Le cahier de romances. (Martinique).
Raphael Confiant Le cahier de romances Paris. Gallimard. 2000. 248 pages 85 F. ISBN 2-07-073896-5 THIS IS THE SECOND volume of memoirs by one of the three Creolist musketeers from Martinique; Ravines du devant-jour (1993; see WLT 68:2, p. 412) was the first. Le cahier de romances...

Awakening Spaces: French Caribbean Popular Songs, Music, and Culture.
By Brenda F. Berrian. (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. [xiv, 287 p.ISBN 0-226-04455-6 (cloth); 0-226-04456-4 (pbk.). $40 (cloth); $16 (pbk.).] Culturally distinct, but politically tied to France as overseas region and department respectively, the Lesser Antilles islands of Martinique and Cuadeloupe find...

Patrick Chamoiseau Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows.
Trans. and with an afterword by Linda Coverdale Foreword by Edouard Glissant Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Pp. 226. $25.00 In this brilliant narrative (published in France in 1986), an evocative precursor to Texaco (Prix Goncourt 1992), the moribund vegetable market of Fort-de-France, Martinique, rises to...

Gisele Pineau: writing the dimensions of migration.
GUAVA JUICE IN LA GUADELOUPE DURING A RESEARCH TRIP to Guadeloupe in 1997, I met the author Gisele Pineau at her mother's house for an informal interview. When we sat down, she offered me some guava juice, squeezed fresh from fruit in the tree in her mother's...

Patrick Chamoiseau. Biblique des derniers gestes.
Paris, Gallimard. 2002, 789 pages 25 [euro]. ISBN 2-07-075019-1 WITH THE NOTABLE exception of his 1997 essay Ecrire en pays domine (see WLT 72:2, p. 441), Patrick Chamoiseau had written in a minor vein since winning the Prix Goncourt in 1992 for Texaco (see WLT 67:4, p....

Editor's note.
Few ideas have been more influential in contemporary literary theory over the last decade than that of "postcolonialism." And yet, while francophone studies across the United States have been energized by postcolonial theory in its various f0rms, there has always been some hesitation about its application to Quebec. Certainly...

Mary Gallagher. Soundings in French Caribbean Writing since 1950: the Shock of Space and Time.
Mary Gallagher. Soundings in French Caribbean Writing since 1950: The Shock of Space and Time New York. Oxford University Press. 2002 (released 2003). viii + 293 pages. $72. ISBN 0-19-815982-X IN Soundings in French Caribbean Writing since 1950, Mary Gallagher has produced a concise, elegantly written study...

Teaching world "postliterature".
In "Toward a Poetics of the Caribbean" (WLT summer/ autumn 2002, pp. 52-53), Nancy Morejon draws on the two "emblematic" positions of Aime Cesaire and Nicolas Guillen to usefully highlight the ways in which Caribbean poetry is "multilingual and plural, multiple and one." Both Cesaire and Guillen write poetry...

Ravines du devant-jour.
Raphael Confiant won the 1993 Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba) for his short memoir of childhood, Ravines du devant-jour. Confiant's star has risen quite rapidly, due in part to his participation in the elaboration of a new literary movement based in Martinique that has come to be known as...

Zouk: World Music in the West Indies.
Jocelyne Guilbault's Zouk: World Music in the West Indies is the first book in English to give an ethnographic treatment of zouk, a dance music popular in Creole-speaking Caribbean. The book focuses on the various local and international issues raised by the performance and commercialization of zouk. Identifying zouk...