This thesis analyses the themes of history, memory, and authorship in the works of four women playwrights from the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. In doing so, it aims to reveal the three levels of marginalization to which Caribbean women theatre practitioners are subjected: being a woman, being a French Caribbean woman, and being a French Caribbean woman who writes theatre. The thesis seeks to contribute to the expansion of the field of French Caribbean literary and drama studies, endeavours to redress the gender balance in studies on French Caribbean literature, and aspires to add to the existing body of work on French Caribbean women's writing. Therefore, the thesis aims to reveal and to analyse the world of French Caribbean women's theatre and to study how the playwrights address socio-political issues that affect their communities and influence their own writings and careers. The corpus consists of plays by Gerty Dambury, Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Suzanne Dracius from the 1980s to the early 2000s. While focussing on a different theme, each chapter rests its analysis on theatrical works of a similar genre. The analysis of the plays deploys theories of the theatre pertaining to postcolonial drama and gender. The first chapter serves as an introduction to a group of female French Caribbean writers and their predecessors. The second chapter is a study of two historical plays, focussing on the collective experience of historical events and the role played by women in those events. The third chapter analyses plays that problematize the relationship between the collective and the individual. The fourth chapter looks at the image of the French Caribbean female artist and the multiple barriers she encounters in achieving creative independence.

In this qualitative study, I examine the utilization of electronic publication and electronic writing systems to provide new possibilities for the translation of French Caribbean literary texts. Using Simone Schwarz‐Bart's 1972 novel Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle specifically for analysis and exploration, I investigate the potential of digital technology to aid in the production of literary translations that are mindful not only of the dynamics of language, but of French Caribbean women's discourse as well. Since the cultural turn of translation studies, translators need not only be bilingual but bicultural as well, having a discerning knowledge and familiarity of the culture that they render. Cultural translation scholars, therefore, have argued that translators should make the reasons for their translation choices known through annotations, prefaces, introductions, or footnotes. Advancing this established claim through critical and theoretical analysis and the construction of hypermediated textual translation samples from Pluie et Vent, I argue that translators can make their choices known by utilizing digital writing and hypermedia tools, such as TEI‐conformant XML, for computer assisted translation (CAT) and electronic publication. By moving a new translation of Schwarz‐Bart's text to a digital space, translators have more options in how they present their renderings including what information to include for better textual interpretation and analysis. The role, thus, of the translator has expanded. This person is not just a translator of language and culture, but an editor who provides scholarly information for critical interpretation. She is also a programmer who is skilled in new media iv writing and editing tools and uses those tools rhetorically to invent new methods for the electronic translation of literature.