Africa, Pan-Africanism, and the Global Caribbean in Maryse Condé's <em>The Story of the Cannibal Woman</em>

Abstract

The Caribbean is frequently imagined as a quintessential site of diasporic arrival and encounter in modernity. But since the early years of the twentieth century, the Caribbean has more prominently served as a site of diasporic departure as well as the intellectual point of origin for pan-Africanism, negritude and other radical conceptions of transnational community and global justice. This essay situates a recent work of Caribbean fiction, Maryse Condé's 2003 The Story of the Cannibal Woman, in relation to this author's longstanding engagement with the often fraught relationship between diasporic movement and black internationalism in her fiction and criticism. The story of Rosélie, Condé's diasporic protagonist living in post-apartheid Cape Town, is linked to the midcentury transatlantic history of negritude and pan-Africanism, as well as to more recent histories of postcolonial violence in southern Africa. Exploring these links, this article interrogates how we might read the early twenty-first century Caribbean novel of globalization within a genealogy of mid-twentieth century black internationalism and its afterlives.