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Continuing the tradition? Michael Roch and the Afrofuturist turn in Martinican literature | Research Seminar | Dr Laura Kennedy (French Department)
This talk will introduce the up-and-coming writer Michael Roch, who is spearheading a moment within Martinican literature.
A Science Fiction and Afrofuturist author and screenwriter, Roch is the pioneer of what he has branded as Franco-Caribbean Science Fiction: a genre that deals with contemporary issues facing the region such as climate change, accelerated globalisation, and rapid advances in technology. With his latest interventions, Roch has begun to explicitly align himself with the Martinican literary tradition, directly alluding to and expanding key concepts first developed by Martinican writers Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau. In this paper, I will argue that Roch is continuing and galvanising the Martinican literary tradition of Glissant and Chamoiseau, focusing particularly on his 2022 novel Tè Mawon and its relationship of both continuity and rupture with the work of its literary predecessors. In positioning Roch as the latest “son” in the exclusive, highly selective, and strongly gendered Martinican literary family tree – with Chamoiseau the father and Glissant the grandfather – this paper will thus be a reflection on the intergenerational tendency of literature from and about Martinique, offering insight into the Afrofuturist turn of the literary tradition as embodied through the work of Roch.
Dr Laura Kennedy is a Lecturer in the Department of French at UCC. She is a broad-based postcolonial literary scholar with a strong specialism in North Africa and the French Caribbean. Her research has been published in journals such as The French Review, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and the Irish Journal of French Studies, and her first monograph, on the politics and poetics of language in francophone and anglophone world literature, is under contract with Liverpool University Press.