Books by Christina Kullberg
Palgrave MacMillan, 2023
This open-access book investigates Francophone Caribbean literature by exploring and analyzing Fr... more This open-access book investigates Francophone Caribbean literature by exploring and analyzing French seventeenth-century travel writings. The book argues for a literary re-examination of the representation of the early colonial Caribbean by proposing theoretical linkages to contemporary Caribbean theories of creolization and archipelagic thinking. Using Édouard Glissant’s notion of points of entanglement, Christina Kullberg claims that the historical, social, and political messiness of the Caribbean seventeenth century make for complex representations and expressions, generating textual instability despite the travelers’ apparent desires to domesticate the islands. Taking a synoptic approach to travel narratives in French from 1620 up to the publication of Labat’s Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique in 1722, Kullberg examines textual instances where the islands and the peoples of this period disrupt and unsettle dominant French narratives and enter productively into the construction of knowledge and the representations of the region. Kullberg’s contribution is to read French early modern travels in situ as shaped by the archipelagic geography, its history and social formations in order to interrogate both the construction and the limitations of discourses of power.
Brill, 2020
Introduction to:
Cette étude propose d’examiner les ramifications historiques de l’exotisme à par... more Introduction to:
Cette étude propose d’examiner les ramifications historiques de l’exotisme à partir d’une lecture critique de l’ Histoire générale des Antilles (1654/1667-71) écrite par le missionnaire dominicain, Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre. En procédant d’une analyse littéraire, notre étude suggère une reconfiguration de l’exotisme basée à la fois sur la théorisation contemporaine et sur le contexte historique et l’esthétique de l’époque. Notre travail se veut donc à la fois théorique en offrant une analyse critique des différentes orientations de l’exotisme ; et historique, en présentant une lecture approfondie d’une œuvre dont l’importance est considérable aussi bien pour l’histoire de la littérature française et antillaise que pour l’histoire de l’anthropologie. À cet égard, cette étude fournira aussi une exploration de la toute première colonisation française des îles et de la manière dont elle a été représentée.
Brill/Francopolyphonies, 2020
Cette étude propose d’examiner les ramifications historiques de l’exotisme à partir d’une lecture... more Cette étude propose d’examiner les ramifications historiques de l’exotisme à partir d’une lecture critique de l’ Histoire générale des Antilles (1654/1667-71) écrite par le missionnaire dominicain, Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre. En procédant d’une analyse littéraire, notre étude suggère une reconfiguration de l’exotisme basée à la fois sur la théorisation contemporaine et sur le contexte historique et l’esthétique de l’époque. Notre travail se veut donc à la fois théorique en offrant une analyse critique des différentes orientations de l’exotisme ; et historique, en présentant une lecture approfondie d’une œuvre dont l’importance est considérable aussi bien pour l’histoire de la littérature française et antillaise que pour l’histoire de l’anthropologie. À cet égard, cette étude fournira aussi une exploration de la toute première colonisation française des îles et de la manière dont elle a été représentée.
Time and Temporalities in European Travel Writing, 2021
This chapter investigates how Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre’s Histoire Générale de... more This chapter investigates how Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre’s Histoire Générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1667) placed the French settlements in the Caribbean within a classical and biblical timeframe. Mythological European temporality was thus linked to the politics of early colonisation and missions, creating a historical narrative of the French Antilles built on competing temporalities. The chapter studies metaphors, iterations, and visual images employed to create coherence within the layered and competing temporalities at play. Such temporal juxtapositions place the colony’s American adventure in the lineage of a European heritage, as if the author let the ‘sigh of History’ sweep over the Caribbean as a supplement for what Derek Walcott has described as the region’s absence of ruins. Kullberg argues that they infuse the text with competing temporalities pointing backwards and elsewhere while at the same time operating as a prolepse, hinting to the future. The analysis shows how Du Tertre embeds the story of French colonialism with a sense of moving forward, towards a new community to come, at the same time as this very movement not only temporally displaces the islands but also excludes Native inhabitants and enslaved people from the imagined futurity.
Time and Temporalities in European Travel Writing, 2021
This book is a collective effort to investigate and problematise notions of time and temporality ... more This book is a collective effort to investigate and problematise notions of time and temporality in European travel writing from the late medieval period up to the late nineteenth century. It brings together nine researchers in European travel writing and covers a wide range of areas, travel genres, and languages, coherently integrated around the central theme of time and temporalities. Taken together, the contributions consider how temporal aspects evolve and change in regard to spatial, historical, and literary contexts. In a chapter-by-chapter account this volume thus offers various case studies that address the issue of temporality by showing, for example, how time is inscribed in landscape, how travellers’ encounters with other temporalities informed other disciplines; it interrogates the idea of "cultural temporalities" in regard to a tension between past and future, passivity and progression; and focuses on how time is entangled in identity construction proper to travelogues.
L'Harmattan, 2020
La Guadeloupe 1790. Un créole et un mulâtre, devenus amis inséparables sous l'égide des idéaux ré... more La Guadeloupe 1790. Un créole et un mulâtre, devenus amis inséparables sous l'égide des idéaux républicains, sont de retour aux îles. Cette fraternité peut-elle survivre dans une société coloniale et esclavagiste ? Les Créoles ou La Vie aux Antilles explore l'écart entre les idées des Lumières et leur applicabilité dans une Guadeloupe parcourue par les soulèvements des Noirs esclaves. Publié en 1835 alors que le débat sur l'esclavage et les relations interraciales resurgit en France, le roman est encore d'actualité aujourd'hui lorsque nous réinterrogeons les ramifications historiques des inégalités raciales. Nouvelle édition critique du roman de Jospeh Levilloux, publié en 1835, avec une présentation de Christina Kullberg
Karib: Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies, 2018
The outbreak of the 1791–1804 Haitian revolution shook the imperial powers of Europe and the U.S.... more The outbreak of the 1791–1804 Haitian revolution shook the imperial powers of Europe and the U.S. Never before had the enslaved rebelled so powerfully, and in the decades to come, the name of the once-lucrative colony, Saint-Domingue, provoked anxiety and suspicion. In 2010, Western eyes again turned to Haiti as a devastating earthquake hit the island. Natural forces, together with poverty and inadequate infrastructure, caused a major humanitarian crisis.
Taking its point of departure in the intersection of politics and aesthetics, this special issue of Karib probes the global responses to these events and explores the repercussions within the frame of emergent and contemporary modernity.
The articles originate from a conference held in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2017, but they have since been considerably worked over. We were happy to have the opportunity to discuss the manifold roles of Haiti in a globalized world at the conference. This collection of essays presents some of the thoughts, questions, and ideas that made up the intellectual framework of the 2017 conference. As a journal, Karib is a platform for voices in Caribbean Studies in the Nordic region, and we hope that other Haiti scholars here and elsewhere will take this special issue as a point of departure for criticizing and further developing the ideas presented in this issue.
Cet article explore le rôle et la présence des arbres et des forêts dans deux romans antillais: É... more Cet article explore le rôle et la présence des arbres et des forêts dans deux romans antillais: Édouard Glissant (Mahagony) et Maryse Condé (Traversée de la mangrove). Nous verrons que les arbres agissent et s’inscrivent dans la poétique même des textes et nous tenterons de montrer comment ces auteurs forgent une sorte d’écriture arborescente qui s’enracine dans le local tout en tendant vers le monde extérieur. En se servant des arbres pour repenser le rapport à leur réalité passée et présente, entre violence et beauté, révolte et soumission, ces auteurs tentent, à travers l’écriture, d’articuler différemment le sujet postcolonial. Par le biais de cette interrogation, les enjeux sont également théoriques. L’article cherche à mettre en question une certaine opposition qui s’est établie entre d’une part une écocritique, basée sur les cultural studies dont font partie les études postcoloniales, et d’autre part une écopoétique focalisée sur le texte. Nous parlerons donc d’une écopoétique située où le contexte culturel, social, historique et littéraire surgit du texte même et entre dans l’écriture comme force créatrice.
Antologin Litteratur i gränszonen analyserar texter som uppstått i sammanhang där olika språk mer... more Antologin Litteratur i gränszonen analyserar texter som uppstått i sammanhang där olika språk mer eller mindre frivilligt samexisterar och ställer frågan om vad som händer när verk vandrar från ett språk till ett annat, från en kontext till en annan. Boken stammar ur ett antal workshopar kring översättning och reception av utomeuropeiska litteraturer i Norden och samlar forskningsrapporter från tio forskare från olika ämnen som kritiskt diskuterar olika aspekter av transnationalism i litteraturen i relation till översättning. Uppsatserna bidrar inte bara till att belysa hur vi genom litteraturen bemöter det främmande utan har också som syfte att synliggöra och problematisera Noredns plats på det världslitterära fältet.
This thesis deals with the role of urban space in Patrick Chamoiseau's first three novels. Observ... more This thesis deals with the role of urban space in Patrick Chamoiseau's first three novels. Observing that the colonial city is often stigmatized in French Caribbean literature and that Chamoiseau's style changes as his following novels are set elsewhere, the study has as its goal an assessment of the ways in which urban space determines his writing.
Paradoxically Chamoiseau appropriates colonial discourses, namely ethnography and history. Focusing on the novels' ethnographic aspects, the first part examines the development of a writer-figure through whom meta-fictive problems are introduced and ways to approach the city are dramatized. The analyses show that Chamoiseau's writing negotiates between different entities in the texts and engender a polyphonic style, close to James Clifford's notion of surrealist ethnography. However the study also demonstrates that Chamoiseau plays with ethnography's documentary dimensions in order to situate his writing. The second part deals with the discourse of history. It investigates how the past is integrated in the narrative form of a chronicle, establishing a Creole identity and cultural heritage connected with urban space. Drawing from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this study shows that Chamoiseau's fictional city is constructed as a plane of composition where power and deterritorializing movements of marginalized characters operate simultaneously. Chamoiseau turns the city into a place where Creole heritage is not only inscribed in the past, but also constantly renewed.
This study ultimately argues that the way Chamoiseau deals with urban space places his writing at the heart of certain esthetical reflections of Western modern literature. Since Chamoiseau's Fort-de-France is a space of transformation, the desire to situate the texts is not necessarily a sign of self-centered cultural nostalgia. Chamoiseau's urban novels question how inscription in and engagement with the local may resist forces of homogenization and add to the dynamics of the global.
Drawing on narratives from Martinique by Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, Ina Césaire, and Patrick... more Drawing on narratives from Martinique by Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, Ina Césaire, and Patrick Chamoiseau, among others, this book shows how these writers turn to ethnography --- even as they critique it --- as an exploration and expression of the self. They acknowledge its traditions as a colonial discourse and a study of others, but they also argue for ethnography's advantage in connecting subjectivity to the outside world. Further, they find that ethnography offers the possibility of capturing within the hybrid cultures of the Caribbean an emergent self that nonetheless remains attached to its collective history and environment.
Papers by Christina Kullberg
Transcultural Identity Constructions in a Changing World
Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures, 2022
Kreolisering, arkipelagiskt tankande, opacitet, relation, spar och kringflackande -- i Relationen... more Kreolisering, arkipelagiskt tankande, opacitet, relation, spar och kringflackande -- i Relationens filosofi ryms alla de viktiga begreppen i Edouard Glissants langa forfattarska. Det ar ett sallsamt tankande som vaxer fram ur erfarenheterna fran de karibiska oarna: det koloniala arvet och den kreolska kulturen. Att fa kunskap ar "bokstavligen att rora sig fran plats till plats" skriver Glissant, och syftar pa textens geografi lika mycket som pa varldens. Ordens och tankens rotloshet blir en forutsattning for en filosofi i vardande. Men denna texts utpraglat poetiska rorelse ar aven politisk. Det ar en filosofi som varken forbiser eller soker forsoning med den smartsamma historien -- de sjunkna slavskeppen och de tystade ursprungen -- utan istallet gor den till sin utgangspunkt och anvander den for att driva vidare in i framtiden.
When Pere Labat, a Dominican missionary to the French Caribbean between 1697 and 1709, embarks on... more When Pere Labat, a Dominican missionary to the French Caribbean between 1697 and 1709, embarks on the ship that would take him to Martinique, he is sick and not far from dying. Miraculously, however, he recovers within a few days. This initial scene of sickness and recovery will be repeated throughout Labat's Voyage aux isles de l'Amerique, as if this travelogue really was a story of convalescence and even of resurrection. Stories of illness is a common ingredient in travel literature from the Caribbean at this time. Nevertheless, in positioning himself as the victim of various diseases Labat changes the parameters not only for the representation of illness, but also for the idea of subjectivity. This presentation investigates how Labat via discourses on illness constitutes his own body as a central locus for naturalist explorations of the Caribbean. I argue that the shift from observing the outside world to observing his own body as it is effected by the Caribbean milieu is...
La question que nous aborderons dans cet article est de savoir comment le sujet s'articule da... more La question que nous aborderons dans cet article est de savoir comment le sujet s'articule dans deux recits de voyage du debut de la colonisation francaise des Antilles : L’Histoire generale des An ...
This presentation places itself within the topic “Travelers, or the transformation of identities.... more This presentation places itself within the topic “Travelers, or the transformation of identities.” However, dealing with travel writing from the middle of the 17th century the notion of identity is ...
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Books by Christina Kullberg
Cette étude propose d’examiner les ramifications historiques de l’exotisme à partir d’une lecture critique de l’ Histoire générale des Antilles (1654/1667-71) écrite par le missionnaire dominicain, Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre. En procédant d’une analyse littéraire, notre étude suggère une reconfiguration de l’exotisme basée à la fois sur la théorisation contemporaine et sur le contexte historique et l’esthétique de l’époque. Notre travail se veut donc à la fois théorique en offrant une analyse critique des différentes orientations de l’exotisme ; et historique, en présentant une lecture approfondie d’une œuvre dont l’importance est considérable aussi bien pour l’histoire de la littérature française et antillaise que pour l’histoire de l’anthropologie. À cet égard, cette étude fournira aussi une exploration de la toute première colonisation française des îles et de la manière dont elle a été représentée.
Taking its point of departure in the intersection of politics and aesthetics, this special issue of Karib probes the global responses to these events and explores the repercussions within the frame of emergent and contemporary modernity.
The articles originate from a conference held in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2017, but they have since been considerably worked over. We were happy to have the opportunity to discuss the manifold roles of Haiti in a globalized world at the conference. This collection of essays presents some of the thoughts, questions, and ideas that made up the intellectual framework of the 2017 conference. As a journal, Karib is a platform for voices in Caribbean Studies in the Nordic region, and we hope that other Haiti scholars here and elsewhere will take this special issue as a point of departure for criticizing and further developing the ideas presented in this issue.
Paradoxically Chamoiseau appropriates colonial discourses, namely ethnography and history. Focusing on the novels' ethnographic aspects, the first part examines the development of a writer-figure through whom meta-fictive problems are introduced and ways to approach the city are dramatized. The analyses show that Chamoiseau's writing negotiates between different entities in the texts and engender a polyphonic style, close to James Clifford's notion of surrealist ethnography. However the study also demonstrates that Chamoiseau plays with ethnography's documentary dimensions in order to situate his writing. The second part deals with the discourse of history. It investigates how the past is integrated in the narrative form of a chronicle, establishing a Creole identity and cultural heritage connected with urban space. Drawing from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this study shows that Chamoiseau's fictional city is constructed as a plane of composition where power and deterritorializing movements of marginalized characters operate simultaneously. Chamoiseau turns the city into a place where Creole heritage is not only inscribed in the past, but also constantly renewed.
This study ultimately argues that the way Chamoiseau deals with urban space places his writing at the heart of certain esthetical reflections of Western modern literature. Since Chamoiseau's Fort-de-France is a space of transformation, the desire to situate the texts is not necessarily a sign of self-centered cultural nostalgia. Chamoiseau's urban novels question how inscription in and engagement with the local may resist forces of homogenization and add to the dynamics of the global.
Papers by Christina Kullberg
Cette étude propose d’examiner les ramifications historiques de l’exotisme à partir d’une lecture critique de l’ Histoire générale des Antilles (1654/1667-71) écrite par le missionnaire dominicain, Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre. En procédant d’une analyse littéraire, notre étude suggère une reconfiguration de l’exotisme basée à la fois sur la théorisation contemporaine et sur le contexte historique et l’esthétique de l’époque. Notre travail se veut donc à la fois théorique en offrant une analyse critique des différentes orientations de l’exotisme ; et historique, en présentant une lecture approfondie d’une œuvre dont l’importance est considérable aussi bien pour l’histoire de la littérature française et antillaise que pour l’histoire de l’anthropologie. À cet égard, cette étude fournira aussi une exploration de la toute première colonisation française des îles et de la manière dont elle a été représentée.
Taking its point of departure in the intersection of politics and aesthetics, this special issue of Karib probes the global responses to these events and explores the repercussions within the frame of emergent and contemporary modernity.
The articles originate from a conference held in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2017, but they have since been considerably worked over. We were happy to have the opportunity to discuss the manifold roles of Haiti in a globalized world at the conference. This collection of essays presents some of the thoughts, questions, and ideas that made up the intellectual framework of the 2017 conference. As a journal, Karib is a platform for voices in Caribbean Studies in the Nordic region, and we hope that other Haiti scholars here and elsewhere will take this special issue as a point of departure for criticizing and further developing the ideas presented in this issue.
Paradoxically Chamoiseau appropriates colonial discourses, namely ethnography and history. Focusing on the novels' ethnographic aspects, the first part examines the development of a writer-figure through whom meta-fictive problems are introduced and ways to approach the city are dramatized. The analyses show that Chamoiseau's writing negotiates between different entities in the texts and engender a polyphonic style, close to James Clifford's notion of surrealist ethnography. However the study also demonstrates that Chamoiseau plays with ethnography's documentary dimensions in order to situate his writing. The second part deals with the discourse of history. It investigates how the past is integrated in the narrative form of a chronicle, establishing a Creole identity and cultural heritage connected with urban space. Drawing from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this study shows that Chamoiseau's fictional city is constructed as a plane of composition where power and deterritorializing movements of marginalized characters operate simultaneously. Chamoiseau turns the city into a place where Creole heritage is not only inscribed in the past, but also constantly renewed.
This study ultimately argues that the way Chamoiseau deals with urban space places his writing at the heart of certain esthetical reflections of Western modern literature. Since Chamoiseau's Fort-de-France is a space of transformation, the desire to situate the texts is not necessarily a sign of self-centered cultural nostalgia. Chamoiseau's urban novels question how inscription in and engagement with the local may resist forces of homogenization and add to the dynamics of the global.