. “Policing Postcolonial Theory in Maryse Condé’s Crossing the Mangrove.”

This article studies Caribbean literature as an expression of thought in relation to the development of a postcolonial discourse on creole identity in the Caribbean Archipelago, a string of islands of blurred boundaries. Caribbean writers, indeed, have always investigated and explored different (post)colonial approaches to literary texts. They made it clear that postcolonial  discourse  must  cease  to  treat  creole  Caribbeans  as  an  ‘otherness  machine’ (Suleri). In Crossing the Mangrove, the French-Caribbean Maryse Condé deconstructs the binary thinking of postcolonial theoreticians by depicting a community of creoles brought together by Francis Sanchez, a homeless character. Within the scope of this paper, I intend to provide both a perspective on the relation between Condé’s Crossing the Mangrove and postcolonial studies, and an instance of how Condé can engage in debates about policing literary theory by questioning postcolonialism’s status and by policing postcolonialism