La Belle Créole re-creates the dramatic story of Cuba's earliest female author, the adventurous 19th-century countess nicknamed La Belle Créole: María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, or Mercedes, and later the Comtesse Merlin. Alina García-Lapuerta draws from Mercedes' memoirs and letters and contemporary accounts to bring to life this Havana-born aristocrat who was years ahead of her time as a writer, socialite, salon host, and participant in the Cuban slavery debate. Eventually celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, at age 13 headstrong young Mercedes was shipped off to live with her glamorous mother in Spain. Though political chaos blanketed Europe, Mercedes triumphed, charming aristocrats from all sides with her beauty and singing voice. She married General Merlin in Napoleon's army, watched her mother have an intimate affair with Joseph Bonaparte, and discussed painting with Goya. Arriving in Paris after the French defeat, Mercedes, one of the greatest amateur sopranos of her day, hosted the city's premier musical salon where Liszt, Rossini, and great divas performed for Rothschilds, Balzac, and royalty. Increasingly, she turned to her memoirs and travel writings, which have recently been rediscovered and, scholars agree, deserve a place in the canon of Latin American literature. Alina García-Lapuerta was born in Cuba and travels frequently to Miami and Cuba, retaining strong ties with her Cuban-based family and the Cuban American community. She holds a bachelor's degree in international economics from Georgetown University and a master's degree in international relations from Tufts University. She lives in London.

Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Condé added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The twelfth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonné Sabrina, a gardener, aged twenty-two and black, is accused of murdering his employer--and lover--Loraine, a wealthy white woman descended from plantation owners. His only refuge is a sailboat, La Belle Créole, a relic of times gone by. Condé follows Dieudonné’s desperate wanderings through the city of Port-Mahault the night of his acquittal, the narrative unfolding through a series of multivoiced flashbacks set against a forbidding backdrop of social disintegration and tumultuous labor strikes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Guadeloupe. Twenty-four hours later, Dieudonné’s fate becomes suggestively intertwined with that of the French island itself, though the future of both remains uncertain in the end. Echoes of Faulkner and Lawrence, and even Shakespeare’s Othello, resonate in this tale, yet the drama’s uniquely modern dynamics set it apart from any model in its exploration of love and hate, politics and stereotype, and the attempt to find connections with others across barriers. Through her vividly and intimately drawn characters, Condé paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.

New Orleans is one of America's richest architectural possessions ... these architecture books lay a solid foundation in the field, are a gift to general historians, and, as the authors hoped, have contributed immeasurably to the maintenance of extant architectural treasures.This look at the bustling business district is designed to serve as a guide for renovation and restoration.

Long repressed following the collapse of empire, memories of the French colonial experience have recently gained unprecedented visibility. In popular culture, scholarly research, personal memoirs, public commemorations, and new ethnicities associated with the settlement of postcolonial immigrant minorities, the legacy of colonialism is now more apparent in France than at any time in the past. How is this upsurge of interest in the colonial past to be explained? Does the commemoration of empire necessarily imply glorification or condemnation? To what extent have previously marginalized voices succeeded in making themselves heard in new narratives of empire? While veils of secrecy have been lifted, what taboos still remain and why? These are among the questions addressed by an international team of leading researchers in this interdisciplinary volume, which will interest scholars in a wide range of disciplines including French studies, history, literature, cultural studies, and anthropology.

Provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. This book is for the study of French literature and culture.

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.