There are large populations of French-speakers from Canada to Louisiana down to the overseas department of French Guiana in South America and Haiti in the Caribbean. In fact, French is the third most spoken language in North America. All together, there are over sixteen million native French speakers on the continent. Most of these Francophones hail from Haiti and Canada, specifically, Québec and New Brunswick. France also has several North American overseas collectivities like Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Barthélemy, and Saint Martin. Furthermore, North America is home to a couple of the largest French-speaking cities in the world: Montréal, Canada and Port-au-Prince, Haiti. For resources on Quebec see the research guideQuebec: French Culture, First Nations and Folk Music. For more resources on Haiti andHaitian Creole, seeFreedom in the Black Diaspora: A Resource Guide for Ayiti Reimagined. While English- and Spanish-language literature are more conspicuous, the Francophone literature produced in North America is just as powerful. Authors likeAimé Césaire,Maryse Condé, Louis-Philippe Dalembert, andMichel Tremblay are some of the most prolific authors in the Francophone world; each having had profound effects on their cultures.Maryse Condé recorded with the Library of Congress in 1999 for the AHLOT (Today,PALABRA Archive). Contemporary authorMyriam Chancy is a Haitian-Canadian- American author and Guggenheim Fellow. She has written several books — her most recent two works areHarvesting Haiti : Reflections on Unnatural Disasters (2023), andSpirit of Haiti(2023). A recent publication,Elektrik features writers such asMarie-Célie Agnant,Gaël Octavia andMireille Jean-Gilles who examine what it means to be Caribbean in the 21st century. Other prominent themes by the authors mentioned above are racial and ethnic identity, gender identity, sexuality, colonialism, immigrant experience, and family.

The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in theLibrary of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional digitized versions are included when available.

• African Diasporic Women's Narratives by Simone A. James Alexander

  Call Number: PS153.N5 A3986 2014

  ISBN: 9780813049823

  Published/Created: 2014

  Winner of the College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award "Brilliant. Alexander helps us to understand the complexities of race, gender, sexuality, migration, and identity as they intersect with creativity. A must-read for those interested in women's writing today."--Renée Larrier, author of Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean "Critically engages current topical issues with sophisticated scholarly readings. There is a tone of the transgressive that gives this work the kind of edge that always provides transcendence."--Carole Boyce Davies, author of Caribbean Spaces "An authoritative and original study, characterized by meticulously researched scholarship, which focuses on the female body across a fascinating corpus of literary production in the Caribbean and elsewhere. This refreshing and effective interdisciplinary approach extends the boundaries of traditional literary analysis."--E. Anthony Hurley, author of Through a Black Veil Using feminist and womanist theory, Simone Alexander analyzes literary works that focus on the black female body as the physical and metaphorical site of migration. She shows that over time black women have used their bodily presence to complicate and challenge a migratory process often forced upon them by men or patriarchal society. Through in-depth study of selective texts by Audre Lorde, Edwidge Danticat, Maryse Condé, and Grace Nichols, Alexander challenges the stereotypes ascribed to black female sexuality, subverting its assumed definition as diseased, passive, or docile. She also addresses issues of embodiment as she analyzes how women's bodies are read and seen; how bodies "perform" and are performed upon; how they challenge and disrupt normative standards. A multifaceted contribution to studies of gender, race, sexuality, and disability issues, African Diasporic Women's Narratives engages a range of issues as it grapples with the complex interconnectedness of geography, citizenship, and nationalism.
• Against the Wind by Madeleine Gagnon; Phyllis Aronoff (Translator); Howard Scott (Translator)

  Call Number: PQ3919.2.G318 V4613 2012

  ISBN: 9780889226968

  Published/Created: 2012

  Is an artist born, or rather, created by experience? From the moment in childhood when he is forced to take drastic action to defend his adoptive mother from a violent assault - the only maternal figure that he has ever known - it is evident that the life of Joseph Sully-Jacques is to be no ordinary life, and one marked by sorrow and adversity. Unable to cope with or even recognize the residual effects of his trauma in adolescence, Joseph retreats into an increasingly abstract world, one in which he must confront what he calls his "visions." And when he hears of the death of his natural mother, this brings to the surface memories he had hoped were buried deep within him, and precipitates the form of various crises to come, particularly as he discovers and makes use of the artistic abilities revealed to his family during his psychiatric evaluation. After many more hardships, the young man does find meaning to the absurdities of life, ironically in the asylum, where he meets a virtuoso pianist whose condition prevents her from continuing to exercise her talents. They heal together through their mutual love, which will soon subsist upon nothing but memory and absence. During mournful years of raising his son alone, in his extensive adversaria, Joseph sets out to reconcile the contradictory themes in his life, including abandonment, madness, love, and death. In spare, lucid prose, and in a style reminiscent of André Gide, Madeleine Gagnon invites the reader to experience the creation and development of an artist "in his own words" - Joseph's gelid journal entries that are to become emphatic poetic laments - in a novel that chronicles the extreme destitution of Quebec in the years before World War Two and in abstract developing forms of artistic expression after years of uncertainty and loss.
• The American Fiancée by Eric Dupont

  Call Number: PQ3919.3.D8689

  ISBN: 9780062947468

  Published/Created: 2020

  In this extraordinary breakout novel--a rich, devastatingly humorous epic of one unforgettable family--award-winning-French-Canadian author Eric Dupont illuminates the magic of stories, the bonds of family, and the twists of fate and fortune to transform our lives. Over the course of the twentieth century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Their complicated family dynamic--as dramatic as Puccini's legendary opera, Tosca--will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world... until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts. Born on Christmas, Louis Lamontagne, the family's patriarch, is a larger-than-life lothario and raconteur who inherits his mother's teal eyes and his father's brutish good looks and whose charms travel beyond Quebec, across the state of New York where he wins at county fairs as a larger-than-life strongman, and even in Europe, where he is deployed for the US Army during World War II. We meet his daughter, Madeleine, who opens a successful chain of diners using the recipes from her grandmother, the original American Fiancée, and vows never to return to her hometown. And we end with her son Gabriel, another ladies' man in the family, who falls in love with a woman he follows to Berlin and discovers unexpected connections there to the Lamontagne family that re-frame the entire course of the events in the book. An unholy marriage of John Irving and Gary Shteyngart with the irresistible whimsy of Elizabeth McCracken, The American Fiancée is a big, bold, wildly ambitious novel that introduces a dynamic new voice to contemporary literature. Translated from the French by Peter McCambridge. [Fiancée américaine]
• American Street by Ibi Zoboi

  Call Number: PZ7.1.Z64 Am 2017

  ISBN: 9780062473042

  Published/Created: 2017

  A multi-award-winning evocative and powerful YA coming-of-age story perfect for fans of Nicola Yoon and Jason Reynolds In this stunning debut novel, Pushcart-nominated author Ibi Zoboi draws on her own experience as a young Haitian immigrant, infusing this lyrical exploration of America with magical realism and vodou culture. On the corner of American Street and Joy Road, Fabiola Toussaint thought she would finally find une belle vie--a good life. But after they leave Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Fabiola's mother is detained by U.S. immigration, leaving Fabiola to navigate her loud American cousins, Chantal, Donna, and Princess; the grittiness of Detroit's west side; a new school; and a surprising romance, all on her own. Just as she finds her footing in this strange new world, a dangerous proposition presents itself, and Fabiola soon realizes that freedom comes at a cost. Trapped at the crossroads of an impossible choice, will she pay the price for the American dream. [English only, some Creole]
• Bain de lune : roman by Yanick Lahens

  Call Number: PQ3949.2.L295 B34 2014

  ISBN: 9782848051178

  Published/Created: 2014

  Won the 2014 Prix Fémina. The story goes back three generations and traces the fate of Haitian peasants through the voice and the life of a young girl found shipwrecked.
• The Belle Créole by Maryse Condé; Dawn Fulton (Afterword by); Nicole Simek (Translator)

  Call Number: 9780813944234

  ISBN: 9780813944234

  Published/Created: 2020

  Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Condé added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The twelfth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonné Sabrina, a gardener, aged twenty-two and black, is accused of murdering his employer--and lover--Loraine, a wealthy white woman descended from plantation owners. His only refuge is a sailboat, La Belle Créole, a relic of times gone by. Condé follows Dieudonné's desperate wanderings through the city of Port-Mahault the night of his acquittal, the narrative unfolding through a series of multivoiced flashbacks set against a forbidding backdrop of social disintegration and tumultuous labor strikes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Guadeloupe. Twenty-four hours later, Dieudonné's fate becomes suggestively intertwined with that of the French island itself, though the future of both remains uncertain in the end. Echoes of Faulkner and Lawrence, and even Shakespeare's Othello, resonate in this tale, yet the drama's uniquely modern dynamics set it apart from any model in its exploration of love and hate, politics and stereotype, and the attempt to find connections with others across barriers. Through her vividly and intimately drawn characters, Condé paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.
• Between Two Worlds by Celucien L. Joseph (Editor, Contribution by); Jean Eddy Saint Paul (Editor, Contribution by); Glodel Mezilas (Editor, Contribution by); Patrick Delices (Contribution by); Moussa Traoré (Contribution by); Esther I. Rodríguez-Miranda (Contribution by); Tammie Jenkins (Contribution by); William Alexander (Contribution by); Myriam Mompoint (Contribution by); Paul C. Mocombe (Contribution by)

  ISBN: 9781498545754

  Published/Created: 2018

  Between Two Worlds: Jean Price-Mars, Haiti, and Africa is a special volume on Jean Price-Mars that reassesses the importance of his thought and legacy, and the implications of his ideas in the twenty-first century's culture of political correctness, the continuing challenge of race and racism, and imperial hegemony in the modern world. Price-Mars's thought is also significant for the renewed scholarly interests in Haiti and Haitian Studies in North America, and the meaning of contemporary Africa in the world today. This volume explores various dimensions in Price-Mars' thought and his role as historian, anthropologist, cultural critic, public intellectual, religious scholar, pan-Africanist, and humanist. The goal of this book is fourfold: it explores the contributions of Jean Price-Mars to Haitian history and culture, it studies Price-Mars' engagement with Western history and the problem of the "racist narrative," it interprets Price-Mars' connections with Black Internationalism, Harlem Renaissance, and the Negritude Movement, and finally, the book underscores Price-Mars' contributions to post colonialism, religious studies, Africana Studies, and Pan-Africanism.
• Beyond the Flames by Louise Dupre; Antonio D'Alfonso (Translator)

  Call Number: PQ3919.2.D849 P5813 2014

  ISBN: 9781550718553

  Published/Created: 2014

  A woman, following a visit to Auschwitz, meditates on the possibility -- or impossibility -- of continuing to live, following the killing of millions in death camps. The subject is not new. But Louise Dupré makes this horror present again, while at the same time emphasising the need to go beyond it. Being a parent, as is the anonymous "you" in the book, is to both witness this horror and to raise children who are unaware of this terror, whose innocence seems to make perfect victims of them. It is to hold a child "above the flames", desperately seeking to protect them and, through them, to save ourselves. Louise Dupré is an award-winning Québécoise writer. She was director of Voix et Images: Litterature québécoise and taught at the University of Québec, Montréal. She was admitted to the Académie des lettres du Québec in 1999 and in 2002 into the Royal Society of Canada. She has won numerous awards including the Grand Prix de poésie, Prix Ringuet, and the Governor General's Award for French-language poetry for this book. [Plus haut que les flammes]
• Birds by Saint-John Perse ; a version by Derek Mahon

  Call Number: PQ2623.E386 O713 2002

  ISBN: 1852353384

  Published/Created: 2002

  Poems by the Nobel prizewinner deal with the regeneration of life, the purity nature, and our relationship with time and the world.
• Black Shack Alley by Joseph Zobel; Keith Q. Warner (Translator, Introduction by); Patrick Chamoiseau (Foreword by); Charly Verstraet (Translator); Jeffrey Landon Allen (Translator)

  Call Number: PQ3949.Z6 R813 2020

  ISBN: 9780143133957

  Published/Created: 2020

  The semi-autobiographical, Caribbean novel that explores shifting race relations in early twentieth-century colonial Martinique. Following in the tradition of Richard Wright's Black Boy, Joseph Zobel's semi-autobiographical 1950 novel Black Shack Alley chronicles the coming-of-age of Jose, a young boy grappling with issues of power and identity in colonial Martinique. As Jose transitions from childhood to young adulthood and from rural plantations to urban Fort-de-France on a quest for upward mobility, he bears witness to and struggles against the various manifestations of white supremacy, both subtle and overt, that will alter the course of his life. His ally in this struggle is his grandmother, M'man Tine, who fights her own weariness to release at least one child from the plantation village, a dirt street lined with the shacks of sugarcane workers. Zobel's masterpiece, the basis for the award-winning film Sugar Cane Alley, is a powerful testament to twentieth-century life in Martinique, with a foreword by award-winning Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau.
• Border Crossings by Nicole Roberts (Editor); Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw (Editor)

  Call Number: PN849.C32 B67 2011

  ISBN: 9789766402518

  Published/Created: 2011

  Literature has no geographical border and can so easily relocate and migrate into our literary imagination. The only real difficulty facing such crossings is the ever-present language barriers that have for too long limited the ways in which the Caribbean is read, perceived and interpreted. What is distinctive about Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers is its trilingual nature; all of the stories appear in English, French and Spanish. To date, no anthology of short stories from the Caribbean region has accomplished this.The anthology includes stories from Guadeloupe (Gisèle Pineau), Trinidad ( Shani Mootoo), Haiti (Yanick Lahens), Jamaica (Oliver Senior), Puerto Rico (Carmen Lugo Filippi ) and Cuba (Mirta Yáñez). Many stories in the collection do not offer the reader a comforting end. Instead, they suggest the possibilities and the complexities of depicting a Caribbean, not singular but plural, not closed but open-ended and decidedly one without borders.
• Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

  Call Number: PS3554.A5815 B74 2015

  ISBN: 9781616955021

  Published/Created: 2015

  The 20th anniversary edition of Edwidge Danticat's groundbreaking debut, now an established classic--revised and with a new introduction by the author, and including extensive bonus materials At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti--and the enduring strength of Haiti's women--with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage.
• Caribbean Discourse by Edouard Glissant; A. J. Arnold (Editor); Kandioura Drame (Editor); J. Michael Dash (Introduction by, Translator)

  Call Number: F2081 .G5313 1989

  ISBN: 0813912199

  Published/Created: 1992

  Selected essays from the rich and complex collection of Edouard Glissant, one of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the Caribbean, examine the psychological, sociological, and philosophical implications of cultural dependency.
• Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800-1920: Volume 1 by Evelyn O'Callaghan (Editor); Tim Watson (Editor)

  Call Number: PR9205 .C37 2021

  ISBN: 9781108475884

  Published/Created: 2021

  This volume examines what Caribbean literature looked like before 1920 by surveying the print culture of the period. The emphasis is on narrative, including an enormous range of genres, in varying venues, and in multiple languages of the Caribbean. Essays examine lesser-known authors and writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads; non-elite memoirs and letters, such as the narratives of the enslaved or the working classes, especially women. Many contributions are comparative, multilingual, and regional. Some infer the cultural presence of subaltern groups within the texts of the dominant classes. Almost all of the chapters move easily between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements in ways that expand traditional notions of literary influence and canon formation. Using literary, cultural, and historical analyses, this book provides a complete re-examination of early Caribbean literature.
• Close Kin and Distant Relatives by Susana M. Morris

  Call Number: PS374.N4 M67 2014

  ISBN: 9780813935492

  Published/Created: 2014

  The "black family" in the United States and the Caribbean often holds contradictory and competing meanings in public discourse: on the one hand, it is a site of love, strength, and support; on the other hand, it is a site of pathology, brokenness, and dysfunction that has frequently called forth an emphasis on conventional respectability if stability and social approval are to be achieved. Looking at the ways in which contemporary African American and black Caribbean women writers conceptualize the black family, Susana Morris finds a discernible tradition that challenges the politics of respectability by arguing that it obfuscates the problematic nature of conventional understandings of family and has damaging effects as a survival strategy for blacks. The author draws on African American studies, black feminist theory, cultural studies, and women’s studies to examine the work of Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and Sapphire, showing how their novels engage the connection between respectability and ambivalence. These writers advocate instead for a transgressive understanding of affinity and propose an ethic of community support and accountability that calls for mutual affection, affirmation, loyalty, and respect. At the core of these transgressive family systems, Morris reveals, is a connection to African diasporic cultural rites such as dance, storytelling, and music that help the fictional characters to establish familial connections.
• Comment faire l'amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer : roman by Dany Laferrière

  Call Number: PQ3919.2.L163 C66 1985

  ISBN: 2890052184

  Published/Created: 1985

  Dany Laferrière is a Haitian-Canadian novelist and journalist. He was elected to the Académie française in 2013. He was born in Port-au-Prince and moved to Canada in 1976. He writes in French but many of his works are translated by David Homel. This, his first novel, was adapted into a screenplay. He won the Prix Médicis for his novel L'énigme du retour.
• Connecting Histories by Bonnie Thomas

  Call Number: PQ3940 .T56 2017

  ISBN: 9781496810557

  Published/Created: 2017

  The Francophone Caribbean boasts a trove of literary gems. Distinguished by innovative, elegant writing and thought-provoking questions of history and identity, this exciting body of work demands scholarly attention. Its authors treat the traumatic legacies of shared and personal histories pervading Caribbean experience in striking ways, delineating a path towards reconciliation and healing. The creation of diverse personal narratives--encompassing autobiography, autofiction (heavily autobiographical fiction), travel writing, and reflective essay--remains characteristic of many Caribbean writers and offers poignant illustrations of the complex interchange between shared and personal pasts and how they affect individual lives. Through their historically informed autobiography, the authors in this study--Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwidge Danticat, and Dany Laferrière--offer compelling insights into confronting, coming to terms with, and reconciling their past. The employment of personal narratives as the vehicle to carry out this investigation points to a tension evident in these writers' reflections, which constantly move between the collective and the personal. As an inescapably complex network, their past extends beyond the notion of a single, private life. These contemporary authors from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti intertwine their personal memories with reflections on the histories of their homelands and on the European and North American countries they adopt through choice or necessity. They reveal a multitude of deep connections that illuminate distinct Francophone Caribbean experiences.
• Conversations with Edwidge Danticat by Maxine Lavon Montgomery (Editor)

  Call Number: PS3554.A5815 Z46 2017

  ISBN: 9781496812551

  Published/Created: 2017

  This volume sheds a much-needed light on Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969) and her ability to depict timely issues in sparkling prose that delves deep into the borderlands, an uncharted in-between space located outside fixed geographic, cultural, and ideological bounds. Prevalent throughout many interviews here is Danticat's expressed determination not only to reveal Haitian immigrant experience, but also to make that nuanced culture and its vibrant traditions accessible to a wide audience. These interviews coincide with Edwidge Danticat's evolving artistic vision, her steady book publication, and her expanding roles as fiction writer, essayist, memoirist, documentarian, young adult book author, editor, songwriter, cultural critic, and political commentator. Dating from her appearance on the literary scene at the age of twenty-five, the many interviews that she has granted attest to not only her productivity, but also her accessibility to scholars, teachers, writers, and journalists eager for knowledge about her vision. Included in this volume are interviews that range from 2000, covering the publication of her debut work of fiction, Breath, Eyes, Memory, to a personal interview conducted with the volume editor in 2016. In that conversation, which appears for the first time as part of this collection, Danticat provides insight into little-known aspects of her life, art, and politics. Her candid interviews carry out a careful stripping away of preconceived notions of Danticat, disclosing the private and public life of a first-class writer and intellectual whose countless achievements have assured her an enduring place within contemporary world letters.
• Creole by Sybil Kein (Editor)

  Call Number: F380.C87 C7 2000

  ISBN: 0807125326

  Published/Created: 2000

  This is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary history of Louisiana's Creole population. Written by scholars, many of Creole descent, the book wrangles with the stuff of legend and conjecture whilst fostering an appreciation for the Creole contribution to the American mosaic.
• Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean by Jennifer Boum Make

  Call Number: F1609.5 .B68 2025

  ISBN: 9781978840447

  Published/Created: 2025

  Decolonial Care examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Through a variety of media, including novels, graphic narratives, and curatorial discourse, this book explores four key contexts that bring into focus the intersection of care and colonialism: care-focused gender roles; domestic service; nurturing human life and environments; and curation as caring. Decolonial Care argues that to imagine caregiving in the context of the French Caribbean means reckoning with intrinsically uncaring practices inherited from colonial rule that show disregard for human life and environments. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book first aims to elucidate how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism. It then shows how media and narratives about the French Caribbean document the damaging impact of colonialism, but also how they help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments.
• Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire

  Call Number: JV51 .C413 2000

  ISBN: 1583670246

  Published/Created: 2000

  "Césaire's essay stands as an important document in the development of third world consciousness--a process in which [he] played a prominent role." --Library Journal This classic work, first published in France in 1955, profoundly influenced the generation of scholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements and has sold more than 75,000 copies to date. Aimé Césaire eloquently describes the brutal impact of capitalism and colonialism on both the colonizer and colonized, exposing the contradictions and hypocrisy implicit in western notions of "progress" and "civilization" upon encountering the "savage," "uncultured," or "primitive." Here, Césaire reaffirms African values, identity, and culture, and their relevance, reminding us that "the relationship between consciousness and reality are extremely complex. . . . It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society." An interview with Césaire by the poet René Depestre is also included.
• Elektrik by Sarah Coolidge (Editor); Mireille Jean-Gilles; Gaël Octavia

  Call Number: PQ3945.5.E5 E44 2023

  ISBN: 9781949641509

  Published/Created: 2023

  In Elektrik, eight women writers from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe come together to explore, in poetry and prose, the complex nature of Caribbean existence. A single mother has an intimate encounter with a migrant worker; a teenager discovers her sexuality in the shadow of her twin sister; a poet summons a chorus of sirens, only to warn them: "Keep your voices' beauty from waylaying sailors." Through glittering translations from French, Elektrik sings the experience of Franco-Caribbean identity today. These writers communicate through the silence of the past to the unknowability of the future--forever in the rare language of literature.
• Enchanted summer by Gabrielle Roy ; translated from the French by Joyce Marshall

  Call Number: PQ3919.R74 C413 1976

  ISBN: 0771078315

  Published/Created: 1976

  Gabrielle Roy was born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, in 1909. Her parents were part of the large Quebec emigration to western Canada in the late nineteenth century. The youngest of eight children, she studied in a convent school for twelve years, then taught school herself, first in isolated Manitoba villages and later in St. Boniface. In 1937 Roy travelled to Europe to study drama, and during two years spent in London and Paris she began her writing career. The approaching war forced her to return to Canada, and she settled in Montreal. Roy’s first novel, The Tin Flute, ushered in a new era of realism in Quebec fiction with its compassionate depiction of a working-class family in Montreal’s Saint-Henri district. Her later fiction often turned for its inspiration to the Manitoba of her childhood and her teaching career. In 1947 Roy married Dr. Marcel Carbotte, and after a few years in France, they settled in Quebec City, which was to remain their home. Roy complemented her fiction with essays, reflective recollections, and three children’s books. Her many honours include three Governor General’s Awards, France’s Prix Fémina, and Quebec’s Prix David. Gabrielle Roy died in Quebec City, Quebec, in 1983.
• Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat

  Call Number: PS3554.A5815 A6 2019

  ISBN: 9780525521273

  Published/Created: 2019

  From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love. Rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity, set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, Everything Inside is at once wide in scope and intimate, as it explores the forces that pull us together, or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant. In these eight powerful, emotionally absorbing stories, a romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends; a marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences; a young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival; two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives; a baby's christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new; a man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose. This is the indelible work of a keen observer of the human heart--a master at her best.
• Écrits louisianais du dix-neuvième siècle:nouvelles, contes et fables by Gérard Labarre St. Martin and Jacqueline K. Voorhies

  Call Number: PQ3937.L8 E25

  Published/Created: 1979

  Investigation of French writings in Louisiana. Expands on the work done by Tinker (1933) and opens the field to cultural and folk writings. Includes a useful glossary of French-Louisianian vocabulary at the back of the book.
• Femmes au temps des carnassiers by Marie-Célie Agnant

  Call Number: PQ3919.2.A38 F46 2015

  ISBN: 9782890915091

  Published/Created: 2015

  Agnant is a writer and poet born in Haïti and living in Canada since the 1970s. She also writes children's literature and spends time promoting reading and literary events in Canada and the U.S.
• The Haitians by Jean Casimir; Laurent Dubois (Translator); Walter D. Mignolo (Foreword by)

  Call Number: F1921 .C267 2020

  ISBN: 9781469651545

  Published/Created: 2020-10-19

  In this sweeping history, leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupation in 1915. The Haitians also critically retheorizes the very nature of slavery, colonialism, and sovereignty. Here, Casimir centers the perspectives of Haiti's moun andeyo--the largely African-descended rural peasantry. Asking how these systematically marginalized and silenced people survived in the face of almost complete political disenfranchisement, Casimir identifies what he calls a counter-plantation system. Derived from Caribbean political and cultural practices, the counter-plantation encompassed consistent reliance on small-scale landholding. Casimir shows how lakou, small plots of land often inhabited by generations of the same family, were and continue to be sites of resistance even in the face of structural disadvantages originating in colonial times, some of which continue to be maintained by the Haitian government with support from outside powers.
• Harvesting Haiti by Myriam J. A. Chancy

  Call Number: HV600 2010.H2

  ISBN: 9781477327814

  Published/Created: 2023

  This collection ponders the personal and political implications for Haitians at home and abroad resulting from the devastating 2010 earthquake. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 was a debilitating event that followed decades of political, social, and financial issues. Leaving over 250,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, and 1.5 million people homeless, the earthquake has had lasting repercussions on a struggling nation. As the post-earthquake political situation unfolded, Myriam Chancy worked to illuminate on-the-ground concerns, from the vulnerable position of Haitian women to the failures of international aid. Originally presented at invited campus talks, published as columns for a newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago, and circulated in other ways, her essays and creative responses preserve the reactions and urgencies of the years following the disaster. In Harvesting Haiti, Chancy examines the structures that have resulted in Haiti's post-earthquake conditions and reflects at key points after the earthquake on its effects on vulnerable communities. Her essays make clear the importance of sustaining and supporting the dignity of Haitian lives and of creating a better, contextualized understanding of the issues that mark Haitians' historical and present realities, from gender parity to the vexed relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
• Heritage by Miguel Bonnefoy; Emily Boyce (Translator)

  Call Number: PQ2702.O556 H4713 2022

  ISBN: 9781635421828

  Published/Created: 2022

  A dazzling family saga, brimming with poetry and passion, that skillfully weaves together the private lives of individuals and major historical events in South America and Europe. The house on Calle Santo Domingo in Santiago de Chile, with its lush lemon trees, has sheltered three generations of the Lonsonier family. Having arrived from the harsh hills of France's Jura region with a single grape vine in one pocket and a handful of change in the other, the patriarch put down roots there in the late nineteenth century. His son, Lazare, back from World War I's hellish trenches, would live there with his wife and build in their garden the most beautiful aviary in the Andes. That's where their daughter Margot, a pioneering aviator, would first dream of flying, and where she would raise her son, the revolutionary Ilario Da. Like Lazare before them, they will bravely face the conflicts of their day, fighting against dictatorship on both sides of the Atlantic. In this captivating saga, Miguel Bonnefoy paints the portrait of an endearing, uprooted family whose terrible dilemmas, caused by the blows of history, reveal their deep humanity.
• Horizons multiples de l'écriture haïtienne contemporaine by Joubert Satyre, ed.

  Call Number: PQ3948.5.H2 H67 2017

  ISBN: 9782894543481

  Published/Created: 2017

  Il était une fois une ville : pratiques et poétiques de l'espace dans le Port-au-Prince de l'après 12 janvier 2010 / Mame-Fatou Niang -- Surnaturel et sérialité : le vodou dans le polar : le cas de Gary Victor / Émeline Pierre -- Histoire, mémoire et réalisme merveilleux chez Mimi Barthélémy / Carole Edwards -- Stanley Péan : fantasmes et fictions de l'exil / Corinne Beauquis -- D'île en île : la présence de Cuba dans l'œuvre de Louis-Philippe Dalembert / Stève Puig -- Au nom du père et de la fille et de la sainte patrie : autorité paternelle, rébellion filiale et oppression populaire chez Marie Chauvet, Yanick Lahens et Jan J. Dominique / Mylène F. Dorcé -- Jan J. Dominique, Mémoire d'une amnésique : naissance d'une parole pour trop dire / Christiane Ndiaye -- Jean Métellus romancier : exil et écriture, Haïti et Dessalines / Joubert Satyre.
• Humus by Fabienne Kanor; Lynn E. Palermo (Translator)

  Call Number: PQ3949.3.K36 H8613 2019

  ISBN: 9780813944685

  Published/Created: 2020

  While researching in Nantes, a port city enriched by the slave trade, celebrated French novelist Fabienne Kanor came across a chilling report written in 1774 by the commander of a slave ship, Le Soleil. Captain Louis Mosnier recounted the loss of valuable "cargo" when fourteen African women escaped from the ship's hold to leap overboard rather than face enslavement. Half of them drowned or were eaten by sharks. From this tragic incident, Kanor has composed a powerful, polyphonic novel in which each woman tells her own vivid story. Their disparate lives from differing cultures, conditions, and perspectives intersect through their violent mistreatment, profound sense of disorientation, and collective act of resistance. These intertwined narratives reveal the brutalizing effects of slavery, not only on the victim but also on the oppressor: the master can no more escape its dehumanizing effects than can the slave. Kanor is a French writer, filmmaker and journalist of Martinique origin. She has wide-ranging work that spans from children's literature to women's resistance to involuntary servitude.
• I, Tituba by Maryse Condé; Richard Philcox (Translator); Angela Y. Davis (Foreword by); Ann A. Scarboro (Afterword by)

  Call Number: PQ3949.2.C65 M5613 1992

  ISBN: 0813913985

  Published/Created: 1992

  This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls "a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary 'Nanny of the maroons,'" who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her. CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French This book has been supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency.
• Invisible Man at the Window by Monique Proulx; Matt Cohen (Translator)

  Call Number: PQ3919.2.P763 H6613 1994

  ISBN: 1550541714

  Published/Created: 1994

  Invisible Man at the Window is the bizarre and compelling tale of a group of artists and hangers-on whose lives cross in the attic apartment of a painter called Max. Through a series of chapters in the form of "portraits," Max, a paraplegic, lays bare the psyches of those who would surround him, pamper him, love him either because or in spite of his handicap. Winner of the Prix Québec-Paris, the Québec Bookstores' Prize and the Prix Littéraire Desjardins. Monique Proulx is a Canadian novelist, short story writer and screenwriter.
• La fin de Mame Baby by Gaël Octavia

  Call Number: PQ2715.C83 F56 2017

  ISBN: 9782072737015

  Published/Created: 2017

  Gaël Octavia writes novels, poetry, theater, and short stories. She also paints and makes short films. Inspired by Martinican society, her texts explore themes of family, identity, and the female condition. Her plays have been read and performed in France, the United States, the Caribbean, Reunion Island, and Africa. Her first novel, La fin de Mame Baby, received the Wepler Jury Special Mention Award in 2017. -American Library in Paris
• La Sagouine by Antonine Maillet

  Call Number: PQ3919.2.M26 S213 2007

  ISBN: 9780864924155

  Published/Created: 2007

  The premise is deceptively simple: a dirt-poor charwoman and former prostitute leans on her mop and tells her life story. But what a story! As she reminisces and rants, telling stories about herself, her friends and neighbours, the priest and his church, and every other aspect of life in her village, she is actually telling the story of Acadie. More than 25 years after its first publication in English, La Saguoine is available once again, this time in a new translation. Wayne Grady, one of Canada's most distinguished translators, faithfully recreates Acadian speech for an English readership in this new edition, bringing out the cultural richness of the language as well as La Saguoine's strength of character and irrepressible humour. La Saguoine launched the careers of both Antonine Maillet and the actress Viola Léger. with sales of over 100,000 copies, it brought the existence of Acadian literature to a wide and admiring audience. This new edition will introduce it once again to a new generation of English readers. Translated with commentary by Wayne Grady
• Le bal de la rue Blomet : roman by Raphaël Confiant

  Call Number: PQ3949.2.C66 B35 2023

  ISBN: 9782715259133

  Published/Created: 2023

  "Au sortir de la Grande Guerre, la biguine, une musique nouvelle venue des Antilles, conquiert le Tout-Paris. Elle prend ses quartiers au Bal de la rue Blomet, au cœur de Montparnasse. Là, des célébrités (Joséphine Baker, Foujita, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Desnos...) croisent des anonymes, des ouvriers côtoient des intellectuels. Noirs, Blancs, métis, femmes du monde ou de petite vertu se mêlent dans un joyeux chahut, amours et amitiés se font et se défont sur des rythmes endiablés. C'est là que se rencontrent Anthénor Louis-Edmond, vétéran noir de la bataille des Dardanelles, Frédéric Clerville, jeune Mulâtre fils d'un brillant avocat de Fort de France en rupture de ban avec sa famille, Elise, domestique d'anciens coloniaux... Tous les trois sont martiniquais: destins croisés d'exilés sur fond de biguine, de valse et de mazurka en quête de l'amour vrai ou de jouissances immédiates... Avec sa verve incomparable, Raphaël Confiant redonne vie à ce lieux mythique, et plus généralement au Paris glorieux des Années folles, dessinant en filigrane la nostalgie d'un paradis perdu..."-- Provided by publisher.
• Leon-Gontran Damas : the spirit of resistance by Femi Ojo-Ade

  Call Number: PQ3959.D3 Z8 1993

  ISBN: 0907015867

  Published/Created: 1993

  Damas was born in Cayenne, French Guiana. He was close friends with Aimé Césaire and became one of the most influential poets and writer of his time. He lived in Paris and Washington DC among other cities, enlisted in the French Army during WWII and served in the French National Assembly. He is known as the founder of the Négritude Movement, a literary and ideological movement of French-speaking black intellectuals that rejects the political, social and moral domination of the West..
• Les Belles Soeurs by Michel Tremblay

  Call Number: PQ3919.2.T73 B413 1974

  ISBN: 0889220816

  Published/Created: 1983

  This play was Canadian Michel Tremblay's first professionally produced work. A housewife wins a million trading-stamps and invites her friends over to paste them into books. Cast of 15 women. Two acts. Translated by John Van Burek & Bill Glassco.
• Les écrits de langue française en Louisiane au XIXe siècle by Edward L. Tinker

  Call Number: Z1289 .T59

  Published/Created: 1933

  Comprehensive reference work for French writings in Louisiana. Updated in 1979 by St. Martin and Voorhies.
• Les lectures du peuple en Europe et dans les Amériques du XVIIe au XXe siècle by Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink

  Call Number: AY30 .L43 2003

  Published/Created: 2003

  Broad introduction to topics in French and American readership in the 17th through 20th centuries. Of particular importance is an essay by Lise Andries, "La popularisation du savoir dans les almanachs français de 1780 à 1830."
• Le vent majeur by Madeleine Gagnon

  Call Number: PQ3919.2.G318 V46 1995

  ISBN: 2890056198

  Published/Created: 1995
• Lone Sun by Daniel Maximin

  Call Number: PQ3949.2.M38 I8613 1989

  ISBN: 0813912377

  Published/Created: 1989

  At the foot of Soufrière, the drums and West Indian tales punctuate the story of five generations of rebellious fathers and heroic mothers: the horrors of slavery, the fight for freedom and the future to be built. In the lap of an always threatening nature, the poetry of Daniel Maximin tells the epic of Guadeloupe. Born in Guadeloupe, at the foot of Soufrière, Daniel Maximin is a poet, novelist and essayist. "A rich and pathetic book. All West Indian history is there. That everything is finally found there is a miracle." -Aimé Césaire
• Louisiana Creole Literature by Catharine Savage Brosman

  Call Number: PQ3937.L7 B76 2013

  ISBN: 9781617039102

  Published/Created: 2013

  Louisiana Creole Literature is a broad-ranging critical reading of belles lettres--in both French and English--connected to and generally produced by the distinctive Louisiana Creole peoples, chiefly in the southeastern part of the state. The book covers primarily the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the flourishing period during which the term Creole had broad and contested cultural reference in Louisiana. The study consists in part of literary history and biography. When available and appropriate, each discussion--arranged chronologically--provides pertinent personal information on authors, as well as publishing facts. Readers will find also summaries and evaluation of key texts, some virtually unknown, others of difficult access. Brosman illuminates the biographies and works of Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Adolphe Duhart, among others. In addition, she challenges views that appear to be skewed regarding canon formation. The book places emphasis on poetry and fiction, reaching from early nineteenth-century writing through the twentieth century to selected works by poets still writing in the early twenty-first century. A few plays are treated also, especially by Victor Séjour. Louisiana Creole Literature examines at length the writings of important Francophone figures, and certain Anglophone novelists likewise receive extended treatment. Since much of nineteenth-century Louisiana literature was transnational, the book considers Creole-based works which appeared in Paris as well as those published locally.
• Mad Shadows by Marie-Claire Blais

  Call Number: PQ3919.B6 B45 2008

  ISBN: 9780771093524

  Published/Created: 2008-08-12

  A harrowing pathology of the soul, Mad Shadows centres on a family group: Patrice, the beautiful and narcissistic son; his ugly and malicious sister, Isabelle-Marie; and Louise, their vain and uncomprehending mother. These characters inhabit an amoral universe where beauty reflects no truth and love is an empty delusion. Each character is ultimately annihilated by their own obsessions. Acclaimed and reviled when it exploded on the Quebec literary scene in 1959, Mad Shadows initiated a new era in Quebec fiction. Daphne Marlatt (Afterword). [Belle bête]
• Mahagony by Édouard Glissant; Betsy Wing (Translator)

  Call Number: PQ3949.2.G53 M3413 2020

  ISBN: 9781496201782

  Published/Created: 2021

  Édouard Glissant's novels, closely tied to the theories he developed in Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of relation), are rich explorations of a deported and colonized people's loss of their own history and the ever-evolving social and political effects this sense of groundlessness has caused in Martinique. In Mahagony, Glissant identifies both the malaise of and the potential within Martinican society through a powerful collective narrative of geographic identity explored through multiple narrators. These characters' lives are viewed back and forth over centuries of time and through tales of resistance, linked always by the now-ancient mahogany tree. Attempting to untangle the collective memory of Martinique, Mathieu, the contemporary narrator, creates a conscious history of these people in that place--a record that unearths the mechanics of misrepresentation to get at the fundamental, enduring truths of that history, perhaps as only the mahogany tree knows it.
• The Mediterranean Wall by Louis-Philippe Dalembert; Marjolijn de Jager (Translator)

  ISBN: 9781943156962

  Published/Created: 2021

  In this deeply hopeful and viscerally detailed novel, award-winning Haitian author Louis-Philippe Dalembert (The Other Side of the Sea) has provided a Tolstoyan narrative of the contemporary immigrants' exodus from war, famine, poverty, criminality and injustice to a better life across the Mediterranean Sea. Following in intimate detail the lives of three women from disparate religions and cultures, and nations--Nigeria, Eritrea, and Syria--Dalembert compassionately depicts these three women and the bond they form together in their mutual struggle to escape to Europe via an overcrowded, dilapidated boat across the sea, the metaphorical wall between their former lives and the future. Certain to appeal to readers of literature of migration and such recent fiction as "Behold the Dreamers" and "The Lost Children Archive."
• Memoria by Louise Dupré; Louise Dupré

  Call Number: PQ3919.2.D849 M4613 1999

  ISBN: 0889242879

  Published/Created: 1999

  Memoria tells the seemingly ordinary story of a woman overwhelmed by grief when her lover abandons her. The loss opens an old wound: some 20 years ago Emma's teenage sister vanished without a trace. Soon Emma will meet another man, but the return to joy is painfully slow. Rarely has the loss of love, as well as the subtle dislocation of a family hit by tragedy, been evoked more poignantly than in this luminous novel. In Memoria's multi-layered narrative, the reader is irresistibly drawn into the slow reconstruction of Emma's outer and inner world, a world of dizzying sensuality, deep sadness, bewitchingly beautiful images, and, ultimately, "the small circle of new beginnings."
• Mothers of Invention by Miléna Santoro

  Call Number: PQ673 .S26 2002

  ISBN: 0773523731

  Published/Created: 2002

  An examination of the feminist avant-garde aesthetics developed in experimental novels of the mid-1970s. Mothers of Invention draws together innovative works of fiction written by French and Quebec feminists in the mid-1970s. Through an analysis of the strategies adopted by Helene Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard as they rework maternal and (pro)creative metaphors and play with language and conventions of genre, Milena Santoro identifies a transatlantic community of women writers who share a subversive aesthetic that participates in, even as it transforms, the tradition of the avant-garde in twentieth-century literature. Santoro elucidates notoriously difficult works by the four "mothers of invention" studied - Cixous and Hyvrard from France, and Gagnon and Brossard from Quebec - showing how the rethinking of images associated with femininity and motherhood, a disruptive approach to language, and a subversive relation to novelistic conventions characterize these writers' search for a writing that will best express women's desires and dreams.
• Nouvelles d'ici, d'ailleurs et de là-bas : nouvelles by Marie-Célie Agnant

  Call Number: PQ3919.2.A38 A6 2017

  ISBN: 9782890244832

  Published/Created: 2017

  Marie-Célie Agnant was born in 1953 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and has lived in Canada since 1970. Her writings include four novels, two short story collections, and three volumes of poetry. She has also worked as a storyteller, an interpreter, a teacher, and an environmental activist. She received the Prix Alain- Grandbois of the Academie des Lettres du Quebec in 2017 for her most recent collection of poetry, Femmes de terres brûlées (2016). In 2023, she was appointed Canada’s 10th Parliamentary Poet Laureate.- American Library in Paris
• Papillon by Henri Charrière

  Call Number: HV8956.G8 C513

  ISBN: 0246639873

  Published/Created: 1970

  Written by Henri Charrière, a former prisoner from French Guiana. Papillon is a factual account (allowing for lapses in memory) of Charrière's experience escaping from prison. It has been translated and depicted on film over the course of many decades. Translated from the French by Patrick O'Brian [Butterfly]
• Parcours Louisianais by Evelyne M. Bornier; Margaret M. Marshall

  Call Number: PQ3937.L8 B67 2022

  ISBN: 9781946160881

  Published/Created: 2022

  In Parcours Louisianais: Panorama de la littérature francophone de Louisiane de ses origines à 1900, authors Evelyne M. Bornier and Margaret M. Marshall bring to light texts from the 1680s to 1900 that reflect the voices present throughout Louisiana's history: men, women, explorers, political leaders, Native Americans, Africans, African Americans, Acadians, and Creoles. Language varieties are also represented in this volume, with passages in Louisiana Creole and Cajun French. Parcours Louisianais presents francophone literature from Louisiana in its rich diversity and encourages its audience to discover, enjoy, and preserve it. Dans Parcours Louisianais: Panorama de la littérature francophone de Louisiane de ses origines à 1900, les auteures Evelyne M. Bornier et Margaret M. Marshall réunissent des textes des années 1680 à 1900 qui reflètent les grandes voix de l'histoire de la Louisiane: hommes, femmes, explorateurs, dirigeants politiques, Amérindiens, Africains, Afro-Américains, Acadiens, et Créoles. Les variétés linguistiques de cette région sont également représentées dans ce volume, avec des passages en créole louisianais et en français cadien. Parcours Louisianais présente la littérature louisianaise francophone dans sa riche diversité et encourage ses lecteurs à la découvrir, à l'apprécier et à la préserver. Book jacket.
• Postcolonial Violence, Culture and Identity in Francophone Africa and the Antilles by Lorna Milne (Editor)

  Call Number: PQ3980.5 .P67 2007

  ISBN: 9783039103300

  Published/Created: 2007

  This book is the first to examine postcolonial cultures and identities by investigating the way in which violence is represented by Francophone creative artists. Focusing chiefly on literature, but including discussion of both film and photography, the volume includes chapters on the representation of the colonial massacre in Paris and Thiaroye; of beatings, torture and murder in Congo and the Maghreb; of the Rwandan genocide; of slavery in the Antilles; and of violence - especially the rape and abuse of women - throughout the Francophone world. These analyses, while they make for troubling reading, permit interesting comparisons and confirm the existence of concerns that are common to postcolonial Francophone artists. A pressing interest in materiality and the physical body as a vehicle of representation, a preoccupation with gender, and a restless experimentation with creative form are some of the most insistent features of their work. Most importantly, perhaps, their portrayal of violence reveals a strong engagement not only with the politics of postcolonial culture and identity, but with their ethical dimensions.
• Pour l'émancipation et l'identité du peuple martiniquais by René Ménil ; textes recueillis et annotés par Geneviève Sézille-Ménil.

  Call Number: F1609.5 .M46 2008

  ISBN: 9782296057906

  Published/Created: 2008
• Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories by James Nagel

  Call Number: PS267.N49 N34 2013

  ISBN: 9780817313388

  Published/Created: 2014

  Race and Culture in New Orleans Storiesposits that the Crescent City and the surrounding Louisiana bayous were a logical setting for the literary exploration of crucial social problems in America. Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories is a study of four volumes of interrelated short stories set in New Orleans and the surrounding Louisiana bayous: Kate Chopin's Bayou Folk; George Washington Cable's Old Creole Days; Grace King's Balcony Stories; and Alice Dunbar-Nelson's The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. James Nagel argues that the conflicts and themes in these stories cannot be understood without a knowledge of the unique historical context of the founding of Louisiana, its four decades of rule by the Spanish, the Louisiana Purchase and the resulting cultural transformations across the region, Napoleonic law, the Code Noir, the plaçage tradition, the immigration of various ethnic and natural groups into the city, and the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction. All of these historical factors energize and enrich the fiction of this important region. The literary context of these volumes is also central to understanding their place in literary history. They are short-story cycles--collections of short fiction that contain unifying settings, recurring characters or character types, and central themes and motifs. They are also examples of the "local color" tradition in fiction, a movement that has been much misunderstood. Nagel maintains that regional literature was meant to be the highest form of American writing, not the lowest, and its objective was to capture the locations, folkways, values, dialects, conflicts, and ways of life in the various regions of the country in order to show that the lives of common citizens were sufficiently important to be the subject of serious literature. Finally, Nagel shows that New Orleans provided a profoundly rich and complex setting for the literary exploration of some of the most crucial social problems in America, including racial stratification, social caste, economic exploitation, and gender roles, all of which were undergoing rapid transformation at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
• The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz

  Call Number: CT2628.F35 S53 2024

  ISBN: 9780374176426

  Published/Created: 2024

  A revelatory biography of the writer-activist who inspired today's movements for social and racial justice. In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon's shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon's stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller. Fanon left his modest home in Martinique to fight in the French Army during World War II; when the war was over, he fell under the influence of Existentialism while studying medicine in Lyon and trying to make sense of his experiences as a Black man in a white city. Fanon went on to practice a novel psychiatry of "dis-alienation" in rural France and Algeria, and then join the Algerian independence struggle, where he became a spokesman, diplomat, and clandestine strategist. He died in 1961, while under the care of the CIA in a Maryland hospital. Today, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have become canonical texts of the Black and global radical imagination, comparable to James Baldwin's essays in their influence. And yet they are little understood. In The Rebel's Clinic, Shatz offers a dramatic reconstruction of Fanon's extraordinary life--and a guide to the books that underlie today's most vital efforts to challenge white supremacy and racial capitalism.
• Reclaiming Difference by Carine M. Mardorossian

  Call Number: PN849.C3 M34 2005

  ISBN: 0813923468

  Published/Created: 2005

  In Reclaiming Difference, Carine Mardorossian examines the novels of four women writers--Jean Rhys (Dominica/UK), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe/USA), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/USA), and Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic/USA)--showing how their writing has radically reformulated the meanings of the national, geographical, sexual, and racial concepts through which postcolonial studies has long been configuring difference. Coming from the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean, these writers all stage and identify with transcultural experiences that undermine the usual classification of literary texts in terms of national and regional literatures, and by doing so they challenge the idea that racial and cultural identities function as stable points of reference in our unstable world. Focusing on the transformations that have taken place in postcolonial studies since the field began to focus on theory, Mardorossian highlights not only how these writers make use of the styles of creolization and hybridity that have dominated Caribbean and postcolonial studies in recent years but also how they distinguish themselves from the movement's leading figures by offering new articulations of the ties that link race and nation to gender and class. She illuminates how these writers extend the notion of hybridity away from racial and cultural differences in isolation from each other to a set of crisscrossing categories that challenge our simpler, normative figurations. For scholars in postcolonial studies, Caribbean studies, literary feminist studies, and studies in comparative literature, Reclaiming Difference represents a new phase in postcolonial studies that calls for a fundamental rethinking of the field's terminology and assumptions.
• René Jadfard, ou, L'éclair d'une vie by Georges Othily

  Call Number: PQ2619.A24 Z78 1989

  ISBN: 2876790548

  Published/Created: 1989

  Georges Othily was a French Guianese politician. He was elected to the French Senate in 1989 and returned to Latin America. There he continued his service to the people when he was elected mayor of Iracoubo in 1995. He worked to improve cultural centers and the overall infrastructure. This is his biography of a fellow French-Guianese politician.
• Segu by Maryse Condé

  Call Number: PQ3949.2.C65 S4413 1987

  ISBN: 0670807281

  Published/Created: 1987-03-11

  Condé's first and enormously successful two-volume historical saga about the fall of the Bambara Kingdom. It was off the merits of this work that Condé was invited to join the French faculty at Berkeley in 1985 launching her legendary career in America rather than France. She lived and raised her children around the world with husband, and translator of her work, Richard Philcox. She spent her life in the French Caribbean, Africa, France, the United States and England. She worked for the BBC. Her latest and last novel (by her account) is L'evangile du nouveau monde (2021). The English translation of her 2010 work, En attendant la montée des eaux is titled Waiting for the Waters to Rise. Barbara Bray (Translator of Segu). [Ségou]
• Slave Old Man by Patrick Chamoiseau; Linda Coverdale (Translator)

  Call Number: PQ3949.2.C45 E8213 2018

  ISBN: 9781620972953

  Published/Created: 2018

  Patrick Chamoiseau's Slave Old Man was published to accolades in hardcover in a brilliant translation by Linda Coverdale, winning the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and chosen as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018. Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly enslaved person's daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his enslaver and a fearsome hound on his heels. We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man's flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing--even otherworldly--ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself. Chamoiseau's exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of early nineteenth-century Martinique, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history. [Esclave vieil homme et le molosse]
• Spirit of Haiti by Myriam J. A. Chancy

  Call Number: PR9260.9.C43 S65 2023

  ISBN: 9781438495125

  Published/Created: 2023

  Vivid and poignant, Spirit of Haiti follows the intersecting lives of four young witnesses to military-ruled Haiti during the early 1990s. Léah, an apparition, rises from the sea like a siren one morning off the coast of Cap Haitien, clothes untouched by water, blue stones wrapped around her neck, eyes blind to light. Soon to be a mother, Carmen returns to Haiti from Canada as if responding to the call of the vodou spirits. Alexis flees the island in search of a land without strife. Finally, there is Philippe, who walks the northern hills alert to ancestral voices still haunting its peaks and valleys. Doing what he must to get by in the tourist trade and now weakened by illness, he struggles to maintain spiritual dignity and a hold on hope. First published in 2003 and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize in the Caribbean and Canada region, Spirit of Haiti is a novel about confronting the failings of the human heart and the triumph of memory over despair.
• The Story of French New Orleans by Dianne Guenin-Lelle

  Call Number: F379.N557 G84 2016

  ISBN: 9781496804860

  Published/Created: 2016

  What is it about the city of New Orleans? History, location, and culture continue to link it to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the United States. This book explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last three hundred years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French socio-cultural dynamic left on the Crescent City. The migration of Acadians to New Orleans at the time the city became a Spanish dominion and the arrival of Haitian refugees when the city became an American territory oddly reinforced its Francophone identity. However, in the process of establishing itself as an urban space in the Antebellum South, the culture of New Orleans became a liability for New Orleans elite after the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleans and the Caribbean share numerous historical, cultural, and linguistic connections. The book analyzes these connections and the shared process of creolization occurring in New Orleans and throughout the Caribbean Basin. It suggests ""French"" New Orleans might be understood as a trope for unscripted ""original"" Creole social and cultural elements. Since being Creole came to connote African descent, the study suggests that an association with France in the minds of whites allowed for a less racially-bound and contested social order within the United States.
• A Sun to Be Sewn by Jean D'Amérique; Thierry Kehou (Translator)

  Call Number: PQ3949.3.A46

  ISBN: 9781635422832

  Published/Created: 2023

  In this modern fable full of poetry, desire, and blood, a creative young Haitian girl struggles against seemingly impossible odds to escape the cruel reality of her Port-au-Prince slum. "You'll be alone in the great night." That's what Papa has always prophesied to her. Papa, who isn't her real father--he disappeared when she was born. Since then, her mother has been forced to walk the streets to provide for herself and her daughter, while Papa robs and murders for the local gang leader, to ensure his access to ganja and alcohol, but also for the sheer pleasure of it. Often finding herself alone within the four walls of a hovel in a Haitian shantytown with corrugated iron for a roof, the young girl tirelessly tries to compose a letter that will capture what is in her heart and soul. She is consumed with love for a classmate, the daughter of her teacher, and searches for words to faithfully express her feelings and her dreams. In a poetic language that encompasses poverty and idealism, she observes the violence, the shortcomings, and the addictions of the adults around her. Her passion makes her resilient, nurturing her character and helping her to invent a better fate than the one to which she seemed doomed. [Soleil à coudre]
• Taking Flight by Jennifer Donahue

  Call Number: PN849.C3

  ISBN: 9781496828743

  Published/Created: 2020

  Caribbean women have long utilized the medium of fiction to break the pervasive silence surrounding abuse and exploitation. Contemporary works by such authors as Tiphanie Yanique and Nicole Dennis-Benn illustrate the deep-rooted consequences of trauma based on gender, sexuality, and race, and trace the steps that women take to find safer ground from oppression. Taking Flight examines the immigrant experience in contemporary Caribbean women's writing and considers the effects of restrictive social mores. In the texts examined in Taking Flight, culturally sanctioned violence impacts the ability of female characters to be at home in their bodies or in the spaces they inhabit. The works draw attention to the historic racialization and sexualization of black women's bodies and continue the legacy of narrating black women's long-standing contestation of systems of oppression. Arguing that there is a clear link between trauma, shame, and migration, with trauma serving as a precursor to the protagonists' emigration, Jennifer Donahue focuses on how female bodies are policed; how moral, racial, and sexual codes are linked; and how the enforcement of social norms can function as a form of trauma. Donahue considers the relationship between trauma, shame, and sexual politics and investigates how shame works as a social regulator that frequently leads to withdrawal or avoidant behaviors in those who violate socially sanctioned mores. Most importantly, Taking Flight positions flight as a powerful counter to disempowerment and considers how flight, whether through dissociation or migration, functions as a form of resistance.
• A Taste of Eternity by Gisèle Pineau; C. Dickson (Translator)

  Call Number: PQ3949.2.P573 A6413 2014

  ISBN: 9780896728707

  Published/Created: 2014

  When Sybille arrives in Paris from Guadeloupe with her infant son, she encounters the extravagant and marvelous Lila. Sybille is young and black with her life still ahead of her; an ex-actress, Lila is white and seventy years old. Despite their differences, the women become inseparable. Haunted by memories, Lila confides in Sybille and, among other things, relates the endless cycle of lovers in her life. Her most cherished memories are of Henry, a black man from the British Caribbean whom she met during the Liberation Day celebrations in Paris. Gradually, Sybille and Lila discover that the West Indies and the charm of Guadeloupe create a deep and common bond between them. The narrative leaps from one side of the Atlantic to the other, playing black against white, past against present, rural Caribbean culture against the urban life of Paris and New York. Sybille?s memories of her own tragic childhood form a counterpoint to tales of Henry growing up on the island of St. John. The stories contain mysterious and magical elements revolving around one central theme: how fate works to draw lovers apart. Despite repeated defeats, love still survives. In tales and in legends, mocking all obstacles, it circumvents the game of destiny and the tragic vanity of mankind.
• A Tempest by Aimé Césaire

  Call Number: PQ3949.C44 T413 2002

  ISBN: 1559362103

  Published/Created: 2002

  A troupe of black actors perform their own Tempest. Cesaire's rich and insightful adaptation draws on contemporary Caribbean society, the African-American experience and African mythology to raise questions about colonialism, racism and their lasting effects. Richard Miller (Translator)
• The Tragedy of King Christophe by Aimé Césaire

  Call Number: PQ3949.C44 T713 2015

  ISBN: 9780810130586

  Published/Created: 2015

  The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963, revised 1970) is recognized as the Martiniquan writer and activist Aime Cesaire's greatest play. Set in the period of upheaval in Haiti after the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806, it follows the historical figure of Henri Christophe, a slave who rose to become a general in Toussaint Louverture's army. Christophe declared himself king in 1811 and ruled the northern part of Haiti until 1820. Cesaire employs Shakespearean plotting and revels in the inexhaustible possibilities of language to convey the tragedy of Christophe's transformation from a charismatic leader sensitive to the oppression of his people to an oppressor himself. Paul Breslin and Rachel Ney's nimble, accurate translation includes an introduction and explanatory notes to guide students, scholars, and general readers alike.
• What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J. A. Chancy

  Call Number: PR9260.9.C43 W48 2021

  ISBN: 9781951142766

  Published/Created: 2021

  At the end of a long, sweltering day, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster--Richard, an expat and wealthy water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, Anne, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker, Leopold, who pines for a beautiful call girl; Sonia and her business partner, Dieudonné, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; Didier, an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; Sara, a mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, Olivier, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son, Jonas, who haunts them both; and Ma Lou, the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all. Brilliantly crafted, fiercely imagined, and deeply haunting. What Storm, What Thunder is a singular, stunning record, a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and--at the same time--an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit.
• The World Is Moving Around Me by Dany Laferriere; Michaelle Jean (Foreword by); David Homel (Translator)

  Call Number: QE535.2.H2 L3313 2013

  ISBN: 9781551524986

  Published/Created: 2013

  On January 12, 2010, novelist Dany Laferriere has just ordered dinner at a Port-au-Prince restaurant with a friend when the earthquake struck. He survived, but some 300,000 others did not. The quake caused widespread disruption and left over one million homeless; it also revealed flaws in the impoverished nation's infrastructure that will take a generation from which to recover. This moving and revelatory book is an eyewitness account of the quake and its aftermath. Dany Laferrière is a Haïtian Canadian novelist and journalist who writes in French.
• Writing Through the Visual and Virtual by Renée Larrier (Editor); Ousseina Alidou (Editor)

  Call Number: DC33.9 .W75 2015

  ISBN: 9781498501637

  Published/Created: 2015

  Writing Through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean interrogates conventional notions of writing. The contributors--whose disciplines include anthropology, art history, education, film, history, linguistics, literature, performance studies, philosophy, sociology, translation, and visual arts--examine the complex interplay between language/literature/arts and the visual and virtual domains of expressive culture. The twenty-five essays explore various patterns of writing practices arising from contemporary and historical forces that have impacted the literatures and cultures of Benin, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Egypt, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Morocco, Niger, Reunion Island, and Senegal. Special attention is paid to how scripts, though appearing to be merely decorative in function, are often used by artists and performers in the production of material and non-material culture to tell "stories" of great significance, co-mingling words and images in a way that leads to a creative synthesis that links the local and the global, the "classical" and the "popular" in new ways. Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum (Contribution by); Gabrielle Civil (Contribution by); Barbara Cooper (Contribution by); Bojana Coulibaly (Contribution by); Rokhaya Fall Diawara (Contribution by); Khady Diène (Contribution by); Oumar Diogoye Diouf (Contribution by); Nathan H. Dize (Contribution by); Gladys M. Francis (Contribution by); Maha Gad El Hak (Contribution by); Boureima Alpha Gado (Contribution by); Amanda Gilvin (Contribution by); Donna Gustafson (Contribution by); Fakhri Haghani (Contribution by); Phuong Hoang (Contribution by); Julie Huntington (Contribution by); Laurence Jay-Rayon (Contribution by); Abdoulaye Elimane Kane (Contribution by); Jean Hérald Legagneur (Contribution by); Anne Rehill (Contribution by); Anne Patricia Rice (Contribution by); Edwige Sylvestre-Ceide (Contribution by); Becky Schulthies (Contribution by); Jean-Baptiste Sourou (Contribution by); Meghan Tinsley (Contribution by).