Caribbean writing in French is commonly conceptualized in a number of now-familiar modes: as a poetics, from, say, Oswald Durand and Saint-John Perse to the incendiary surrealism of Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Édouard Glissant's Poétique de la relation; as a literature, from Frédéric Mercelin or Jacques Roumain to Maryse Condé or Gisèle Pineau; as a history, from Columbus's journals and plantation ledgers to the letters of Toussaint Louverture and the annals of departmentalization and decolonization. This book proposes instead that Caribbean writing in French is grasped in its most essential characteristics when conceptualized as a practice of critique. This is to argue that while the various genres of Antillean writing are manifold, encompassing letters and novels, histories and polemical tracts, poems and theoretical works, the unifying characteristic of the outstanding texts from this tradition is their status as works of critique – as writings, that is, that cry out in insubordination and aversion to the state of their world (above all, that of plantation slavery and colonialism), and that seek to articulate the promise that another world is possible.

From a philosophical perspective, Caribbean Critique seeks to define and analyze the distinctive contribution of francophone Caribbean thinkers to post-Kantian critical theory, the latter understood not as an academic field, but as a project of practical reason called, as Marx famously argued, not merely to describing the world, but to changing it. The book argues that the singular endeavor of these thinkers has been to forge a brand of critique that, while borrowing tools from North Atlantic predecessors such as Rousseau, Diderot, Robespierre, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, was from the start marked indelibly by the experiential imperatives of the Middle Passage, slavery, and imperialism, as well as the contestatory resources of Vodun and African theoretical traditions such as the Mande human rights Charter of 1222.