In this paper I investigate the development of the ethnographic reference in French Caribbean literature focusing on two autobiographical essays: Édouard Glissant’s Soleil de la conscience (1956) and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Écrire en pays dominé (1997). As opposed to the journal Tropiques which tended to use ethnography to describe rural Creole popular culture, Glissant and Chamoiseau set their texts in Paris and, indirectly referring to Michel Leiris, turn themselves and their role as authors into the object of literary ethnographic exploration. I argue that in Glissant’s and Chamoiseau’s texts the inscription of ethnography implies the participation of the narrator/observer and tries to capture a changing reality and not as an instrument to define culture as a fixed object of knowledge. My hypothesis is that as a result, the use of ethnography in Martinican literature takes a different turn and becomes a means for questioning the relationships between fiction and documentary, past and present, subject and community, between narrator, observer and the world.