In 1990 Patrick Chamoiseau published Antan d'enfance, catalysing the contemporary Antillean turn towards récits d'enfance. A sequel, Chemind’école (1994), quickly followed, and the pair of texts were subsequently republished and repackaged as Une enfance créole, a strategy which drew attention to the intentional narrative continuities between them. Some eleven years later Une Enfance créole was established as a trilogy with the publication of A Bout d'enfance (2005). All three titles appear in Gallimard's ‘Haute enfance’ series. Exploring his personal development from the earliest stage of infancy through the perils of schooling under the French education system to the throes of adolescence, Chamoiseau traverses both individual and collective subject matter in literature which, although heavily influenced by the autobiographical tradition, is rich in self–aware contradiction and artifice.

The notion of créolité as laid out in Eloge de la créolité is particularly evident in Une Enfance créole, and there are significant intersections, overlaps and developments between the views set out in Eloge and the ways in which Chamoiseau's childhood memoirs emphasize the capacity for Antillean – and specifically Creole – culture to successfully oppose European hegemony. The conspicuous absence of a scene of recognition in the trilogy would appear to indicate that the author's energies are channelled into the denunciation of ‘les fastes [du] français universel’. Through their unrelenting emphasis on Antillean agency in the face of cultural domination, Chamoiseau's récits d'enfance play out a number of postcolonial scenarios of resistance. Homi K. Bhabha has argued for the agency of colonized peoples in The Location of Culture, and his theory of mimicry opens up critical insights into how structures of domination and resistance inform Chamoiseau's texts. Bhabha develops mimicry by drawing on discourse on colonial education from India and the Caribbean, evidence of the transnational valency of mimicry. His analysis is inspired by Macaulay's ‘Minute’ about the British need to educate a class of Indian civil servants, and Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul's novel The Mimic Men. Without wishing to collapse the differences between British and French colonial rule, or to play down the attention Chamoiseau pays to the Antillean specificities of the situations he presents, this chapter observes a number of points of contact between Bhabha's notion of mimicry and Chamoiseau's trilogy.