Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of
Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse |
| |
| Valérie Loichot |
| 256 pages, 6 x 9 |
| 2 b&w illustrations |
| Cloth 978-0-8139-2640-7 • $45.00 |
| Paper 978-0-8139-264i-4 • $19.50 |
| New World
Studies |
| Available June 2007 |
 |
In Orphan Narratives, Valérie Loichot investigates the
fiction and poetry of four writers who emerged from the postslavery
plantation world of the Americas—William Faulkner (USA),
Édouard Glissant (Martinique), Toni Morrison (USA), and Saint-John
Perse (Guadeloupe)—to show how these descendants from slaves and
from slaveholders wrote both in relation and in resistance to
the violence of plantation slavery. She uses the term “orphan
narrative” to capture the ways in which this violence severed
the child, the text, and history from a traceable origin. Black
or white, male or female, Antillean or American, these writers
share a common inheritance and transnational connection through
which their texts maintain familial, temporal, and narrative patterns
without having any central authority figure.
The author specifically cites Saint-John Perse’s Éloges
(1911), Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), Morrison’s
Song of Solomon (1977), and Glissant’s La Case du commandeur
(1981) as postslavery texts. Where the actual family is dismembered,
these narrative accounts invent new familial links. Reciprocally,
biological family ties endure despite the literal and discursive
violence inflicted upon them.
Breaking new ground in trans-American studies by juxtaposing texts from the francophone Lesser Antilles and the U.S. South, Orphan Narratives will be a valuable addition to Caribbean, American, and postcolonial studies, not to mention its appeal to scholars and students of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse.
Valérie Loichot is Associate Professor
in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University.
