Petit pays : La Caraïbe à la proue de l’écocritique

Abstract

This essay demonstrates how petits pays, particularly small tropical islands assaulted by human-triggered climate change, are also at the forefront of an aesthetics and ethics of solidary vulnerability. Paradoxically, I argue, their smallness allows them to connect effectively with large planetary events, in a movement Édouard Glissant calls Mondialité, since they can function away from the stifling forces of globalization driven by continental powers. Virgin Islands writer Tiphanie Yanique declared the Caribbean as “Ground Zero for Climate Change.” This essay will explore her claim through a series of poems, philosophical essays, and installation art from Martinique and Guadeloupe. Thus, Aimé Césaire’s apparent prison-island is precisely what links Caribbean subjects to a world-geography of Negritude; Suzanne Roussi Césaire’s Martinique connects, through the tail of a hurricane, with the rest of the Antilles and the world. Guadeloupean artist Guy Gabon’s installation, Yué#sororité puts women climate refugees at the forefront of resistance to global warming. The hope put into play by these poets and artists can only be activated, the essay ultimately argues, if the demonstrated tendency of humans to devour their planet through colonization and over-consumption can make room to an ethics of ecological love.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• Glissant
• Caribbean
• Guy Gabon
• Suzanne Césaire
• vulnerability

Notes

1 Voir Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih, editors, Minor Transnationalism, Duke UP, 2005.

2 Voir Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island : The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, translated by James Maraniss, Charlottesville, U of Virginia P, 1996, pp. 2–5.

3 Voir Kamau Brathwaite, “Caribbean Man in Space and Time,” Savacou, vol. 11–12, 1975, pp. 11–12.

4 Voir J. Michael Dash, “Martinique/Mississippi,” Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies, edited by Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith, Duke UP, 2004, pp. 94–109.

5 Voir “Une espèce de serpent endémique de la Martinique probablement éteinte,” Caribaea Initiative: Actualités, 21 mars 2017, https://caribaea.org/fr/newspublications/une-espece-de-serpent-endemique-de-la-martinique-probablement-eteinte/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2020.

6 Voir “Sargasses: Les photos saisissantes d’une catastrophe pas naturelle,” Mr. Mondialisation, 21 août 2018, https://mrmondialisation.org/sargasses-les-photos-saisissantes-dun-desastre-ecologique/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2020.

7 Voir Patrick Chamoiseau, Gérard Delver, Édouard Glissant, and Bertène Juminer. “Manifeste pour refonder les DOM,” Le Monde, 21 janvier 2000, https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2000/01/21/manifeste-pour-refonder-les-dom_3585463_1819218.html. Accessed 13 Oct. 2020. [texte intégral: “Manifeste pour un projet Global: Manifeste pour refonder les DOM,” Institut du Tout Monde, http://tout-monde.com/dossiers10a.html. Accessed 13 Oct. 2020]

8 Voir Gaël Faye, Petit pays, Paris, Grasset, 2016.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Valérie Loichot

Valérie Loichot is Chair of the Department of French and Italian at Emory University where she is Professor of French and English, and a core member of Comparative Literature. She is the author of three books: Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literatures of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (U of Virginia P, 2007), The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (U of Minnesota P, 2013; winner of MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for best book in French and Francophone Studies, 2015); and Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean (U of Virginia P, 2020). She also directed a special issue of La Revue des Sciences humaines in honor of her mentor Édouard Glissant (Entours d’Édouard Glissant, PU du Septentrion, 2013). In addition, Loichot has published over thirty articles and book chapters on Caribbean literature and culture, the US Gulf South, hurricanes and climate change, rituals of passing, creolization theory, feminism and exile, contemporary art, and food studies.