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or Antillais, who all too easily are identified as the “bad” immigrants. Such a manipulative opposition is an expression of contemporary French empire building.
In her dialogic examination of Carlos Batista’s novel Poulailler (2005)—so named after the henhouse where the Franco-Portuguese narrator used to seek refuge as a little boy from his father’s violence and from French racism and where he turned himself into a hen—Martine Fernandes designates the henhouse as a metaphor for the loss of sovereignty and domestication suffered by Portuguese immigrants and their descendants in France as a result of Salazar’s dictatorship and French neocolonial politics. This political satire of French society is reminiscent of Voltaire’s “Dialogue du chapon et de la poularde,” in which castrated animals fall prey to exploitative humans, as does the emasculated Franco-Portuguese male in France. Such Kafkaesque metamorphosis also limns a discreet genealogy in Mozambican author Mia Couto’s denunciation of various imperialisms (e.g., Portuguese, Russian, American) in Terre Somnambule (1992) and in Beur writer Farida Belghoul’s Georgette! (1986). The fable, a traditional French genre that engages in political satire, becomes a powerful hermeneutic tool to denounce contemporary French imperialism.
The Portuguese émigrésjoin Hardt and Negri’s “new nomadic horde,” which resurfaces at the end of Empire under the subchapter “Nomadism and Miscegenation.” These nomads appear as “figures of virtue, as the first ethical practice on the terrain of Empire” (362). Zahi Zalloua deems Hardt and Negri’s discussion of the nomad exceedingly romantic and asserts that this approach leaves undisturbed the alterity and exemplarity of nomadism. If the authors of Empire, he continues, rightly underscore the limits of a “politics of difference” à la Bhabha, calling attention to the ways “difference” can always be co-opted by the dominant doxa, Hardt and Negri ignore what Zalloua calls “an ethics of difference in the age of globalization.” Zalloua thus brings added nuance to the concept of difference by juxtaposing Hardt and Negri’s understanding of the idea with Edouard Glissant’s ethico-political injunction for the right to opacity and with Derrida’s Levinasian notion