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In A Regarded Self Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female
protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive
communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Conde, Rene
Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these
authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege
the self in ways unmediated and unrestricted by group affiliation.
The women of these texts offend, disturb, and reorder the world
around them. They challenge the primacy of the community over the
individual and propose provocative forms of subjecthood.
Highlighting the style and the stakes of these women's radical
ethics of self-regard, Glover reframes Caribbean literary studies
in ways that critique the moral principles, politicized
perspectives, and established critical frameworks that so often
govern contemporary reading practices. She asks readers and critics
of postcolonial literature to question their own gendered
expectations and to embrace less constrictive modes of
theorization.
Yanick Lahens leads us into a breathless intrigue with her newest
portrait of Haiti, Sweet Undoings. In Port-au-Prince, violence
never consumes. It finds its counterpart in a "high-pitched
sweetness", a sweetness that overwhelms Francis, a French
journalist, one evening at the Korosòl Resto-Bar, when the broken
and deep voice of lounge singer Brune rises from the microphone.
Brune's father, Judge Berthier, was assassinated, guilty of
maintaining integrity in a city where everything is bought. Six
months after this disappearance, Brune wholly refuses to come to
terms with what has happened. Her uncle Pierre, a gay man who spent
his youth abroad to avoid persecution, refuses to give up on
solving this still unpunished crime as well. Alongside Brune and
Pierre, Francis becomes acquainted with myriad other voices of
Port-au-Prince: Ezekiel, the poet desperate to escape his miserable
neighborhood; Nerline, women's rights activist; Waner, diligent
pacifist; and Ronny the American, at home in Haiti as in a second
homeland. Nourishing its power from the bowels of the city, Sweet
Undoings moves with a rapid, electric syncopation, gradually and
tenderly revealing the intimacy of the lives within.
In the 1960s thousands of poor women of color on the (post)colonial
French island of Reunion had their pregnancies forcefully
terminated by white doctors; the doctors operated under the pretext
of performing benign surgeries, for which they sought government
compensation. When the scandal broke in 1970, the doctors claimed
to have been encouraged to perform these abortions by French
politicians who sought to curtail reproduction on the island, even
though abortion was illegal in France. In The Wombs of Women-first
published in French and appearing here in English for the first
time-Francoise Verges traces the long history of colonial state
intervention in black women's wombs during the slave trade and
postslavery imperialism as well as in current birth control
politics. She examines the women's liberation movement in France in
the 1960s and 1970s, showing that by choosing to ignore the history
of the racialization of women's wombs, French feminists inevitably
ended up defending the rights of white women at the expense of
women of color. Ultimately, Verges demonstrates how the forced
abortions on Reunion were manifestations of the legacies of the
racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.
In A Regarded Self Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female
protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive
communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Conde, Rene
Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these
authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege
the self in ways unmediated and unrestricted by group affiliation.
The women of these texts offend, disturb, and reorder the world
around them. They challenge the primacy of the community over the
individual and propose provocative forms of subjecthood.
Highlighting the style and the stakes of these women's radical
ethics of self-regard, Glover reframes Caribbean literary studies
in ways that critique the moral principles, politicized
perspectives, and established critical frameworks that so often
govern contemporary reading practices. She asks readers and critics
of postcolonial literature to question their own gendered
expectations and to embrace less constrictive modes of
theorization.
In the 1960s thousands of poor women of color on the (post)colonial
French island of Reunion had their pregnancies forcefully
terminated by white doctors; the doctors operated under the pretext
of performing benign surgeries, for which they sought government
compensation. When the scandal broke in 1970, the doctors claimed
to have been encouraged to perform these abortions by French
politicians who sought to curtail reproduction on the island, even
though abortion was illegal in France. In The Wombs of Women-first
published in French and appearing here in English for the first
time-Francoise Verges traces the long history of colonial state
intervention in black women's wombs during the slave trade and
postslavery imperialism as well as in current birth control
politics. She examines the women's liberation movement in France in
the 1960s and 1970s, showing that by choosing to ignore the history
of the racialization of women's wombs, French feminists inevitably
ended up defending the rights of white women at the expense of
women of color. Ultimately, Verges demonstrates how the forced
abortions on Reunion were manifestations of the legacies of the
racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.
Set during Carnival in Haiti 1938, a young and beautiful woman
named Hadriana drinks a mysterious potion on her wedding day and
collapses at the altar. She is buried and later resurrected by an
evil sorcerer and, as a zombie, enters the collective memory of her
town of Jacmel. Hadriana's conversion serves as the inciting
incident into an exploration of the strange and esoteric on the
island, where Voodoo and Catholicism keep a symbiotic relationship,
young women turn into zombies, young men turn into lascivious
butterflies and nothing is quite what it seems. Hadriana in All my
Dreams is a frolic through mystery and eroticism that reveals vital
truths about the nature of humanity.
While Haiti established the second independent nation in the
Western Hemisphere and was the first black country to gain
independence from European colonizers, its history is not well
known in the Anglophone world. The Haiti Reader introduces readers
to Haiti's dynamic history and culture from the viewpoint of
Haitians from all walks of life. Its dozens of selections-most of
which appear here in English for the first time-are representative
of Haiti's scholarly, literary, religious, visual, musical, and
political cultures, and range from poems, novels, and political
tracts to essays, legislation, songs, and folk tales. Spanning the
centuries between precontact indigenous Haiti and the aftermath of
the 2010 earthquake, the Reader covers widely known episodes in
Haiti's history, such as the U.S. military occupation and the
Duvalier dictatorship, as well as overlooked periods such as the
decades immediately following Haiti's "second independence" in
1934. Whether examining issues of political upheaval, the
environment, or modernization, The Haiti Reader provides an
unparalleled look at Haiti's history, culture, and politics.
While Haiti established the second independent nation in the
Western Hemisphere and was the first black country to gain
independence from European colonizers, its history is not well
known in the Anglophone world. The Haiti Reader introduces readers
to Haiti's dynamic history and culture from the viewpoint of
Haitians from all walks of life. Its dozens of selections-most of
which appear here in English for the first time-are representative
of Haiti's scholarly, literary, religious, visual, musical, and
political cultures, and range from poems, novels, and political
tracts to essays, legislation, songs, and folk tales. Spanning the
centuries between precontact indigenous Haiti and the aftermath of
the 2010 earthquake, the Reader covers widely known episodes in
Haiti's history, such as the U.S. military occupation and the
Duvalier dictatorship, as well as overlooked periods such as the
decades immediately following Haiti's "second independence" in
1934. Whether examining issues of political upheaval, the
environment, or modernization, The Haiti Reader provides an
unparalleled look at Haiti's history, culture, and politics.
A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via
the OAPEN Library platform (www. oapen. org).
Historically and contemporarily, politically and literarily, Haiti
has long been relegated to the margins of the so-called 'New
World.' Marked by exceptionalism, the voices of some of its most
important writers have consequently been muted by the geopolitical
realities of the nation's fraught history. In Haiti Unbound, Kaiama
L. Glover offers a close look at the works of three such writers:
the Haitian Spiralists Franketienne, Jean-Claude Fignole, and Rene
Philoctete.
While Spiralism has been acknowledged by scholars and regional
writer-intellectuals alike as a crucial contribution to the
French-speaking Caribbean literary tradition, the Spiralist
ethic-aesthetic not yet been given the sustained attention of a
full-length study. Glover's book represents the first effort in any
language to consider the works of the three Spiralist authors both
individually and collectively, and so fills an astonishingly empty
place in the assessment of postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics.
Touching on the role and destiny of Haiti in the Americas, Haiti
Unbound engages with long-standing issues of imperialism and
resistance culture in the transatlantic world. Glover's timely
project emphatically articulates Haiti's regional and global
centrality, combining vital 'big picture' reflections on the field
of postcolonial studies with elegant close-reading-based analyses
of the philosophical perspective and creative practice of a
distinctively Haitian literary phenomenon. Most importantly
perhaps, the book advocates for the inclusion of three largely
unrecognized voices in the disturbingly fixed roster of
writer-intellectuals that have thus far interested theorists of
postcolonial (Francophone) literature. Providing insightful and
sophisticated blueprints for the reading and teaching of the
Spiralists' prose fiction, Haiti Unbound will serve as a point of
reference for the works of these authors and for the singular
socio-political space out of and within which they write."
A diverse, interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring what
makes Maryse Conde a writer for our times In 2018, the New Academy
selected Guadeloupean writer, scholar, and teacher of literature
Maryse Conde as the recipient of the 2018 Alternative Nobel Prize
in Literature. This volume of Yale French Studies examines Conde's
work and legacy, exploring why a diverse group of journalists,
critics, and lay readers selected her as the writer most deserving
of the prize. Varied in their themes, forms, and disciplinary
groundings, the essays consider how Conde's novels, plays, essays,
and memoirs have engaged with many of the urgent social, economic,
and political issues of the late-twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, often anticipating and catalyzing public debates.
Written by scholars from Africa, the Antilles, South America,
France, and the United States, the essays consider Conde's unique
voice and the ways in which her writing speaks to readers all over
the world, making her "a writer for our times."
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