Abstract
In today's progressive, decolonial reading regime, readers can never forget who they are or where they're reading from. We are witnessing the end of the idea of an impersonal reading of works, which dominated formalist literary criticism, i.e. a reading based on objectifiable aesthetic criteria, on universalizable formal parameters, generalizable to all cultures. The depersonalization of the reader is now seen as the ultimate subterfuge of "white supremacism" (Castillo) to assert its domination and keep racialized populations in submission. For decolonial critics, the ideal reader envisaged by the great European canonical texts, the "lector in fabula" (Eco), is a white, male, heterosexual reader of standard culture.
Elaine Castillo, on the other hand, sees herself as an "unplanned reader", which produces in her an effect ofstrangeness, a sense of alienation from the dominant culture. Strangeness, however, is not an imposed destiny. It is possible, if we so wish, to compensate for strangeness throughacclimatization, which is a way of reappropriating a strange culture by re-semantizing its structures of meaning, figures, scenes and symbols, without betraying who we are. This is not Castillo's choice: for political reasons, she refuses acclimatization, in order to maintain the supposedly irreducible difference between the unexpected reader she is and the work she is reading.
This position of unexpected reader leads her to read works with a different sensibility, and to make a few discoveries in famous texts. For example, she rereads the Homeric story of Ulysses landing on the island of Polyphemus, in theOdyssey, putting herself not in the hero's shoes, but in that of the Cyclops Polyphemus, whose territory is violated by the king of Ithaca. In this founding story of Western literature, Castillo rediscovers the violent gesture of intrusion into distant worlds, that of the colonizer. Of course, Ulysses is not a colonist; he just wants to go home. Nevertheless, this misreading is a productive betrayal of meaning.
Reading Perrault's Cinderella (1697), Castillo identifies less with the heroine than with the "non-white " (brown) mice . Based on a few historical coincidences (the exotic Grand Carrousel of 1662, in whose celebration Perrault took part, and the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick ceding part of Santo Domingo to France), she regrets that Cinderella's enchanted pumpkin has made us forget the Taino myth of the ocean's creation by means of a pumpkin. In her view, there is a hidden colonial dimension to Perrault's tale. On the contrary, it can be shown that Perrault was rather negative in his assessment of colonial imperialism. The pumpkin, ubiquitous in European vegetable gardens for at least a century, appears in his tale for reasons that have less to do with cultural appropriation than with a rational economy of narrative.
All culture, even that of so-called primitive peoples, is made up of borrowings, transfers and hybridization. When it comes to intangible goods, the accusation of cultural appropriation is nothing more than a weapon in the service of limiting freedom of thought and compartmentalizing peoples and cultures. A reading dictated solely by personal sensitivity or a sense of injustice is not enough: science and reason are also needed, as is the ability to detach oneself from the myths of origins and belonging. Stories and legends proliferate without measure, but are more often cousins of one another than direct heirs of one or the other.
