Working, writing and the Antillean postcolony: Patrick Chamoiseau and Gisèle Pineau

Patrick Chamoiseau's Un Dimanche au cachot (2007) and Gisèle Pineau's Folie, aller simple (2010) refer to the authors’ professions (respectively social worker and nurse) to explore the tensions besetting Caribbean territories that belong integrally to the French Republic, yet are culturally distinct from the Hexagon. While both writers use a version of ‘staged marginality’ to raise questions about the ‘imagined community’ of the Republic, each adopts a different political approach and writing strategy. Chamoiseau appears still to struggle with binary colonial anxieties in relation to France, despite his professed immersion in Glissant's transcending ‘Tout-Monde’; Pineau presents a less theorized, more integrative ‘transcultural’ Frenchness based on her personal experience. These contrasting interpretations highlight the need for a theoretical approach to the Antilles that accommodates both the shifting, relational dynamic associated with Glissant's postcolonial perspective, and the binary axis of centre and periphery more commonly associated with colonialism.