Writing on the Edge: Women Writers from the Francophone Caribbean and the Literary Field

404 pagesThis dissertation intervenes in the study of the particular social practices surrounding the creation and reception of literary works from women writers of the Francophone Caribbean in order to understand their recent growing contribution and influence in the Literary world, and also their struggle to become more visible despite historical marginalization. “Writing on the Edge: Women writers from the Francophone Caribbean and the Literary Field” questions and revisits the theoretical model of the literary field as conceived by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, through an intersectional approach. Women writers’ trajectories are to be understood at the crossroads of socially constituted dispositions and multiple contextual constraints in the light of not only class but also gender and race hierarchies. The four chapters of the dissertation are devoted to case studies of four prominent women writers from different areas of the Francophone Caribbean (Simone Schwarz-Bart, Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, and Yanick Lahens), drawing upon the biographical interviews that I carried out with them, and other different biographical sources (including autobiographical narratives, other published interviews, and academics studies about these authors). In addition to the institutional dynamics of inequalities faced by women writers from the Francophone Caribbean, I also address the relationships between these authors and their literary work, their coming to writing and what it means for them to write. From a biographical analysis of their trajectory, I could analyze their ambivalent position (marginalized and to some extent recognized) which is in fact a precursor of an ethical and decolonial perspective that I analyze in their work. While moving away from a position of an “engaged” writer, they all reassert the power of transgression of female voices in Caribbean Literature. They insist on their singular creativity as writer, their artistic independence outside the limits of any political, feminist or literary movement, while honoring the silenced voices of history from a subjective perspective.2024-01-2