Over the second half of the twentieth century, a substantial flow of writing emerged from the French-held Caribbean. Much of this work is both theoretically knowing and poetically potent and has attracted international attention to the literary resonances of the uniquely complex geo-historical situation of the Caribbean, and indeed of the Americas in general. Much of its passion, pertinence, and appeal inheres in its approach to time and to space, an approach still reverberating with the shock of displacement and its various after-tremors: an exploded sense of diversity; radical relativization; the profound expropriations of enslavement; colonial erosion. Through readings of high-profile as well as lesser known writing, this book tracks some of the more striking tensions and tropisms at work in the French Caribbean imagination of space and time and their intersection. It studies generic interplay, textual palimpseste, narrative structure, and other dynamics of writing that realize and manipulate the intersections of time and space, history and memory, writing and rewriting, voice and text, referential space and (inter)textual space, as well as cultural theory and literary practice, identity and difference, place and displacement. In this way, it probes both the strains and the stresses, and also the insights and gravitations that make for the particular 'French Caribbean' timbre of this volume of writing. This specific vibration, while illuminating Caribbean, New World, and post-colonial thinking in general, also encourages wider reflection on global resonances of displacement and dislocation and on more general issues such as the role of writing, and of narrative in particular, in the confrontation of absence and presence, loss and desire, distance and diversity. This book locates the problematic of time/space in relation to historiographical, geo-cultural, and phenomenological thinking and it also takes account of the detonation of critical interest in what is broadly termed post-colonial writing. Its fundamental concern, however, is to show how a particular corpus of writing has, in the space of half a century, and from a bracing position of hyper-relationality, responded imaginatively and poetically to the challenge of envisioning place, and of relating space to time.

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.

"Caribbean cities are a unique yet underexposed phenomenon. Their distinctiveness results from a combination of interrelated factors including a history of slavery, development under the hemispheric hegemony of the United States and spatial limitations imposed by the settings of most Caribbean urban areas." "This innovative volume presents a detailed introduction to the spatial, socio-cultural and economic characteristics of the Caribbean city, followed by case studies of selected cities in the Dutch, Hispanophone, Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean. It discusses a broad range of disciplinary approaches in examining the urban Caribbean, incorporating perspectives from anthropology, sociology, history, political science, geography and literary and cultural criticism."--BOOK JACKET.

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.

The essays in this volume consider various literary and linguistic aspects of the francophone Caribbean at the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing particularly on the French Overseas Departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the independent islands of Haiti and Dominica. The literary chapters are devoted to new voices in the region and the Caribbean diaspora, or to recent works by established authors. Contributors offer fresh interpretations of Caribbean literary movements and explore relevant nonliterary issues, such as socio-political developments which have influenced the writers of today. The linguistic chapters examine the dynamics of the respective roles of Creole and the European standard language and consider the present viability of Creole as a literary medium.

Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization, and U.S. Imperialism interprets Haitian literature in a transnational context of anti-colonial--and anti-globalization--politics. Positing a materialist and historicized account of Haitian literary modernity, it traces the themes of slavery, labor migration, diaspora, and revolution in works by Jacques Roumain, Marie Chauvet, Edwidge Danticat, and others. Author Valerie Kaussen argues that the sociocultural effects of U.S. imperialism have renewed and expanded the relevance of the universal political ideals that informed Haiti's eighteenth-century slave revolt and war of decolonization. Finally, Migrant Revolutions defines Haitian literary modernity as located at the forefront of the struggles against transnational empire and global colonialism.