This essay reflects on Haitian radicalism by looking at the life and the works of novelist Marie Vieux Chauvet (1916–73). Though increasingly a subject of interest for scholars of Haitian women's literature and of Haitian feminism, Chauvet's work is only rarely considered alongside that of more politically visible figures such as Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, and René Depestre. Chauvet's exceptionalized status has much to do with her nonparticipation in the gender-bound political culture of her time. This essay seeks to tease out how this pointedly nonaligned woman writer fits into the picture and historiography of Haitian radicalism.
This short essay offers one frame in which to think about the idea of a black radical tradition, a term whose elements are all essentially unstable and contested. What is at stake is a historically minded inquiry into 'uses' rather than 'meanings' - that is, the historical conjunctures in which the idea of a black radical tradition has been employed. The essay suggests that 'Africa' and 'slavery' are recurrent tropes of this tradition and gives the example of Edward Kamau Brathwaite's discussion of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
This essay argues that the death of a fictional photographer in the 1907 novel Rupert Gray: A Tale in Black and White allays anxieties posed by photographic surveillance and 'feminization.' Even if the novel's faith in the British Empire disqualifies it from being radical, its portrayal of the political fortunes of black male leadership in the Caribbean as potentially thwarted by female authority, ancestral shame, and the objectification of tourist photography offers a useful way of conceptualizing the black radical tradition in terms of vulnerability as a condition to be avoided. Moreover, Rupert Gray illuminates concerns about sovereignty and surveillance in our present.
These introductory remarks frame the special section 'Translating the Caribbean' and discuss the impetus behind the project as well as its future iterations. Each of the five essays in the special section is outlined in its broad strokes, and specific reference is made to Edouard Glissant's Caribbean Discourse, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and Lawrence Venuti's Rethinking Translation and The Translator's Invisibility.
