This volume traces multiple and intersecting Caribbean crossings in the work of the award-winning Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, who passed away in 2024 (1934– 2024). Among the most fêted and well-known contemporary global writers working in French, Condé’s work features extensively on undergraduate and graduate syllabi and is widely read and translated within and beyond the Francophone world. Her writings—like her life—have crossed continents, from sub-Saharan Africa, to Europe, to North America and across the Caribbean archipelago. As she herself wrote in 1993, “We live in a world where, already, frontiers have ceased to exist.” The concept of the crossing—already prominent in the title of Condé’s 1989 novel, Crossing the Mangrove—goes beyond the spatial in Condé’s literary imaginary, to encompass further temporal and spiritual realms. Condé’s intersecting, doubled, spectral stories illustrate how the past—histories of enslavement, the Middle Passage, colonial occupation, racial discrimination, bereavement, filial alienation—can resurface in successive generations. Intertextual crossings and borrowings; literary cannibalism and hybridity are notably exemplified in Condé’s later writings, particularly texts such as The Story of the Cannibal Woman (2005) and in her final novel, The Gospel According to the New World (2021). Critical approaches that emphasize this syncretic, plural quality of Condé’s literary style along with queer, creole, and feminist readings have led the way in twenty-first-century scholarly evaluation of Condé’s oeuvre. Such readings further enrich the central concept of crossings within this volume marking the passing of Maryse Condé, which also includes a foreword by her husband and translator Richard Philcox, and her final, unfinished piece of writing, Le “mentir vrai”.
