<p><italic>Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics</italic> confronts islands -at once as a problem, a concept, and a historical and mythical fact and product- by generating a tidalectical encounter between some of the ways in which islands have been imagined and used from without, primarily in the interest of the advancement of western capitalist coloniality, and from within, as can be gathered from Caribbean literatures. The perspective from without, predominantly based on negation, is explored in Section 1 using examples of islands in the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic, as well as a few canonical texts in various academic discourses. Section 2 discusses the perspective from within, an affirmative and creative counter-imagination on/of islands. Emerging from literary work by Derek Walcott, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Édouard Glissant, and Alejo Carpentier, the chapters in Section 2 are organized around three key concepts associated with insularity -tropical light, the coast, and the sea/ocean- and the ways in which they force a rearrangement of enduring philosophical concepts: respectively, vision and sense perception, time and space, and history.<br><p> <italic>Imagined Islands'</italic> Introduction establishes, (1) the stakes of a project undertaken from an immanent perspective set in the Caribbean; (2) the method, inspired chiefly by Kamau Brathwaite's concept of <italic>tidalectics</italic>; (3) the epistemological problems posed by islands; (4) an argument for a different understanding of history, imagination, and myth inspired by Caribbean texts; and, (5) an overview of the academic debates in which <italic>Imagined Islands</italic> might make a significant contribution. The first section, "Islands from Without," comprising Chapter 1, provides an account of a few uses and imaginations of islands by capitalist coloniality as they manifest themselves both in the historical and the mythical imaginary realms. I focus on five uses and imaginations of islands (entrepôt island, sugar island, strategic island, paradise island, and laboratory island), with specific examples from the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic, and from five canonical texts ascribed to different disciplinary discourses: Plato's "Atlantis," Thomas More's <italic>Utopia</italic>, Daniel Defoe's <italic>Robinson Crusoe</italic>, Charles Darwin's <italic>The Origin of the Species</italic>, and Margaret Mead's <italic>Coming of Age in Samoa</italic>. I argue, on the one hand, that a dominant idea of the island based on negation (lack, dependency, boundedness, isolation, smallness, remoteness, among other characteristics) has coalesced in the expansionist and exploitative interests of capitalist coloniality, despite the fundamental promiscuity of the concept of "island." On the other hand, I find in the analyzed examples, especially in those of the mythical imaginary, residues in flight that remain open for creative reappropriation.<br><p> <italic>Imagined Islands'</italic> second section, "Islands from Within," encompassing Chapters 2 through 5, relocates the discussion within the Caribbean in order to argue that some of the region's literatures have produced a counter-imagination concerning insularity. This counter-imagination, resulting from an immanent and affirmative engagement with Caribbean islands, amounts to a way of thinking about and living the region and its possibilities in terms other than those of the dominant idea of the island. Each chapter opens with a historical and conceptual discussion of the ways in which light (Chapter 2), the coast (Chapters 3 and 4), and the sea/ocean (Chapter 5) have been imagined and deployed by capitalist coloniality, before turning to Caribbean literary texts as instances of a re-conceptualization of the aforementioned insular features and their concomitant rearrangement of apparently familiar philosophical concepts. Chapter 2 focuses on tropical light, vision, sense perception, Walcott's book-length poem <italic>Tiepolo's Hound</italic>, and Rodríguez Juliá's novel <italic>El espíritu de la luz</italic>. Chapter 3 turns to the insular coast, time, space, and the novels <italic>El siglo de las luces</italic> by Carpentier and <italic>The Fourth Century</italic> by Glissant. Chapter 5 goes out to sea and history with the help of Rodríguez Juliá's chronicles "El cruce de la Bahía de Guánica y otras ternuras de la Medianía" and "Para llegar a Isla Verde," as well as of sections from Glissant's <italic>Poetics of Relation</italic> and some of his poems from <italic>The Restless Earth</italic>. Finally, <italic>Imagined Islands'</italic> Coda points to some of the ripples this project produces for future study, and defends the urgent need to "live differently" the Caribbean archipelagoes.</p> / Dissertation

À l'horizon de ce travail se trouve la volonté d'affirmer la cohésion et les nuances d'un imaginaire caribéen, construit en dialogue avec tous les substrats culturels et les expériences de l'histoire et du paysage dont il est issu. L'étude se concentre sur les œuvres de trois auteurs qui ont fourni une réflexion critique sur la création littéraire et sur le rôle de l'artiste caribéen ou latino-américain : Alejo Carpentier, Édouard Glissant, Derek Walcott. Ils arpentent le réel caribéen, dans une tension toujours renouvelée entre un canon littéraire inculqué depuis l'autre rive européenne, et la volonté de représenter dans et par le texte littéraire les pratiques vives de l'oralité. Comment concilier les tensions entre médiation (inter)textuelle et immédiateté ou coïncidence rêvée du chant, pour écrire avec justesse l’histoire oblitérée d’un archipel ou d’un continent ? Je développe à partir de leurs usages une conception dynamique de l'intertextualité comme dialogue, confrontation et revitalisation de la mémoire écrite, qui entend dépasser l'axe binaire de la soumission ou la subversion à un canon écrit surtout européen. J'envisage en particulier l'axe Méditerranée-Caraïbe pour penser les phénomènes de transferts et de différenciation et montrer comment l'Antiquité gréco-latine peut servir à articuler le désir de fondation et la rencontre entre performance orale et trace écrite. J'examine enfin comment le désir d'oralité, allié à la notion de communauté, travaille les textes du corpus, à travers un certain nombre de scènes de passage, de scènes rituelles, ou de scènes limites de la représentation. / This work intends to stand for the cohesion and the nuances of a Caribbean imaginary, which is based on a constant dialogue with all the cultural substrates and the experiences of history and landscape. The study focuses on the works of three writers who produced a critical appraisal of literary creation and the role of the Caribbean or Latin-American artist: Alejo Carpentier, Édouard Glissant, Derek Walcott. They keep measuring the Caribbean reality, in a continuous tension between a literary canon often brought and taught from the European shore and view, and the will to represent in and by the literary text the vivid practices of orality. How can we conciliate the tensions between (inter)textual mediation and immediacy or coincidence of the song, in order to write the obliterared history of an archipelago or a continent? Reading their intertextual uses, I develop a dynamic conception of intertextuality as dialogue, confrontation and revitalization of literary memory, which intends to go beyond the binary axis of submission or subversion to European written canon. I study in particular the Mediterranean-Caribbean axis to think about the cultural transfers and differentiation, in order to show how the Greek and Roman tradition can be used to articulate the desire for foundation and the encounters between oral performance and written traces. Finally, I examine how the desire for orality, which seems to traduce a desire of community, influences the textual composition, through the study of scenes of passing, ritual scenes and boundary scenes of representation.

Ce travail interroge les espaces traversés dans les trois romans suivants du poète-romancier vagabond Louis-Philippe Dalembert : L’autre face de la mer (1998), Avant que les ombres s’effacent (2017) et Mur Méditerranée (2019). Le mémoire s’ouvre sur une rétrospective de la vie et de l’itinéraire littéraire de l’écrivain avant de poser les bases des enjeux critiques autour desquels la réflexion sur les espaces s’articule. Le premier chapitre intitulé « Étendue des lieux » expose le rôle actif du sujet constituant en traversée dans le lieu habité. L’analyse des représentations de la maison d’enfance, de la ville, du pays, de l’océan et de la mer ainsi que des frontières souligne alors une instabilité du « lieu ». Le chapitre « Épaisseurs de temps » présente la notion de temps en tant que conditionnement linguistique cherchant à dire la relation fondamentale de l’individu avec l’espace vécu, nommé par Dalembert le « pays-temps ». Les allers-retours de la mémoire révèlent ainsi leur portée stratégique et l’Histoire devient un amalgame d’expériences subjectives dont la transmission est dépendante de leur mise en récit(s). Le dernier chapitre, « Échos de langues », questionne la langue même de Dalembert, puis celles dans lesquelles évoluent ses personnages. Les espaces partagés que sont la prière et les chants dévoilent un imaginaire créole du monde et soulignent la corporéité du langage. Avec les penseurs de « l’entre-deux » issus de la pensée postcoloniale et de la philosophie contemporaine, ce travail est traversé par une réflexion d’ordre éthique sur l’irréductible présence du sujet constituant dans le monde sensible, traduisant une relation perpétuellement à faire. / This work interrogates the spaces crossed in the following three novels by the vagabond poetnovelist Louis-Philippe Dalembert : L’autre face de la mer (1998), Avant que les ombres s’effacent (2017) and Mur Méditerranée (2019). The memoir opens with a retrospective of the writer’s life and literary itinerary before laying the groundwork for the critical issues around which the reflection on spaces is articulated. The first chapter entitled “Étendue des lieux” exposes the active role of the constituent subject crossing the inhabited place. The analysis of the representations of the childhood home, the city, the country, the ocean and the sea as well as the borders expresses then the instability of the “place”. The chapter “Épaisseurs de temps” presents the notion of time as a linguistic conditioning that seeks to express the fundamental relationship of the individual with the lived space, named by Dalembert the “pays-temps”. The back and forth of memory thus reveals its strategic significance and History becomes an amalgam of subjective experiences whose transmission depends on their narrative(s). The last chapter, “Échos de langues”, questions Dalembert’s own language, and then those in which his characters evolve. The shared spaces of prayer and song reveal a creole imaginary of the world and emphasize the corporeality of language. With the thinkers of the “in-between” from postcolonial studies and contemporary philosophy, this work is crossed by an ethical reflection on the irreducible presence of the constituent subject in the sensitive world, translating a relation perpetually to be made.