“A Question to Be Lived”

Abstract

This essay develops an anthropological genealogy of the creolite literary project. Examining works by Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant, the author studies how the creolistes read ethnography and the social sciences into a revitalized creole literary history, generating a vision of creole fiction as ethnographic fiction. More specifically, he demonstrates how the human sciences perform three interrelated tasks in the history the creolistes create of their own literary production: first, they serve as disciplinary frameworks for creole fiction; second, they index and reflect empiricist desires in literature, gesturing toward a fictional form that would connect with the Real in ways that earlier modes of Caribbean writing could not; and, finally, they become figural modes in fictional texts, informing the creolistes' senses of narrative and characterology.