Introduction: Diasporic Identities in Francophone Caribbean Women’s Literature

Abstract

Diaspora and the quest for identity represent defining tropes in the work of several Francophone women writers from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti, such as Maryse Conde, Gisele Pineau, Dany Bebel-Gisler, Edwidge Danticat, and Ina Cesaire, among others. These authors interrogate questions of migration, transnationalism, identity, intellectual production, and creolization through a diasporic lens. This perspective provides the necessary framework for their feminist contestations of patriarchy, political and social disenfranchisement, citizenship, exile, and cultural dystopia in their countries of origin, as well as the European and American diasporic metropolises of Paris, New York, and Miami. The diasporic trajectories of Haitian women writers differ from and collude with their Guadeloupean and Martinican counterparts given the differing migratory patterns and dissimilar histories of Haitian sovereignty versus French-Caribbean departmentalization in Martinique and Guadeloupe. However, all the writers discussed in this book demonstrate their common engagement with the problems of their specific diasporas by the production of transnational narratives reflecting the tensions of the colonial past and the ambiguities of the neocolonial present, especially in terms of identity and gender concerns.