1 Introduction: Chronotropics, co-authored by Odile Ferly and Tegan Zimmerman with Joshua Deckman
Section I: Defiances/Divergences/Digressions
2: Odile Ferly - Of Slave Ships as Chronotopes: Fabienne Kanor’s Humus and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s Las Negras
3: Erica Johnson - Wreckognition: Archival Ruins in Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk
4: Nicole Roberts - Past Histories and Present Realities: Reading Desire and Difference in Mayra Santos Febres’ Fe en disfraz
5: Lisa Outar - Haunting Genealogies: Indo-Caribbean Feminist Literary Reimaginings of the Monstrous Past
Section II: Traumas/Restructures/Retracings
6: A. Marie Sairsingh: Connecting Diasporas: Reading Erna Brodber’s Work through African Fractal Theory
7: Valerie Orlando - When the Tout-Monde is not one: Maryse Condé’s Problematic ‘World-in-Motion’ in Les belles ténébreuses (2008) and Le fabuleux et triste destin d’Ivan et Ivana (2017)
8: Megan Myers - Writing “In Transit”: Literary Constructions of Sovereignty in Julia Alvarez’s Afterlife
Section III: Destruction/Desires/Disruptions
9: Elaine Savory - Beyond the Crossroad: Caribbean Environments, Gender and Race in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale and Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter
10: Carine Mardorossian and Veronica Wong - Creolized Ecology in Mayra Montero’s Palm of Darkness
11: Vivian Nun Halloran - Canadian Re-mapping of Caribbean Desire in Nalo Hopkinson’s Sister Mine and Shani Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea
Section IV: Bilocation/Inhabitations/(G)hostings
12: Joshua Deckman: Spiritual Crossings: Olokún and Caribbean Futures Past in La mucama de Omicunlé by Rita Indiana Hernández
13: Renée Larrier - A Site of Memory: Revisiting (in) Gisèle Pineau’s Mes quatre femmes
14: Robert Sapp: At the Crossroads of History: The Cohabitation of Past and Present in Kettly Mars’s L’Ange du patriarche
15: Tegan Zimmerman: Fiction as a Spider’s Web? Ananse, Tricksters, and Storytellers in Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo
Odile Ferly is Associate Professor of Francophone Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA. She is the author of A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium (2012).
Tegan Zimmerman is an Adjunct Professor in Women and Gender Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Canada, and an executive member of the Committee on Comparative Gender Studies within the International Comparative Literature Association.
This book deconstructs androcentric approaches to spacetimeinherited from western modernity through its theoretical frame of the chronotropics. It sheds light on the literary acts of archival disruption, radical remapping, and epistemic marronnage by twenty-first-century Caribbean women writers to restore a connection to spacetime, expanding it within and beyond the region. Arguing that the chronotropics points to a vocation for social justice and collective healing, this pan-Caribbean volume returns to autochthonous ontologies and epistemologies to propose a poetics and politics of the chronotropics that is anticolonial, gender inclusive, pluralistic, and non-anthropocentric.