ABSTRACT
As an international Guadeloupean female author Maryse Conde negotiates the categories of writer, critic and academic with an acute awareness of the conditions of reception of her work. Johnson's analysis of the interview as situated within a nexus of relations structured both by societal expectations and authorial intention points to a broadening of the implicitly particular or individual relationship between author and reader in terms of author and 'reading public' or 'society'. The significance of Guadeloupe as a field of reception for Conde's work is rendered evident by her repeated and often contradictory comments concerning her relationship to her country of 'origin'. Commenting on the reception of her work in France, Conde characterizes the general tenor of reviews of her work in the French media as 'exoticizing'. This literary space is also one of constitution and dissolution of the authorial identity of Conde herself.
