Signs of Dissent - (New World Studies) by Dawn Fulton (Paperback)
About this item
Highlights
- Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean writer and critic whose work has challenged the categories of race, language, gender, and geography that inform contemporary literary and critical debates.
- About the Author: Dawn Fulton is Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies at Smith College.
- 208 Pages
- Literary Criticism, Caribbean & Latin American
- Series Name: New World Studies
Description
About the Book
Signs of Dissent offers one of the most comprehensive assessments of Condé's literary production to date, illuminating its exceptional role in shaping a dialogue between francophone studies and the English-dominated field of postcolonialism.Book Synopsis
Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean writer and critic whose work has challenged the categories of race, language, gender, and geography that inform contemporary literary and critical debates. In Signs of Dissent, the first full-length study in English on Condé, Dawn Fulton situates this award-winning author's work in the context of current theories of cultural identity in order to foreground Condé's unique contributions to these discussions. Staging a dialogue between Condé's novels and the field of postcolonial studies, Fulton argues that Condé enacts a strategy of "critical incorporations" in her fiction, imitating and transforming many of the prevailing narratives of postcolonial theory so as to explore their theoretical and conceptual limits.
By rejecting the facile classification of her work as "Caribbean," "African," or "feminist," Condé has gained a reputation as an iconoclast. But Fulton proposes that behind this public image of provocation lies an incisive reflection on the burdens of representation imposed on the non-Western writer, and that Condé's novels expose the ways in which postcolonial criticism can be complicit in constructing such burdens even as it questions them. Signs of Dissent offers one of the most comprehensive assessments of Condé's literary production to date, illuminating its exceptional role in shaping a dialogue between francophone studies and the English-dominated field of postcolonialism.
Review Quotes
A thorough and careful study of Maryse Conde's complete fictional ouevre to date, and the first monograph to be devoted entirely to this important and provcative Caribbean author.
--Ronnie Scharfman, Professor of French and Literature, Purchase College, SUNYAbout the Author
Dawn Fulton is Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies at Smith College. Her articles on the literature of the francophone Caribbean have appeared in Romantic Review and French Forum.