Explores the way writers address the formation and fate of the contemporary American working class in an age of neoliberal globalization. Specifically, the essay examines Russell Banks's 1985 novel Continental Drift, which interweaves the stories of two characters who pull up stakes and head to Florida in search of a better life: an oil furnace repair man from New Hampshire and a young, single mother from Haiti.
"First work of a young Haitian born author, How to Make Love to a Negro without getting tired is still valid seventeen years after its release. Meanwhile, the novel became a classic of Quebec literature and Dany Laferriere has been recognized as a major writer of French literature. Greeted by unanimous criticism and enthusiastic audiences, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired was a resounding success in several countries, particularly in the Anglophone world in which we compared its author to Bukowski and Miller."
The work of Haitian author Jacques Stephen Alexis is replete with examples of characters caught in the dilemmas of exile. The author focuses on Alexis's characters who go through a "true" expatriation, a movement out of Haiti and into another country, and considers how the various experiences of expatriation are represented, as well as how the presence of the Haitian exiles impacts the host country. Taking examples from Alexis's novel Compère Général Soleil, Monro argues that the Haitian exiles unwittingly, though inevitably, disrupt the illusion of oneness of national identity and culture and become a subversive force, creolizing culture in the place of exile, the Dominican Republic. This cultural creolization in turn is a threat to the monocultural, totalizing political discourses of the host country, it is argued.;