CONTESTED SOURCES

Abstract

Situated at the intersection of postcolonial studies and ecocriticism, this essay argues that fresh water is a site of contested representational regimes in French Caribbean literature. The meaning of water in the Caribbean is the result of the encounter between ideas brought together by a wide range of actors, with French and African understandings of water the two most significant. French notions of water's meaning and value circulate throughout the French Atlantic, but take hold most vigorously in those places—such as Martinique, Guadeloupe, and even to a certain degree Haiti—where these notions were buttressed by the legal and cultural practices and institutions of colonialism. While briefly addressing what those French notions of water are and how they have been imposed on cultures with radically different notions of water's meaning, the bulk of the essay is taken up with the contemporary refashioning of those notions in French Caribbean literature, the area of the French Atlantic that has been subject to arguably the greatest variety and intensity of cultural flows.