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The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 thrust the nation into the public consciousness as never before. That terrible event piqued interest in a remarkable country with a rich history as both the first black republic in the world and the first country to break free of European imperialism in Latin America. Haiti Rising brings together more than 20 of the most prominent authorities on Haiti in to provide both a historical and cultural introduction to Haiti and a chance for earthquake survivors to testify to their experiences. Ranging widely across politics, society, history, art and culture, contributors such as Maryse Condé, Yanick Lahens, Evelyne Trouillot, J. Michael Dash and Laurent Dubois illuminate this most extraordinary of countries and the tragedy that befell it in 2010. Haiti Rising will stand as a written document of this cataclysmic event in Haitian history and as a monument to the experiences of those who were in Haiti at the time of the earthquake. It is vital reading for anyone who wants to find out more about Haiti, and the prospects for its future. All royalties from the book will be donated to the Haitian Art Relief Fund.
Our Civilizing Mission is both an exploration of colonial education and a response to current anxieties about the foundations of the ‘humanities’. Focusing on the example of Algeria, it asks what can be learned by treating colonial education not just as an example of colonialism but as a provocative, uncomfortable example of education.
This book argues that contemporary Haitian literature historicizes the political and environmental problems raised by the 2010 earthquake by building on texts of earlier generations. It contends that this literary "eco-archive" challenges universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene with depictions of migration and refuge within Haiti and around the Americas.
Phonographic Memories is the first book-length analysis of Caribbean popular music in the Caribbean novel. Tracing a region-wide poetics that attends to the centrality of Caribbean music in retrieving and replaying personal and cultural memories, Hamilton offers a fresh perspective on musical nationalism and nostalgic memory in the era of globalization.
Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.
This volume is the product of a long-term collaboration between French and American scholars who share a common preoccupation with reading canonical and contemporary works of literature and cinema in a theoretical and pedagogical context. It offers a multipolar approach, informed by different historical, thematic, aesthetic, philosophical and formal perspectives, that allows for a more complete and nuanced understanding of the complex relations between artists and works commonly separated by disciplinary boundaries. The chapters cover a variety of literary genres and artistic forms such as the novel (Madame de Lafayette, Gustave Flaubert, André Weckmann, Ahmadou Kourouma, Calixthe Beyala, a...
This book analyses how the idea – or the problem - of belonging is articulated in a range of contemporary francophone Mauritian novels. Waters explores how forms of affective belonging intersect with the exclusionary ‘politics of belonging’ in novels by Nathacha Appanah, Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, Bertrand de Robillard, Amal Sewtohul and Carl de Souza.
In considering cultural works from French-speaking North Africa and the Middle East all published or released in France from 1962-2011, Solheim’s study of listening across cultural genres will be of interest to any scholar curious about contemporary postcolonial France.
Traces of War examines how the trauma of the Second World War influenced the work of the brilliant generation of writers and intellectuals who lived through it.
Entangled Otherness explores the dynamics of cross-dressing and gender performance in contemporary francophone Caribbean cultures through a range of visual and textual media. Original in its comparative focus on the islands of Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe and their diasporic communities in France, this study reveals how opaque strategies of crossing, mimicry and masquerade have enabled resistance to the racialised, gendered and patriarchal classifications of bodies that characterized Enlightenment thought during the French transatlantic slave trade. It engages with archival texts of pre-revolutionary Haiti to offer a historical understanding of current constructions of Caribbean gender most...