My dissertation, entitled "Mobile Islands: Home, Migrancy and Identity in French Caribbean Narratives", examines the representation of home, space and migration in French-Caribbean literature and film. Using original narratives of Guadeloupean and Martinican writers and filmmakers, I demonstrate that the sociological phenomenon of mobility between the Caribbean and France has become a determining factor in the construction of identity of French-Caribbean people. I explain that migration presently highlights the specificity of the diasporic experience of French Caribbean people who are constantly divided about whether to consider France as an extension of home, a second home or as a "home-abroad". In this sense, I argue against the dominant understanding of migration as exile, which fails to suggest the actual magnitude of identity and cultural transformations inflicted by displacement or dislocation and the type of consciousness migration to/from France produces upon the French-Caribbean subject. I also argue that displacements due to migration and travel make the notion and location of home debatable because French-Caribbean subjects never really stay in one place. Finally, whereas scholarship of the mid 20th century produced by eminent writers such as George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul and Edward Kamau Brathwaite tends to focus on the exilic nature of Caribbean migration and the confining aspect of insular life, I contend that in French-Caribbean narratives, migration is reflected as an on-going phenomenon that allow different types of negotiation and mediation between the French-Caribbean subject and his/her living spaces. Therefore I propose new concepts such as transitional migration and migrancy in order to address the complex evolution of migration within French-Caribbean societies and its affect on the identity and cultural construction of French-Caribbeans since the colonial era until the current era of globalization.

Last modified

• 09/19/2018

Creator

• Stephanie M Silvestre

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N25J0K

Subject

• Comparative Literary Studies

Keyword

• insularity
• French Caribbean
• migration
• exile

Date created

• 2008-08-29

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright