Felisa Vergara Reynolds

BOOKS:

Maryse Condé and Caribbean Crossings, edited by Felisa Vergara Reynolds and Kate Hodgson (Liverpool University Press, 2026) brings together an international group of scholars to reflect on the life, work, and legacy of one of the most significant writers of the Caribbean and the Black Atlantic world, Alternative Nobel Prize-winning author Maryse Condé. The volume emerges from a landmark international symposium held in May 2024, just weeks after Condé’s passing. Organized by the Centre for Comparative Literature and the Centre for Caribbean and Diaspora Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, the symposium brought together scholars to honor Condé’s life and to interrogate the crossings that define her œuvre.

Taking as its point of departure Condé’s assertion that frontiers have ceased to exist, the volume approaches crossing as both a critical framework and a guiding concept. The essays explore geographical movements between the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, as well as crossings between genres, histories, and temporalities. Contributors examine the porous boundaries between fiction and autobiography, memory and imagination, and the living and the dead, while attending to how Condé’s work unsettles inherited literary paradigms and fixed identities. The volume opens with a foreword by Richard Philcox and concludes with an unedited appendix presenting Condé’s final text, Le “mentir vrai”, reproduced in its original form.

Click to listen to an interview on The Author as Cannibal for The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy

The Author as Cannibal: Rewriting in Francophone Literature as a Post-Colonial Genre (1969-1995) (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) shows how in the first decades after the end of French rule, Francophone authors engaged in an exercise of rewriting narratives from the colonial literary canon. In The Author as Cannibal, I present these textual revisions as figurative acts of cannibalism and examines how these literary cannibalizations critique colonialism and its legacy in each author’s homeland. I focus on four representative texts: Une tempête (1969) by Aimé Césaire, Le temps de Tamango (1981) by Boubacar Boris Diop, L’amour, la fantasia (1985) by Assia Djebar, and La migration des cœurs (1995) by Maryse Condé. Though written independently in Africa and the Caribbean, these texts all combine critical adaptation with creative destruction in an attempt to eradicate the social, political, cultural, and linguistic remnants of colonization long after independence. The Author as Cannibal situates these works within Francophone studies, showing that the extent of their postcolonial critique is better understood when they are considered collectively. Crucial to the book are two interviews with Maryse Condé, which provide great insight on literary cannibalism. By foregrounding thematic concerns and writing strategies in these texts, I show how these re-writings are an underappreciated collective form of protest and resistance for Francophone authors.