Words of yesteryear and duty of memory in ‘The fourth century’, by Édouard Glissant
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2019.42883Keywords:
Caribbean literature, duty of memory, oral history, dispossession of history, cultural identity.Abstract
This article aims to analyze the “duty of memory” in the novel The Fourth Century, published in 1964 by the Martinican writer ÉdouardGlissant. It intends to highlight, in the novelistic text, the colonial domination and the resistance in Martinique by the observation of the dramas and adventures of four generations of the families Longoue and Béluse, slaves that arrived in Martinique in 1788 during the French colonial company and the slave trade. The novel/saga examines the oral story to tell the local history from the point of view of slaves and their heirs, refusing the soliloquy of the colonizer and the danger of the unique story. It is a matter of weakening the official historiography, testifying ways between the dispossession and the appropriation of the history and celebrating the rehabilitation of the ancestral African voice by means of a griot and a quimboiseur to make emerges the word of yesteryear and the black soul of the Caribbean.
---
Original in French.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authorization
Matraga – Scientific Journal of the Post-graduate Program in Arts and Humanities of UERJ is authorized to publish the article submitted here, if it is accepted for online publication. It is attested that the contribution is original, that it is not being submitted to another publisher for publication, and that this statement is the expression of truth.
The works published in Matraga's virtual space – Scientific Journal of the Post-graduate Program in Arts and Humanities of UERJ will be automatically transferred, and your copyright is reserved to Matraga. Its reproduction, in whole or in part, is conditional on the citation of the authors and the data of the publication.

Matraga uses license Creative Commons - Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International.