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."
Danticat,Edwidge (Author) and New York (Series Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1995
Published:
Vintage Books
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she gains a legacy of shame that only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her., 234 p
Allende,Isabel (Author) and Peden,Margaret Sayers (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
New York: Harper
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
457 p, The story of a mulatta woman, a slave and concubine, determined to take control of her own destiny in a society where that would seem impossible
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.;
