Editors’ Introduction

The concept of generation is like the air that we breathe—essential and largely unnoticed. It is constitutive of our understanding of family and society, of biological and historical processes; at the same time, it tends to remain invisible, a cluster of tacit assumptions underlying a ubiquitous formula. (Erll 2014, 385)

Something inside is laid wide like a wound, some open passage that has cleft the brain, some deep, amnesiac blow. We left somewhere a life we never found, customs and gods that are not born again, some crib, some grille of light clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld us from that world below us and beyond, and in its swaddling cerements we’re still bound. (Walcott 1986, 88)

The history of the Caribbean has been imagined, in both colonialist discourse and by Caribbean writers and thinkers themselves, predominantly in terms of rupture. The region, axiomatically, is borne out of a series of traumas—the dislocations of conquest, genocide, transportation, enslavement, violation and indenture and breaking up linguistic, tribal and familial groups, causing an irreparable fracture in origins and shattering stable lines of genealogical descent. This generational shattering was deliberately and strategically imposed and was even more marked and brutal in the Caribbean than in the American South: death rates of the enslaved were one-third higher in the Caribbean, the birth rate there was considerably lower, and there was a far higher proportion of recent arrivals from Africa. Even among the white populations, death rates were strikingly high: Vincent Brown writes that from 1722 to 1774 in Kingston, Jamaica, there were nearly 18,000 funerals and only 2,669 baptisms among the white population (Brown 2008, 2). In such conditions, “where rampant disease, malnutrition, overwork, and violence resulted in frequent burials” (4), generational unsettling was a human consequence, part of the broader “flux and instability” of the society, which “shattered networks of belonging that connected the newly born to the long dead” (10). As such, the enslaved “had to reconstitute their social worlds wherever they landed,” and “struggled to conceive new relations out of kinship idioms that they already shared, learned from each other, or had forced upon them by their overlords” (Brown 2008).

The very language through which such experiences are reimagined, in both colonial and postcolonial contexts, and with very different ideological emphases, posits Caribbean identity as emerging from a radical schism with the Old. The motif of the break is registered, for example, in the notorious colonial metanarrative that coalesces around 1492, with Columbus’s “discovery” of a “New World”; or in Édouard Glissant’s description of the region’s past as an “histoire faite de ruptures,” whose beginning, located by Glissant in the trade in enslaved peoples, is an “arrachement brutal,” a “choc” (Glissant 1981, 223–224), catalyzing an “irruption dans la modernité” (146). One finds a similar emphasis on explosion, fissure and the sudden jolt in Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s characterisation of the slave plantation system as the “Big Bang” of the Caribbean universe (1998, 55), a motif reprised by Patrick Chamoiseau among others (Chamoiseau 2002, 59). Derek Walcott’s imagining of the region as a broken vase, lovingly if painfully reassembled (Walcott 1998, 69), dwells similarly “on fracture and suture” as a response to “the imperialist renderings of a serialized progression of events” (Phillips 2002, 124). If the Big Bang is held by many to characterize the origins of the Plantationocene, the subsequent history of the Caribbean can be seen as a succession of aftershocks, from for example the Haitian Revolution and independence (1791–1804), an incomparable example of violent political rupture, to the frequent micro-shocks that also punctuate the region’s history, from the anomalous neocolonial departmentalization (1946), to the mass migrations of the BUMIDOM (1960s–70s), to the history of US occupation in Haiti followed later by the Duvalier regimes (imagined in spectacularly paternalistic terms) to the tragically literal aftershocks detonated by the Haitian earthquake of 2010.

The dominance of these narratives of rupture, fission and fissure—deriving, themselves, from very real experiences of uprooting and violence—means that it has been, perhaps, less common to imagine the Caribbean as a site of (re)generation, continuity, tradition and return. And yet a remarkably persistent strain of what we might call “generational thinking” has characterized Caribbean discourse, allowing politicians, historians, writers and critics to attempt to better understand or even to manipulate Caribbean culture, identity and politics. In some cases, the generational paradigm conveys a profoundly colonialist mentality: in the construction of Toussaint L’Ouverture as the “untutored child of the Enlightenment” (Connor 2003, 54); or in the freight of colonial ideology underlying the designation of France as mère-patrie, leading in turn to Martinique being configured as the better-behaved, more pleasing, daughter, and Guadeloupe as the more rebellious but ultimately compliant wild child. At the same time, the designation of these islands, alongside Canada, Réunion and other conquered territories, as vieilles colonies, appears to legitimize and even to elevate the colonial relationship by suggesting a generational hierarchy founded on the longevity of the link to France. Sometimes the paradigm serves more questionable ends still, notably in the domestication of tyranny and the mobilization of paternalism and innocence registered in the monikers Papa and Baby Doc, and in the styling of dictators as “fathers of the nation.”

The term “generation” of course derives from the Greek, genesis: the genesis story is one that is famously lacking in Caribbean mythology, a lacuna that successive generations of writers and thinkers have grappled with in fiction, poetry, and drama. This heightened awareness of the inaccessibility of history as a longue durée, and the disorienting absence of any story of origins, arguably encourages reflection on intergenerational relay, diegetic, discursive and critical. And in these discourses of engenderings, lateral relations are perhaps less valorized than those that cut across the generations and offer a sense of diachronic continuity. Caribbean fiction in particular stages repeated intergenerational encounters, as many of the essays collected here testify, compensating for what Derek Walcott calls the “deep amnesiac blow” of slavery (Walcott 1998, 29), privileging instead the physical and emotional bonds within and between generations. Ideas of generation, filiation, tradition and return are also exemplified by the intense intertextuality of Caribbean writing, an intertextuality that is often conspicuously internal, in other words focused on referencing, remembering and, often, rebuking Antillean writers themselves. Generational dynamics are also evident in the particular histories of Caribbean islands: the classic tripartite structure of Négritude, Antillanité, and Créolité, in the French Departments (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane) is shaped by the specific experiences of colonialism and Departmentalization there, which perhaps accounts in turn for the underlying common concerns of each generation; and in Haiti one might think of the La Ronde generation, the occupation generation, the indigenist, 1946, Haïti Littéraire, Spiralists, Duvalier, post-Duvalier, exile, post-earthquake generations, and no doubt many more—generational shifts that are arguably driven less by the singular memory of slavery and colonialism than by the vicissitudes of independence that are reflected in the often abrupt shifts in literary and cultural movements from one generation to the next.

Generation implies, then, “not only the synchronicity of a particular group” (members having the same age), but also “diachronicity, genealogy” (Erll 2014, 395). In other words, generationality operates both horizontally and vertically; it also operates in terms of biology and society, the familial and the cultural. And as Marius Hentea cautions, in literary studies the term is used “casually, as it seems like we already know what we mean when using it”; moreover, the term “retains the gloss of science because of its biological origins” meaning that it “unwittingly […] periodizes even though it is employed to avoid monolithic periodization” (Hentea 2013, 586). It is therefore important in these configurations to remember, as David Scott suggests, that generations are “social institutions of temporal experience [that] embody successive and overlapping frameworks of remembering, successive intellectual and affective ways to assimilate or incorporate, the past in the present” (Scott 2014, 102). In this respect they constitute a usable fiction, one that enables us to conceive of and map the longue durée, but that have no pre-given, intrinsic or ontological status. As Tim Ingold argues in a very recent study, generations can be seen both as “ropes” (“with the rope young lives overlap older ones, and life itself is regenerated in their collaboration” [Ingold 2024, 4]) and as “slices that cut across the life process” (2). This latter “stratigraphic” thinking, which is deeply imprinted on modernist sensibilities, is also remarkably prominent in Caribbean discourse. It is based on the (false) premise that a generation is a “cohort of humanity that has fallen into rank at a particular time, or over a particular interval, whose members judge themselves or are judged in some way to be coeval, and whose formation is complete at the outset” (Ingold 2024). Ingold continues that, in this “march of cohorts,” we witness “not continuity but serial replacement, as each in turn takes the stage and, having enjoyed its share of the limelight, is overlain by its successor and sinks into the past. Generation carries on, but generations pile up, stage by stage, layer upon layer, into a stack” (Ingold 2024).

The evolutionary narrative by which the literary history of the Francophone islands of the Caribbean has been constructed and understood conspicuously conforms to Ingold’s stratigraphic model. This can be seen in Léon-Gontran Damas’s characterisation of Jean-Price Mars as “le père du Haïtianisme,” the title of a 1960 article published in Présence Africaine, a piece which also, by implication, positions him as the father (or grandfather) of Négritude. Damas was clearly invested in the quest for a masculine genealogy; in a later interview, he describes the (contested) paternity of Négritude:

In Vermont at the Conference on Black Francophone Literature, they asked me, “Who is the father of Négritude?” I said, “I’m fed up of all that. I don’t understand why Négritude needs so many fathers.” Anyway, I recalled an African proverb. I said that in Africa we don’t know our fathers, we know our mothers. Now, the man who coined the word “Négritude” was Aimé Césaire, and Senghor has been obliged to admit this. But, for many reasons, Senghor is first now, the father of Négritude. In Vermont they asked me who I was among the three. I said, “Perhaps I’m the Holy Spirit.” (qtd. in Edwards 2003, 121)

As Edwards suggests, these more or less explicit paternal metaphors “frame [Négritude’s] birth as a special kind of immaculate conception” (Edwards 2003). This gendered story of filiation persists in the paternalistic paradigms deployed by later generations, too. Most notoriously Aimé Césaire (widely known as Papa Césaire in the Antilles), was claimed as literary father by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant in the opening of the 1989 manifesto Eloge de la créolité, with Glissant implicitly positioned as the “avuncular hinge” between Césaire and the créolité writers (Bongie 1998, 54). As many have noted, and as several of our contributors underline, the declaration by the créolistes that they are “à jamais fils d’Aimé Césaire” (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 1989, 18) should be read as a profoundly ambivalent gesture of filiation, given the notoriously Oedipal tenor of the engagement with Césaire in the Éloge, as well as in subsequent essays such as Lettres créoles and, above all, in Confiant’s Aimé Césaire : une traversée paradoxale du siècle. In this latter, Confiant presents himself as “un fils qui estime avoir été trahi par ses pères” (Confiant 1993, 37), the foremost of whom is the Martinican poet-politician. This quarrel between ancients and moderns was displaced by the increasingly close relationship between Patrick Chamoiseau and Édouard Glissant in the 2000s; although Chamoiseau once described Glissant as “le père de sa [de la Martinique] littérature prochaine” (Chamoiseau 1990, 143), the relationship in later years resembled more an avuncular, even fraternal one. Meanwhile, the generational positionality of Aimé Césaire’s biological daughters Ina and Michèle, themselves eminent writers, anthropologists and essayists, has generally been underplayed in favor of the poet-statesman’s intellectual relationship with these putative sons and heirs.

Gender and generation are therefore intimately intertwined, and in the French Caribbean have generally worked to exclude or diminish the contributions of women writers. Edwards notes how, in Damas’s Holy Trinity metaphor cited above, the poet “moves slyly from matrifocal foundation […] to paternal dénouement” (2003, 121). Jennifer M. Wilks makes a compelling point when she suggests that “while familial designations provide a ready model for tracing intellectual influences, they can also recast formerly active participants in cultural movements—especially women—as mere facilitators, if not overlooking their contributions altogether” (Wilks 2015, 91). Such considerations lead Wilks to locate Suzanne Césaire as Négritude’s Madonna, “its singular feminine presence, related to the Trinity but unquestionably separate” (Wilks 2008, 109). If the Négritude Salon was an unusually lateral, indeed literal, familial generational coterie, which included the Nardal sisters (Wilks arguably downplays the role of the Nardals in her formulation) and married couple Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, it is one in which the role of women has been notoriously overlooked. And, while the generational paradigm has been invoked by some critics in order to trace a specific genealogy of women’s writing (Sam Haigh, for example, titles the second Chapter of her study of post-Négritude women’s writing, Mapping a Tradition (Haigh 2000), “The Return of Africa’s Daughters”), such attempts to trace female filiation are more the exceptions than the rule. This may be because, historically, female intergenerational inheritance has been primarily channeled through the oral rather than the written tradition; it may also be because women writers themselves tend much more than their male counterparts to trace their genealogy in terms of both male and female precursors. The spectacularly short shrift given to generations of women writers in the literary history proposed in Lettres créoles, much like Chamoiseau’s “Sentimenthèque” in Ecrire en pays dominé (which names, in the host of authors celebrated, a single woman writer), merely perpetuates a long tradition of male-on-male referencing and intergenerational validation. Yet, when women writers of the French Caribbean are asked to account for their literary forebears, they tend to invoke not only Caribbean women but also men, and indeed arguably spread their intertextual nets much wider, geographically, than many of their male colleagues. Maryse Condé is an especially interesting case in point: a champion of Caribbean women writers in her pioneering La Parole des femmes (Condé 1979), she had also the previous year authored a literary study of Césaire in the “Profil d’une œuvre” series. While her intertextual references necessarily encompass figures like Simone Schwarz-Bart and Suzanne Césaire, for Condé Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon loom much larger still, as do international figures such as Langston Hughes. For her part Gisèle Pineau, when asked about her influences, acknowledges Schwarz-Bart as “a diamond” but immediately invokes Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Richard Wright (Veldwachter 2004, 185).

Such ecumenism is perhaps as much as anything a mode of resistance to the straight, exclusionary genealogical lines of filiation that have been the hallmark of so much male French Caribbean discourse. Meanwhile there may be good reason to suggest that generational paradigms are becoming more inclusive. Kara Rabbitt suggests that Suzanne Césaire is being recuperated as “the missing mother of Martinique’s intellectual family tree” (Rabbitt 2013, 36), proposing a genealogy that is rather more optimistic than Wilks’s view of her as “Madonna.” Rabbitt argues that she now stands as both “biological and metaphorical mother” and “as the maternal figure of a cultural tree that branches, through Glissant and Fanon to Chamoiseau and Dracius and her own children, from the trunk the Césaires created jointly through their work in Tropiques. Papa Césaire is there; and yet, so is Suzanne” (49).

In our opening essay, by Maeve McCusker, generation is understood in a primal, strictly familial, and perhaps ultimately universal, way. McCusker locates her discussion of the mother-daughter plot in Maryse Condé’s childhood memoir Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer by acknowledging the longstanding and continuing pull of autobiography, autofiction and childhood memoir, which testifies to the desire among Caribbean writers to interrogate individual, genetic inheritance. Maternal loss suffuses Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer; while words in this text function largely as weapons, or as pain-inducing capsules that are generally vectors of hurt, damage and destruction, the mother’s body, the primal site of generation and genesis, is a kind of promised land, the site of untrammeled comfort and preoedipal oneness. Condé’s brief but affecting narrative, studded with love, guilt, frustration and pain, can be read as a privileged textual site in which gender, genre and generation coalesce to produce an exploration of the “plot of generations” which has universal and timeless significance.

Lorna Milne, drawing also on both the fictional and essayistic work of Condé, is concerned in her essay with women writers. She examines the ways in which gendered and intergenerational dynamics play out in the work of Gisèle Pineau, Fabienne Kanor and Gaël Octavia. Focusing on female (literary) identity, she interrogates how the woman writer seeks on a personal level to end intergenerational family legacies by liberating herself from socio-cultural expectations which, although informed by viriarchal norms, are often perpetuated by mothers and grandmothers. Milne also shows how, in her capacity as a writer, each protagonist attempts to strike a balance between venerating and distancing herself from both male and female predecessors in order to pave the way for a new generation of forward-looking writers.

Kate Hodgson’s essay also adopts both a gendered and generational approach. Turning her attention to Haiti, Hodgson interrogates the portrayal of revolutionary episodes, particularly the events of January 1946, and the positioning of women in texts by participants and witnesses to these events including Gérald Bloncourt and Marie Vieux Chauvet, as well as by authors belonging to a newer literary generation such as Yanick Lahens. After discussing the historical marginalization of female revolutionaries on the political stage, Hodgson goes on to examine the obscured or partially visible female figure in fictional depictions of January 1946. She demonstrates how these narratives invite us to look beyond standard accounts, challenging our perception of what revolution looks like by showing it to be something rooted in and manifested by the female body.

Margaret Cunningham moves back through the generations, examining writing from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, interrogating generational relations in and between white Creole families, as well as the need to preserve patriarchal order, family bloodlines, names and language apparent in the caste’s literary output. Examining texts produced over the course of a century, she demonstrates how béké lineages appear at once strong and fragile, growing inexorably weaker over time. Cunningham argues that (post)colonial plantation society at once compels white Creoles to think generationally and makes it difficult to ensure longevity of any kind, since the generational cycle appears to clash with the cycles of “natural” disasters in the region. She also draws out some of the points at which béké preoccupations, specifically the concern for longevity and durée, converge with those of more contemporary Black writers from the French Antilles, notably Édouard Glissant, who makes a connection between endurance and duration.

In his article, Patrick Crowley interrogates the temporal complexities of generational affiliations through exploring the relationship of thought between Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. Adopting an intertextual approach, Crowley examines Fanon’s citations of Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient in Peau noire masques blancs and Les Damnés de la terre, as well as Césaire’s Une tempête, highlighting the primary differences that exist between how these two thinkers envision revolt and its aftermath in decolonial struggles. As he notes, what emerges at the intersection of these texts is a fundamental rupture between Fanon’s advocacy for anti-colonial violence and Césaire’s belief in the power and subversive potential of non-violent approaches to anti-colonial resistance. His article thus attests to the diverging manners in which these issues and questions have been engaged with and understood across generations.

Hugo Azerad argues that Glissant’s novel Malemort triggered in Chamoiseau a lasting fascination for this style of writing that was both negative and almost impenetrable in its language and narration, but paradoxically liberating in terms of what the novelistic form—a form that this article calls Antillean Modernism—can accomplish. Stylistically marked in its form by Faulkner and Joyce, Malemort’s Modernism is at the same time Caribbean and planetary. Azerad proposes that the political and aesthetic stakes of Malemort cannot really be understood in isolation, and must be put in relation with its direct tributaries and other contemporaneous key works of Caribbean Modernism. However, the notion of hierarchical influence must be rejected, and that of generations also further interrogated, in keeping with the non-linear history of the Caribbean, with its spiral temporalities and inherent multiplicity. Finally, the article argues that Malemort performs an apparently conflicting but truly fertile relationship between Antillean Modernism and key tenets of Adorno’s aesthetic theory.

Mary Gallagher picks up on another of Chamoiseau’s inter-generational fascinations: that with the writing of Saint-John Perse, which is, she says, sustained, intense, sentient, and highly generative. The article’s focus on Perse amplifies the relational timbre of Chamoiseau’s own writing even as it dances around the Guadeloupean-born poet’s relation both to the “pays natal” and the “tout monde.” The article identifies four moves that constitute the steadily intensifying high points of this particular realisation of a Glissantian “poetics of Relation”: the Perse intertext in Chamoiseau’s childhood memoirs, the two-hander construction of Perse’s poetic persona in Lettres créoles; the sentimenthèque disseminated across Ecrire en pays dominé and, most crucially, the “Méditations à Saint-John Perse,” which was eventually integrated into Chamoiseau’s 2013 book-length account of his “Magnetic Liaisons” with Césaire, Perse and Glissant. The Meditations articulate a critique of criticism in favor of a demiurgic poetics of self-reflexive magnification and esteem even as they perform a dance of intergenerational and interethnic convergence.

Laura Kennedy’s article looks forward, exploring an emerging generation of Antillean writers in her discussion of Michael Roch’s Afrofuturist novel Tè Mawon. Examining Roch’s relationship of both continuity and rupture with his literary predecessors—Patrick Chamoiseau and Édouard Glissant—she argues that the writer is ushering in a new moment within the exclusive, highly selective, and strongly gendered Martinican literary tradition, expanding the potentialities of this tradition by opening it up to new imaginaries. As she notes, the emergence of Roch and his future-orientated literary generation could signal a revival in French Caribbean writing, where newer writers are now turning to innovative genres such as Afrofuturism in order to grapple with the most pressing concerns of their generation, such as unprecedented technological growth and climate change.

Our last two contributions move from understanding generation in literary or textual terms, to focus rather on the institutional, offering a study of generations of critics, faculties and disciplinary structures and innovation. Charles Forsdick explores the emergence of the first generation of Francophone Caribbean scholars in Great Britain and Ireland—Richard D.E. Burton, Bridget Jones, Roger Little and others—who were in the vanguard of the opening up of teaching and research in French studies towards the literatures and cultures of the region. Forsdick understands these developments biographically, considering the professional factors (notably early-career postings to universities outside Europe and early engagement in doctoral research with examples of French literature and culture beyond the Hexagon) that shaped these challenges to the disciplinary status quo. He situates the emergence of Francophone Caribbean studies in relation to what Christophe Campos (1989) dubs a wider “cracking of coherence” in the study of French, and analyzes the development and consolidation of a new disciplinary infrastructure between the 1970s and the 1990s—in Caribbean studies and Francophone literature more broadly. Forsdick concludes with a brief reflection on Tim Ingold’s recent work on generations, underlining the need for both engagement, in the present, with the legacies of earlier cohorts of scholars and emphasizing the possibility of dialogue between today’s researchers and these earlier disciplinary histories. As Ingold notes, this implies an approach to generations as phenomena “wrapping around one another along their length, more like fibres in a rope than stacked sheets” (Ingold 2024, 2).

Finally, Martin Munro writes on the legacy of a generation of scholars working at the University of the West Indies, principally at Mona, Jamaica, in the late 1960s. Drawing on interviews with some of the scholars, Munro argues that the UWI generation was pioneering in its teaching of and research into Caribbean writing in French, and that it is a key element in the evolution of Francophone Postcolonial Studies more generally. Framed by David Scott’s ideas on Caribbean generations, the article argues that the UWI generation was from the beginning wary of exclusionary notions of race and culture and, inspired especially by the examples of Haitian literature, and the writings of Édouard Glissant, it developed a particularly sophisticated, enduring scholarly understanding of the region, its peoples, and cultures. The article is a tribute to the UWI generation, and in particular to the late J. Michael Dash.

Guest Co-EditorsEditor Roger Celestin
Margaret Cunningham , Laura Kennedy , Maeve McCusker , Martin Munro

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Celestin

Roger Celestin is Professor emeritus of French & Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Margaret Cunningham

Margaret Cunningham was awarded her Ph.D. for a thesis entitled “Paradise Lost?: Narratives of Disaster in the French Caribbean,” at Queen’s University Belfast in July 2023. Her research is concerned with the ways in which writers from the Francophone Caribbean imagine, construct, measure and in some cases, repress the cultural effects of “natural” disaster in fiction and non-fiction.

Laura Kennedy

Laura Kennedy holds a Ph.D. from Queen’s University Belfast and is the co-founder of the research network “Literary Dislocation(s).” Her work has been published in journals such as The French Review and The Translator. At the intersection of Comparative Literature and Postcolonial Studies, her research explores the politics and poetics of language in francophone and anglophone World Literature, examining how—and why—writers from various regions within the Caribbean, Africa, and the metropolitan margins engage with the once colonial languages of French and English.

Maeve McCusker

Maeve McCusker is Professor of French and Caribbean Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. Her most recent book, Fictions of Whiteness. Imagining the Planter Caste in the French Caribbean Novel (Virginia University Press, 2021) was awarded the Gapper Prize by the Society for French Studies, for the best book in French Studies in the UK and Ireland. She has written on contemporary narrative (Chamoiseau; Condé; Glissant; Placoly), and on nineteenth-century fiction from the French Antilles (Traversay; Levilloux), and is the editor of a scholarly edition of an early novel by Martinican author Louis de Maynard (Outre-mer 2010 [1835]). She has also published on topics such as autobiography, memoir, and the oral tradition, and an essay on decapitation in plantation fiction, “Headless Horror,” is forthcoming in PMLA. She is currently President of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies.

Martin Munro

Martin Munro is Winthrop-King Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University. He previously worked in Scotland, Ireland, and Trinidad. His publications include Shaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre (W.H. Maney and Sons, 2000), Exile and Post–1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat (Liverpool, 2007), Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (California, 2010), Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010 (Liverpool, 2014) and Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times (Virginia, 2015). In 2019, he published a translation of Michaël Ferrier’s Mémoires d’outre mer, and in 2022 and 2023 translations of Ferrier’s Scrabble and François, portrait d’un absent. He has also translated Édouard Glissant’s Une nouvelle région du monde and Laura Alcoba’s Par la forêt. In 2020–2021 he was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. His latest monographs are Listening to the Caribbean: Sounds of Slavery, Revolt, and Race (Liverpool, 2022) and The Music of the Future: Sound and Vision in the Caribbean (Oxford, 2024).