333 p., Examines both historical and contemporary attempts by the people of Ouidah, Benin Republic in West Africa and in the Caribbean country of Haiti to confront and reconcile their relationship via the transatlantic slave trade. Oral and visual narrative have been central to this process as people represent, reflect and interpret a past that is fraught with gaps, silences and erasures. Proposes that the process of remembrance mirrors a traditional rites of passage whereby one lives as part of a community, dies to the past and then is reborn anew in the community. Both Ouidahans and Haitians now occupy a liminal space--an exilic space--in which they struggle to remember a past that was for many years repressed and suppressed.
203 p., This research sterns from twelve months of ethnographic research with Haitian migrant women who reside in Batey Sol , a former sugar-company labor camp located along the Línea Noroeste (northwest line) linking the Dominican Rebulic's border town of Dajabón with the urban center of Santiago. The multi-sited study considers the larger network of political, social, and economic structures and relations of power in which these women are positioned in their daily lives and through their livelihoods as market women.
This paper explores the African Diaspora and the psychological, social, political, and economic effects of the Atlantic slave trade on people of African descent in the historical fiction text The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat and the travel narrative The Atlantic Sound by Caryl Phillips. By examining the complex history of the British and French slave trade and its later consequences in the twentieth century, this paper examines the connection between the evidence of displacement and the search for identity coupled with the idea of healing in regards to trauma suffered by the spirits of Danticats' and Phillips' characters symbols of those in the African Diaspora.
276 p., A critical examination of Haitian migration and displacement in North America that engages both a theoretical and literary analysis of exile and diaspora as consequences of migration and displacement. Argues that Haitian writers in North America inscribe migration by troping exile and diaspora to speak of the predicament of displaced migratory subjects and their inevitable crossings of places, landscapes, borders, cultures, and nations. Analyzes three novels by Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), The Farming of Bones (1998), and the Dew Breaker (2004); and two novels by Haitian Canadian writer Myriam Chancy: Spirit of Haiti (2003) and The Scorpion's Claw (2005).
