher, Tocqueville, Cesaire, Conde, Sartre, Fanon, Glissant, and Aristide. Although unmentioned in the chapter titles, G.W. Friedrich Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Leon-Gontran Damas, Rene Menil, and Peter Hallward also weave themselves into the theoretical fabric that informs the actions especially of Cesaire and Glissant. As such, the book serves as a survey of both Caribbean and European thought since the implementation of slavery in the Americas. It quietly reminds that slavery and colonialism are the pillars of many of the major sources of wealth of Europe and North America, that to philosophize Europe is to undoubtedly contend with a less than enlightened past. Yet, while Nesbitt's book may be read as a survey, it also offers extremely succinct, complex, and compelling new perspectives on polemical issues that inhabit our work as professors, pedagogues, and intellectuals today: notably, the viability of the postcolonial as a veritable prism of analysis as regards the legitimacy of doing away with the notion of Universality in favor of specificities and the role of violence in realizing democratic principles. Another of Nesbitt's provocative arguments is to refute Cesaire's supposedly compromised role in acquiescing to a French neocolonial order, in his choice to encourage Martinicans to opt for departmentalization. While Nesbitt's work deals primarily with Caribbean and European political philosophy, his interrogations apply to more far-reaching questions involving a contemporary world order, complementing the recent scholarship around the history of human rights by Peter de Bolla, Samuel Moyn, Martha Nussbaum, and Eric D. Weitz. While he explains that issues such as the Arab Spring are beyond the reach of this book, it only takes noting the prominent role that Samia Kassab-Charfi's and Mohamed Bahi's edited volume Memoires et imaginaires du Maghreb et de la Caraibe (2013) gives to Fanon and Glissant to ascertain that the interrogations that Nesbitt's work leads us through, as well as the deliberations of these questions by some of the most prominent writer-poet-political philosophers of the production of knowledge in French, are of utmost currency in our work as scholars of the contemporary world. Nesbitt's book may be read as a survey, it also offers extremely succinct, complex, and compelling new perspectives on polemical issues that inhabit our work as professors, pedagogues, and intellectuals today ... The founding assumption behind Nick Nesbitt's extensive survey of French Antillean writing is that the diverse range of texts he analyzes all possess a unifying characteristic, namely their status as works of critique-as writings, that is, that cry out in insubordination and aversion to the state of their world (above all, that of plantation slavery and colonialism), and seek to articulate the promise that another world is possible (p. xi). Thus Nesbitt attributes a fundamental unity to the numerous political and intellectual figures he considers, from Toussaint Louverture and the Baron de Vastey through Victor Schoelcher to Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Conde, and Edouard Glissant. He maintains that each elaborates a distinctly Caribbean mode of critique (p. xiii). Although distinctly Caribbean, this mode of critique rests on a politics of principle that appeals neither to community nor to ethnic difference but to a universal axiom of justice as equality (pp. 14-19). As such, Caribbean critique is understood to be in a symbiotic relationship with what might be termed a Western tradition of Critical Theory running from the thinkers of the radical Enlightenment (Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel) to those in a broadly Marxist tradition (Marx himself, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou). In seeking to establish the validity of this specifically Caribbean mode of critique, Nesbitt engages in some spirited defenses of the legitimacy of political violence in certain specific circumstances, finding support in the work of Immanuel Kant. He argues that Kant defended the legitimacy of revolutionary Jacobinism as a necessary step in the establishment of a democratic state in circumstances where the ancien regime simply refused to recognize workers or slaves as equal human beings at all (pp. 50-59). He extends this model to argue that political violence was thus legitimate in cases such as revolutionary France and Saint-Domingue, French colonial Algeria, or Aristide's Haiti, where the very existence of democracy was at stake. By contrast, in France's Antillean possessions, whose black inhabitants enjoyed democratic rights, negotiated, nonviolent solutions were available and hence preferable (pp. xii-xiii). This, in turn, allows Nesbitt to present Cesaire's advocacy in 1946 of departmentalization for the French Antilles as entirely consistent with the violent struggle of the Haitian Revolution or with Fanon's insistence on the necessity of anticolonial violence in Les Damnes de la terre; all can be accommodated within the unified category of Caribbean critique since all are motivated by the single aim of achieving justice as equality (p. 84). On one level, this represents a justified rebuttal of all those who claim that any recourse to political violence must inevitably lead to totalitarianism. However, Nesbitt surely risks effacing here the significant political differences between Cesaire and Fanon on the question of revolutionary violence. Moreover, his account rests on a rather selective presentation of the facts. Thus he makes no mention of the influence of the French Communist Party's official line on Cesaire's advocacy of departmentalization, despite the fact that, as a Communist deputy, Cesaire was bound to obey that line, a line that, in 1946, was set against more radical or nationalist solutions in France's colonies. Further, in defending Cesaire's choices here, Nesbitt feels obliged to dismiss Leon Gontran Damas's opposition to departmentalization by unjustly caricaturing the latter as a producer of pro-colonial propaganda (p. 91). When discussing Cesaire's shift, in 1949, to a more critical position on departmentalization (p. 107), Nesbitt also neglects to mention that this coincided with a shift in the Party line toward a more overt, if qualified anti-imperialism. Nesbitt's desire to maintain the unity and integrity of Caribbean critique as an analytical category thus sets in motion a questionable dialectic of absorption and expulsion that sometimes operates on highly partial and tendentious grounds. On a more positive note, through his trenchant defenses of a radical Enlightenment tradition and the universal principles it mobilizes, Nesbitt distinguishes himself from what both Peter Hallward and Chris Bongie see as the dominant tendency in Francophone postcolonial studies toward a depoliticizing emphasis on the interstitial, the indeterminate, the hybrid, and the singular, alongside a persistent conflation of the cultural or aesthetic with the realm of politics proper. Caribbean Critique bears witness to Nesbitt's critical engagement with both Hallward's and Bongie's work, an engagement that sees him taking on board some of their criticisms of the depoliticizing tendencies in postcolonial theory, while mounting qualified defenses of the value of a politics of culture and identity in certain circumstances (pp. 141, 249). Nesbitt concedes that Hallward's and Bongie's criticisms of the allegedly depoliticizing aestheticism of the later Glissant have some validity. He thus distinguishes between that strand of Caribbean critique, epitomized by the late Glissant, that lapses into a Nietzschean antipolitics of epicurean delight and those figures, from Vastey to the early Glissant, who elaborate a Caribbean materialist dialectic that aims at the constitution of a militant subject (pp. 231-32). The importance of Nesbitt's book thus rests on its attempts to mediate between postcolonial theory, as conventionally practiced, and the universalist axiomatics advocated by Hallward and Bongie in opposition to that discipline. Inevitably, this attempt raises a series of theoretical, political, and historical questions that would require far more detailed treatment than the limitations of the current review allow. What is certain is that Nesbitt has made an important and highly original contribution to such debates. Nesbitt has made an important and highly original contribution to such debates.
