This book investigates the exilic literature of Caribbean-born and Caribbean-descent writers who, from their new location in North America, question their cultural obligation of Caribbeanness, Creoleness, and even Blackness. This new consciousness has led them to challenge their roots as they search for a creative autonomy deemed treacherous by the home community. Though their poetics are infused with an enticing sense of cultural, sexual, or racial emancipation, their deviance is not always defiant. As author Boisseron argues, a burden of guilt is one of the defining features of the modern Ca ... More

This book investigates the exilic literature of Caribbean-born and Caribbean-descent writers who, from their new location in North America, question their cultural obligation of Caribbeanness, Creoleness, and even Blackness. This new consciousness has led them to challenge their roots as they search for a creative autonomy deemed treacherous by the home community. Though their poetics are infused with an enticing sense of cultural, sexual, or racial emancipation, their deviance is not always defiant. As author Boisseron argues, a burden of guilt is one of the defining features of the modern Caribbean diaspora. While untangling the complex rhetoric of cultural debt, betrayal, and guilt at the heart of Caribbean diasporic discourse, Creole Renegades proposes to expose a more human, albeit more flawed and vulnerable, side of the modern Creole subject. Boisseron delves into the ways in which the second-generation Caribbean diaspora moves beyond nationality, communitarianism, and cultural belonging to embrace its individual subjectivity and personal needs, thus raising controversy at home and abroad about its disengagement. What is the role of the migrant writer in cultures and histories pressured by the need of cultural remittance? Does the expatriate writer feed or feed off the home country when writing about home miseries? Where should we cross the line between “individualism” and “opportunism” in a diasporic context? Should racial allegiance be a necessary component of the Creole black diasporic community in America? These are some of the key questions this book raises.