Product Description:
Rewriting the Return to Africa: Voices of Francophone Caribbean Women Writers examines how post-colonial women writers Maryse Conde, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Myriam Warner Vieyra emerged with a new vision of the notion of origins and identity and in the process revised the myth of the return to Africa previously constructed by Negritude writers in the 1930s. Their works reveal that the rediscovery of Caribbean history and culture leads to a new awareness of hybridity in identity and culture.
Review:
Rewriting the Return to Africa makes a long over-due and compelling argument about the way we position women's literature in the Francophone Caribbean tradition. Focusing on works by Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra written in the era following African independence, Anne François identifies a key recurring trope: Africa as a "disappointing father figure." In tracing the variations on this theme, she shows convincingly that we must identify Caribbean women's writing of this period as constituting a movement in its own right, one that stands as a bridge between Négritude and Créolité. Lucidly written and clearly argued, Rewriting the Return to Africa will be of great interest to students as well as experienced scholars of Francophone Caribbean and post-colonial literatures.--Valerie Kaussen, University of Missouri-Columbia
François's engaging study of three Francophone Caribbean women writers--Guadeloupeans Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra--provides an interesting take on an old theme (taken up principally by male Caribbean writers): the allegorization of Africa as the nurturing mother. For these women, Africa assumes an opposite, though unfulfilling, patriarchal figure. In looking at two of the giants of Francophone Caribbean writing, Condé and Schwartz-Bart, and the less-known Warner-Vieyra, François (Eastern Univ.) differentiates the Antillean male/female sentiment of a mythical return to Africa. Reminiscent of Chantal Kalisa's Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Literature (CH, Jul'10, 47-6129), which took a feminist perspective in opposition to the patriarchal discourse of male writers in the Caribbean diaspora, the present title provides fresh feminist interpretations of the nostalgic yearnings for a welcoming Africa. In considering each author's search for Caribbean self-identity, François extends beyond the limitations imposed by the negritude and Creole of pre- and post-independence writing; she envisions writings by the women as a willful act of cultural identity rooted in the Caribbean rather than in a search of a mythical nurturing Africa. For these women, writing is a migratory journey that reconnects yearnings for identity to renewed Caribbean feminist understanding of self. Summing Up: Recommended.--CHOICE
François's thesis that Condé, Schwarz-Bart, and Warner-Vieyra transformed the myth of Africa as motherland to which Caribbean cultures must necessarily return provides an insightful and original analysis of the role that these now canonical writers have played in Caribbean identity construction. Offering a more complex vision of any Caribbean identity, François shows how these three writers advocate global nomadism over mythical return, and an appreciation of métissage and the local over the celebration of Africa, thus postulating a transnational identity, particularly where women are concerned. The first study to bring together these three Guadeloupean writers, and to identify their pivotal role in the development of Franco-Caribbean discourse, this is a useful addition to Caribbean literary studies. Rewriting the Return to Africa will be of interest to scholars of Caribbean, Francophone, and women's writing, and is accessible to an undergraduate as well as a scholarly readership.--Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies
Rewriting the Return to Africa: Voices of Francophone Caribbean Women Writers meticulously demonstrates that the notion of return to Africa -- be it metaphorical, physical or spiritual -- has a long history in Caribbean literature and culture. The text explores the complexity of return as it relates to identity, language, gender and culture. Ultimately, this book challenges the myths of the return to origins and examines errancy among other possibilities as an alternative to Africa-the father/mother land.--Cécile Accilien, Columbus State University
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