Diving into heavy waters: Water and gender in contemporary francophone Caribbean and Oceanian art and literature

Abstract

This project examines contemporary representations of gendered waters in the works of francophone Oceanian and Caribbean women, offering possibilities for re-imagining the space, history and identity of these regions and entangling Black and Indigenous futures. It focuses on six authors and artists: Déwé Gorodé (Kanaky-New Caledonia), Titaua Peu and Marie-Hélène Villierme (Mā’ohi Nui-French Polynesia), Fabienne Kanor (Martinique), Maryse Condé and Guy Gabon (Guadeloupe). What role does water play in the imaginaries of these geographically disparate artists and authors? Can examining their representations of water deepen links between the francophone Antilles and Pacific beyond French colonialism?

This thesis unites its corpus using a framework based on the oceanic philosophies of the two regions, notably those of Édouard Glissant and Epeli Hau’ofa, and Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s concept of “minor transnationalism.” Drawing out conceptual affinities between each text, it explores the artists’ and authors’ imaginations of spatiality, memory, and identity in relation to water. Part I draws on Katherine McKittrick and Françoise Vergès to explore Gorodé’s and Peu’s critiques of dominant mappings of Oceania and their spatialisations of their region through minor freshwaters. Part II builds on the work of Teresia Teaiwa and Saidiya Hartman to analyse Villierme’s and Kanor’s representations of water as an archive containing traumatic memories of French colonial experiments (nuclear testing and the transatlantic trade in enslaved people) and the seeds of suppressed stories of resistance. Part III turns to Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter to examine Condé’s and Gabon’s deconstructions of gender through water, exploring how they trace the presence of the Middle Passage in the rising waters of climate change. This thesis argues that water is an ambiguous substance: while it carries the heavy traces of the past, it is through water that new futures can be imagined.