Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Conde added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The fourteenth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonne 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 Creole, a relic of times gone by. Conde follows Dieudonne'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, Dieudonne'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, Conde paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.

Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Conde added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The fourteenth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonne 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 Creole, a relic of times gone by. Conde follows Dieudonne'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, Dieudonne'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, Conde paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.

Maryse Conde 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 Conde, Dawn Fulton situates this award-winning author's work in the context of current theories of cultural identity in order to foreground Conde's unique contributions to these discussions. Staging a dialogue between Conde's novels and the field of postcolonial studies, Fulton argues that Conde 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," Conde 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 Conde'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 Conde's literary production to date, illuminating its exceptional role in shaping a dialogue between francophone studies and the English-dominated field of postcolonialism.