Postcolonial Echoes and Evocations: The Intertextual Appeal of Maryse Condé (Modern French Identities)

This work is a sedulous enquiry into the intertextual practice of Maryse Condé in Moi, Tituba, sorcière… noire de Salem (1986), Traversée de la mangrove (1989) and La Migration des cœurs (1995), the texts of her œuvre in which the practice is the most elaborate and discursively significant. Arguing that no satisfactory reading of these novels is possible without due intertextual reference and interpretation, the author analyses salient intertexts which flesh out and, in the case of Traversée de la mangrove, shed considerable new light on meaning and authorial discourse. Whether it be in respect of canonical (William Faulkner, Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne), postcolonial (Aimé Césaire, Jacques Roumain) or other (Anne Hébert, Saint-John Perse) writers, the author explores Condé’s intertextual choices not only around such themes as identity, resistance, métissage and errance, but also through the dialectics of race-culture, male-female, centre-periphery, and past-present. As both textual symbol and enactment of an increasingly creolised world, intertextuality constitutes a pervasively powerful force in Condé’s writing the elucidation of which is indispensable to evaluating the significance of this unique fictional œuvre.