395 p., Inspired by the study of Western historiography and the processes by which silence enters into history in Michel-Rolph Trouillot's seminal work, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, this dissertation demonstrates that fiction can be used both for silencing the past and for rewriting it. This study focuses on seven novels, one short story and two plays published between 1798 to 2007: Adonis ou le Bon Nègre by Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, L'Habitation de Saint-Domingue ou L'Insurrection by Charles de Rémusat, Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, Les Nuits chaudes du Cap-Français by Hugues Rebell, Drums at Dusk by Arna Bontemps, Le Royaume de ce monde (El reino de este mundo ) by Alejo Carpentier, Monsieur Toussaint by Edouard Glissant, and the trilogy of the historical novel (Le SouleÌvement des âmes, Le Maître des carrefours, La Pierre du bâtisseur ) by Madison Smartt Bell.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
347 p., While investigating the seemingly innocent death of the U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Edgar Espinosa-Jones (EJ) finds the Caribbean islands of the 1970s seething with political intrigue, revolutionaries, superstition, violence, and love affairs--with the curse of voodoo magic over all.
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.;
