You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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.
What are the effects of a catastrophic earthquake on a society, its culture and politics? Which of these effects are temporary, and which endure? Are the various effects immediately discernible, or do they manifest themselves over time? What roles do artists, and writers in particular have in witnessing, bearing testimony to, and gauging the effects of natural disasters? What is the worth of literature in a time of disaster? These are the fundamental questions addressed in this book, which examines the case of the Haitian earthquake of 12 January 2010, a uniquely destructive event in the recent history of cataclysmic disasters, in Haiti and the broader world. The book argues that Haitian lit...
The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art is situated at the crossroads of language, culture and genre; it contends that suffering transcends time, space and cultural specificity. Even when extreme trauma is silenced, it often still emerges in surprising and painful ways. This volume draws together examples from throughout the Francophone world, including countries such as Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Rwanda, Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, New Caledonia, Quebec and France, and across genres such as autobiography, poetry, theater, film, fiction and visual art to provide a cohesive analysis of the representation of trauma. In addition to the survivor...
This book deconstructs androcentric approaches to spacetime inherited from western modernity through its theoretical frame of the chronotropics. It sheds light on the literary acts of archival disruption, radical remapping, and epistemic marronnage by twenty-first-century Caribbean women writers to restore a connection to spacetime, expanding it within and beyond the region. Arguing that the chronotropics points to a vocation for social justice and collective healing, this pan-Caribbean volume returns to autochthonous ontologies and epistemologies to propose a poetics and politics of the chronotropics that is anticolonial, gender inclusive, pluralistic, and non-anthropocentric. This is an open access book.
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice is a comprehensive and multi- purpose collection on this important topic. With contributors working in various fields, the Companion provides in- depth analyses of both the cumulative and emergent issues, obstacles, praxes, propositions, and theories of social justice. The first section offers a historical overview of major developments and debates in the field, while the following sections look in more detail at the key traditions and show how literature and theory can be applied as analytical tools to real- world inequalities and the impact of doing so. The contributors provide reviews of major theoretical traditions, including Marxi...
Rudel examines historical examples of environmental reform, arguing that reforms occur when defensive and altruistic environmentalists join forces.
What would it mean to reorient the study of Haitian literature toward ethics rather than the themes of politics, engagement, disaster, or catastrophe? Looking for Other Worlds engages with this question from a distinct feminist perspective and, in the process, discovers a revelatory lens through which we can productively read the work of contemporary Haitian writers. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles explores the "ethical imagination" of three contemporary Haitian authors—Yanick Lahens, Kettly Mars, and Evelyne Trouillot—contending that ethics and aesthetics operate in relation to each other through the writers’ respective novels and that the turn to ethics has proven essential in the twenty-first century. Jean-Charles presents a useful framework for analyzing contemporary literature that brings together Black feminism, literary ethics, and Haitian studies in a groundbreaking way.
Despite being a major figure of Haitian literature, Jean-Claude Charles (1949-2008) has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. The present volume seeks to serve as an introduction to the work and universe of this unique and capital writer to an English-language readership. The essays in the collection are organized along three major axes: contextual articles, placing Charles’ work within the larger Haitian literary landscape, punctual articles, addressing specific themes in a selection of Charles’ books, and author testimonials, attesting to Charles’ work’s importance both to his contemporaries and to a new generation of writers. With the ongoing republication of Cha...
Approaching Haiti’s history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective This volume is the first to focus on teaching about Haiti’s complex history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective. Making broad connections between Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean, contributors provide pedagogical guidance on how to approach the country from different lenses in course curricula. They offer practical suggestions, theories on a wide variety of texts, examples of syllabi, and classroom experiences. Teaching Haiti dispels stereotypes associating Haiti with disaster, poverty, and negative ideas of Vodou, going beyond the simplistic neocolonial, imperialist, and racist descriptions ofte...
The newest English translation of one of Haiti’s most powerful literary voices Désirée Congo is a riveting, powerful, and profoundly original novel set in the final years of the Haitian Revolution at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this richly textured work, Trouillot—one of the leading voices of the francophone literary world—constructs an intricate narrative web from the varied experiences of freedmen and women, maroons, enslaved African people and their Creole children, as well as French planters and white smallholders in colonial Saint-Domingue at a historical moment of unthinkable upheaval. It is a moving, lyrical book whose strikingly realized characters enrich our understanding of the last confrontations between the Haitian revolutionaries and Napoleon’s imperial forces—a conflict that resulted in the success of the largest slave revolt in recorded history and the independence of the first Black state in the western hemisphere.