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 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 304. 45.00 [pounds sterling] Mary Gallagher examines the issue of collective memory in novels from the French departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the second half...

Life on a volcanic planet. (From the Editor).
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, A VOLCANIC ERUPTION on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean killed all but one of the 29,026 inhabitants of the town of St Pierre. The scale of the catastrophe prompted wide-ranging research into how volcanoes work and why they erupt when they...

Trinidad gas pipeline may extend to Cuba. (Business Briefs).
Patrick Manning, prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, has proposed the construction of an undersea pipeline that would bring natural gas from Trinidad to several Caribbean islands including Cuba. The pipeline would run from Trinidad to the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique--with branches extending to Antigua, St. Kitts...

Popular music and Martinican-Creole identity.
In Martinique during the mid-1950s, a young light-skinned mulatto of bourgeois origins startled the population of Fort-de-France with a series of provocative musical creations. During the Carnival of 1956, Frantz Denis "Francisco" Charles took a conical drum to the streets of Fort-de-France and joined the masqueraders. Until that time,...

Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Cesaire, Glissant, Conde.
Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Cesaire, Glissant, Conde. By JEANNIE SUK. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press. 2001. 206 pp. 45 [pounds sterling]. This book attempts to negotiate the difficult terrain that stands between the French Caribbean (here limited to Martinique and Guadeloupe) and postcolonial theory. It does...

Texaco.
Patrick Chamoiseau's novel is an ambitious narrative history of the Caribbean island of Martinique, tracking the growth of a shanty-town named 'Texaco' after a nearby oil depot. Chamoiseau tells the story of the epic struggle of the Creole underclass to carve out of an uncaring and unfair society their...

Andre Delpeuch, Jean-Pierre Giraud & Albert Hesse (ed.). Archeologie precolombienne et coloniale des Caraibes.
ANDRE DELPEUCH, JEAN-PIERRE GIRAUD & ALBERT HESSE (ed.). Archeologie precolombienne et coloniale des Caraibes. 375 pages, 233 figures, 26 tables. 2002. Paris: Comite des travaux historiques et scientifiques; 2-7355-0496-4 paperback 39 [euro]. These papers cover the archaeology of the French-speaking Caribbean from the pre-ceramic period to the...

Paris No Paradise for Pissarro in New Epic Poem.
Derek Walcott. Tiepolo's Hound. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. 164 pp., 26 color ills. S3o. Known as poet, playwright, and essayist. Derek Walcott, the Nobel laureate for literature in 1992, has also painted since boyhood. Born in St. Lucia, Walcott's gifts would propel him to...

Toward a poetics of the Caribbean. (Currents).
HOW DOES ONE DESCRIBE that indefinable substance that is poetry? Aristotle refers to "poetry for the possessed, of being multiform, its plasticity, its potential for ecstasy." Lorca speaks of the essence of poetry as a kind of fire. Lezama Lima responded, "Poetry? It's a nocturnal shell in a rectangle...

Caribbean Dance from Abakua to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity.
Caribbean Dance from Abakua to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity Edited by Susanna Sloat. Gainesville, FL University Press of Florida. 2002. 400 pages. Cloth. $39.95 This volume grows on you--like an infections mambo that gradually compels the most prudish observer to succumb to the beats. And it...