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This groundbreaking book analyzes the theme of community in seven French Caribbean novels in relation to the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. The complex history of the islands means that community is often a central and problematic issue in their literature, underlying a range of other questions such as political agency, individual and collective subjectivity, attitudes towards the past and the future, and even the literary form itself. Celia Britton here studies a range of key books from the region, including Édouard Glissant’s Le Quatrième Siècle, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit, and Vincent Placoly’s L’eau-de-mort guildive, among others.
"Murdoch exploits the postmodern theoretical vocabulary to provide perceptive readings of a selection of French Caribbean novels within the framework of antillanité and créolité."-- E. Anthony Hurley, State University of New York, Stony Brook Adlai Murdoch offers a detailed rereading of five major contemporary French Caribbean writers--Glissant, Condé, Maximin, Dracius-Pinalie, and Chamoiseau. Emphasizing the role of narrative in fashioning the cultural and political doubleness of Caribbean Creole identity, Murdoch shows how these authors actively rewrite their own colonially driven history. Murdoch maintains that the culture of the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique i...
The essays in this volume consider various literary and linguistic aspects of the francophone Caribbean at the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing particularly on the French Overseas Departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the independent islands of Haiti and Dominica. The literary chapters are devoted to new voices in the region and the Caribbean diaspora, or to recent works by established authors. Contributors offer fresh interpretations of Caribbean literary movements and explore relevant nonliterary issues, such as socio-political developments which have influenced the writers of today. The linguistic chapters examine the dynamics of the respective roles of Creole and the European standard language and consider the present viability of Creole as a literary medium.
Sex, Sea, and Self reassesses the place of the French Antilles and French Caribbean literature within current postcolonial thought and visions of the Black Atlantic. Using a feminist lens, this study examines neglected twentieth-century French texts by Black writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, making the analysis of some of these texts available to readers of English for the first time. This interdisciplinary study of female and male authors reconsiders their political strategies and the critical role of French creoles in the creation of their own history. This approach recalibrates overly simplistic understandings of the victimization and alienation of French Caribbean people. In the sy...
"This book examines the representation of the white Creole in Antillean literature"--
Believed to have emerged in the French Caribbean based on African spirit beliefs, the zombie represents not merely the walking dead, but also a walking embodiment of the region’s history and culture. In Haiti today, the zombie serves as an enduring memory of enslavement: it is defined as a reanimated body robbed of part of its soul, forced to work in sugarcane fields. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, the zombie takes the form of a shape-shifting evil spirit, and represents the dangers posed to the maroon or “freedom runner.” The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction is the first book-length study of the literary zombie in recent fiction from the region. It examines how this symb...
Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are Martinicans and Guadeloupeans today transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? This book answers these questions by relating the 1998 controversy surrounding the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery to the period of the slave regime spanning the late Enlightenment and the French Revolution. By comparing a diversity of documents—including letters by slaves, free people of color, and planters, as well as writings by the philosophes, royal decrees, and court cases—the author untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that have shaped collective memory. The current nationalization of the memory of slavery in France has turned these once peripheral claims into passionate political and cultural debates.
This book is the first major study of French Caribbean literature in light of the concept of postcoloniality. Postcolonial theory debates have developed in the anglophone domain, and have not as yet referred prominently to francophone literature. Jeannie Suk investigates how the literature ofMartinique and Guadeloupe provides a kaleidescopic view of the paradoxes at the heart of postcoloniality. Through subtle and provocative readings of Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Conde, Baudelaire, Freud, and others, she illuminates how the development of French Caribbean literature anddebates about negritude, antillanite, and creolite contribute to theories of in-betweenness and incompleteness ...
This volume brings together scholars working in different languages—Creole, French, English, Spanish—and modes of cultural production—literature, art, film, music—to suggest how best to model courses that impart the rich, vibrant, and multivalent aspects of the Caribbean in the classroom. Essays focus on discussing how best to cross languages, histories, and modes of discourse. Instead of relying on available paradigms that depend on Western ways of thinking, the essays recommend methods to develop a pan-Caribbean perspective in relation to notions of the self, uses of language, gender hierarchies, and ideas of nationhood. Contributors represent various disciplines, work in one of the several languages of the Caribbean, and offer essays that reflect different cadres of expertise.