Se fondant sur un corpus de romans constitué de trois auteurs francophones, originaires de la Caraïbe et d'Afrique : Patrick Chamoiseau, Dany Laferrière et Tierno Monénembo, notre recherche analyse les configurations de la mémoire collective et montre en quoi elles se laissent interpréter comme des mémoires sensibles. Les enjeux de mémoire qui sous-tendent le discours des romanciers permettent de répondre à la question : pourquoi se souvenir ? Du corpus se dégagent trois configurations de la mémoire blessée : en tant que réservoir de souvenirs ou récit du passé, la mémoire apparaît, parfois, telle une absence ou un manque involontaire et subi. Au contraire, lorsque la mémoire est envisagée comme un héritage ou comme une trace du passé, inscrite dans les lieux, les *habitus* et les représentations collectives des personnages, la mémoire est indice d'une présence négative. Enfin, envisagée comme un processus de remémoration en cours, la mémoire est mise en scène comme une tâche difficile, tortueuse, parfois impossible et pourtant nécessaire ou inévitable. De ce fait, la blessure s'exprime par la conjonction d'une thématique (événements violents), d'un discours qui laisse deviner le trauma ou la souffrance des personnages, ainsi que d'une fonctionnalité narrative attribuée aux événements et à leur mémoire, qui les rend toujours problématiques. Enfin, les romanciers réinvestissent les domaines sensibles de la mémoire collective dans une visée transformative et de transcendance des blessures. Répondant à des enjeux de vérité, justice, devoir de mémoire et compréhension du présent à la lumière du passé, les textes opèrent une relecture critique de l'h(H)istoire et prennent part à la configuration - toujours mouvante - de la mémoire collective.

Within the Caribbean, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are unusual: they are French overseas departments and thus also European Union members. As such, they must assimilate to French national culture even though their heterogeneous populations, mainly descendants of exploited imported labour, have their own unique island identity. Their heavy economic dependence on France and the effects of modernization and globalization pose further identitarian challenges for them. Franco-Antillean literature clearly reflects this long-standing identity confusion. This thesis explores two very recent novels— Toxic Island by Guadeloupean Ernest Pépin and L’Empreinte à Crusoé by Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau— and their divergent stylistic treatments of individuation. Both are inspired by Édouard Glissant’s theories of Relation and Tout- Monde; both engage questions of language, orality, the island space, race, the subject of alterity and the role of the arts and artists in identity formation. Yet both are also marked by distinctly unique forms of ambivalence. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015 / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

“Telling Otherwise: Rewriting History, Gender, and Genre in Africa and the African Diaspora” examines counter-discursive postcolonial rewritings. In my first chapter, “Re-Writing the Canon,” I examine two works that rewrite canonical texts from the European tradition, Jean Rhys’s retelling of the life of Jane Eyre’s Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea and Maryse Condé’s relocation of Wuthering Heights to the Caribbean in La migration des coeurs. In this chapter, I contend that re-writing functions not only as a response, as a “writing back” to the canon, but as a creative appropriation of and critical engagement with the canonical text and its worldview. My second chapter, “Re-Storying the Past,” examines fictional works that rewrite events from the historical past. The works that I study in this chapter are Assia Djebar’s recuperation of Algerian women’s resistance to French colonization in L’amour, la fantasia and Edwidge Danticat’s efforts to reconstruct the 1937 massacre of Haitians under Trujillo in The Farming of Bones. In my third chapter, “Re-Voicing Slavery,” I take for my subject neo-slave narratives that build on and revise the slave narrative genre of the late eighteenth- through early twentieth- centuries. The two works that I examine in this chapter are Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose and the poem sequence Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, based on the 1781 murder of Africans aboard the slave ship Zong. My fourth chapter, “Re-Membering Gender,” examines texts that foreground the processes of re-writing and re-telling, both thematically and structurally, so as to draw attention to the ways in which discourses and identities are constructed. In their attempts to counter masculinist discourses, these works seek to re-inscribe gender into these discourses, a process of re-membering that engenders a radical deconstruction of fixed notions of identity. The works that I read in this chapter include Daniel Maximin’s L’Isolé soleil, which privileges the feminine and the multiple in opposition to patriarchal notions of single origins and authoritative narrative voices and Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove, which rewrites Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnifique so as to critique the exclusive nature of Caribbean identity in his notion of créolité. / text

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