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Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité. SHIREEN K. LEWIS. New York: Lexington Books, 2006. xx + 167 pp. (Paper US$ 25.95)
Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité is an ambitious endeavor. As Shireen K. Lewis indicates, her book is "the first comprehensive study to date to map literary and theoretical discourse by Francophone intellectuals associated with Négritude (Léon Damas, Leopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Paulette Nardal), Antillanité (Edouard Glissant), Créolité (Jean Bernabé, Raphaël Confiant, Patrick Chamoiseau)" (p. xii). She situates her diachronic analysis in the larger debate around modernism and postmodernism in order to trace the varying identitarian shifts within French West Indian literature. Lewis examines these shifts as they evolve from a concern with African origins and racial and cultural purity toward a preoccupation with creolization, hybridity, and fragmentation, arguing for the inclusion of female Martiniquan intellectuals as significant participants in the birth of modern black Francophone and Caribbean literature. Doing so, she claims that she is "the first scholar to conceptualize black women's relationship to Négritude" (p. xv).
Chapter 1 presents the sole issue of légitime défense as the guiding manifesto for nine young Marxist-Leninist and surrealist Martiniquans and argues that it represents a flawed precursor to Césaire's Négritude. Lewis contextualizes their cultural project within French modernism and argues that Martiniquan students of the time, despite their anticolonial stance and attack against...