Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary

Michele Praeger

Description

The Imaginary is everywhere in representations of the Caribbean Islands and their people and has been ever since their “discoverers” dreamt themselves arriving, triumphant, in the Indies. This book poses a provocative question: When the Imaginary occupies the place of the Real, as in Caribbean culture and European projections of that culture, how does the Real position itself? Michèle Praeger seeks an answer by bringing the Caribbean discourses of French traditional criticism and American social sciences, particularly history and psychoanalysis, into conversation with the imaginings of the Caribbean—in the form of fiction by Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Maryse Condé, Michèle Lacrosil, and Suzanne Césaire.

 

Through careful analysis of historical and psychoanalytic work on the Caribbean, Praeger reveals both the biases of these disciplines, and the possibilities they hold when brought into dialogue with one another and with literature. She shows how Caribbean writers respond to these discourses in their re-creation of the daily experience, history or non-history, and gender differences of their culture. She highlights in particular the aesthetics and ethics of these Caribbean writers.

 

Like the fluid structures of Caribbean fiction, this work weaves back and forth between metropolitan France and the French Caribbean, between Caribbean men and women, between history and fiction, self and community, and between conflicting ideologies and aesthetic and ethic practices to form a web of complexities that begins to fathom the creativity specific to the Caribbean

Sujets

• Cultural studies

Informations

• Publié par: Nebraska
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780803203396
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary

michèle praeger

The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London

Parts of chapter 2 appeared as ‘‘Édouard Glissant: Of Masters and Maroons,’’Journal of Caribbean Studies 9.3 (1993–94): 178–93, and as ‘‘Biographie Africaine, Autoethnotgraphies Créoles’’ inPostcolonialism and Au- tobiography,ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1998), 245–54.

Part of chapter 3 appeared as ‘‘Édoard Glissant: Toward a Literature of Orality,’’Callaloo15.1 (1992): 41–48.

Parts of chapter 4 appeared as ‘‘Maryse Condé: Mythes et Contremythes’’ inL’Oeuvre de Maryse Condé (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996): 205–15, and as ‘‘Créolitéor Ambiguity?’’ inCrossing Racial Borderlines and Border- lands,ed. Debra J. Rosenthal and Monica Kaup (Aus- tin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 88–100.

∫2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America!

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Praeger, Michèle. The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean imaginary / Michèle Praeger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn0-8032-3739-1 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Caribbean fiction (French) – History and criti- cism. 2. Creoles in literature.i. Title. pq3944.p73 2003 843.009%9729—dc21 2003050753

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c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Caribbean as Imagined by Historians and Psychoanalysts

2. Performing Caribbean Histories andDéraisons

3. The Island Walkers and the Forest Wanderer

4.Créolitéand Its Discontents

5. The Creolization of theJe

6. France and Its Caribbean ‘‘Peripheral’’

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ix

1

9

33

73

101

121

155

169

177

191

201

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for their help and support: Richard Praeger, Catrina Bevilacqua, Claude Imbert, Hafid Gafaïti, Maryse Condé, Edouard Glissant, Suzanne Develter, JoAnn Cannon, Ruby Cohn, Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, Jacques Coursil, Jean Grunberg, Elizabeth Langland, and Ronnie Scharfman.