| This study uses the entwined themes of insularity and exile as analytical bases for exploring the works of six women writers from island nations in the Caribbean and in the Indian Ocean. These women, Monique Agenor of Reunion Island, Edwidge Danticat of Haiti, Ananda Devi of Mauritius, Nancy Morejon of Cuba, Gisele Pineau of Guadeloupe, and Michele Rakotoson of Madagascar, have elicited a fair amount of critical commentary and analysis. Most of the scholarship has, however, mainly focused on racial, ethnic, class, and gender contours in their writing while overlooking the particular position of the island and the island experience in thematizing the ambiguity of these very identities.; My thesis then engages in an investigation of the insular space as an emblematic topos through which binary oppositions of center/margin, male/female, homeland/hostland are articulated, negotiated, contested, and disseminated. Indeed, by virtue of its geographical position, the island offers a perfect model of autonomy and hence a prototype of a distinct, unified, and homogenous whole. But the island is also associated with journeys and travels, which open the door to the world, dissolve borders, and usher in a never-ending flux of exchange.; I argue that these women writers employ the island as a major organizational framework of their narratives to convey their dualistic and ambivalent identities, which are increasingly shifting to adapt to the exigencies of a globalizing modernity. In these writers' works, the very nature of insular identity challenges and deligitimizes absolute totalizing identities. Further, I propose that the highly ambivalent formulation of insular duality---represented here as ex/isle---can be used to critically explore the contextualization of increscent discourses on the psychologically compelling yet ephemeral notions of "home," "origin," and dis/re/location, as well as to dislodge paradigms based on binaries and dialectics of oppositional models of any kind.; Besides complementing research that explores the convergence of notions such as home and exile, this study will provide scholars in world literature, post-colonial studies, and women's studies with a clearer understanding of the complex impact of insularity on literature and on people from the most distant margins of the world. |
