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The transformation of the arts, foreseen and announced by Hegel, coincides with the birth of modernity. One of its essential aspects is the noetic turn in literature, which can be seen as a manifestation of autoreflexivity within the framework of intraliterary dynamics: autoreflexivity engages the questioning of language, it redefines the status of the lyric subject and the narrator, it problematizes discursivity and thus proposes new approaches to referential reality. Literature becomes a specific form of thought and a crucible of reflection by occupying a terrain that neither science nor philosophy could explore, that of existential human experience, not yet conceptualized. Literature thus produces discourses and concepts that can later be grasped and systematized by science and philosophy. An exemplification attempts to illustrate this process from the 19th century to the present day.

The Zombie (zombi), or living-dead (mort-vivant), is a major literary and mythic figure in the Haitian imaginary that has begun to appear in the literature of other Antillean countries. I explore the potential this cultural and literary symbol has for representing the complexity of Antilliean identity in the post-colonial era. By juxtaposing ethnological studies (Hall, Fay, Laroche, Métraux) next to Antillean novels (Depestre, Frankétienne, Schwarz-Bart, Desquiron, Chamoiseau), it becomes clear that the figure of the Zombie in these works is more than a mere atavism of African cultural tradition. Looking at the ubiquity of the living-dead in the novel The Old Slave and the Mastiff (1997) of Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, I make the argument that the Zombie can be seen as an allegory, an expression of the mutable recursive process that is Antillean identity. Unfixed between the collective and the individual, oral and written tradition, le retour and détour, domination and resistance, I see the Zombie as a literary representation of the identitary engenderment articulated within the school of thought of Créolité. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Martinican author and educator, Patrick Chamoiseau's evocation of the carceral ruin across his writing and, in particular, his novels. The notion of a 'carceral ruinology' at play in Chamoiseau's oeuvre is explored in the specific context of a 'penalscape' marked not only by today's prisons, camps and detention centres but equally and increasingly by the remnants of historical forms of imprisonment and internment. The article suggests that Chamoiseau's most sustained engagement with the ruins of the prison, his essay on France's former penal colony in French Guiana, Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne, published alongside photographs by Rodolphe Hammadi, provides a conceptual tool for thinking about the political stakes of these ruins. Such an approach also circumvents existing critiques of the photo-essay and its recent republication as an appendix to new images by Jean-Luc de Laguarigue. The article will argue that Chamoiseau's writing of the carceral ruin is both a writing against history and a writing against the prison. It will chart the movement from a reluctance to describe the slave dungeon in Texaco, to the use of the same space as a means of telling a different story in Un Dimanche au cachot before finally considering the shift that occurs in L'empreinte à Crusoé where the island in its totality is reimagined as prison. Where the presence of ruins allows different stories to be told, the prison that disappears without a trace enables the return of the carceral as much as the colonial via the myth of virgin territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, Martinican writers Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau published a short address to President Obama, writing his rise and election victory into planetary histories of creolization. This short text appears outdated or even naïve today, since Glissant and Chamoiseau's reading of Obama seeks to inaugurate new narratives of American historical and political time that seem entirely foreclosed by the arrival of Donald Trump on the world stage. And yet I argue that we can recuperate and reactivate utopian threads in Glissant and Chamoiseau's text that provoke us to reread contemporary U.S. politics in the light of these imagined futures that never came about. What appears at first glance to be a fantastical reading of the Obama presidency actually opens up new ways of imagining utopian political strategies today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Walls Fall is a manifesto written by Glissant and Chamoiseau against the creation of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity, and Co-development established in 2007 by French president Nicolas Sarkozy. The manifesto is a call against the building of walls that separate us rather than relate us one to another in a society. Walls are contradictory to the notion of Relation that Glissant and Chamoiseau advocate, where one would be open to the unpredictable and unforeseeable. Both authors criticize the notion of a national identity that would be fixed and firmly established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses Éloge de la créolité and Patrick Chamoiseau's novels and later texts, arguing that créolité , or creoleness, is far more complex and ambiguous than its critics have hitherto assumed. It is not confined to the Creole language but can be expressed in French, as in Chamoiseau's writing. More important, it is not a straightforward identitarian movement: it both claims a creole identity and simultaneously questions that claim. The characterizations in Chamoiseau's novels demonstrate that cultural alienation is not the opposite of creoleness but an inevitable part of it. Chamoiseau identifies as much with the alienated figures—often but not solely mulattoes—as he does with the others. Also, his later writings reject his earlier militant stance for an amoral complexity and find beauty in the imaginary and the marvelous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay starts with a theoretical discussion about the differences and similarities between Magical Realism and the Fantastic, especially concerning the possibility to apply the two concepts to the writing about the past, in particular a past marked by trauma. On the basis of this thoretical introduction, I analyze two theoretical works written by two francophone authors who have both won the prestigious Goncourt prize: Biblique des derniers gestes by Patrick Chamoiseau (2002) and Trois femmes puissantes by Marie NDiaye (2009). The two works appear as original ways to appropiate a traumatic, deeply hidden past, using a style which can be seen as close to magical realism or to the fantastic.

Représenter à l’écrit des récits issus de sociétés traditionnellement orales, telles que le sont les Antilles et l’Afrique, exige de l’écrivain francophone qu’il intègre une forte thématique de la parole et qu’il simule l’oralité, en recourant à une variété de stratégies stylistiques ou narratives. « Puisque l’écriture est un outil de séduction » (Descas 44), les marques de l’oralité ne sont pas gratuitement imposées au texte et elles jouent un rôle précis que nous tenterons de déterminer dans Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, d’Aimé Césaire, Chronique des sept misères, de Patrick Chamoiseau, et L’Aîné des orphelins de Tierno Monénembo. Nous montrons que l’oralité dans ces œuvres jouent le rôle commun de figuration de la mémoire.

This essay, which introduces part 2 of the special section "Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Éloge de la créolité ," considers the Éloge' s relationship with time, specifically the idea that it was before its time or that it was published in advance of the existence of an appropriately prepared reading public. Referring to some recent global events, and drawing on a largely neglected pamphlet by Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, the author wonders if the time for the Éloge and the broader, related Caribbean theories of history and culture may have arrived and argues that Caribbean thought needs to rediscover and reengage with its radical foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O artigo analisa os métodos utilizados pelo movimento literário da Crioulidade para formular um conceito ontológico e explicativo da coletividade antilhana. Produto do pensamento, a literatura crioula encontra na expressão literária do real seu maior desafio. Escrever a cultura transformou-se numa verdadeira obsessão, em torno da qual gravitam todos os esforços literários do grupo. A dificuldade do projeto reside na associação da ficção, subcategoria do imaginário e do intelecto, ao “vivido” do cotidiano. Para diminuir a distância entre a ficção e o “vivido”, eles utilizam em sua literatura o que podemos chamar de “processos exemplares”, buscando maneiras de transmitir idéias abstratas na escritura sem abandonar completamente a experiência sensível da cultura. Palavras-chave: Crioulidade. Chamoiseau. Confiant Resumen El articulo analiza los métodos utilizados por el movimiento literário de la Criollidad para formular um concepto ontológico y explicativo de la coletividad antilhana. Producto del pensamiento, la literatura criolla encuentra en la expresion literaria de lo real su mayor desafio. Escrivir la cultura transformase en una verdadera obsesion, en torno de la cual gravitan todos los esfuerzos literarios del grupo. La dificuldad del projecto reside en la associacion de la ficcion, subcategoria Del imaginario y del intelecto, a lo “vivido” del cotidiano. Para disminuir La distância entre la ficção y lo “vivido”, ellos utilizan en su literatura lo que podemos llamar de “processos ejemplares”, buscando maneias de trasmitir ideas abstractas en la escritura sin abandonar completamente la experiencia sensíble de la cultura. Palabras claves: Crioullidad. Chamoiseau. Confiant Abstract The article analyzes the methods used by the literary movement of Creoleness to formulate an ontological and explanatory concept of Caribbean collectivity. Product of thought, Creole literature finds in the written expression of reality its greatest challenge. Writing about culture became to them a true obsession, around which all the literary efforts of the group gravitate. The difficulty of their project resides in the association of fiction, sub-category of the imaginary and the intellect, with daily “lived” experience. To diminish the distance between fiction and “lived” experience, they practice in their literature what we might call “exemplary processes”, looking for ways of conveying, through writing, abstract ideas, without completely abandoning the sensible experience of the culture. Keywords: Creoleness. Chamoiseau. Confiant

Este texto procura mostrar como Patrick Chamoiseau (nascido na Martinica em 1953) empreende uma reescrita da memória da escravidão no romance Un dimanche au cachot (2007), dando continuidade a uma temática que já aparecia em obras precedentes. Ele efetua um trabalho de perlaboração, no sentido freudiano, ao rememorar uma história como meio de curar o trauma que foi recalcado. Chamoiseau mistura história e ficção ao tentar recriar de modo não realista um certo ambiente durante o período escravista, incorporando um personagem histórico, Victor Schoelcher, mas mostrando-o antes dos grandes eventos que protagonizou. Palavras-chave: Escravidão. Memória. Chamoiseau Resumen Este texto busca mostrar cómo Patrick Chamoiseau (nacido en Martinica en 1953) empreende una reescritura de la memoria de la esclavitud en la novela Un dimanche au cachot (2007), en continuidad a una temática que venía surgiendo en obras precedentes. Él efectúa un trabajo de perlaboración, en el sentido freudiano, al rememorar una historia como medio de curar el trauma que fue recalcado. Chamoiseau mezcla historia y ficción al intentar recrear de modo no realista un cierto ambiente durante el período de la esclavitud, incorporándole un personaje histórico, Victor Schoelcher, pero mostrándolo antes de los grandes eventos que protagonizó. Palabras claves: Esclavitud. Memória. Chamoiseau Abstract This text depicts how Patrick Chamoiseau (born in Martinique in 1953) undertakes a rewriting of the slavery’s memories in the novel Un dimanche au cachot (2007), continuing a subject that was present in preceding books. He endeavors a working through, in Freudian terms, reminding a story/history as a means of healing the trauma that has been repressed. Chamoiseau mixes up history and fiction in order to create, in a non realistic style, a certain atmosphere during the slavery’s period, incorporating a historical character, Victor Schoelcher, but showing him before the important facts and actions he accomplished. Keywords: Slavery. Memory. Chamoiseau

Using the theoretical framework developed by Glissant, Bhabha, Said, Rushdie, and Chamoiseau (among others), the paper focuses on ‘desire’ as the driving force behind the foundation of a 'nation' emancipating itself from Colonial regime through narration, and building its own identity. The novel is the means to express the desire to actualize an ’imaginary homeland’ with the stories and memories of places historically unexpressed and forgotten; Stories and memories, which are intertwined by "organic intellectuals" driven by the desire to know their past, to rediscover it, and to better define themselves in the present, and above all in the future.

Patrick Chamoiseau's Un Dimanche au cachot (2007) and Gisèle Pineau's Folie, aller simple (2010) refer to the authors' professions (respectively social worker and nurse) to explore the tensions besetting Caribbean territories that belong integrally to the French Republic, yet are culturally distinct from the Hexagon. While both writers use a version of 'staged marginality' to raise questions about the 'imagined community' of the Republic, each adopts a different political approach and writing strategy. Chamoiseau appears still to struggle with binary colonial anxieties in relation to France, despite his professed immersion in Glissant's transcending 'Tout-Monde'; Pineau presents a less theorized, more integrative 'transcultural' Frenchness based on her personal experience. These contrasting interpretations highlight the need for a theoretical approach to the Antilles that accommodates both the shifting, relational dynamic associated with Glissant's postcolonial perspective, and the binary axis of centre and periphery more commonly associated with colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the field known as 'Whiteness Studies' has been thriving in Anglophone criticism and theory for over 25 years, it is almost unknown in France. This is partly due to epistemological and political differences, but also to demographic factors - in contrast with the post-plantation culture of the US, for example, whites in Martinique and Guadeloupe are a tiny minority of small island populations. Yet 'whiteness' remains a phantasized and a fetishized state in the Antillean imaginary, and is strongly inflected by gender. This article sketches the emergence of 'white' femininity during slavery, then examines its representation in the work of a number of major Antillean writers (Condé, Placoly, Confiant, Chamoiseau). In their work, a cluster of recurring images and leitmotifs convey the idealization or, more commonly, the pathologization, of the white woman ; these images resonate strongly with Bhabha's 'unhomely', and convey the disturbing imbrication of sex and race in Antillean history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parler du plurilinguisme textuel dans le roman francophone, c’est poser la question du choix de la langue d’écriture chez l’écrivain francophone, mais aussi c’est évoquer à la fois les éléments constitutifs qui participent de la définition même de la littérature francophone. Par définition, un écrivain francophone c’est celui qui écrit en français peut-on dire de manière tautologique. Mais cette définition passe sous silence la dimension institutionnelle voire idéologique à l’œuvre dans la constitution de tout groupe social. Ainsi, selon Dominique Combe, les écrivains francophones forment un groupe bien distinct dans lequel des hommes et des femmes « expriment le sentiment d’appartenir, à travers la langue française, à une communauté de pensée, de culture. » (Combe, 1995 :14). Cependant, il faut reconnaître que tout texte possède sa propre identité, par ses langues et ses référents extratextuels, que ceux-ci soient ceux de l’auteur ou non. Dès lors, comment distinguer la langue de l’auteur de celle du texte ? Et dans quelles mesures les mécanismes de la mise en texte des langues concourent à la production du sens dans l’œuvre ? Alors qu’Ahmadou Kourouma se vante de faire parler ses personnages dans la langue de leur milieu social et culturel, Patrick Chamoiseau, se qualifiant lui-même de marqueur de parole, affirme retranscrire les paroles du conteur. Dès lors, à travers une approche comparative, il sera question dans cette communication d’analyser chez ces deux écrivains francophones, Ahmadou Kourouma et Patrick Chamoiseau en l’occurrence, comment cette textualisation des langues est mise en pratique dans leurs écritures.

S’inspirant des idées avancées par Homi Bhabha au sujet de la difficulté de représenter une tradition culturelle dans une autre langue, cet article aborde la question de la traductibilité d’un dit profondément ancré dans une culture essentiellement orale. Chez Panaït Istrati, écrivain français d’origine roumaine, aussi bien que chez le Martiniquais Patrick Chamoiseau, récipiendaire du prix Goncourt, la mise en écrit des paroles d’un conteur est-elle donc un acte de traduction ou une trahison de la diction originelle? Dans les deux cas, on constatera que l’écriture tisse un espace linguistique hybride portant les traces de l’oral qui l’in-forme.

Le métissage, culturel ou biologique, semble être la chose la mieux partagée entre les peuples. Il en résulte des identités multiples ou plurielles qui font l’objet de traitements divers par des auteurs comme Patrick Chamoiseau ou Henri Lopes. En effet, l’identité plurielle serait l’appropriation par l’individu ou la collectivité de plusieurs éléments culturels. Il semble cependant qu’il est davantage question d’hybridation et non de juxtaposition d’identités distinctes. À partir d’une lecture ponctuelle de deux romans de ces deux écrivains précités, il s’agira de mettre en relief un tel processus d’appropriation identitaire qui aboutit à la formation d’une identité de synthèse.

The first section of Patrick Chamoiseau's autobiographical novel,Chemin d’école(Paris: Gallimard, 1996), is entitled “Envie,” while the second section is “Survie.” As Chamoiseau recounts his youth in Martinique, he tempers his nostalgic longing for a childhood full of brilliant discovery with a deft and comic portrait of the ironies of his colonial education. The initial joy he takes in learning to write is so absolute and essential that writing is nothing less than “emprisonner des morceaux de la réalité dans ses tracés de craie” (31). However, his fond memories of coming to language are contained among those of a schoolteacher who seeks to disinherit his students from their Creole language. Herein lies the paradox of postcolonial nostalgia, for even as Chamoiseau's remembrances mock his colonial education, he makes is clear that the mere survival of the artist as such is jeopardized by an institutional assault on language. The structuring themes of “envie” and “survie” are connected by the author's “Répondeurs,” a chorus of voices that occupies the contact zones between memory and forgetting, between the child's innocence and the narrator's experience, and thus enables Chamoiseau's ambivalent longing for a past that he had to survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the evolving definitions of animality, humanity, non-animality and non-humanity in Patrick Chamoiseau's L'esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997). A chiastic representation of the novella illustrates how the slave and the molosse co-identify on the plantation, how the hunt in the Grands-bois develops the slave's humanity and denies the molosse of his animality and, overall, how Chamoiseau rejects traditional dichotomies between animal and man. By means of a critical lens shaped by Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben and Georg Hegel, this article analyzes how Chamoiseau evokes eye-to-eye confrontation between man and animal in order to subvert the traditional relationship between hunting dog and slave within plantation culture. L'esclave vieil homme et le molosse serves to suggest the paradoxical importance of postcolonial Caribbean literature to the emerging field of animal studies; within this space of subjugation and exploitation, a new, truer definition of humanity is affirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore the usefulness of Jacques Derrida's notion of ‘hauntology’, whereby the past is always revenant and the repressed returns, through analysis of two acclaimed contemporary Caribbean novels by Patrick Chamoiseau and Émile Ollivier, and a critically successful film by Austrian director Michael Haneke. A key theoretical concept, the philosopher's neologism is looked at in a postcolonial frame to explore how painful memory is often repressed or elided to mask historical events, and how the traumas of the past perpetually impinge on the present. This article contributes to the ever-growing rhetoric around memory in a postcolonial world deeply concerned with issues of remembrance and commemoration. It highlights the important role literature and film have to play in helping us retrieve our forgotten and fragmented past as we continually seek to make sense of the present. Cet article cherche à examiner, par l'analyse de deux romans célébres des écrivains antillais, Patrick Chamoiseau et Émile Ollivier, et un film à succès critique du directeur autrichien, Michael Haneke, l'utilité de la notion d' ‘hantologie’. Selon ce terme inventé par Jacques Derrida, le passé, toujours revenant, et le refoulé réapparaissent. Concept théorique primordial, le néologisme du philosophe est considéré sous une optique postcoloniale afin d'explorer comment les souvenirs pénibles sont souvent refoulés, voire élidés, pour cacher ou mieux, masquer, les événements historiques, et comment les traumatismes du passé ont des répercussions perpétuelles sur le présent. Cet article contribue à la rhétorique toujours croissante autour de la Mémoire dans un monde postcolonial profondément préoccupé par des questions de remémoration et de commémoration. Il souligne le rôle important de la littérature et du film dans la quête de récupérer une histoire oubliée et fragmentée et en même temps d'élaborer une – voire plusieurs – signification(s) du présent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concerns the Creole Conteur in Patrick Chamoiseau's depictions of the slave plantation in Au temps de l'antan (1988a), Écrire en pays dominé (1997) and Texaco (1992). It proposes that Chamoiseau's vision of the plantation be seen as a parable for contemporary Martinique, one that seeks to reinstate a redemptive history in which the past has a positive claim on the present. The article examines the tensions internal to this recuperative attempt, especially those carried in the relationship between literal and spiritual forms of hunger: the slaves' famine condition and the survival tactics of débrouillardise compete with the spiritual nourishment found in an emergent collective identity. The article demonstrates that Chamoiseau uses the Conteur to redraw the symbolic boundaries of the plantation from an amoral grey zone to a cohesive Creole social order, making the plantation past relevant to the present day. It explores how Chamoiseau preserves the parable's frame of moral instruction even though, as a survival tale involving extreme duress, it involves a calculus beyond good and evil. Cet article porte sur le personnage du Conteur créole dans la plantation esclavagiste dépeinte par Chamoiseau dans Au temps de l'antan (1988a), Ecrire en pays dominé (1997) et Texaco (1992). Cette vision de la plantation peut être perçue comme une parabole pour la Martinique de nos jours, une Martinique qui chercherait une histoire rédemptrice où le passé revendiquerait positivement le présent. Cet article examine les tensions engendrées par cet effort de récupération, en particulier celles qui sont associées à la relation entre les formes litérales et symboliques de la faim: la confrontation entre, d'une part, la famine inhérente à l'esclavage et la débrouillardise des tactiques de survie, et d'autre part la nourriture spirituelle puisée dans l'identité collective naissante. Le Conteur, pour Chamoiseau, va élaborer un nouveau tracé des frontières symboliques de la plantation qui irait d'une zone grise amorale vers un ordre social Créole cohésif. Cet article explore la façon dont Chamoiseau préserve l'inspiration morale de cette parabole de survie et de détresse même si, paradoxalement, les catégories du bien et du mal doivent être dépassées. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amongst the contemporary French-Caribbean writers who appear to see themselves as heirs to the Martiniquan poet/politician Aimé Césaire, certain writers of the younger generation – Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant in particular – tend to base their reservations, if not their outright hostility towards the figure of Césaire on a negative view of the political tenor of Césaire's poetics. Whereas Édouard Glissant seems to hold to the middle ground, expressing respectful distance from his precursor's vision, the writers of the créolité movement reject Césaire's poetics, no less than his politics. Their negative perspective on Césaire's writing is based not just on a certain view of the French language as inherently exclusive and oppressive, but also on a certain conceptualization of poetry as a genre. More specifically, their representation (and rejection) of poetry, and of Césaire's poetry in particular, is motivated by a commitment to the Creole language and to oraliture, and above all by their determination to give voice to the highly differentiated collective Caribbean experience. However, the question concerning the different way that Césaire's poetry (as opposed to Glissant's, or Confiant's or Chamoiseau's novels) mediates the relation between the singular self and the collective voice is a highly complex one, as is the question concerning the political value of that mediation and, indeed, of that relation. At the heart of that difficult question, which is partly a question of genre, lies the politically and ethically sensitive matter of the relation between writing and the subject. Les réserves, pour ne pas dire l'hostilité exprimées à l'égard de leur aïeul littéraire par certains auteurs contemporains des Antilles françaises qui sembleraient se considérer malgré tout comme étant les héritiers du poète martiniquais Aimé Césaire, et surtout par la génération des ‘petit-fils’ (Patrick Chamoiseau et Raphaël Confiant) sembleraient être fondées sur un jugement foncièrement négatif de la teneur politique de la poétique césairienne. Alors que Édouard Glissant semblerait adopter pour sa part une perspective bien nuancée, se limitant à exprimer une certaine distance par rapport à la vision afrocentrique de l'estimé précurseur, les auteurs de la créolité rejettent non seulement la politique mais aussi la poétique de Césaire. Leur critique de l'écriture césairienne semblerait être fondée non seulement sur une certaine vision de la langue française comme instance hautement exclusive et opprimante, mais aussi sur une certaine appréciation de la spécificité générique de la poésie. En effet, leur représentation de la poésie et leur rejet de ce genre sembleraient se justifier par leur projet littéraire, lequel consisterait essentiellement à donner à entendre la voix antillaise en tant que voix collective. Et pourtant la notion selon laquelle le roman serait, prétendument à l'encontre de la poésie, à même de médier une conscience soi-disant collective, ainsi que la valeur politique attribuée à une telle médiation, soulèvent bien des questions, entre autres la question bien opaque de savoir quelle est la part d'identification collective dans la constitution du sujet à travers l'écriture de tel ou tel genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]