L'ecrivain Caribéen, Guerrier de L'imaginaire


Book Description

This bilingual collection illustrates the concept of the 'Warrior of the Imaginary', as defined by Patrick Chamoiseau, in a multi-faceted corpus of texts. Francophone contributions explore the role of the Caribbean writer in works by Chamoiseau, Édouard Glissant, Daniel Maximin, and Joseph Zobel. Essays in English focus not only on familiar writers (Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, Derek Walcott) but also on less widely studied voices (Robert Antoni, Albert Helman). Other contributions deal with such 'fighting areas' as Afro-Brazilian music, film, and Mutabaruka's militant poetry. The whole testifies to a surprisingly coherent imaginary, one that goes beyond the 'balkanization' of the Caribbean archipelago. Dans ce collectif bilingue, le concept de 'Guerrier de l'imaginaire' tel que défini par Patrick Chamoiseau est illustré par un corpus de textes variés. Plusieurs des articles en français engagent directement le cycle romanesque de l'auteur martiniquais, d'autres étendent l'interrogation de la fonction de l'auteur caribéen à l'écriture glissantienne, maximinienne et zobélienne. Études en anglais portent sur des écrivains dont le renom n'est plus à faire (Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, Wilson Harris, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, Derek Walcott) mais donnent aussi la parole à des auteurs jusqu'à présent moins étudiés (Robert Antoni, Albert Helman). Enfin, quelques-unes des contributions portent sur d'autres 'terrains de lutte', comme la musique afro-brésilienne, le cinéma, ou la poésie militante de Mutabaruka. L'ensemble témoigne d'un imaginaire étonnamment confluant, au-delà de la 'balkanisation' de l'archipel caribéen.




Violence in Caribbean Literature


Book Description

Violence in Caribbean Literature: Stories of Stones and Blood, this book looks at the scene of the throwing of a stone found in five novels, and uses it as a starting point to an examination of the turmoil of history in the Caribbean, the colonial education imposed on Caribbean populations, the gendered relations that exist today in the Caribbean region, the political status and aspirations of Caribbean nations, and the psychological impact of colonization on Caribbean minds. The trope of the stone and the analysis of the violence it delivers provide the thread that conducts the linked readings of these novels, written by Dominican Jean Rhys, Trinidadian Merle Hodge, Guadeloupean Gisèle Pineau, Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau, and Jamaican-American Michelle Cliff. The analytical and critical readings of these writers’ novels complement each other, and draw out their commonalities, echoes, and differences, while the juxtaposition of Anglophone and Francophone novels from different Caribbean nations contributes to a polyphonic understanding of the region. While the book offers diversity in the range of countries and languages represented, and in the interdisciplinarity of the scholarly fields that intersect in its cultural discussions, it maintains its coherence by the unifying theme of violence and its representations in Caribbean literature.




Practices of Resistance in the Caribbean


Book Description

The Caribbean has played a crucial geopolitical role in the Western pursuit of economic dominance, yet Eurocentric research usually treats the Caribbean as a peripheral region, consequently labelling the inhabitants as beings without agency. Examining asymmetrical relations of power in the Greater Caribbean in historical and contemporary perspectives, this volume explores the region’s history of resistance and subversion of oppressive structures against the backdrop of the Caribbean’s central role for the accumulation of wealth of European and North American actors and the respective dialectics of modernity/coloniality, through a variety of experiences inducing migration, transnational exchange and transculturation. Contributors approach the Caribbean as an empowered space of opposition and agency and focus on perspectives of the region as a place of entanglements with a long history of political and cultural practices of resistance to colonization, inequality, heteronomy, purity, invisibilization, and exploitation. An important contribution to the literature on agency and resistance in the Caribbean, this volume offers a new perspective on the region as a geopolitically, economically and culturally crucial space, and it will interest researchers in the fields of Caribbean politics, literature and heritage, colonialism, entangled histories, global studies perspectives, ethnicity, gender, and migration.




French XX Bibliography, Issue #62


Book Description




The Body in Francophone Literature


Book Description

Much of Francophone literature is a response to an elaborate discourse that served to bolster colonial French notions of national grandeur and to justify expansion of French territories overseas. A form of colonial exoticism saw the colonized subject as a physical, cultural, aesthetic and even sexual singularity. Francophone writers sought to rehabilitate the status of non-Western peoples who, through the use of anthropometric techniques, had been racially classified as inferior or primitive. Drawing on various Francophone texts, this collection of new essays offers a compelling study of the literary body--both corporeal and figurative. Topics include the embodiment of diasporic identity, the body politic in prison writing, women's bodies, and the body's expression of trauma inflicted by genocidal violence.




Jamaica Kincaid's Writings of History


Book Description

Jamaica Kincaid's works consistently explore how colonial history affects contemporary everyday lives. Throughout her novels, short fiction, and non-fictional essays, Kincaid's texts engage with history through its medial representations, which are starkly determined by colonial perspectives. This study examines the entanglements of temporalities in current perceptions of the past and how literary text intervenes in historical consciousness. With a focus on the media text, image, and the human body, the chapters of this book demonstrate how Kincaid's "poetics of impermanence" counter colonial representations of history with strategies of ambiguity, repetition, and redirection. Kincaid's texts repeat and revise aspects of colonial history - a process that decenters the totality of historical colonial ideology and replaces it with self-determined versions of the past through a multiplication of perspectives and voices.




Reimagining Resistance in Gisèle Pineau’s Works


Book Description

As one of the most prominent voices from and about the French Caribbean, Gisèle Pineau has garnered significant scholarly attention; however, this interest has culminated in precious few volumes devoted entirely to the author and her work. In response to this lack of in-depth critical attention, Reimagining Resistance in Gisèle Pineau’s Works brings together a range of perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic and across the Pacific to explore the unique ways in which Gisèle Pineau’s works redefine the concept of resistance, particularly as it relates to gender, race, history, and Antillean identity. As this volume ultimately demonstrates, resistance holds up a mirror to the political, economic, and cultural forces that have shaped the past, construct the present, and build the future. It argues that Pineau’s characters open the narrative frame for reading them and move us beyond the categories of the wholly defiant or the inherently complicit. Above all, as they invite us to reimagine resistance, they expose our expectations and hopefully shift our understanding about what it means to rise and to fall in a world we seek to call our own.




The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat


Book Description

Edwidge Danticat's prolific body of work has established her as one of the most important voices in 21st-century literary culture. Across such novels as Breath, Eyes, Memory, Farming the Bones and short story collections such as Krik? Krak! and most recently Everything Inside, essays, and writing for children, the Haitian-American writer has throughout her oeuvre tackled important contemporary themes including racism, imperialism, anti-immigrant politics, and sexual violence. With chapters written by leading and emerging international scholars, this is the most up-to-date and in-depth reference guide to 21st-century scholarship on Edwidge Danticat's work. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat covers such topics as: · The full range of Danticat's writing from her novels and short stories to essays, life writing and writing for children and young adults. · Major interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives including from establishing fields fields of literary studies, Caribbean Studies Political Science, Latin American Studies, feminist and gender studies, African Diaspora Studies, , and emerging fields such as Environmental Studies. · Danticat's literary sources and influences from Haitian authors such as Marie Chauvet, Jacques Roumain and Jacques-Stéphen Alexis to African American authors like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Caribbean American writers Audre Lorde to Paule Marshall. · Known and unknown Historical moments in experiences of slavery and imperialism, the consequence of internal and external migration, and the formation of diasporic communities The book also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Danticat's work and key works of secondary criticism, and an interview with the author, as well as and essays by Danticat herself.




Minor Genres in Postcolonial Literatures


Book Description

Moving beyond the postcolonial literature field’s traditional focus on the novel, this book shines a light on the "minor" genres in which postcolonial issues are also explored. The contributors examine the intersection of generic issues with postcolonial realities in regions such as South Africa, Nigeria, New Zealand, Indonesia, Australia, the United Kingdon, and the Caribbean. These "minor" genres include crime fiction, letter writing, radio plays, poetry, the novel in verse and short stories, as well as blogs and essays. The volume closes with Robert Antoni’s discussion of his use of the vernacular and digital resources in As Flies to Whatless Boys (2013), and suggests that "major" genres might yield new webs of meaning when digital media are mobilized with a view to creating new forms of hybridity and multiplicity that push genre boundaries. In focusing on underrepresented and understudied genres, this book pays justice to the multiplicity of the field of postcolonial studies and gives voice to certain literary traditions within which the novel occupies a less central position. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.




Autofiction


Book Description

Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile explores the multiple aspects of exile, displacement, mobility, and identity as expressed in contemporary autofictional work written in French by women writers from across the francophone world. Drawing on postcolonial theory, gender theory, and autobiographical theory, the book analyses narratives of exile by six authors who are shaped by their multiple locales of attachment: Kim Lefèvre (Vietnam/France), Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe/mainland France), Nina Bouraoui (Algeria/France), Michèle Rakotoson (Madagascar/France), Véronique Tadjo (Côte d’Ivoire/France), and Abla Farhoud (Lebanon/Quebec). In this way, the book argues that the French colonial past continues to mould female articulations of mobility and identity in the postcolonial present. Responding to gaps in the critical discourse of exile, namely gender, this book brings genre in both its forms — gender and literary genre — to bear on narratives of exile, arguing that the reconceptualization of categories of mobility occurs specifically in women’s autofictional writing. The six authors complicate discussions of exile as they are highly mobile, hybrid subjects. This rootless existence, however, often renders them alienated and ‘out of place’. While ensuring not to trivialize the very real difficulties faced by those whose exile is not a matter of choice, the book argues that the six authors experience their hybridity as both a literal and a metaphorical exile, a source of both creativity and trauma.