This book is the first major study of French Caribbean literature in light of postcoloniality. Through readings of Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Conde, Baudelaire, Freud, and others, Jeannie Suk illuminates how debates about negritude, antillanite, and creolite contribute to paradoxes at the heart of postcolonial modes.
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In 1989, the Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant visited Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi. His visit spurred him to write a revelatory book about the work of one of our greatest but still least-understood American writers.
"A fascinating way to read Faulkner. . . . Glissant's] case is nothing less than that, no matter how Faulkner's personal Furies twisted his public speech, Faulkner was a great, world-beating multiculturalist."-Jonathan Levi, "Los Angeles Times Book Review"
"A sharp, challenging, and wholly unique tour of Yoknapatawpha County." -"Kirkus...

Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows traces the rise and fall of Pipi Soleil, "king of the wheelbarrow" at the vegetable market of Fort-de-France, in a tale as lively and magical as the marketplace itself. In a Martinique where creatures from folklore walk the land and cultural traditions cling tenuously to life, Patrick Chamoiseau's characters confront the crippling heritage of colonialism and the overwhelming advance of modernization with touching dignity, hilarious resourcefulness, and truly courageous joie de vivre. Patrick Chamoiseau's novel Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992. Linda...

The Fourth Century tells of the quest by young Mathieu Beluse to discover the lost history of his country, Martinique. Aware that the officially recorded version he learned in school omits and distorts, he turns to a quimboiseur named Papa Longoue. This old man of the forest, a healer, seer, and storyteller, knows the oral tradition and its relation to the powers of the land and the forces of nature. He tells of the love-hate relationship between the Longoue and Beluse families, whose ancestors were brought as slaves to Martinique. Upon arrival, Longoue immediately escaped and went to live in...

Edouard Glissant's Caribbean Discourse is an unflaggingly ambitious attempt to read the Caribbean and the New World experience, not as a response to fixed, univocal meaning imposed by the past, but as an infinitely varied, dauntingly inexhaustible text.