Rhetoric exceeds not only documentary or referential but all utilitarian, workaday, and instrumental functions of language. It involves verbal displa… - Dominick LaCapra

Rhetoric involves a dialogical understanding of discourse and of “truth” itself in contrast to a monological idea of a unified authorial voice providing an ideally exhaustive and definitive (total) account of a fully mastered object of knowledge. Historiography is dialogical in that, through it, the historian enters into a “conversational” exchange with the past and with other inquirers seeking an understanding of it. The problem is the nature of the conversation.

The interactions between metropolitan France and its former colonies have been complex, often hegemonically skewed, and typically strained. Still, any understanding of francophone literature and culture should, I think, attempt not to isolate it but to explore its contested relations with the metropole and with figures and intellectual or cultural forces that are themselves not simply metropolitan but often internally complex, self-contradictory, hybridized, or riven.

Contexts of interpretation are at least three-fold; those of writing, reception, and critical reading.