"Very refreshing in the understanding of Caribbean literature . . . Succeeds in blending close readings of specific texts with a constant awareness of the larger picture. . . . From a theoretical complexity that calls on Glissant, Fanon, Ngugi, Benito-Rojo among others, this profoundly human exploration of autofiction and advocacy in Francophone Caribbean literature study does not succumb to the temptation of theory; that is, she does not demand texts illustrate a rigid theoretical frame; the reverse is true throughout the study."—Cilas Kemedjio, University of Rochester Larrier breaks new ground in analyzing 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. Employing the Martinican combat dance—danmye—as a trope, the author argues that these narratives can be read as testimony to the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and patriarchy that denied Caribbean people their subjectivity. In chapters devoted to Zobel, Chamoiseau, Pineau, Danticat, and Conde—who come from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti—Larrier probes the presence, construction, and strategy of the first-person narrator, which sometimes shifts within the text itself. Providing a perspective different from European travel literature, these texts deliberately position the "I" as a witness and/or performer who articulates experiences ignored or misinterpreted by sojourners' more widely circulated chronicles. While not purporting to speak for others, the "I" is concerned with transmitting what he or she saw, heard, experienced, or endured, therefore disrupting conventional representations of the Francophone Caribbean. Moreover, in modeling authenticity and agency, autofiction is also a form of advocacy.

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. Nicole Simek approaches the relationship between literature, theory, and public life through a specific site, the French Antillean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and focuses on two mutually elucidating terms: hunger and irony. Reading these concepts together helps elucidate irony’s creative potential and limits. If hunger gives irony purchase by anchoring it in particular historical and material conditions, irony also gives a literature and politics of hunger a means for moving beyond a given situation, for pushing through the inertias of history and culture.

Autofiction and Cultural Memory breaks new ground in autofiction research by showing how it gives postcolonial writers a means of bearing witness to past cultural or political struggles, and hence of contributing to new forms of cultural memory. Most discussion of autofiction has treated it as an individualistic form, dealing with the personal growth of its authors. In doing so, it privileges narratives of private development over those of social commitment and accords with Western concepts of ownership and authorship. By contrast, Hywel Dix shows how a variety of writers outside the Western world have used the techniques of autofiction in a different way, placing themselves on the side lines of their own stories to show solidarity with struggles against imperialism and tyranny. Drawing on examples from Algeria, Ethiopia, the Caribbean, the Americas, India and Turkey, Dix presents autofiction as a form which combines the life stories of authors with the collective struggles of their societies to restore to view historical injustices that have been marginalised and forgotten. By contributing to new forms of cultural memory, autofiction raises important questions about what we choose to remember and what we value in the present. This book will be of interest to anyone working in postcolonial studies, world literature, trauma studies, autobiography, life writing or social justice.

Autobiography, a fully-recognised genre within mainstream literature today, has evolved massively in the last few decades, particularly through colonial and postcolonial texts. By using autobiography as a means of expression, many postcolonial writers were able to describe their experiences in the face of the denial of personal expression for centuries. This book is centred around the recounting and analysis of such a phenomenon. Literary purists often reject autobiography as a fully-fledged literary genre, perceiving it rather as a mere life report or a descriptive diary. The colonial and postcolonial autobiographical texts analysed in this book refute such perceptions, and demonstrate a subtle combination of literary qualities and the recounting of real-life experiences. This book demonstrates that colonial and postcolonial autobiographical texts have established their ‘literarity’. The need for postcolonial authors to express themselves through the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, as subjects and not as objects, is the essence of this book, and confirms that self-affirmation through autobiographical writing is indeed an art form.

The study of masculinities and gender identity in contemporary literature is relatively new and, with each year of this millennium, gains momentum. Indeed, as the women’s movement becomes forceful in developing nations, the question of tolerance to gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transvestites undergoes a similar process. At a time when women refuse to be subjected to war crimes, when they begin entering the workforce and realize the need to support their families independently, and when they refuse to remain in abusive marriages or remain silent in countries, where governments ignore their needs, men and women are questioning the meaning of gender in their culture and often seek alternatives to established gender roles. In some countries, this entails organized demonstrations for additional civil rights, while in others, the expression of sexual freedom remains a question of remaining silent or risking public execution. Thanks to the scholarly commitment of its authors, this book examines the range of masculine expression on three continents: Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In this collection, they write about men’s past and present challenges, male friendships, and male immigrants and outcasts. Paralleling the independence movement of France’s former colonies, the goal of this collection is to continue the expression of freedom toward understanding and tolerance of all variances of sexuality.

Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women's Writing uses a unique four-dimensional lens to frame questions of diaspora and gender in the writings of women from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti. These divergent and interconnected perspectives include violence, trauma, resistance, and expanded notions of Caribbean identity. In these writings, diaspora represents both a wound created by slavery and Indian indenture and the discursive praxis of defining new identities and cultural possibilities. These framings of identity provide inclusive and complex readings of transcultural Caribbean diasporas, especially in terms of gender and minority cultures.

This anthology seeks to introduce women writers in the "global" Francophone world by investigating the place of feminist, postcolonial and cross-cultural theories in interpreting women francophone literature. The book also allows the reader to examine the extent to which women writers reflect or negate the conventional archetypes of Francophone literature, how they reinvent the political, cultural and critical discourse of their time and place, and create their own identity from objectification to subjectivity. The ambition of this anthology is to explore these themes at a time when globalization is redefining the concepts of language, identity, space and history, and transforming the rapport of each individual to the "other". While most research on the subject focus on specific countries or regions, this volume offers a new critical introduction to Francophone women authors from a broad geographical range in North and West Africa, the Near East, the Pacific, North America, the Caribbean Islands and Europe. Significantly, this study assembles a broad and representative collection of texts written by women authors that will generate a fruitful and critical reflection among students and scholars. The selected texts present critical issues that students and readers at large need to explore to further their knowledge of francophone literature and culture.