Search Results

The dwellings of enslaved laborers toiling on the sugar estates in the British colony of Nevis were fragile in character and perishable in construction. Unlike more robust plantation housing found on other islands, of wattle-and-daub or masonry, the homes on Nevis for enslaved workers consisted mainly of wood-plank. They were single-room structures with thatched roofs, propped up on stacked dry-stone platforms. Plantation maps from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries consistently portray such modest huts clustered in semi-orderly rows on estate property. Yet, as ephemeral as they were, they have not vanished entirely from the landscape. The archaeological footprints of these humble homes can be traced in the outlines of piled stone foundations, charcoal deposits, and scattered domestic artifacts. Furthermore, the style slowly transitioned into a vernacular form lasting post-emancipation into the early twentieth century, and it forms the basis of present vernacular architecture observable on the Nevisian landscape. This chapter will detail the archaeological evidence for traditional labor houses and trace how the architectural style likely evolved into a current vernacular form.

As a complement to the in-depth literary analyses that follow, Chapter 1 begins by examining a bona fide architectural structure, the Haitian gingerbread house, as a literal—i.e. physical—manifestation of authentic French-Caribbean construction. Drawing from both (past) traditional techniques and present-day technologies and innovations, the Gingerbreads’ vernacular architecture is described as a fundamentally localized, transformative building process that, for the purposes of this book, equate with what can be understood as the vernacular architexture of the French Caribbean. Hence, the recent “spatial turn” (Conley) in literary criticism should encompass not only natural but human landscapes in so far as their integral role as characters in the telling and creating of the region’s identifying narratives. Consequently, three brief textual analyses of French-Caribbean works serve to illustrate how the construction of individual and collective identities is informed by the architectural and architextual structures found within literature. The chapter concludes with an overview of relevant literary criticism, in particular as pertaining to the role of literary form in the evolving fields of spatial and postcolonial theory.

This essay focuses on the evolution of the humble case créole on Île de la Réunion, as physical ‘crystallisation’ of the various stages of the island’s colonial history and of the diverse cultural influences that have shaped its abiding features. As reflected in contemporary Reunionnese literature, the case créole also offers a potent symbol of a lost ‘art de vivre réunionnais’ and, implicitly, of marked, colonial-era racial and social divisions. Despite the seemingly ineluctable disappearance of the case créole as a living, lived-in milieu, recent developments paradoxically signal the enduring resilience and adaptability of this most evocative of (neo)colonial lieux de mémoire.