The Gospel According to Maryse Condé: Black Feminist Literary Ethic in <i>L’Évangile du nouveau monde</i> (2021) and What’s Love and Laughter Got to Do with It

This essay considers L’Évangile du nouveau monde (2021), Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé's last published novel during her lifetime, to be a victory lap of her œuvre, one in which she revisits her greatest thematic and poetic hits, while reaffirming her allegiance to social justice and the freedom of literature. Pascal, the novel's main protagonist, is a floundering full-time messiah and part-time author who travels from the Caribbean to Brazil via New York, bearing witness — albeit poorly — to some of the world's most pressing issues: police brutality, misogyny, xenophobia, exploitative work practices, and more. Behind Pascal's struggles to fulfill his mission to bring harmony to the world with his writings, Condé playfully conceals a capacious literary ethic rooted in humor, as an essential mode of critique, and love, as a Black feminist reading and writing praxis that insists on the complementary roles of intellectual mothers and fathers in the project of global emancipation.