Conclusion… or Alternative Beginnings

Abstract

AbstractThis book set out to challenge the silence of a messy period of Caribbean history by relocalizing early colonial travel writing to the Caribbean and by paying attention to textual disjunctions and temporal overlaps. The concluding chapter offers a discussion about what the readings of early modern travel writings might entail for (French) Caribbean literary history. More precisely, it teases out the possibility of putting this past to work in terms of alternative beginnings for a literature that has to a large extent been governed by a colonial distant center. The chapter gathers the findings that have been made throughout the critical readings of travel writing, synthesizing how archipelagic geography, self as site of mediation and influence, and, most importantly languages allow a new understanding of how the shaping of imperial and racial power was constructed in the narratives while also being disrupted by other forces and by creativity. It further engages in a broader discussion of how to retrieve traces from the archive while resisting nostalgia and sentimentality, by interrogating the works of scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Simon Gikandi, and David Scott, along with Édouard Glissant.