Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora

Caribbean Philosophical Association Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award

Caribbean Studies Association Barbara T. Christian Literary Award - Honorable Mention

Exiled writers often have extremely complicated relationships with their native lands. In this volume, Bénédicte Boisseron examines the works of Caribbean-born writers who, from their new locations in North America, question their cultural obligations of Caribbeanness, Creoleness, and even Blackness. She surveys the works of Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Maryse Condé, Dany Laferrière, and others who at times have been well received in their adopted countries but who have been dismissed in their home islands as sell-outs, opportunists, or traitors.

These expatriate and second-generation authors refuse to be simple bearers of Caribbean culture, often dramatically distancing themselves from the postcolonial archipelago. Their writing is frequently infused with an enticing sense of cultural, sexual, or racial emancipation, but their deviance is not defiant. Instead, their emancipations are those of the nomad, whose actual and descriptive travels between points on a cultural compass help to deconstruct the “sedentary ideology of Caribbeanness” and to reanimate it with new perspectives.

Underscoring the often-ignored contentious relationship between modern diaspora authors and the Caribbean, Boisseron ultimately argues that displacement and creative autonomy are often manifest in guilt and betrayal, central themes that emerge again and again in the work of these writers.

Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.