In the Penumbra of the Antillean Hallucination

This intervention in the problem of representation and postcoloniality examines the proliferating newspaper photographs of accused criminals in the former British colony of Nevis. These images instantiate what Frantz Fanon describes as an “autoscopic” hallucination, the effect of a mirror that disorders Antillean imagination and governmentality. However, one finds that Fanon's formulation of the “Antillean hallucination” and the resulting negative assessment of the prospects of an Antillean postcoloniality are the effect of a sticky/tarring alignment with the sensory schisms and epistemic rifts that constitute Lacanian psychoanalysis as an extension of French colonial politics. Recognizing how Jacques Lacan “prepares his own snout” and makes himself a “tar-baby,” Griffin offers the grave citation as a ruse for escape. He examines a point of separation in the Lacanian/Fanonian union by identifying in the Antillean hallucination a voice that is not ventriloquized and names that picture an achievable Antillean postcoloniality.