Diasporic Identity

Abstract

This chapter highlights the inherent historical ruptures that give birth to new Caribbean identities in a process of conflict resolution and lateral “south-south” hybridizations. The quest for identity constitutes an important leitmotif in French-Caribbean women’s writing, as affirmed earlier. This search is situated within the negating tropes of colonization, departmentalization, sexual and racial alterity, assimilation, and migration to demarcate the liminal spaces of exile’s physical and psychological trajectories. These spaces provide the characters with potentially ambivalent referential paradigms of self-definition. Succumbing to the alienation, isolation, and frustration of their exilic dispositions at home and abroad, the protagonists in this literature express their conflicting reactions of anguish and resistance to Otherness through suicide, nervous breakdown, illness, violence, and madness as symptoms of a gender-determined response to the tensions and ambiguities inherent in Antillean “transcoloniality.”