This book is the first major study of French Caribbean literature in light of the concept of postcoloniality. Postcolonial theory debates have developed in the anglophone domain, and have not as yet referred prominently to francophone literature. Jeannie Suk investigates how the literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe provides a kaleidescopic view of the paradoxes at the heart of postcoloniality. Through subtle and provocative readings of Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Baudelaire, Freud, and others, she illuminates how the development of French Caribbean literature and debates about négritude, antillanité, and creolité contribute to theories of in-betweenness and incompleteness central to postcolonial modes. In each chapter, lively and detailed analyses of literary and critical texts reveal connections between key thematic, conceptual, rhetorical, and psychic issues that form the interface of Caribbean and postcolonial concerns. The first part paves theoretical ground, focusing on readings of two seminal texts, Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Glissant's Discours antillais; the second part concentrates on Maryse Condé's exemplary work. Lucidly articulating the overlap and interplay of the distance of oceanic crossing, the discontinuities of allegorical signification, and the gap at the heart of trauma, Suk probes the paradoxical dynamic of impossible yet inevitable returns in space, time, and the psyche. She shows how literal and metaphorical "crossings" both produce and impede history and representation. The result is a new framework for understanding the intersection of postcolonial, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and French Caribbean problems in a language attentive to improbable recurrences across theories and registers. Postcolonial Paradoxes is a major contribution to criticism and theory, of interest to scholars and students of postcolonialism, Caribbean and African diaspora literature, French literature, and psychoanalysis.

This issue considers the oeuvre of Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet (1916-1973) as a prism through which to examine individual and collective subject formation in the postcolonial French-writing Caribbean, the wider Afro-Americas, and beyond. While both Vieux-Chauvet and her corpus are situated in the violent space of mid-twentieth century Haiti, her work articulates the obstacles to claiming legitimized human existence on a global scale. The contributors to this interdisciplinary volume examine Vieux-Chauvet's positioning within the Haitian public sphere, as well as her broader significance to understanding gendered and racialized postcolonial subjectivities in the twenty-first century.

In Caribbean writing, place is intimately inflected by displacement - place and displacement are not dichotomous; every 'here' invariably implies a 'there'. In line with this extreme imbrication of (dis)location, Caribbean writing in French explores questions of increasing global pertinence such as the relation between writing and displacement, local and distant space, text and place, identity and migration, passage and transformation. Contributions range across genres and the work of writers such as Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, René Dépestre, Édouard Glissant, Émile Ollivier, Gisèle Pineau, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Ernest Pépin. Topics explored include the poetics of dwelling space, the postmodern or postcolonial dynamic of the Creole town, and the textualization of place and displacement. Also included are essays on the drama of distance, the metamorphosis of recent Haitian writing, the literary reverberations of the figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and links between Ireland and the French Caribbean.

In the late 1990’s, Postcolonial Studies risked imploding as a credible area of academic enquiry. Repeated anthologization and an overemphasis on the English-language literatures led to sustained critiques of the field and to an active search for alternative approaches to the globalized and transnational formations of the post-colonial world. In the early twenty-first century, however, postcolonial began to reveal a new openness to its comparative dimensions. French-language contributors to postcolonial debate (such as Edouard Glissant and Abdelkebir Khatibi) have recently risen to greater prominence in the English-speaking world, and there have also appeared an increasing number of important critical and theoretical texts on postcolonial issues, written by scholars working principally on French-language material. It is to such a context that this book responds. Acknowledging these shifts, this volume provides an essential tool for students and scholars outside French departments seeking a way into the study of Francophone colonial postcolonial debates. At the same time, it supplies scholars in French with a comprehensive overview of essential ideas and key intellectuals in this area.

Tobias Döring uses Postcolonialism as a backdrop to examine and question the traditional genres of travel writing, nature poetry, adventure tales, autobiography and the epic, assessing their relevance to, and modification by, the Caribbean experience. Caribbean-English Passages opens an innovative and cross-cultural perspective, in which familiar oppositions of colonial/white versus postcolonial/black writing are deconstructed. English identity is thereby questioned by this colonial contact, and Caribbean-English writing radically redraws the map of world literature. This book is essential reading for students of Postcolonial Literature at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

During and after the two World Wars, a cohort of Caribbean authors migrated to the UK and France. Dissecting writers like Lamming, Césaire, and Glissant, McIntosh reveals how these Caribbean writers were pushed to represent themselves as authentic spokesmen for their people, coming to represent the concerns of the emigrant intellectual community.

Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature provides readers with an excellent introduction to recent Haitian literature, one of the richest literary traditions in the Americas. Martin Munro focuses on works written after 1946, a period in which exile has become the dominant theme in Haitian literature. Using this notion of Haitian writing as a literature of exile, Munro analyzes key novels by the most important figures of each generation of the past sixty years, including Jacques Stephen Alexis, René Depestre, Émile Ollivier, Dany Laferrière, and Edwidge Danticat.