Abstract
While the first major Anglophone authors traveled to Britain with waves and waves of their countrymen, the vanguard Francophone writers arrived before spikes in movement from the French Caribbean to French metropole. Unlike Britain, which actively solicited island subjects immediately after World War II to fill vacancies in manufacturing and medicine, France did not entice people from its Caribbean colonies until the 1960s. As with the Anglophone context, a spike in emigration corresponded with a spike in writing about the colonies, but those authors whose first publications came in the 1960s and 1970s inserted their works into an already established body of French Caribbean literature, one whose earliest writers began their work in the 1920s and 1930s. This has created a very different generational division than that of authors in Britain.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Celia Britton, “Eating their Words: The Consumption of French Caribbean Literature,” ASCALF Yearbook: The Annual Publication of the Association for the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French, 1 (1996), pp. 15–23 (p. 18).
Sam Haigh, “Introduction,” in An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique, ed. Sam Haigh (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 1–16 (p. 11).
Richard D. E. Burton, “The Idea of Difference in Contemporary French West Indian Thought: Négritude, Antillanité, Créolité,” in French and West Indian: Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana Today, ed. Richard D. E. Burton and Fred Reno (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 137–66 (p. 158).
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 88.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 167.
Robert Aldrich, Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 202. Alistair Hennessy notes the “Chain of Being,” which relegated Africans to a status beneath that of whites, as one of the Enlightenment’s innovations along with the concepts of “Liberty Equality and Fraternity.” See “The Hispanic and Francophone Tradition,” in Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century Caribbean, Volume II, Unity in Variety: The Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean, ed. Alistair Hennessy (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 1–35 (p. 3).
Catherine A. Reinhardt, Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), pp. 28, 29.
For an exhaustive study of this period, see Benetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 19–42.
Michelle Chilcoat, “In/Civility, in Death: On Becoming French in Colonial Martinique,” boundary 2, 31 (2004), pp. 47–73 (pp. 49–50).
I have borrowed the term “negrophilia” from James Clifford’s article “Negrophilia,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier and others (London: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 901–8.
René Maran, Batouala, trans. Barbara Beck and Alexandre Mboukou (London: Heinemann, 1987), p. 8. The French is taken from Maran, Batouala (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1938), p. 11. Further references to the novel are cited in parentheses within the text with the page numbers for the French edition cited after a semicolon.
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (London: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 81–82.
Eleni Coundouriotis, Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 35.
Tyler Edward Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Mariner, 1996), p. 106.
Renée Larrier, “A Tradition of Literacy: Césaire in and out of the Classroom,” Research in African Literatures, 41 (2010), pp. 33–45 (pp. 41–42).
H. Adlai Murdoch, “Ars Poetica, Ars Politica: The Double Life of Aimé Césaire,” Research in African Literatures, 41 (2010), pp. 1–13 (p. 1).
See Maximilien Laroche, “La Bataille de Vertières et le Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: Westerns du tiers monde,” in Présence Africaine, 151—152 (1995), pp. 180–96 (p. 190);
and Susan Frutkin, Aimé Césaire: Black between Worlds (Coral Gables: Center for Advanced International Studies, University of Miami, 1973), p. 1.
The exact circumstances surrounding the writing of the Cahier vary based on the source consulted. General opinion seems to be that Césaire began writing it when visiting a friend in the former Yugoslavia, but the details of that story are far from agreed. One telling, by Robin D. G. Kelley, has a mythic, almost folkloric tone. We are told that Césaire, after seeing a small Yugoslavian island, had a flash of inspiration and “stayed up half the night working on a long poem about the Martinique of his youth—the land, the people, the majesty of the place. The next morning when he inquired about the little island he was told it was called Martinska. A magical chance encounter, to say the least; the words he penned that moonlit night were the beginnings of what would become his most famous poem of all.” See Robin D. G. Kelley, “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” in Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), pp. 7–28 (p. 13). Césaire himself claimed to have started the poem after returning to Martinique. See René Depestre, “An Interview with Aimé Césaire,” trans. Maro Riofrancos, in Discourse on Colonialism, pp. 81–94 (p. 81). Interestingly, both of these accounts are collected in the same volume.
Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Resistance and Caribbean Literature (London: Ohio University Press, 1980), p. 133.
A. James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 1.
Mireille Rosello, “Introduction,” in Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to my Native Land: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 1995), pp. 9–68 (p. 20).
Jeannie Suk, Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), p. 30. Roger Toumson and Simonne Henry-Valmore poetically echo this in their statement that the Parisian environment gave Césaire “a second birth: that of a writer” (“une seconde naissance: celle de l’écrivain”); see their Aimé Césaire: Le nègre inconsolé (Paris: Syros, Vent des îles, 1993), p. 39.
Toumson and Henry-Valmore, Aimé Césaire: le nègre inconsolé (Paris: Syros, Vent des îles, 1993), p. 36.
Debra L. Anderson, Decolonizing the Text: Glissantian Readings in Caribbean and African-American Literatures (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), p. 3.
André Breton, Martinique: Snake Charmer, trans. David W. Seaman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), p. 86. Further references are cited in parentheses in the text.
A. James Arnold, “Beyond Postcolonial Césaire: Reading Cahier d’un retour au pays natal Historically,” Forum for Modem Language Studies, 44 (2008), pp. 258–75 (p. 262).
See Toumson and Henry-Valmore, Aimé Césaire, p. 96; and Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (London: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 339.
J. Michael Dash, “Postcolonial Eccentricities: Francophone Caribbean Literature and the fin de siècle,” in The Francophone Caribbean Today: Literature, Language, Culture, ed. Gertrud Aub-Buscher and Beverley Ormerod Noakes (Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 2003), pp. 33–44 (p. 36).
Léopold Sédar Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948).
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” in “What Is Literature” and Other Essays [n. trans] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 289–330 (p. 291). Further references are cited in parentheses in the text.
Thomas A. Hale and Kora Véron, “Is There Unity in the Writings of Aimé Césaire?,” Research in African Literatures, 41 (2010), pp. 46–70 (p. 47).
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), p. 32.
J. Michael Dash, Edouard Glissant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 9.
See Larrier, “A Tradition of Literacy: Césaire in and out of the Classroom,” p. 43 n. 17; and Betsy Wing, “Introduction,” in Black Salt: Poems by Edouard Glissant (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 1–13 (p. 2).
Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. 6.
For a detailed engagement, from multiple perspectives, with the birth of Présence Africaine, see V. Y. Mudimbe, ed., The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947–1987 (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Mimi Sheller, “Oraliteracy and Opacity: Resisting Metropolitan Consumption of Caribbean Creole,” Department of Sociology, Lancaster University (2003), p. 6 <http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/sheller-oraliteracy-and-opacity.pdf> (accessed October 2, 2010).
See Dash, Edouard Glissant, p. 19; and Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 140.
Maryse Condé, “The Stealers of Fire: The French-Speaking Writers of the Caribbean and their Strategies of Liberation,” Journal of Black Studies, 35 (2004), pp. 154–64 (p. 157).
Dash, “Introduction,” in The Ripening, ed. Edouard Glissant (London: Heinemann, 1985), p 8.
See Anderson, Decolonizing the Text, p. 38, and Richard D. E. Burton, “Comment Peut-on être Martiniquais? The Recent Work of Edouard Glissant,” The Modern Language Review, 79 (1984), pp. 301–12 (p. 305), Burton, “Edouard Glissant: A Creative Critic,” World Literature Today, 63 (1989), 589–92. for just two examples. This practice has latterly declined in the face of growing recognition of a gap between the early and late Glissant.
See Charles Forsdick, “Late Glissant: History, ‘World Literature,’ and the Persistence of the Political,” Small Axe, 14 (2010), pp. 121–34.
Ronnie Leah Scharfman, Engagement and the Language of the Subject in the Poetry of Aimé Césaire (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1980), p. 62.
Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial, pp. 66–125. See also Philip Kaisary’s “Edouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint: Conservatism Hidden in Relation,” in The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints (London: University of Virginia Press, 2014).
Edouard Glissant, Black Salt: Poems by Edouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 22, 23, 25.
Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), pp. 9, 59. Further references are cited in parentheses in the text.
Wilbert J. Roget, “Land and Myth in the Writings of Edouard Glissant,” World Literature Today, 63 (1989), pp. 626–31 (p. 630).
Much of what follows is drawn from Myriam Cottias and Madeleine Dobie, Relire Mayotte Capécia: Une femme des Antilles dans l’espace colonial français (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012), an essential text for background on the author.
See Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Womenin Caribbean Literature (London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 143–44,
and Beatrice Stith Clark, “Introduction,” in I am a Martinican Woman & The White Negress: Two Novelettes by Mayotte Capécia (Lucette Ceranus), ed. Mayotte Capécia, trans. Beatrice Stith Clark (Pueblo: Passeggiata Press, 1997), pp. 1–25 (pp. 4–5).
Laurence Lesage, “Literature in France, 1950,” in The French Review, 24 (1951), pp. 281–93 (p. 283)
See Clarisse Zimra, “Daughters of Mayotte, Sons of Frantz: The Unrequited Self in Caribbean Literature,” in An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique, ed. Sam Haigh (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 177–94 (p. 186);
and Sam Haigh, Mapping a Tradition: Francophone Women’s Writing from Guadeloupe ([Leeds:] Maney Publishing, [2000]), p. 19.
Maryse Condé, Heremakhonon, trans. Richard Philcox (London: Lynne Rienner, 2000), p. 28.
A. James Arnold, “Frantz Fanon, Lafcadio Hearn et la Supercherie de ‘Mayotte Capécia,’” Revue de litérature comparée, 302 (2002), pp. 148–66; and “‘Mayotte Capécia’: De la parabole biblique à Je suis Martiniquaise,” Revue de littérature comparée, 305 (2003), pp. 35–48. Ail translations of these essays are my own.
See Gail Low, Publishing the Postcolonial: Anglophone West African and Caribbean Writing in the UK 1948–1968 (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 108, and Samuel Selvon, “Autobiographical Essay 3,” Item 90, The Samuel Selvon Collection, Alma Jordan Library, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.
Christiane P. Makward, Mayotte Capécia: Ou l’aliénation selon Fanon (Paris: Karthala, 1999), p. 204.
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Feminism, Race and Difference in the Works of Mayotte Capécia, Michèle Lacrosil, and Jacqueline Manicom,” Callaloo, 15 (1992), pp. 66–74 (pp. 69–70).
For a bracingly astute description of the stakes of the claims of Fanon’s argument, see Gwen Bergner’s “Who Is that Masked Woman? Or, the Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,” PMLA, 110 (1995), pp. 75–88.
See, for instance, Beryl Gilroy, Leaves in the Wind: Collected Writings of Beryl Gilroy, ed. Joan Anim-Addo (London: Mango Publishing, 1998), p. 213; Arthur Paris, “The Transatlantic Metropolis and the Voices of Caribbean Women,” in Caribbean Women Writers, pp. 82–85 (p. 85); Low, Publishing the Postcolonial, pp. 102–3; and Alison Donnell on women writers and Caribbean Voices in “Heard But Not Seen: Women’s Short Stories and the BBC’s Caribbean Voices Programme,” in The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, ed. Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt, and Emma Smith (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2011), pp. 29–43.
Quoted in Doris Garraway, “‘What Is Mine’: Césairean Negritude between the Particular and the Universal,” Research in African Literatures, 41 (2010), pp. 71–86 (p. 75).
Raphaël Confiant, Aimé Césaire: Une Traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris: Stock, 1993), pp. 108–9. See Depestre, “An Interview with Aimé Césaire,” p. 83, for Césaire’s statement that he expressed himself in the French language “whether I want to or not” but that he had nonetheless “always striven to create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage […] an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character.”
Copyright information
© 2015 Malachi McIntosh
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McIntosh, M. (2015). Patrons, Power Struggles, Position-takings: Emigration, Césaire, Glissant, Capécia. In: Emigration and Caribbean Literature. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543219_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543219_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-55949-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54321-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)