In their récits d'enfance, the Guadeloupean authors Daniel Maximin and Gisèle Pineau explore the child's connection to the Antillean environment. Their approaches, however, are markedly different and comparison of their texts reveals significant contrasts in the child narrators’ experiences of place and space. While Maximin recalls his childhood in Guadeloupe, Pineau describes a childhood largely spent in metropolitan France. Nonetheless, for both authors the child's bond with the environment articulates a politics of landscape, through which history, memory, exile and diaspora come to the fore. Maximin's Tu, c'est l'enfance (2004) is structured around the physical exploration of Guadeloupean space and the environmental phenomena to which this space is subjected: earthquakes, cyclones and volcanic activity. In contrast, Pineau's L'exil selon Julia (1996) displays a concern with the lost landscapes of Guadeloupe and Africa, which are unfavourably juxtaposed with the lived landscape in France. Of all the texts in this study, Pineau's narrative presents the most searing articulation of diaspora, and vivid evocations of the lost land of origin prove both painful and essential to her exploration of identity.

In evoking the landscape, Maximin and Pineau depict the island's tropical plenitude but avoid the trap of exoticism. The earliest Antillean literature was marked by the doudouiste tradition perpetuated by béké authors such as Guadeloupean poet Poirié Saint–Aurèle (1795–1855), who celebrated the Antilles as a natural paradise in texts which were destined to captivate a metropolitan audience. The islands became an overdetermined, fetishized space, typified by ‘blue seas, golden sands, humming birds, luxuriant vegetation, and the physical grace of the Creole doudou ’, as Guadeloupean author Ernest Pépin has commented. The doudou, a stereotypically beautiful, desirable Creole woman, gave her name to a literary tradition, doudouisme, which was prominent in the later colonial era; this literature celebrated the beauty of the Antilles but remained blind to grittier social realities. Pépin provides a perceptive deconstruction of doudouiste literature, explaining that it