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.
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).
225 p., Drawing attention to poets whose writing on this subject has received little critical attention, this study examines contemporary poetry of the black Atlantic in particular focusing on work by Kwame Dawes, David Dabydeen, Lucille Clifton, and Elizabeth Alexander. In exploring poetic treatment of the Middle Passage, primarily through the lyric, epic, and long poem, the author identifies four interrelated poetics that reveal the dynamism of this legacy: lamentation, retribution, rupture, and re-membering. While critical analysis of texts that rewrite slave experiences has tended to focus on narrative, and that primarily on plantation slavery, "Sea of Bones" advocates attention to the way black Atlantic poetry renders the Middle Passage as a complicated and haunting personal heritage.
