African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
192 p, Book Description Using a multifaceted approach, this study explores questions of identity in novels by Dany Bbel-Gisler, Maryse Cond, and Emile Ollivier. As signs, narrators and characters are connected to each other dialogically and produce multilayered narratives that problematize the concept of a cohesive and static collective identity. In revealing identity to be a constantly fluctuating semiotic process, the study shows that Caribbean Francophone narrative is creating a new literary space where the dialogic underpinnings of the self are called upon to express the difficulties, the heterogeneity, and the opacity of meaning associated with any definition of a cultural or national identity. (Amazon);
"There was no trial. No formal accusations. They just dumped all of the prisoners like animals into a cage," [Jan Mapou] recalls. "they stripped us and then crammed 14 of us into a small cell. We had no idea if we would ever see our families again. We had no idea if we would even be alive from one second to the next." Tell no one "When I first started working with Jan Mapou and the Sosyete Koukouy, I knew very little about the meanings of the daces I was performing," says Nancy St. Leger, who is now the dance troupe's choreographer. "Mapou opened me up to the significance of each dance. He didn't want the dance troupe to perform anything we didn't understand." "What Mapou is promoting through his work is not just Haitian culture but what Haitian culture represents," says [Yves Colon]. "He keeps alive those ideas of beauty, harmony and black pride which are all a part of what Mapou believes is Haitian culture.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
89 p, The transatlantic slave trade played a major role in the development of the modern world. It both gave birth to and resulted from the shift from feudalism into the European Commercial Revolution. James A. Rawley fills a scholarly gap in the historical discussion of the slave trade from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century by providing one volume covering the economics, demography, epidemiology, and politics of the trade.
"F. S. J. Ledgister observed that in writing about British racism in the nineteenth--century Caribbean, 'Williams presents establishment figures such as Carlyle and Trollope as demonic, but he fails to mention comparable figures on the other side. Williams's objective in assaulting Carlyle in British Historians and the West Indies is clearly political rather than historiographical'." (Selwyn Cudjoe, 11/12/2006 review of Colin Palmer's book on Eric Williams)
A critical look at the works of fiction of Haitian expatriate author Dany Laferrire, specifically his willingness to mix himself up into his characters without any strict adherence to factual truth of situations
