Soundings in French Caribbean writing since 1950

"Since 1950, a flow of theoretically resonant and poetically potent writing has emerged from the French Caribbean. Much of the passion and appeal of this work - by authors such as Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Daniel Maximin - lies in its approach to time and to space, an approach still reverberating with the shock of displacement and its various after-tremors: the far-reaching exproporiations of enslavement; a bracing sense of diversity; the charge of dislocation; the creative potential of radical relativization and relationality."

"Through readings of high-profile as well as less acclaimed writing, Soundings in French Caribbean Writing tracks some of the more striking tensions and tropisms informing the French Caribbean imagination of space and time. Whether probing Joseph Zobel's configuration of plantation and urban time-space, or registering the relative imprint of European, African, and local American gravitations in Maryse Conde's work, it foregrounds the dynamics of writing itself.

For it is largely by pressurizing narrative, diversifying genre, and highlighting textual meshwork and intertextual palimpsest that French Caribbean writing both stresses and manipulates innumerable intersections: between time and space, history and memory, chronology and duration, synchrony and allochrony, voice and text, place and displacement, theory and practice, identity and relativity."--Jacket.