A Question to Be Lived

This essay develops an anthropological genealogy of the créolité literary project. Examining works by Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, the author studies how the créolistes read ethnography and the social sciences into a revitalized creole literary history, generating a vision of creole fiction as ethnographic fiction. More specifically, he demonstrates how the human sciences perform three interrelated tasks in the history the créolistes create of their own literary production: first, they serve as disciplinary frameworks for creole fiction; second, they index and reflect empiricist desires in literature, gesturing toward a fictional form that would connect with the Real in ways that earlier modes of Caribbean writing could not; and, finally, they become figural modes in fictional texts, informing the créolistes’ senses of narrative and characterology

Art · Creole language · Discipline · Empiricism · Epistemology · Ethnography · History of literature · Linguistics · Literary criticism · Literary fiction · Literature · Narrative · Social science · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · History · Migration, Identity, and Health · Philosophy

• American Creoles

  Open Access•Martin Munro, Celia Britton•American Creoles•2012

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