The Disengaged Immigrant: Mapping the Francophone Caribbean Metropolis
As an exemplary locus of crosscultural contact, the city offers fertile ground for theories of hybridity, transnationalism, and globalization. Today's metropolis signals the transformative and transforming identifications, the new axes of belonging and exclusion, and the reconfiguring of national and regional borders occurring across the globe, while at the same time occupying a privileged role as the quintessential space of transnationalism. Recent work on postcolonial urban spaces has foregrounded the incidence of the immigrant in these transformations: emblem of the era's mass migrations, this cultural outsider is paradoxically of the new global city, fundamentally changing the fabric of the metropolis through the crosscultural exchange his or her inscription in urban daily life embodies.1 The productive encounters generated by these intersections thus reveal a dependence on the figure of the immigrant, a need for both the presence and the dialogical engagement of the exogenous city dweller in the construction of a transnational metropolitanism. This essay seeks to examine the particular terms of this engagement through a consideration of two recent novels of Francophone Caribbean migration: Marie-Celie Agnant's La Dot de Sara (1995) and Gisele Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia (1996). As contributions to the growing canon on Francophone Caribbean exile in Western metropolitan settings, these novels recall inaugural voices such as Cesaire's and Fanon's as well as later works by Michele Lacrosil, Andre and Simone Schwarz-Bart, Myriam Warner- Vieyra, and Joseph Zobel.2 While Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia reflects a recurrent preoccupation with the autobiographically inflected subject of French metropolitan exile, La Dot de Sara is Agnant's first novel and effects a Haitian-Canadian displacement of this Parisian setting in the tradition of Dany Laferriere and Emile Ollivier.3 Amongst these myr