Mixed Race Studies

Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora

University Press of Florida
2014-06-17
240 pages
6.125 x 9.256
Hard Cover ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4979-3

Bénédicte Boisseron, Associate Professor in French and Francophone Studies
University of Montana

In Creole Renegades, Bénédicte Boisseron looks at exiled Caribbean authors—Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Maryse Condé, Dany Laferriére, and more—whose works have been well received in their adopted North American countries but who are often viewed by their home islands as sell-outs, opportunists, or traitors.

These expatriate and second-generation authors refuse to be simple bearers of Caribbean culture, often dramatically distancing themselves from the postcolonial archipelago. Their writing is frequently infused with an enticing sense of cultural, sexual, or racial emancipation, but their deviance is not defiant.

Underscoring the typically ignored contentious relationship between modern diaspora authors and the Caribbean, Boisseron ultimately argues that displacement and creative autonomy are often manifest in guilt and betrayal, central themes that emerge again and again in the work of these writers.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translations
• Introduction: The Second-Generation Caribbean Diaspora
• 1. Anatole Broyard: Racial Betrayal and the Art of Being Creole
• 2. Maryse Condé’s Histoire de la femme cannibale: Coming Out in the French Antilles
• 3. Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière: Parasitic and Remittance Diaspora
• 4. V. S. Naipaul and Jamaica Kincaid: Rhetoric of National Dis-Allegiance
• 5. Creole versus Bossale Renegade: “Turfism” in the Black Diaspora of the Americas
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South

Liverpool University Press
May 2012
256 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846317538

Edited by:

Celia Britton, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
University College London

Martin Munro, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Florida State University

The Francophone Caribbean and the American South are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. This book takes as its premise that the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Essays written by leading authorities in the field examine the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South, including Louisiana, which among the Southern states has had a quite particular attachment to France and the Francophone world. The essays focus on issues of history, language, politics and culture in various forms, notably literature, music and theatre. Considering figures as diverse as Barack Obama, Frantz Fanon, Miles Davis, James Brown, Édouard Glissant, William Faulkner, Maryse Condé and Lafcadio Hearn, the essays explore in innovative ways the notions of creole culture and creolization, terms rooted in and indicative of contact between European and African people and cultures in the Americas, and which are promoted here as some of the most productive ways for conceiving of the circum-Caribbean as a cultural and historical entity.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Martin Munro and Celia Britton
• Creolizations
  • Lafcadio Hearn’s American Writings and the Creole Continuum – Mary Gallagher
  • Auguste Lussan’s La Famille creole: How Saint-Domingue Emigres Bcame Louisiana Creoles – Typhaine Leservot
  • Caribbean and Creole in New Orleans – Angle Adams Parham
  • Creolizing Barack Obama – Valerie Loichot
  • Richard Price or the Canadian from Petite-Anse: The Potential and the Limitations of a Hybrid Anthropology – Christina Kullberg
• Music
  • ‘Fightin’ the Future’: Rhythm and Creolization in the Circum-Caribbean – Martin Munro
  • Leaving the South: Frantz Fanon, Modern Jazz, and the Rejection of Negritude – Jeremy F. Lane
  • The Sorcerer and the Quimboiseur: Poetic Intention in the Works of Miles Davis and Edourard Glissant – Jean-Luc Tamby
  • Creolizing Jazz, Jazzing the Tout-monde: Jazz, Gwoka and the Poetics of Relation – Jerome Camal
• Intertextualities: Faulkner, Glissant, Conde
  • Go Slow Now: Saying the Unsayable in Edouard Glissant’s Reading of Faulkner – Michael Wiedorn
  • Edouard Glissant and the Test of Faulkner’s Modernism – Hugh Azerad
  • The Theme of the Ancestral Crime in the Novels of Faulkner, Glissant, and Conde – Celia Britton
  • An American Story – Yanick Lahen
• Notes on Contributors
• Index

Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel

University Press of Florida
2001-01-18
320 pages
6 x 9
ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-1835-5; ISBN 10: 0-8130-1835-8

H. Adlai Murdoch, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Adlai Murdoch offers a detailed rereading of five major contemporary French Caribbean writers–Glissant, Condé, Maximin, Dracius-Pinalie, and Chamoiseau. Emphasizing the role of narrative in fashioning the cultural and political doubleness of Caribbean Creole identity, Murdoch shows how these authors actively rewrite their own colonially driven history.

Murdoch maintains that the culture of the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique is less homogeneous and more creatively fragmented than is commonly supposed. Promoting a new vision of this multifaceted region, he challenges preconceived notions of what it means to be both French and West Indian. The author’s own West Indian origin provides him with intimate, firsthand knowledge of the nuances of day-to-day Caribbean life.

While invaluable to students of Caribbean literature, this work will also appeal to those interested in the African diaspora, French and postcolonial studies, and literary theory.