Vers une représentation textuelle du déplacement et du voyage dans la littérature francophone antillaise et guyanaise: l’exemple de Joseph Zobel, Guy Tirolien et René Maran
type: CreativeWork
description: French colonialism, with its brutal history of transplantation, slavery, and migration, was founded on displacement; the experience of the Caribbean subject is thus axiomatically one of travel, exile, and scission. While postcolonial studies are increasingly turning to transnational paradigms, translocal discourses produced by Caribbean and Guyanese writers from the first waves of transatlantic migration are still neglected. Their writing, however, is strongly imbued with notions of (dis)placement and flux. This thesis aims to address these lacunae by exploring the textual representation of interstitial, unstable, and travelling identity from works written by authors who were part of the first transatlantic Caribbean diaspora and born before the end of the 1910s. Indeed, the lives of Martinican Joseph Zobel, Guadeloupean Guy Tirolien, and Guyanese René Maran were punctuated by transnational and peripatetic mobility. Thus, this thesis advocates for the impact of movement, within and between the Caribbean, France, and Africa (only Tirolien returned to Guadeloupe) – on the themes, style, language or even the very emergence, of their works. The methodology situates close readings of the primary texts within a multidisciplinary conceptual framework incorporating theories of travel and mobility, as well as postcolonial theories. The thesis thus examines how travel and displacement provide an exploratory framework to investigate identity and culture in the chosen corpus. Here, mobility is a biographical reality, but also an intellectual and a diegetic one, as well as a literary trope. This malleable approach to travel thus allows the study of its paradigmatic manifestation in a multigeneric corpus (novels, poetry, short story, biography): Les Jours immobiles (1946) and Les Mains pleines d’oiseaux (1978) by Zobel, Balles d’or (1961) and Feuilles vivantes au matin (1977) by Tirolien and Livingstone et l’exploration de l’Afrique (1938) by Maran. The experience of multipolar m…
abstract: French colonialism, with its brutal history of transplantation, slavery, and migration, was founded on displacement; the experience of the Caribbean subject is thus axiomatically one of travel, exile, and scission. While postcolonial studies are increasingly turning to transnational paradigms, translocal discourses produced by Caribbean and Guyanese writers from the first waves of transatlantic migration are still neglected. Their writing, however, is strongly imbued with notions of (dis)placement and flux. This thesis aims to address these lacunae by exploring the textual representation of interstitial, unstable, and travelling identity from works written by authors who were part of the first transatlantic Caribbean diaspora and born before the end of the 1910s. Indeed, the lives of Martinican Joseph Zobel, Guadeloupean Guy Tirolien, and Guyanese René Maran were punctuated by transnational and peripatetic mobility. Thus, this thesis advocates for the impact of movement, within and between the Caribbean, France, and Africa (only Tirolien returned to Guadeloupe) – on the themes, style, language or even the very emergence, of their works. The methodology situates close readings of the primary texts within a multidisciplinary conceptual framework incorporating theories of travel and mobility, as well as postcolonial theories. The thesis thus examines how travel and displacement provide an exploratory framework to investigate identity and culture in the chosen corpus. Here, mobility is a biographical reality, but also an intellectual and a diegetic one, as well as a literary trope. This malleable approach to travel thus allows the study of its paradigmatic manifestation in a multigeneric corpus (novels, poetry, short story, biography): Les Jours immobiles (1946) and Les Mains pleines d’oiseaux (1978) by Zobel, Balles d’or (1961) and Feuilles vivantes au matin (1977) by Tirolien and Livingstone et l’exploration de l’Afrique (1938) by Maran. The experience of multipolar m…
author: McComb, Maeva
language: fra
keywords: Postcolonial studies, Francophone, Carribean literature, Guyanese literature, Guy Tirolien, Joseph Zobel, René Maran, travel, displacement
date published: 2021-7
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:55:51Z
provider: Queen's University Belfast
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Queen's University Belfast