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25 mars 2022
- doi: 10.4000/books.pulm.11673
- isbn: 9782842698119
- eisbn: 9782367813974
https://www.openedition.org/12554 , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Mots-clés
esclavage postcolonial récit d’esclave littérature Caraïbe abolition Afro-Américain slavery postcolonial slave narrative Caribbean literature abolition African-American Literature LIT004100 DSBSujets proches
Slave keeping Antislavery Enslavement Slaveholding Servitude Ownership of slaves Mui tsai Abolition of slavery Thralldom Slave systemCiter ce document
Claude Julien, « The Island: Martinique: a Narrative of the long Shadow of Slavery », Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, ID : 10.4000/books.pulm.11673
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The Homewood trilogy has established Wideman’s reputation as a writer drawing — reconstructing — material from his own experience and family life, a creation process that of course also primarily applies to his memoirs. The Island Martinique, his third non-fiction book, resulted from a National Geographic commission “to go anywhere and write about it” — a carte blanche he has used freely to bring forth a challenging book (part diary, part fiction and part rumination) in which personal and historical matters merge or, rather, in which past inequities submerge, islandize the modern individual. Wideman has produced a new meditation that follows the probing of the effects of slavery denounced in Fatheralong. Whereas the earlier book focused on family relationships (the deleterious effects of past dehumanization on the rapports between fathers and sons) on American soil, The Island Martinique looks more generally at the long-lasting effects of slavery and racism on attitudes and psyches. World history is brought under consideration as the advent of Christianity is designated as the great divide at the origin of the “either/or” social stratification affecting modern societies.