Elizabeth Bowles Duchanaud

Reading the French Caribbean Through Edouard Glissant: New Approaches to Conde, Chamoiseau, Schwarz-bart, and Chauvet Elizabeth Bowles Duchanaud

Positioning the French Caribbean and its literature within a postcolonial context is not only tricky, but erroneous. A new area of study, the francophone postcolonial, allows for an alternative voice to be forged. However, while this fresh concept argues for less hegemonic visions of what the postcolonial has come to represent, it continues to be expressed almost exclusively via the anglophone world, creating a paradox that reinforces the very real need for francophone critical perspectives. Through the theoretical and literary tenets of Edouard Glissant, one of the most prominent thinkers and writers of the French Caribbean today, contemporarary francophone criticism within a postcolonial framework can be developed. Glissant proposes not only alternative approaches to modern philosophical and social categories, but as a writer and reader himself, revolutionary ways to read modern French Caribbean literature.