Dissertation: Haiti re-membered: Exile, diaspora, and transnational imaginings in the writings of Edwidge Danticat and Myriam Chancy (original) (raw)

4: Haitian Identities at the Juncture Between Diaspora and Homeland

Center for Migration Studies special issues, 1996

NOCTOBER 16, 1994, the day after President Aristide had been flown back to Haiti by the U.S. Armed Forces, a group of Haitian professionals living in New York launched an 0 urgent appeal for help to the H a i t i a n populations during a hurriedly produced special program on Radio 'Ropicale, a Haitian-owned radio station in New York. The organizers' intentions were to exhort the Haitian immigrants to seize this rare opportunity to lend their services, at their convenience, to Haiti to "rebuild their country" and secure the "return of democracy in Haiti." To make their point, they explained to their audience that "during the preceding three years, Haiti, our mother, had been raped and vilified by the enemies of the people." But, since she was being delivered by the U.S. troops that had brought Aristide back to power in H a i t i , she urgently needed her children's assistance in her hour of need. 127 Hey! twdp pmbldm peyi mwen!!! Gen lontan nap &ache yon kote pow nou Gen lontan nap chache yon kote poun nou viv an pd!!! Hey! too many problems in my country!!! For a l o q time, we have been loolung for a For a long time, we have been loolung for a place to live in peace!!! sa viv!!! place to live!!! .

The paradox of Haiti in African Diaspora Studies

African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 2020

This article is grounded on the premise that any critical discussion of the formation and intellectualization of the African Diaspora as discourse and field of study must confront the place and displacement of Haiti as a constitutive element of global black diasporic identity and consciousness. Since one of the tenets of African Diaspora Studies is the examination of the impact of displaced peoples of African descent, hence the significant tropes of displacement in African Diasporic literature, I argue that further research on Haiti in the field that attempts to tackle the paradox of Haiti would do well to consider the notion of Haiti as both displaced subject and object of intellectual inquiry. Such perspective not only contributes to critical investigation into global discourses of racialization and the erasure of global black histories, but also, more broadly, articulations of displacement in Diaspora Studies. KEYWORDS In the past few decades, and certainly since 2010, when a major 7.0 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, scholarship on Haiti has insisted on exposing the myriad ways in which Haiti has been deliberately effaced, actively silenced, strategically disavowed, intellectually displaced, and structurally dismissed from history. Some scholars have begun to explore how Haiti is marginalized within and by disciplinary forms of

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)Recognitions, Journal of Postcolonial Francophone Studies

There are two stories Haiti opens for political anthropology. The first has to do with the kinds of politics that have and have not been possible in the region, and the kinds of sovereignty that have and have not been recognized and valued. The second, related, story has had to do with the links between cultural alterity and nation-building or national identity. Both these stories, of course, are not bounded regionally, but reflect broader modernist imperatives. In this

Colonial Subjects No More: Histories of the Haitian Revolution

In his 1995 book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot has used the construction of both public memory and the academic M a t t s o n | 2 historiography of the Haitian Revolution to explore issues such as dominant narratives, historical silences, and the postmodernist recognition of many truths. These themes can in fact be seen quite often in the recent historiography of the Haitian Revolution due to its remarkable but for too long silenced impact on world history. Trouillot emphasizes the usefulness of the Haitian Revolution in examining the discipline of history itself, down to the insistence upon the rigors of research even in a postmodernist context. "The unearthing of silences," writes Trouillot, "and the historian's subsequent emphasis on the retrospective significance of hitherto neglected events, requires not only extra labor at the archives […] but also a project linked to an interpretation." 1 The historiography of the Haitian Revolution intersects with many issues of French colonialism; modernism, colonialism, postcolonialism, slavery, revolts, revolutions, racism, citizenship, republicanism and historical discourse are all topics which are well-represented in the scholarship. This essay will explore the English-language histories of the Haitian Revolution with a primary focus on the most recent works.

Haiti and Its Revolution: Four Recent Books

Radical History Review, 2013

Haiti' s history, Laurent Dubois tells us, "can-indeed must-serve as a source of inspiration, and even hope" (10). For those who would write it, this is a problem. Among the country's many burdens has been the exemplary role it has perforce played in international debates about slavery, colonialism, and race. Just as its earliest chroniclers often aimed to denigrate, modern historians frequently lean toward apologetics and celebration. The attraction exerted by Haiti's revolutionary origins has tended to pull in writers more eager to make a statement than to research its