French Caribbean Literature Research Articles

Madness, Isolation and the Female Condition in Gisèle Pineau’s Writing

This article examines themes of madness and mental illness in fictional and non-fictional writing by Guadeloupean author Gisèle Pineau. Madness is an important trope in French Caribbean literature that critiques the enduring legacies of colonization, slavery and forced displacement. It is a prevalent theme in Pineau’s work because her writing is inspired by her parallel career as a psychiatric nurse. The article explores madness from a gendered perspective in her short stories “Ombres créoles” (1988) and “Ta mission, Marny” (2009). Arguing that here, madness is a specifically Antillean condition that both erases the agency of the female protagonists and grants them power to resist, the article then examines how Pineau explores the theme from a metropolitan viewpoint in the autobiographically inspired Folie, aller simple: journée ordinaire d’une infirmière (2010). Through her writing, Pineau bears witness to the ordeals of Caribbean women haunted by the collective trauma of slavery and patriarchal power.

Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean by Jason Herbeck

Reviewed by: Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean by Jason Herbeck Lucy Swanson Jason Herbeck, Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean, Liverpool University Press, 2017, 340 pp. With Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean, Jason Herbeck offers an insightful and innovative contribution to discussions of identity formation in the literature of Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Herbeck's nuanced close readings of recent works by writers from the region and comparative approach to studying French Caribbean literature and cultures are two of the book's greatest strengths. They make Architextual Authenticity a compelling intervention into two complex questions: firstly, how can "authentic" Caribbean identities be constructed in light of the region's diasporic roots in the Middle Passage? Secondly, despite the absence of an original "French Caribbean culture," how do writers from the former French colonies craft an Antillean literary specificity that neither reproduces French metropolitan literature (with a bit of exotic couleur locale), nor idealizes lost African roots (as Césaire has been accused of in his theorization of négritude)? Herbeck explores these questions, as the book's title indicates, through an examination of the literary theme of architecture—studying works in which houses allegorize Caribbean identity construction—and through these works' architexture, the "meta-textual construction of texts" (10)—in this case, their references to and engagement with previous works of French Caribbean literature. In the introduction, Herbeck frames this approach in relation to the "Colonocene," through a discussion of francophone postcolonial theory—including a broad discussion of these issues by writers like Albert Memmi as [End Page 121] well as more specifically by the theorists of antillanité and créolité, and in light of recent scholarship on French Caribbean identity and narratological and formal aspects of postcolonial literature in French. The first chapter serves as an extension of the introduction. Through an exploration of the Haitian Gingerbread house, it lays out how architecture can serve as a lens for examining the construction of French Caribbean identity. Specifically, Herbeck analyzes writing that attempts to pinpoint the Haitian specificity of this architectural style that draws on European traditions (Victorian and French). One interesting moment is the discussion of the implications of the decline of "authentic" architecture in post-earthquake Haiti in light of the ongoing intervention of NGOs. Herbeck subsequently applies this exploration of literal structures to close readings of literary structures in short stories by Haitian writers Yanick Lahens and Evelyne Trouillot. This approach frames the close readings found in the second through fifth chapters of Architextual Authenticity, each of which studies a different writer. Chapter two focuses on Edouard Glissant's La Lézarde (1958), adding a case study of the Maison de la Source to the existing body of scholarship on the writer's landscapes and shedding new light on the way the author reflects on Martinican identity in the wake of the 1946 departmentalization of the French Antilles. In chapter three, Herbeck considers Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé's seminal Traversée de la mangrove (1989), and in particular the Propriété Alexis inhabited by Francis Sancher before his death. Herbeck's discussion of Condé's multiethnic and multicultural representation of Guadeloupe is particularly interesting where he discusses Condé's debate with créoliste Patrick Chamoiseau, and in his reading of Traversée's intertextual relationship with Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis's Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944). The fourth chapter offers an extended discussion of the Maison des Flamboyants in Daniel Maximin's L'Île et une nuit (1995), arguing Condé's Traversée is a "latent intertext" (173) with Maximin's novel. Herbeck convincingly reads the porous structure of the Maison des Flamboyants—which initially helps it withstand the onslaught of a hurricane—as a metaphor for Caribbean identity construction as an open, flexible and ongoing process. It is, he writes, "necessary to consider the concept of resistance in L'Île as a vital process of negotiation rather than as unconditional opposition to or outright obstruction of external influences" (202). The fifth and final chapter returns to the context of post-earthquake Haiti evoked in the first chapter...

Translation bibliomigrancy: the case of contemporary French Caribbean literature in Sweden

This paper examines consecration mechanisms contributing to translation taking place from one local periphery in the global translation field, notably from French Caribbean literature, to another (semi-) periphery, Swedish literature. The translation bibliomigrancy of Dany Laferrière, Maryse Condé and Patrick Chamoiseau is mapped out and tested against the Double Consecration Hypothesis, which states that writers from peripheral cultures, to be selected for translation into Swedish, haveprimarilyto be consecrated within the center of their previous (colonial) culture in the global translation fieldand thenwithin the centers of the British and American literary cultures. It is shown that double consecration constitutes a favorable condition for the peripheral writers studied to reach Swedish readers in translation. However, the success of these writers within Swedish literary culture heavily depends on their consecration within the Anglo-American culture, on the prestige of the publishing houses and on the involved translators’ possession of translation capital.

De l’éruption rhétorique : étude de l’hypotypose dans la littérature catastrophique franco-antillaise

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The Living Word: Intracultural Translation in Ina Césaire's Zonzon tête carrée

In French Caribbean literature, translations from Creole to French, along with the inclusion of Creole orality in novels written in French, constitute a broader form of intracultural translation that expose problematic tensions between sameness and difference. The essay starts by exploring some of the modes of intracultural translation used by the authors of the créolité movement but focuses on Ina Césaire's novel Zonzon tête carrée, where cultural difference is downplayed in favor of another approach to translation developed from an internal Caribbean perspective. Even though Ina Césaire explicitly builds her novel from the tales she has collected in her professional ethnographic research, the art of storytelling is only referred to indirectly and is built into a larger structure based on environment, music, rhythm, dance, and movement. These alliances between literature, nonlinguistic forms, and spatial geography, along with orality, suggest that the author attempts to radically reconsider the way creole folk culture should be translated into writing.

Haiti's Traces

This review dialogues with Kaiama L. Glover's Haiti Unbound to explore how the Spiralist authors have grappled with the problem of history and the difficulty of representing life under the Duvalier regimes. The essay seeks to situate her contribution within a broader field of literary criticism surrounding French Caribbean and Haitian literature, and draws on her approach to analyze a selection of novels by Lyonel Trouillot.

Yoruba deities in Aim Csaire\s Dramaturgy

The French Caribbean Literature is replete with African cultural archetypes, an important inheritance from the African origin of the predominantly black population. Most prominent of these archetypes are traceable to the Yoruba culture and faith system. This paper studies the esthetic use of Yoruba deities in Aime Cesaire\'s dramatic works. The study reveals that Cesaire, who is ever conscious of the African substratum of his multi-cultural heritage, has used to good literary effect his allusion to Yoruba deities. He has also reincarnated some of them as perceived by the Caribbean in the plays. The paper observes a distortion of the original Yoruba image of the deities in the Antillean perception as represented by Cesaire\'s plays. However, this neither diminishes the esthetic significance of the allusion nor does it violate the sacredness of the deities in question. Rather, it demonstrates the resilience of these deities and their adaptability to time and space.

Yoruba Deities In Aimé Césaire\'s Dramaturgy

The French Caribbean Literature is replete with African cultural archetypes, an important inheritance from the African origin of the predominantly black population. Most prominent of these archetypes are traceable to the Yoruba culture and faith system. This paper studies the esthetic use of Yoruba deities in Aime Cesaire\'s dramatic works. The study reveals that Cesaire, who is ever conscious of the African substratum of his multi-cultural heritage, has used to good literary effect his allusion to Yoruba deities. He has also reincarnated some of them as perceived by the Caribbean in the plays. The paper observes a distortion of the original Yoruba image of the deities in the Antillean perception as represented by Cesaire\'s plays. However, this neither diminishes the esthetic significance of the allusion nor does it violate the sacredness of the deities in question. Rather, it demonstrates the resilience of these deities and their adaptability to time and space.

CONTESTED SOURCES

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.

Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature Peter Hallward Nick Nesbitt . Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. 258 pp. Most if not all work in postcolonial literary criticism seeks to combine principled political commitment (in a context marked by the eclipse of Marxism and the waning of anti-colonial struggle) and contemporary theoretical sophistication (in a context still mainly marked by the influence of Adorno and Foucault). Nick Nesbitt's book on francophone Caribbean literature is unusually successful on both counts. Wide-ranging and impressively documented, it revives a broadly dialectical conception of historical agency and artistic innovation in terms that [End Page 170] retain both a sharp political edge and a respect for contextual specificity and constraint. Nesbitt's point of departure is a pessimistic assessment of the cultural alienation and political dependency of contemporary Guadeloupe and Martinique. The directly anti-colonial promise once associated with revolutionary figures like Guadeloupe's Louis Delgrès has long since been incorporated into an ever more commodified local folklore (a process described in Nesbitt's first and perhaps most original chapter). Against the progressive consolidation of neo-colonialism in the Caribbean, Nesbitt presents Aimé Césaire in particular—and after him more recent writers like Edouard Glissant, Daniel Maximin, Maryse Condé and Edwidge Danticat—as struggling to recover a relational subjective autonomy through the "aesthetic construction of historical experience." The key philosophical inspiration behind this effort is Hegel, who as Nesbitt points out exerted a direct and lasting influence upon both Césaire and Glissant. As opposed to the more acontextual frameworks of both Kant and Heidegger, Hegel seeks to articulate the universal directly through the mediation of the particular. Nesbitt uses Hegel to explain how "self-consciousness arises from the specific experience of lived contradiction," and in particular from the concrete Caribbean experience of slavery and exploitation. This explanation is the basis, in turn, for the account that Nesbitt develops, as much from Glissant as from Adorno, of the process whereby this alienation is overcome through its conversion into a semi-autonomous aesthetic construction. Nesbitt's Hegel privileges recognition of the opacity or non-identity of the other (Adorno's "preponderance of the object") over the claims of an absolute subject who sees in its objects only the manifestation of its own creative consciousness (Kojève's "end of history"). Most of Nesbitt's book consists of detailed interpretations of the work of Césaire and more recent Caribbean writers as successive contributions to this broadly Hegelian and tendentially global project. Césaire figures here as a fundamentally ambivalent figure. Nesbitt acknowledges his early work, in particular his landmark Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, as the inaugural affirmation of an anticolonial subjectivity in the francophone world. But he sees his later work in particular (most notably the play that dramatizes the corruption of Haiti's Roi Christophe) as tempted if not compromised by leanings towards a Kojevian or absolutist Hegelianism. This sets the stage, in [End Page 171] duly dialectical fashion, for Glissant to emerge as the more consistently relational artist and thinker. Unlike most admirers of Glissant, Nesbitt recognizes that his recent writings are themselves susceptible to the lure of the immediate or absolute, albeit less in a Hegelian than in a Spinozist or Deleuzian vein. Nesbitt prefers, however, to privilege Glissant's concern for local specificity, artistic construction and political engagement. Although the present (and rather more skeptical) reviewer doesn't find it entirely persuasive, the result is a sympathetic portrayal of Glissant as the champion of an "aesthetic constructionism," i.e., of a painstaking effort to respect the "opacity" of the other, to secure the "autonomy of objects by passing through subjective experience, maximizing its determinations in a poetic quasi-logic rather than eliminating subjectivity in deference to an engulfing scientific positivism." Exactly who or what is threatened by such engulfing, however, isn't always clear. More substantial grounds for skepticism may be signaled by the fact that the period (mainly the late 1980s and 1990s) during which Glissant no doubt became the single most influential figure in francophone Caribbean literary studies was...

Essai sur les essais dans la littrature des Antilles au tournant du xxe sicle

This is an article on essays in French Caribbean literature at the end of the last century. The essay is one of the ambiguous genres of French Caribbean literature. It is frequently practised in the Caribbean in journals and newspapers, autobiographies and novels, short stories and theatre. Whether it appears collectively or individually, is written by one or various authors, the essay offers a loud and far-reaching voice and serves as Caliban's response to the questions of frustration, absence, and silence which are the consequences of slavery in the West Indies. The main concern of the essay at the end of the twentieth century is to create and organize a new Creole reason in politics, history, and literature.

Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature

Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature

Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (review)

Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (review)

Disenchanting les Bons Temps: Identity and Authenticity in Cajun Music and Dance (review)

L'Esprit Créateur by (neo)colonialism—so that writers from the French Caribbean are best understood from a dialectical perspective in which the present contains the possibility of its own negation, a possibility which is embodied in the aesthetic construction of historical experience. The theoretical framework of the book is thus Hegelian and humanist Marxist; rather than the more prevalent postmodernist canon, the principal references here are Hegel, Kojève, Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin , and Marcuse. The introduction describes the erasure and subsequent commodification of communal memory in the French Antilles, and then presents the philosophical concepts that will inform the subsequent discussion. Chapter 1 traces the history of representations of Louis Delgrès from immediately after the revolt he led in 1802 to the present day. The next three chapters are devoted to Césaire: the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and négritude, his participation in Présence africaine and his Bourdieu-esque positioning of himself as the leading black intellectual of the period, and La Tragédie du roi Christophe in the context of African decolonization. Chapter 5 analyses the role of jazz in Maximin's L'Isolé soleil and L'Ile et une nuit as not merely thematic but determining structural parallels in combining improvisation with relationship to an existing tradition. Chapter 6 discusses Glissant's conception of historical totality, equating 'Relation' with dialectical consciousness and arguing that the modernist thrust of his early work persists in the concept of the 'Tout-monde'. The final chapter is devoted to Condé and Danticat, both of whom exemplify the potential for an emancipatory aesthetic response to the violence and oppression of Caribbean society. The strengths of Nesbitt's approach are his solid historical research and his unfashionable commitment to a dialectical vision, which produces powerful new readings of some major texts. His analysis of La Tragédie du roi Christophe in conjunction with the Phenomenology of Spirit, and of the hitherto largely neglected Hegelian influence on Glissant's thought are particularly valuable. Not all his textual interpretations are convincing, and the philosophical framework sometimes results in a rather unbalanced view of the text in question; his book is not a useful introduction to French Caribbean literature, but it is a stimulating and illuminating reconceptualization of the field. Celia Britton University College London Charles J. Stivale. Disenchanting les Bons Temps: Identity and Authenticity in Cajun Music and Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 217. This book examines the conflicting forces and processes at work within Cajun cultural practices , specifically, Cajun music, song lyrics, and dance. It brings together voices from within the Cajun world, voices from without, and, most especially, voices from in-between, the loudest and clearest of which is the author's own voice, which benefits at once from a critical savvy (Stivale ranks among the best informed and eclectic scholars in the business), a personal passion (as a dancing and spectating fan of Cajun music and dance), and a keen interest to locate "the hybrid inbetweenness " of Cajun cultural practice. Through an approach that is itself hybrid and in-between the disciplines of critical theory (especially Deleuze and Guattari, but also Nora, Bakhtin, et al.), cultural studies, and popular culture, Stivale argues skillfully that Cajun culture is in-between the enchantment and the disenchantment of its myth. On one hand the voices from within the culture, through their song and dance practices, declare an abandonment to the pleasure principle (laissez les bons temps rouler), and on the other they disenchant the free spirit of the culture by staging its identity and authenticity and by regulating, manipulating, and enforcing its continuity. An avowed interest in Cajun culture is not a prerequisite for enjoying and learning from this book. It expands the reader's critical understanding of the paradoxes of cultural constructs and the borders between them, while masterfully guiding the reader through some difficult critical territory , systematically resituating, and reinforcing its major arguments. 100 Winter 2004 Book Reviews The introduction and first chapter ("Becoming-Cajun") lay the groundwork for Stivale's blossoming interest in the topic, and they situate the key concepts of identity, authenticity, enchantment and disenchantment in relation to...

Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (review)

Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (review)

Les aventures de la littérature antillaise

Early French Caribbean writing was a pale reflection of French literature. This state of alienation later led some writers from the French Antilles to assert a new Caribbean identity as the basis of a literary renewal focused around their own values. Out of a pursuit of the Caribbean renaissance grew major works inspired by literary movements such as Negritude, Antillanite, Creolite and Diaspora that mirror the evolution of Caribbean identity from a state of subordination to one of independence and authenticity. From an historical perspective, this article analyzes the development of French Caribbean literature by dealing with ways in which its writers work in the colonial and post-colonial contexts to redefine their diverse humanity, culture and literature through the passionate quest for a modern native identity.

Gendering mornes and volcanoes in French Caribbean literature

Volcanism has shaped the natural and man-made landscapes of the Lesser Antilles but also remodelled their political and economic activities. This violent interaction has inspired literary authors to explore the role of volcanoes in providing an iconography of resistance. While Aimé Césaire finds inspiration in volcanoes as positive symbols of revolt, other authors, particularly women, tend to be more receptive to their dual identity as rebellious figures and indiscriminate killers. mornes also play a prominent role in the iconography of resistance. Their ruggedness mirror the invincible maroon as it emerged not so much from historical studies as from local folklore and literary portrayals. A gendered reading of mornes emerges as French Caribbean male authors tend to focus on the role they played in marooning while women writers are more aware of mornes as life-giving forces where rivers are born, herbal remedies grow and emotionally wounded characters find solace.

Magical Realism in Contemporary French Caribbean Literature : Ideology or Literary Diversion?

Magical Realism in Contemporary French Caribbean Literature : Ideology or Literary Diversion?

Exile and Identity in the Plays of Maryse Condé

Exile and Identity in the Plays of Maryse Conde Melissa L. McKay One of the most prolific writers of the French Caribbean, Maryse Conde is well known in France and throughout the Francophone world. She has written novels, essays and plays, the latter of which have been performed in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and the United States. Although Conde's plays are not as renowned as her novels and essays, they are an important key to understanding her work as a whole. Throughout her plays, we see themes that will be treated in more depth later in novels such as Segou and Traversee de la Mangrove. Perhaps for autobiographical reasons, or perhaps since given the history of the islands, these ideas are very important in French Caribbean literature, Maryse Conde is especially interested in the problems of exile, the eventual return to the native country, and the effect that exile has on one's identity. In this paper, I would like to explore the relationship between exile and identity in three of Conde's plays, focusing on the different ways in which the author, who herself spent many years away from her native Guadeloupe, examines these themes. Dieu nous l'a donne, published in 1972, deals with a common problem in post-colonial literature: the conflicts that arise when traditional values are threatened by modern European ideas. The main character is Dieudonne, a young doctor educated in Paris who returns to Guadeloupe hoping to use the things that he has learned in France to effect some sort of change. He befriends Mandela, a traditional healer, and his daughter Maeva, but is eventually betrayed by both, due to their suspicions of his motives for coming back to the island. Instead of leading a revolution as he had hoped, Dieudonne is met at every turn by resistance to his liberal ideas, and in the end, he is rejected by his friends and killed by his own people. In Mort d'Oluwemi d'Ajumako, published in 1973, some of the same conflicts can be seen between Oluwemi, an African king and his son, Ange, who has been educated in Europe. The tension is even greater due to the fact that Ange has had to forget about his love for Sef ira who was forced to become Oluwemi's bride. The young lovers eventually try to escape together but

A Woman's Voice: Perspectives on Marie-Magdeleine Carbet

Marie-Magdeleine Carbet occupies a unique position in the literary history of Martinique of the twentieth century. Born in the first decade of the century, she has been writing and publishing consistently since the middle 1930s, before Cesaire, in a variety of genres: novels, short stories, children's stories, essays, as well as poetry. She has been a vocal activist against racism and anti-semitism, and has spoken out about the publication difficulties faced by francophone writers.' The sheer volume of her creative output can rival that of Cesaire or Glissant. And yet, she has received very little attention from anthologists, literary historians or critics,2 perhaps because she seems to have ignored significant major issues that are reflected in the voices of other French Caribbean writers of her generation, particularly Surrealism, Negritude, and the ongoing political struggles of the French Caribbean. It is undoubtedly true that Carbet is a 20th century French Caribbean woman writer who has chosen the kind of voice she finds most appropriate as a literary response to her situation. Evidently as a woman she finds some solace in the nineteenth century traditions of Romanticism and of Western European Christianity, which validated suffering, expressed her own perceived state of exile, and promoted female passivity. While writing within this dominant metropolitan tradition, however, Carbet develops and produces a voice that distinguishes her as essentially Caribbean. This study will illustrate, by an examination of poems from Point d'Orgue [Organ Stop] and Rose de ta grace [Rose of thy Grace], some of the modulations of Carbet's poetic voice. The nature of her response, in these collections, to the problematic of cultural identity confronting all French Caribbean poets, in terms both of the cultural model she adopts as a poet, and of the poetic choices she makes as a woman, provides further insight into the characteristics of an authentic French Caribbean literature. Carbet's Point d'Orgue,3 published in 1958, is a collection of thirty-four poems, eight of which are designated as chansons [songs]. These poems are in their form very traditional (from the perspective of metropolitan French literary practices) and present few direct indications, if any, of a specific Caribbean poetic presence. The landscape is generally non-tropical and the thematic orientation evokes memories of the poetry both of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, in relation to the loving, passive poetic subject, to the primacy of suffering and to the representation of nature, and of Baudelaire, in the feelings of being exiled and in the longing for a tropical paradise. Even the identity of the poetic persona, often not clearly female, seems somehow masked or muted, lacking definition and precision. The title of the collection, Point d'Orgue, bears the double association of, on the one