Empire of Language

Dubreuil explores the power-language phenomenon in the context of European and, particularly, French colonialism and its aftermath.

Laurent Dubreuil is Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature, Director of the French Studies Program, and member of the cognitive science program and graduate field at Cornell University. He is the editor of diacritics. He is the author of several books in French, including, most recently, Le Refus de la politique.

Laurent Dubreuil's insightful Empire of Language is an original approach to important questions about the discourses of postcolonial writing of French expression. Dubreuil raises the issue of the character of these discourses, particularly concentrating on the pattern of prohibitions, inhibitions, and obligatory expressions imposed by seemingly invisible social and political pressures. These deformations of language(s) in turn have powerful effects on action, on what happens.

Ranjana Khanna, Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's StudiesDuke University, author of Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present:

In Empire of Language, Laurent Dubreuil focuses on possession and haunting on the level of phraseology, the linguistic occupation of French colonial possessions, and the complicity (ironically) of the language of decolonizers as well as that of the defenders of the French nation-state. Boldly, Dubreuil also addresses the antipathy toward postcolonial thought—and the anti-Americanism that goes along with it—in French academic and mainstream contexts.

Jacques Neefs, James M. Beall Professor in French Literature, The Johns Hopkins University:

Empire of Language covers a broad span of time and subject matter: all the way from the seventeenth century to the present; from the texts of Christopher Columbus to those of Spinoza and Sartre; from racist treatises to major texts denouncing colonialism; and from little-known eighteenth-century Haitian historians to contemporary institutions. This brief sampling gives but a small idea of the extraordinary richness and magnitude of this book, and especially of its critical impact. With great vigor and lively intelligence, Laurent Dubreuil gives readers a new understanding of the hold language exercises in the colonial model of power. This is obviously a very innovative book.