“Comique et Laid”: Bitter Laughter and Dystopia in Francophone Caribbean and Urban Literatures

In spite of the flashy, highly consumable traits that have earned it considerable success in the last two decades, the work of literary dystopias is complex, engaging nothing less than the past, the present and the future. It is easy to forget that beyond the stunning special effects of its cinematographic productions, or the suspenseful, page-turning poetics of its literary expressions—in short, beyond its undeniable entertainment value—the dystopian genre, in its most recent iteration, aims above all to shake the world out of the dangerous complacency of late-stage capitalism. There exists a tension between the genre’s extravagant aesthetics and the latent threats it wishes to signal. Onscreen or on the page, protagonists vie for their physical lives in ostentatiously dangerous situations. These are metaphors for other, often invisible yet very real threats, including social death and cultural death are such threats. My dissertation explores specifically how authors of francophone expression seek to represent the experience of minoritized subjects by utilizing dystopian tropes that render these invisible threats visible. I take as a point of departure that the République universelle française continues to be animated by a utopian ethos inherited from a perennial humanist tradition. Still in search of an essential, universal understanding of both Frenchness and humanity, it struggles to relate to those among its citizens whose ontological particularities resist its homogenizing impulses. In its new postcolonial iteration, France seems to envision itself as having achieved utopia: it purports to be a good place. But for those who do not comfortably fit within these ideological walls, this utopia is perceived as a dystopia: a bad place. To be sure, it is a soft dystopia, one that operates on lower frequencies, which allows it to continue to pass as a utopia. My dissertation contends that the presence of dystopian tropes in the literary and cinematographic works I explore exposes the République universelle française for what it is. Fictional dystopia emerges out of and unmasks its real-word, underhanded alter ego.The frequent presence of laughter alongside these dystopian tropes is striking, and calls for close consideration. How can one laugh in the face of cultural death? What is the function of this laughter? Does it serve to soften the moral indictment of the Republic? Does it serve to render the critique more vitriolic, tipping it toward the satirical? Does it constitute a self-soothing gesture for the writer or the artiste? Can this laughter also be complicit? Can it be the sign of the surrender of the self to the powerful appeal of utopia? The search for answers to these questions has brought the present work to the intersection of postcolonial critique, utopian/dystopian studies and laughter theory.