Representations of childhood are anything but simple. Childhood may be, on the one hand, a democratic trope which derives its appeal from the fact that it is a stage common to all humankind, or it may serve to emphasize the intense alienation and isolation of individual experience. Writing about childhood can function as an initiation into an unknown society, the child's learning curve correlating with that of the reader. Alternatively, it may be an act of consolidation, as readers – particularly those who are familiar with the context being described – identify recognizable experiences. While childhood often evokes nostalgia and celebration of (a lost) innocence, it is just as frequently used in order to cast a critical eye over significant moments of social conditioning or indoctrination, and their consequences.

The literary accounts of childhood examined in this study are strongly aligned with autobiography. Autobiographical forms of writing in Francophone Caribbean literature have, however, long been neglected, occupying an annexed position in both an individual author's wider output and the critical studies of such works. Autobiography is not a major identifiable genre in Francophone Caribbean literature before the 1990s. Prior to this, the overwhelming majority of authors approached questions of identity formation from the standpoint of collective identity, rather than examining the minutiae of individual identity formation. The early twentieth–century cultural movement of négritude shaped intellectual debates in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, and their diasporas. With its focus on uniting black peoples and emphasis on Africa, négritude imposed a fascination with collectivity and elsewhere which is likely to have dissuaded Francophone Caribbean authors from engaging with their immediate surroundings through the solipsistic genre of autobiography.

This relative lack of an autobiographical tradition in Francophone Caribbean literature contrasts sharply with contemporary literature of the same period from the former British Caribbean colonies and North America. The origins of Anglophone African American literatures can be traced to a tradition of slave autobiographies by authors such as Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano (who settled in the United Kingdom) and Harriet Jacobs.