Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

The chapter on Pasolini in Exotic Memories anticipated the more contemporary focus of parts of my second book, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature, which was a study of the “creolization” process and its relevance to both colonial and postcolonial literatures. The texts studied in this book ranged in date from the late eighteenth century (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie) to the present (chapters on francophone Caribbean writers Edouard Glissant and Daniel Maximin, but also sections on Anglophone writers such as J. M. Coetzee and Keri Hulme). Shuttling back and forth between colonial and postcolonial literature, with a few intermediary stops on the way (such as an extended discussion of the role of Haiti in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!), I developed the concept of the “post/colonial” in order to identify the ways in which “the colonial and the postcolonial appear uneasily as one, joined together and yet also divided in a relation of (dis)continuity.”