FREN481E: Race, Roots, and Identity in the French Caribbean: Home

Explores one the of most influential theorists of the anti-colonial movement, as it follows Fanon from his birth in 1925 on the French island of Martinique through his medical training in France, then to Algeria where he joined the liberation struggle.

Dangerous Creole Liaisons explores a French Caribbean context to broaden discussions of sexuality, nation building, and colonialism in the Americas. Couti examines how white Creoles perceived their contributions to French nationalism through the course of the nineteenth century as they portrayed sexualized female bodies and sexual and racial difference to advance their political ideologies. Questioning their exhilarating exoticism and titillating eroticism underscores the ambiguous celebration of the Creole woman as both seductress and an object of lust. She embodies the Caribbean as a space of desire and a political site of contest that reflects colonial, slave and post-slave societies. The under-researched white Creole writers and non-Caribbean authors (such as Lafcadio Hearn) who traveled to and wrote about these islands offer an intriguing gendering and sexualization of colonial and nationalist discourses. Their use of the floating motif of the female body as the nation exposes a cultural cross-pollination, an intense dialogue of political identity between continental France and her Caribbean colonies. Couti suggests that this cross-pollination still persists. Eventually, representations of Creole women's bodies (white and black) bring two competing conceptions of nationalism into play: a local, bounded, French nationalism against a transatlantic and more fluid nationalism that included the Antilles in a "greater France."

Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Condé added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The twelfth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonné Sabrina, a gardener, aged twenty-two and black, is accused of murdering his employer--and lover--Loraine, a wealthy white woman descended from plantation owners. His only refuge is a sailboat, La Belle Créole, a relic of times gone by. Condé follows Dieudonné's desperate wanderings through the city of Port-Mahault the night of his acquittal, the narrative unfolding through a series of multivoiced flashbacks set against a forbidding backdrop of social disintegration and tumultuous labor strikes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Guadeloupe. Twenty-four hours later, Dieudonné's fate becomes suggestively intertwined with that of the French island itself, though the future of both remains uncertain in the end. Echoes of Faulkner and Lawrence, and even Shakespeare's Othello, resonate in this tale, yet the drama's uniquely modern dynamics set it apart from any model in its exploration of love and hate, politics and stereotype, and the attempt to find connections with others across barriers. Through her vividly and intimately drawn characters, Condé paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.

In Caribbean Dynamics: Re-configuring Caribbean Culture, the authors present the multi-vocality of Caribbean culture with an integrated overview of the social, political and cultural themes that dominate the Caribbean landscape. Francophone, Anglophone, Dutch and Spanish creolization in the Caribbean is examined to reveal reconfigured national and regional identities. Divided into 3 main sections, the first, 'The Dynamics of Carib-being', looks at how literature has helped to shape Caribbean identities. The second section, 'Performing Arts: Mapping out the Caribscape' presents the diversity of Caribbean culture, while the third section, 'Transcending Adversity to Foster a Caribbean Culturalist Ethos' examines how Caribbean cultural identity is articulated and translated in social and government policies.

Entangled Otherness explores the dynamics of cross-dressing and gender performance in contemporary francophone Caribbean cultures through a range of visual and textual media. Original in its comparative focus on the islands of Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe and their diasporic communities in France, this study reveals how opaque strategies of crossing, mimicry and masquerade have enabled resistance to the racialised, gendered and patriarchal classifications of bodies that characterized Enlightenment thought during the French transatlantic slave trade. It engages with archival texts of pre-revolutionary Haiti to offer a historical understanding of current constructions of Caribbean gender most influenced by French colonial legacies. The author argues that cross-dressing, as a form of 'self-fabrication', complicates inherently entangled colonial binaries of identity and resists France's paternalistic gaze. The book's multidisciplinary approach to gender analysis weaves a dialogue between cross-cultural voices garnered from textual and historical analysis, ethnographic interviews and theoretical insight to foreground the continued need to decolonize Eurocentric readings of gender identity in the francophone and creolophone islands, and the Caribbean region more generally. Works of art, film, photography, carnival, performance, and dress, including depictions of fluid identities in the binary-resistant Afro-Creole religion of Vodou, are examined using contemporary performance, gender and social theory from within the region. Entangled Otherness thus makes a unique and timely contribution to the growing body of knowledge and debate in the areas of gender, sexuality and the body in Caribbean Studies.

In the early years of World War II, thousands of political refugees traveled from France to Vichy-controlled Martinique in the French Caribbean, en route to what they hoped would be safer shores in North, Central, and South America. While awaiting transfer from the colony, the exiles formed influential ties-with one another and with local black dissidents. Escape from Vichy recounts this flight from the refugees' perspectives, using novels, unpublished diaries, archives, memoirs, artwork, and other materials to explore the unlikely encounters that fueled an anti-fascist artistic and intellectual movement. The refugees included Spanish Republicans, anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians, anti-fascist Italians, Jews from across Europe, and others fleeing violence and repression. They were met with hostility by the Vichy government and rejection by the nations where they hoped to settle. Martinique, however, provided a site propitious for creative ferment, where the revolutionary Victor Serge conversed with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the Surrealist André Breton met Negritude thinkers René Ménil and Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. As Eric T. Jennings shows, these interactions gave rise to a rich current of thought celebrating blackness and rejecting racism. What began as expulsion became a kind of rescue, cut short by Washington's fears that wolves might be posing in sheep's clothing.

From Vodou to Zouk is a landmark bibliography documenting vernacular music traditions of Haiti and the French-speaking Caribbean. Its nearly 1300 entries cover all of the French-speaking islands, in particular Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, as well as their overseas enclaves in France, the United States and Canada.

Joseph Zobel (1915-2006) is one of the best-known Francophone Caribbean authors, and is internationally recognised for his novel La Rue Cases-Negres (1950). Yet very little is known about his other novels, and most readings of La Rue Cases-Negres consider the text in isolation. Through aseries of close readings of the author's six published novels, with supporting references drawn from his published short stories, poetry and diaries, Joseph Zobel: Negritude and the Novel generates new insights into Zobel's highly original decision to develop Negritude's project of affirming pridein black identity through the novel and social realism. The study establishes how, influenced by the American Harlem Renaissance movement, Zobel expands the scope of Negritude by introducing new themes and stylistic innovations which herald a new kind of social realist French Caribbean literature.These discoveries in turn challenge and alter the current understanding of Francophone Caribbean literature during the Negritude period, in addition to contributing to changes in the current understanding of Caribbean and American literature more broadly understood.

Through a series of case studies spanning the bounds of literature, photography, essay, and manifesto, this book examines the ways in which literary texts do theoretical, ethical, and political work.

In Obeah and Other Powers, historians and anthropologists consider how marginalized spiritual traditions--such as obeah, Vodou, and Santeria--have been understood and represented across the Caribbean since the seventeenth century.

The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction andHomegrown Caribbean Feminism(s) is a comparative study of foodimagery in contemporary fiction by Guadeloupeans Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau,Haitian Edwidge Danticat, and Trinidadians Lakshmi Persaud and Shani Mootoo. RobynCope's key contention is that the past quarter century of Caribbean culinaryfiction engenders the Caribbean freedom struggle in two senses of the word:first, by imbuing the history of that struggle with gender sensitivity andspecificity; second, by dreaming up a new kind of creative, coalitionalCaribbean freedom struggle. Cope reads food imagery in Caribbean women'swriting not only for what it can teach us about the colonizer-colonized binary,but also in order to gain insight into power dynamics within the Caribbeanitself - between generations, ethnic and racial groups, religious and politicalaffiliations, social classes and sexual identities, and most especially betweenwomen. Cope's approach, part of theexciting new field of literary food studies, aims to recover stories thatcannot be told without food. By reading these works with and against one another,Cope honours the great geographic, linguistic, ethnic, racial, political andsocial diversity of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean women'sexperiences with oppression and resistance. At the same time, her readingteases out Caribbean women's common longing for affirming coalition, symbolizedby commensality, that liberates without collapsing difference. In The Pen and the Pan, the sharedmeal and the shared struggle go hand in hand.

In A Regarded Self Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege the self in ways unmediated and unrestricted by group affiliation. The women of these texts offend, disturb, and reorder the world around them. They challenge the primacy of the community over the individual and propose provocative forms of subjecthood. Highlighting the style and the stakes of these women's radical ethics of self-regard, Glover reframes Caribbean literary studies in ways that critique the moral principles, politicized perspectives, and established critical frameworks that so often govern contemporary reading practices. She asks readers and critics of postcolonial literature to question their own gendered expectations and to embrace less constrictive modes of theorization.

In 1946, at a time when other French colonies were just beginning to break free of French imperial control, the people of the French Antilles-the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe-voted to join the French nation as departments. This examines the Antilleans' more peaceful but perhaps equally vexing process of forging a national identity in the French empire.

This book analyses the theme of community in seven French Caribbean novels in relation to the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. The islands' complex history means that community is a central and problematic issue in their literature, and underlies a range of other questions such as political agency, individual and collective subjectivity, attitudes towards the past and the future, and even literary form itself. Britton examines Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosée, Edouard Glissant's Le Quatrième Siècle, Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Vincent Placoly's L'eau-de-mort guildive, Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco, Daniel Maximin's L'Ile et une nuit and Maryse Condé's Desirada.

Twelve scholars representing a variety of academic fields contribute to this study of slavery in the French Caribbean colonies, which ranges historically from the 1770s to Haiti's declaration of independent statehood in 1804. Including essays on the impact of colonial slavery on France, the United States, and the French West Indies, this collection focuses on the events, causes, and effects of violent slave rebellions that occurred in Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Martinique.

Manifestes et programmes litteraires aux Caraibes francophones etudie les textes manifestaires et programmatiques publies aux Caraibes francophones durant le XXe siecle.

Karukéra: présence littéraire de la Guadeloupe est un portrait général de la littérature de l'archipel guadeloupéen qui met l'accent sur sa spécificité et sa diversité.

As an ethnographer and a member of the diaspora, Ulysse delivers critical cultural analysis of geopolitics and daily life in a series of dispatches, op-eds and articles on post-quake Haiti. Her complex yet singular aim is to make sense of how the nation and its subjects continue to negotiate sovereignty and being in a world where, according to a Haitian saying, tout moun se moun, men tout moun pa menm (All people are human, but all humans are not the same). . The book is trilingual (English, Creole, and French) and includes a foreword by award-winning author and historian Robin D.G. Kelley.

This lyrical novel, structured like a Creole quadrille, is a rich ethnography bearing witness to police violence in French Guadeloupe. Narrators both living and dead recount the racial and class stratification that led to a protest-turned-massacre. Dambury’s English debut is a vibrant memorial to a largely forgotten atrocity, coinciding with the government’s declassification of documents pertaining to the incident.