Intergenerational memory in the work of Francophone Caribbean women writers

In my doctoral dissertation, I will explore the expression and transmission of individual and cultural memory in the works of Maryse Conde and Gisele Pineau. Reading a selection of novels by these authors, I will consider four different paradigms or expressions of intergenerational memory: the transmission of traumatic memory (Maryse Conde's Desirada and Celanire cou coupe), the lingering of the "spirit" of familial and communal pasts (Gisele Pineau's La Grande drive des esprits), the transmission and transformation of literary history in the context of intertextuality (Maryse Conde's rewriting of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights in La Migration des coeurs and finally, the bequest of memory within the context of diasporic and transnational inheritances in Gisele Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia and Chair piment.;I understand intergenerational memory as memory that is passed from generation to generation, sometimes overtly (as recited family or collective histories), sometimes as a complex and hidden pathology (as in the case of traumatic memory), and yet again as ghosts rattling in the psyche or manifesting as virtual beings haranguing their descendents to be recognized, to be heard, to be brought into the present, to be situated in their rightful place in the flow of time. My thesis will argue that in many literary works by Caribbean authors, memory is principally represented as an intergenerational phenomenon, and that this emphasis is associated with recurrent thematic and formal effects. Memory has been a question that has engaged Caribbean writers from the time of the Negritude movement to contemporary writers of the Caribbean diaspora living in North America, England and France. Drawing their inspiration from Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, W.E. Du Bois and other thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, Aime Cesaire, Leon-Gontran Damas and Leopold Senghor formulated in their work a poetics of Negritude, which looked back to the memory of a mythic Africa in order to assert, in the face of French colonial imposition, a black Atlantic identity which was rooted in African ancestry. The question of memory continued to engage the creolist writers of the following generation (Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, among others) who have insisted on, to use Toni Morrison's poetry, the rememory of the experience of the Plantation to fine-tune the concept of an Afro-Caribbean identity. A new generation of diasporic writers living in the "West" return to the mythic memory of their native lands in the negotiation of their interstitial identities representative of the increasingly dual/multiple nature of belonging of the postmodern subject.;To understand the centrality of the discourse of memory in the works of writers of the African Diaspora, both in and of the Caribbean as well as in the writings of those installed in various western metropolises, it is necessary to emphasize the role and workings of memory in the process of recalling, recreating, and putting back into place Caribbean subjectivity, which the shattering experience of displacement and slavery had fractured, and its history, which the absence of a recorded history had erased. In his treatise on Caribbeanness (Le Discours antillais), the Martinican theorist and novelist Edouard Glissant identifies what he terms a "trou" or "void" in the history and identity of the Caribbean. According to Glissant, this state of disconnection from time and self in Caribbean societies is caused by the massive trauma of the slave experience, which has left Caribbean societies without narrative continuity. In the face of this "vertiginous black hole" (Fresco) in New World black identity, intergenerational memory offers a link to the subterranean past of black peoples and communities in the Caribbean. The work of the Caribbean writer involves the articulation of this past in their work as theorists, poets and novelists. This dissertation will investigate the contribution of Maryse Conde and Gisele Pineau to this process of remembering, creating and bringing into relief the "submarine" unity of Caribbean identity.