Sugar’s Sequels: Inventing Traditions in the Plantation Saga Novels of Martinique and Brazil

Abstract

This essay will consider how plantation culture, and by extension, national culture, is reflected in two literary sagas that depict life in sugar-producing regions of the New World, one by the Brazilian regionalist writer José Lins do Rego (1901-1957) and the other by the Martinican créoliste author Raphaël Confiant (b. 1951). The serialization - in other words, the narrative and temporal continuity - of Confiant’s trilogie sucrière (sugar trilogy) and Lins do Rego’s cíclo da cana de açúcar (sugarcane cycle), provides particularly fertile terrain for exploring the function of repetition and self-referentiality as they relate to literary production and the construction and promulgation of Martinican and Brazilian national identity.