Ici-Là: Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French (Cross/Cultures 62)

In Caribbean writing, place is intimately inflected by displacement - place and displacement are not dichotomous; every ‘here’ invariably implies a ‘there’. In line with this extreme imbrication of (dis)location, Caribbean writing in French explores questions of increasing global pertinence such as the relation between writing and displacement, local and distant space, text and place, identity and migration, passage and transformation. Contributions range across genres and the work of writers such as Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, René Dépestre, Édouard Glissant, Émile Ollivier, Gisèle Pineau, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Ernest Pépin.

Topics explored include the poetics of dwelling space, the postmodern or postcolonial dynamic of the Creole town, and the textualization of place and displacement. Also included are essays on the drama of distance, the metamorphosis of recent Haitian writing, the literary reverberations of the figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and links between Ireland and the French Caribbean.