How might non-indigenous, post-slavery, irrevocably traumatized, and broken individuals and communities such as those described by the Spiralists possibly hope to take possession of the island landscape and to escape the tragic history to which this landscape has borne witness? This is a question that has implicitly and explicitly determined the treatment of time and space in Caribbean literature since the very beginning of the nineteenth century, and such concerns as the “repossession” of history and the landscape have since become veritable catchphrases in literature and theory of the (French-speaking) Americas. Césaire's and Brathwaite's reliance on an historical and geographical linkage between Africa and the Caribbean and their passionate evocations of the Middle Passage, Walcott's and Fanon's call to resist divisive investigations of the historical misdeeds of whites and the sufferings of blacks, Glissant's quest for tangible moorings in the histories (as opposed to the History) and landscapes of the New World, and Chamoiseau's and Confiant's efforts to find literary inspiration in the absence of an epic past or proud sense of place are only some examples of the levels at which Caribbean intellectuals have engaged themselves in explorations of regional history and space in the formulation of their philosophical and aesthetic perspectives.

The interrelatedness of temporal and spatial elements as the impetus for theoretical reflection and narrative drama is, of course, by no means unique to Caribbean or New World aesthetic traditions. As Mikhail Bakhtin has famously explained in his reflections on the chronotope, the literary presentation of time and space reflects the most basic components of any given society. The chronotope provides, Bakhtin asserts, “an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring” (425–26).