This collection of essays considers the means and extent of Haiti's 'exceptionalization' - its perception in multiple arenas as definitively unique with respect not only to the countries of the North Atlantic, but also to the rest of the Americas. Painted as repulsive and attractive, abject and resilient, singular and exemplary, Haiti has long been framed discursively by an extraordinary epistemological ambivalence. This nation has served at once as cautionary tale, model for humanitarian aid and development projects and point of origin for general theorising of the so-called Third World. What to make of this dialectic of exemplarity and alterity? How to pull apart this multivalent narrative in order to examine its constituent parts? Conscientiously gesturing to James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture (1988), the contributors to The Haiti Exception work on the edge of multiple disciplines, notably that of anthropology, to take up these and other such questions from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives, including Africana Studies, Anthrohistory, Art History, Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, education, ethnology, Jewish Studies, Literary Studies, Performance Studies and Urban Studies. As contributors revise and interrogate their respective praxes, they accept the challenge of thinking about the particular stakes of and motivations for their own commitment to Haiti.

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.

This collection of essays considers the means and extent of Haiti's 'exceptionalization' - its perception in multiple arenas as definitively unique with respect not only to the countries of the North Atlantic, but also to the rest of the Americas. Painted as repulsive and attractive, abject and resilient, singular and exemplary, Haiti has long been framed discursively by an extraordinary epistemological ambivalence. This nation has served at once as cautionary tale, model for humanitarian aid and development projects and point of origin for general theorising of the so-called Third World. What to make of this dialectic of exemplarity and alterity? How to pull apart this multivalent narrative in order to examine its constituent parts? Conscientiously gesturing to James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture (1988), the contributors to The Haiti Exception work on the edge of multiple disciplines, notably that of anthropology, to take up these and other such questions from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives, including Africana Studies, Anthrohistory, Art History, Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, education, ethnology, Jewish Studies, Literary Studies, Performance Studies and Urban Studies. As contributors revise and interrogate their respective praxes, they accept the challenge of thinking about the particular stakes of and motivations for their own commitment to Haiti.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.