Childhood Autobiography And The Francophone Caribbean

This book explores a major modern turn in Francophone Caribbean literature towards récits d’enfance (narratives of childhood) and asks why this occurred post-1990.

The Francophone Caribbean boasts a trove of literary gems. Distinguished by innovative, elegant writing and thought-provoking questions of history and identity, this exciting body of work demands scholarly attention. Its authors treat the traumatic legacies of shared and personal histories pervading Caribbean experience in striking ways, delineating a path towards reconciliation and healing. The creation of diverse personal narratives�encompassing autobiography, autofiction (heavily autobiographical fiction), travel writing, and reflective essay�remains characteristic of many Caribbean writers and offers poignant illustrations of the complex interchange between shared and personal pasts and how they affect individual lives. Through their historically informed autobiography, the authors in this study�Maryse Cond�, Gis�le Pineau, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwidge Danticat, and Dany Laferri�re�offer compelling insights into confronting, coming to terms with, and reconciling their past. The employment of personal narratives as the vehicle to carry out this investigation points to a tension evident in these writers� reflections, which constantly move between the collective and the personal. As an inescapably complex network, their past extends beyond the notion of a single, private life. These contemporary authors from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti intertwine their personal memories with reflections on the histories of their homelands and on the European and North American countries they adopt through choice or necessity. They reveal a multitude of deep connections that illuminate distinct Francophone Caribbean experiences.

This book examines a cross-section of postcolonial Francophone writing from Africa and the Caribbean to highlight and compare their transnational reception.

Contributions by María V. Acevedo-Aquino, Consuella Bennett, Florencia V. Cornet, Stacy Ann Creech, Zeila Frade, Melissa García Vega, Ann González, Louise Hardwick, Barbara Lalla, Megan Jeanette Myers, Betsy Nies, Karen Sanderson-Cole, Karen Sands-O’Connor, Geraldine Elizabeth Skeete, and Aisha T. Spencer The world of Caribbean children’s literature finds its roots in folktales and storytelling. As countries distanced themselves from former colonial powers post-1950s, the field has taken a new turn that emerges not just from writers within the region but also from those of its diaspora. Rich in language diversity and history, contemporary Caribbean children’s literature offers a window into the ongoing representations of not only local realities but also the fantasies that structure the genre itself. Young adult literature entered the region in the 1970s, offering much-needed representations of teenage voices and concerns. With the growth of local competitions and publishing awards, the genre has gained momentum, providing a new field of scholarly analyses. Similarly, the field of picture books has also deepened. Caribbean Children's Literature, Volume 1: History, Pedagogy, and Publishing includes general coverage of children’s literary history in the regions where the four major colonial powers have left their imprint; addresses intersections between pedagogy and children’s literature in the Anglophone Caribbean; explores the challenges of producing and publishing picture books; and engages with local authors familiar with the terrain. Local writers come together to discuss writerly concerns and publishing challenges. In new interviews conducted for this volume, international authors Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, and Olive Senior discuss their transition from writing for adults to creating picture books for children.

This book links postcolonial theory with structuralism and poststructuralism to show how analysis of the textual illuminates the political and ideological positions of French Caribbean writers.

Joseph Zobel is one of the best-known Francophone Caribbean authors, and is internationally recognised for his novel La Rue Cases-Nègres (1950). Through a series of close readings, with supporting references drawn from his published short stories, poetry and diaries, Joseph Zobel: Négritude and the Novel generates new insights into Zobel’s highly original decision to develop Négritude’s project of affirming pride in black identity by turning to the novel.

Analyzes first-person narratives by five Francophone Caribbean writers - Joseph Zobel, Patrick Chamoiseau, Gisele Pineau, Edwidge Danticat, and Maryse Conde - that manifest distinctive interaction among narrators, protagonists, characters, and readers through a layering of voices, languages, time, sources, and identities.

The first book on pan-Caribbean life writing, Dreams of Archives Unfolded reveals the innovative formal practices used to write about historical absences within contemporary personal narratives. Although the premier genres of writing postcoloniality in the Caribbean have been understood to be fiction and poetry, established figures such as Erna Brodber, Maryse Condé, Lorna Goodison, Edwidge Danticat, Saidiya Hartmann, Ruth Behar, and Dionne Brand and emerging writers such as Yvonne Shorter Brown, and Gaiutra Bahadur use life writing to question the relationship between the past and the present. Stitt theorizes that the remarkable flowering of life writing by Caribbean women since 2000 is not an imitation of the “memoir boom” in North America and Europe; instead, it marks a different use of the genre born out of encountering gendered absences in archives and ancestral memory that cannot be filled with more research. Dreams of Archives makes a significant contribution to studies of Caribbean literature by demonstrating that women’s autobiographical narratives published in the past twenty years are feminist epistemological projects that rework Caribbean studies’ longstanding commitment to creating counter-archives.