Maryse Conde and Caribbean Crossings

Maryse Condé and Caribbean Crossings 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.

Maryse Condé and Caribbean Crossings 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.