“Every Discipline […] is a Lineage of Begetting”: The Generation(s) of Francophone Caribbean Studies in the UK and Ireland

Abstract

The article explores the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies in Great Britain and Ireland. It focuses on the first generation of scholars—Richard D.E. Burton, Bridget Jones, Roger Little and others—who were in the vanguard of this opening up of teaching and research in French studies towards the literatures and cultures of the region. The aims of the article are four-fold: (i) to understand these developments biographically, and to consider the professional factors (notably early-career postings to universities outside Europe and early engagement in doctoral research with examples of French literature and culture that spill beyond the Hexagon) that shaped these challenges to the disciplinary status quo; (ii) to situate the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies in relating to what Christophe Campos dubs a wider “cracking of coherence” in the study of French; (iii) to explore the ways in which historically existing disciplinary infrastructure—taking the example of the journal French Studies—adapted with varying degrees of enthusiasm to these changes; and (iv) to analyse the emergence and consolidation of a new disciplinary infrastructure in the 1970s–1990s—in Caribbean studies and Francophone literature more broadly (e.g., ASCALF, with its annual conference and publications)—to support these developments