Espace urbain et écriture des carrefours : Une étude de Chronique des sept misères, Solibo Magnifique et Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau
Sammanfattning: This thesis deals with the role of urban space in Patrick Chamoiseau's first three novels. Observing that the colonial city is often stigmatized in French Caribbean literature and that Chamoiseau's style changes as his following novels are set elsewhere, the study has as its goal an assessment of the ways in which urban space determines his writing.Paradoxically Chamoiseau appropriates colonial discourses, namely ethnography and history. Focusing on the novels' ethnographic aspects, the first part examines the development of a writer-figure through whom meta-fictive problems are introduced and ways to approach the city are dramatized. The analyses show that Chamoiseau's writing negotiates between different entities in the texts and engender a polyphonic style, close to James Clifford's notion of surrealist ethnography. However the study also demonstrates that Chamoiseau plays with ethnography's documentary dimensions in order to situate his writing. The second part deals with the discourse of history. It investigates how the past is integrated in the narrative form of a chronicle, establishing a Creole identity and cultural heritage connected with urban space. Drawing from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this study shows that Chamoiseau's fictional city is constructed as a plane of composition where power and deterritorializing movements of marginalized characters operate simultaneously. Chamoiseau turns the city into a place where Creole heritage is not only inscribed in the past, but also constantly renewed.This study ultimately argues that the way Chamoiseau deals with urban space places his writing at the heart of certain esthetical reflections of Western modern literature. Since Chamoiseau's Fort-de-France is a space of transformation, the desire to situate the texts is not necessarily a sign of self-centered cultural nostalgia. Chamoiseau's urban novels question how inscription in and engagement with the local may resist forces of homogenization and add to the dynamics of the global.
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