Maryse Conde

The Daughter's Return offers a close analysis of an emerging genre in African-American and Caribbean fiction produced by women writers who make imaginative returns to their ancestral pasts. Considering some of the defining texts of contemporary fiction--Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven--Rody discusses their common inclusion of a daughter who returns to the site of her people's founding trauma of slavery through memory or magic. Rody treats these texts as allegorical expressions of the desire of writers newly emerging into cultural authority to reclaim their difficult inheritance, and finds a counter plot of heroines' encounters with women of other racial and ethnic groups running through these works.

Unlike many classic works of fiction, literature of the fantastic enjoys mass popularity. Because the fantastic is so much a part of popular culture, fantasy literature can represent or address the racial attitudes of its audience. Representations of race in the fantastic provide a measure of the concern the culture has for racial matters. If a work is racist, whether consciously or not, it may perpetuate racist attitudes unless it is carefully examined. At the same time, literature of the fantastic is able to present possible worlds rather than real ones. It is thus a literature of possibility, in which racial matters may be addressed and exposed, so that readers may become more conscious of the evils of racist attitudes. This volume explores the significance of race and color in the works of a wide range of authors, including Octavia Butler, Robert Heinlein, Stephen King, and Robert Silverberg.

This volume of essays examines the forced dispossession of the Middle Passage through the texts, religious rites, economic exchanges, dance and music it elicited, both on the liminal transatlantic journey and on the continent and eventual return. As a whole this collection establishes a broad topographical and temporal context for the Passage that extends from the interior of Africa across the Atlantic and to the interior of the Americas, and from the time of the Middle Passage to the present day. A collective narrative of itinerant cultural consciousness as represented in histories, myth and arts, these contributions reconceptualize the meaning of the Middle Passage for African American history and fiction.

Edited collection of essays examining the fiction of contemporary Africana women including Ama Ata Aidoo, Shirley Anne Williams, Ntozake Shange, Flora Nwapa, Maryse Conde, Elizabeth Nunez Harrell, Jamaica Kinkaid and others.

"The volume sets out to provide a panorama of the diversity of the Francophone Caribbean, an area which is becoming ever more widely studied in Anglophone university departments of French studies. . . . The increasing interest of students of French and Francophone Studies in the Caribbean should ensure a broader readership, and the volume is wide-ranging enough to serve as a general introductory critical text."

There has been an explosion of interest in Francophone studies, as postcolonial and diaspora literatures more generally have gained recognition both within and outside the academy. Identity, culture and history as well as issues relating to class, race, and colonialism, and the literary production itself have always been central to Caribbean Francophone culture and are matters currently of hot debate. From the growth of the negritude movement, principally associated with poetry, through to the rise of the novel, contributors to this book explore the theoretical, political and philosophical debates that have informed, and continue to inform, the rich and varied tradition of Caribbean Francophone literature.In recent years, the number of Francophone Caribbean women writers has increased significantly and experimental writing has featured more prominently. Contributors explore these and other trends, mainly in the literatures of Guadeloupe and Martinique. In providing the only available overview of this important literature and in positioning it critically, this book makes an invaluable contribution to students and scholars alike.

A reference companion to Third World women writers and their writing available in English.