Maryse Condé is a Guadeloupean writer and critic whose work has
challenged the categories of race, language, gender, and geography that
inform contemporary literary and critical debates. In Signs of
Dissent, the first full-length study in English on Condé, Dawn Fulton
situates this award-winning author's work in the context of current
theories of cultural identity in order to foreground Condé's unique
contributions to these discussions. Staging a dialogue between Condé's
novels and the field of postcolonial studies, Fulton argues that Condé
enacts a strategy of "critical incorporations" in her fiction, imitating
and transforming many of the prevailing narratives of postcolonial
theory so as to explore their theoretical and conceptual limits.
By rejecting the facile classification of her work as "Caribbean,"
"African," or "feminist," Condé has gained a reputation as an
iconoclast. But Fulton proposes that behind this public image of
provocation lies an incisive reflection on the burdens of representation
imposed on the non-Western writer, and that Condé's novels expose the
ways in which postcolonial criticism can be complicit in constructing
such burdens even as it questions them. Signs of Dissent offers one of
the most comprehensive assessments of Condé's literary production to
date, illuminating its exceptional role in shaping a dialogue between
francophone studies and the English-dominated field of postcolonialism.