Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora by Bénédicte Boisseron (review)

This book proposes a shift from considering Caribbean writing from a collective standpoint that focuses on groups of writers geographically located on the islands, to the individuals of the Caribbean diaspora, who write from abroad, all the while looking back at their native lands. This includes migrants and exiles, who left their original environments either by choice or extenuating circumstances and now “relate to their community from a questionable distance” (1).

In the introduction, “The Second-Generation Caribbean Diaspora,” Boisseron explains how an examination of these writers allows her to break out of the traditional dichotomies of postcolonialism in her analysis, since these authors often write from a “decentered location” (4) and “against new types of binarisms: neither the Caribbean nor Europe, neither the ex-colony nor the metropole, neither the periphery nor the center” (4). Boisseron explicitly states her objective in the book as that of challenging “‘the writing back to the center’ consensus in postcolonial studies” (7). In particular, “Creole Renegades focuses on Caribbean (Creole) American writers who have admitted one way or another that had they not moved to the north, they might never have produced what they did” (22).

Chapter one, “Anatole Broyard: Racial Betrayal and the Art of Being Creole,” considers the connection between the notion of betrayal and the concept of Creoleness by examining a memoir about the life of Anatole Broyard, a renowned literary critic who passed for white his entire life despite his mixed origins, before being “outed,” so to speak, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s study on the subject. Boisseron uses the story of Broyard to propose a theory of Creoleness that understands it as fundamentally unpredictable, dependent on the situation, and never fixed. She argues that the notion of “Creole,” much like Broyard himself, “is that which will adjust and adapt to circumstances and, like a chameleon, will pass in a chosen environment” (35).

Chapter two, “Maryse Condé’s Histoire de la femme cannibale: Coming Out in the French Antilles,” explores the recurrent presence of homosexuality in Condé’s work, a fascinating yet highly neglected area of study. Boisseron expertly links Fanon’s notion of the debarqué, or person “just off the boat,” to Condé’s use of the term “macoumé” in her novels. She argues that for both Fanon and Condé, time spent overseas is associated with sexual deviance, such that the theme of homosexuality is often used to revisit the question of departure and the inability to return home.

In chapter three, “Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière: Parasitic and Remittance Diaspora,” Boisseron performs a reading of testimonial work by Danticat and Laferrière in order to explore the question, “Is writing about home a cultural obligation or an act of opportunism for the expatriate writer?” (25). In particular, she focuses on the sensitive issue of writing about Haiti, since diasporic writers from this island nation often feel “survivor’s guilt” (especially after the 2010 earthquake) and must confront the question of whether they are giving back to the community or exploiting it for their own ends.

Chapter four, “V. S. Naipaul and Jamaica Kincaid: Rhetoric of National Dis-Allegiance,” approaches the fundamental question of whether diasporic writers have a duty to praise their native homes, or can acceptably criticize them without committing an act of treason. Boisseron presents an interesting comparison of the reactions of Western and postcolonial critics to Naipaul’s work, which often takes a European perspective when discussing Trinidad. The chapter presents a juxtaposition between Naipaul and Kincaid in order to illustrate not only the similarities between the two authors, but how the geographical context of the production of their works ultimately sets them apart.

Chapter five, “Creole Versus Bossale Renegade: ‘Turfism’ in the Black Diaspora of the Americas,” questions the role of individualism in Caribbean writing through an examination of the figure of the bossale—a New World slave born in Africa...