Patrick Chamoiseau

"In this timely book Maeve McCusker examines the work of the acclaimed Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, perhaps best known for his novel Texaco, which won the Prix Goncourt and sold well over half a million copies in France alone. McCusker places Chamoiseau in the context of literary representations of memory in Martinique, a society founded on slavery, but now politically assimilated to the metropolitan centre, France. If the initial trauma of transplantation, the middle passage and slavery, irrecoverably fractured collective memory across the Caribbean, the extreme dependence that resulted from the decline of the plantation economy and departmentalization has accelerated a sense of historical and cultural amnesia. Chamoiseau's work exhibits an explicit and far-reaching concern with memory and his theoretical interventions are critical, if neglected/contributions to postcolonial theory more generally. Hence Patrick Chamoiseau: Recovering Memory offers a valuable contribution to 'memory studies' by bringing this' discipline into dialogue with postcolonialism, a link seldom made despite an obvious interconnectedness."--Jacket.