Rhetoric includes “performative” uses of language that make a difference in one’s relation to the object of study. This does not mean that the histor… - Dominick LaCapra

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.

Rhetoric highlights the problem of how one reads texts. It even raises the question of whether historians are trained to read. I have already noted the tendency of professional historians to see texts as documents in the narrow sense of the word and, by the same token, to ignore the textual dimensions of documents themselves, that is, the manner in which documents “process” or rework material in ways intimately bound up with larger sociocultural and political processes.

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