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Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past explores the complex interchange between shared and personal pasts and how they impact upon individual lives. Through their historically-informed self-writings, the five Caribbean authors that have been selected for this study–Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière–offer compelling insights into confronting, coming to terms with and reconciling with their past, both collective and individual. A central question is the conceptual link between singular and plural, between personal and collective notions of history and the connections that exist between them. The employment of ‘personal narratives’ as the vehicle to carry out this investigation encompasses the tension that is evident in the writers’ reflections, which constantly move between the collective and the personal and is embodied in the idea of ‘their past’–a complex, rhizomatic network that extends beyond the notion of a single, private life. The contrasting yet complementary nature of the book’s title–connecting histories and the personal past-underlines the existence of a shared past of which the five writers are deeply conscious, but also their own past, which overlaps with these historical inheritances. The book’s central focus, then, is trifold: it concerns a collective, and to some extent documented and shared, historical past; a more variable, unique, personal past revealed in the ‘personal narratives’ of the five authors as well as on the connections between these two pasts.

The Francophone Caribbean and the American South are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. This book takes as its premise that the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Chapters written by leading authorities in the field examine the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South, including Louisiana, which among the Southern states has had a quite particular attachment to France and the Francophone world. The chapters focus on issues of history, language, politics and culture in various forms, notably literature, music and theatre. The chapters explore in innovative ways the notions of creole culture and creolization, terms rooted in and indicative of contact between European and African people and cultures in the Americas, and which are promoted here as some of the most productive ways for conceiving of the circum-Caribbean as a cultural and historical entity.

This book examines the career, oeuvre, and literary theories of one of the most important Caribbean writers living today. Patrick Chamoiseau’s work sheds light on the dynamic processes of creolization that have shaped Caribbean history and culture. Chamoiseau is the recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the prestigious Prix Goncourt for the epic novel Texaco. His diverse body of work, which includes plays, novels, fictionalized memoirs, treatises, and other genres of writing, offers a compelling vision of the postcolonial world from a francophone Caribbean perspective. This book is for scholars interested in francophone, Caribbean, and world literatures as well as cultural studies, and scholars and students with interests in creolization, neocolonialism, and globalization will find it particularly valuable. It brings Chamoiseau’s major works of fiction into dialogue with lesser-known texts, including unpublished theatrical works, screenplays, visual texts, and treatises. This holistic, comprehensive, and largely chronological study of Chamoiseau’s oeuvre includes analyses of various authorial strategies, especially the use of narrative masques, cross-cultural storytelling techniques, and creolizing poetics.