Liberating Borders Edwidge Danticat and the Poetics of Vulnerability (original) (raw)
Related papers
Plátanos and Perejil: Border Thinking in Caribbean Literature
EnterText, Special Issue on Caribbean Literature and Culture: “Opening Out the Way(s) to the Future,” (2013).
This paper analyzes the “Plátano Curtain” as a metaphor for the border that separates the Dominican Republic and Haiti as represented in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Dominican American author, Junot Díaz as well as The Farming of Bones (1997) by Haitian American writer, Edwidge Danticat. While both authors pay attention to the divisions and separations associated with the border, they also represent the Hispaniola border through the common history of a border culture shared by Haitians and Dominicans. Historically, the Dominican dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, presented a symbolically charged representation of this border in order to isolate and separate Dominicans and Haitians, thereby contributing to a culture of violence. The border divides two nations, but it also serves as an epistemic representation of division and separation, especially as expressed through the discourses and practices associated with the “Parsley Massacre” or “Mantanza” of 1937, when Trujillo oversaw the massacre of thousands of Haitians living in the borderlands. Drawing on the work of Walter Mignolo, I argue that both Danticat and Díaz challenge the dictator’s violent acts or border patrol and divisive nationalist representation while reinforcing the connective character of the border culture by incorporating voices from both sides of the boundary and offering important examples of “border thinking”. By giving voice to hitherto silenced voices, new meanings in language emerge that serve to erase epistemic borders and separations and enable a view of the shared history and cultural proximity of Dominicans and Haitians rather than merely focusing on the separating character of the border . The meaning of borders is no longer fixed, but rather open and flexible. The challenge to dictatorial violence, shaped by the legacies of colonialism, enables another vision of the world to be articulated, a world in which different worlds can coexist in “pluriversality” rather than universality.
Time and the otherwise: Plantations, garrisons and being human in the Caribbean
In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoretico-ethnographic space of the Caribbean has to do with what its foundational histories can tell us about the relationships between time, temporality and sovereignty. Drawing from an ethnographically derived creative project I am currently developing in collaboration with musician Junior 'Gabu' Wedderburn and psychologist Deanne Bell, I will show that recurring moments of exceptional violence, themselves emerging from ongoing, everyday patterns of structural and symbolic violence, lead to an experience of time neither as linear nor cyclical, but as simultaneous, where the future, past, and present are mutually constitutive and have the potential to be coincidentally influential. This ontological alterity does not rely on a condition of being prior, outside or marginal, but instead is fully embedded within the violences of modernity. As a result, exploring the relationships among labor, race, politics and what it means to be human from the space of the Afro-Caribbean allows a critical reorientation of modern ideologies of tem-porality that are inexorably linked to linear teleologies of progress, development, and improvement, and which therefore require the erasure of the forms of racial prior-ness that have been central to the making of the Caribbean as a material and ideological space.
The Creative Launcher
The essence of history, on the most part, is to provide discursive knots that either hold a people together or provide tissues of asymmetrical relations that separate them permanently. Hence, through the Postcolonial lens, this paper argues that Edwidge Danticat and Grace Nichols have used their historical novels: The Farming of Bones and Whole of a Morning Sky– the novels that not only take their setting and some events and characters from history, but make the historical events and issues crucial for the course of the narrative to (re)inscribed historical codes that harbour a constant shift in individuation among the colonized people. Their aim is to unearth certain salient relational frontiers – ones that have created a “...radically asymmetrical relations of power” in modern Caribbean nations. The reason for this, on the one hand, is to show “...the marks of a shifting boundaries that alienates the frontiers of the modern (Caribbean) nation”, and on the other, to show how these ...
Final draft thesis:Danticat and Haiti in her The Farming of Bones
Studying the massacre of Haitians in the1937 ‘Parsley Massacre’ in Danticat’s The Farming of Bones through the lens of a literary representation rather than solely through histographical accounts enables the imaginative depth perception necessary to the creative remembrance of Caribbean history.
Observed from a distance, the moving-image landscapes in the Spanish, French and Spanglish Caribbean could appear as a typical result of postmodernism, with its juxtaposed narratives, hybrid discourses and reinvention's undertakings governed by global hegemonic parameters. But this is not the case, or at least not completely. Different discursive genealogies of resistance assert themselves within each particular sociohistorical context in the atmosphere of these three Caribbean scenarios.
Embodying Hispañola: Urban Performance on and Around the Dominican-Haitian Borderland
The recent stripping of Dominican citizenship for Haitians residing in the Dominican Republic has internationally publicized the racial tensions prevalent on the island of Hispañolathe Spanish colonial name given to the entire island in the fifteenth century, a space now shared by Dominican Republic and Haiti. 1 Dominican identity became radically differentiated from Haitian identity in the 1930s through a racialized historical narrative constructed by dictator Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961) and his successors, which portrayed blackness as "backwards," ugly, and opposed to Dominicanness. Although this racialized discourse often persists in the Dominican Republic today it shifted for Dominicans living abroad, especially for communities in the United States. Dominican mass migration to the United States began in the early 1960s, following Trujillo's death and widespread political unrest in the country. 2 This essay argues that the performances of Scherezade Garcia and Charo Oquet on and around the Dominican borderland challenge historical notions of Dominican racial identity that eschew blackness in favor of other racial designations such as indio (Indian). In framing Dominican racial ideology from a post-Civil Rights US perspective, both artists draw upon their own personal experiences of difference while living in New York and Miami to reevaluate the construction of race on the island. By situating the Haitian body as physically connected and culturally parallel to the Dominican one, they reject the hegemonic Dominican racial discourse that positioned Dominicans as racially and sociopolitically opposite to Haitians. Garcia and Oquet strategically develop their performances around the urban and cultural landscape of the Haitian-Dominican border cities of Daj abon and Ouanaminthe. Due to shared cultural, linguistic and religious traditions in Daj abon and Ouanaminthe, the Dominican-Haitian borderland inherently contradicts the constructed historical narrative rooted in anti-blackness. Most importantly, embodying Hispañola on and around the charged space of the border problematizes the denial of Dominican blackness, exposing issues of race, citizenship and gender inequalities.
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