A blank voice in the middle of the night tells Michael Ferrier of the deaths of his friend Francois and his daughter Bahia. In the following devastation, speech resumes and memories return: how two young loners meet and connect, their years of study, their passion for cinema and radio. Memories unfold and gradually come together in a chronicle of friendship and a memorial to a lost friend. Francois, Portrait of an Absent Friend is both an elegy to a friend and a wonderfully delicate, poetic look at friendship in general. Ferrier tells us how friendships are formed, how they are lost, how they are maintained, and what happens when they are taken from us. From Paris to Japan, Ferrier transports us to the writer's time and the place as we feel the pain, the bitterness, and the longing left by Francois' death.

The earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010 thrust the nation into the public consciousness as never before. There is now an unprecedented empathy for and interest in Haiti, and a related need for information on Haitian reality, beyond the cliches often associated with the nation. In particular, there is a special interest in the earthquake and the questions of Haiti's future development. Haiti Rising responds to this public interest and has three fundamental aims: to raise awareness of Haiti, its people, culture and history; to allow some who were in Haiti during the earthquake a chance to testify. The book brings together more than twenty essays written by some of the most prominent authorities on Haiti, and offers insights on the political, social and historical contexts, as well as the uniquely rich culture of the nation. The first part features survivor testimonies - moving accounts of the earthquake and its aftermath written by authors and academics, Haitian nationals and foreign visitors. The second part presents essays on economics, politics, society and culture (music, religion, visual art), and the ways in which they are interrelated in history and in contemporary life. The third section focuses on the history of Haiti from colonial times to the present and shows the ways in which history has shaped Haitian society. It shows how colonial class and colour structures have persisted, how the revolution has shaped subsequent political, cultural and social structures, and how the legacy of the Duvalier dictatorship has lingered. The final section features contributors who were not in Haiti at the time of the earthquake, but who have strong ties to Haiti. These authors write about their personal connections to Haiti, their reactions to the earthquake, and their hopes and recommendations for reconstruction.

We are all now entering into a new region of the world, which designates its sites on all the given and imaginable expanses, and of which only a few had been able to foresee in the distance its wanderings and obscurities. [...] This region itself, we soon foresee, as difficult as it may seem to formulate its partition, is mixed in time as much as in space, a common site which hides another gap. Time has changed and space has changed. A steep separation of time and space, overwhelming one another. A new region that is an epoch, mixing all times and all durations, an epoch also which is an inexhaustible country, accumulating expanses, which are looking for other limits, in incalculable but always finite number, as has been said of atoms. [...] we are entering into this new region of the world, of totalized space, of relativized time, where everyone already admits that differences are determinant, but most often they refuse to recognize that their sum, their realized quantity, sketches another Relation, quite different because we have so long ignored it, but we know that it is made and brewed from inextricable and propitious contaminants. [...] And we enter into the Whole-World, which always for us covers the totality of the world, but here it is that this Whole-World is also in our actuality another region of the world, a whole new region, and the world is there, it is right-here, it is ahead of us, who say it without saying it while saying it again, undertaking a new category of literature. None of the regions of the world is really unknown, the explorers have driven their trains to their endpoint, yet there is another region of the world in the world, which we have not traveled so much, for we will have to cross it all together, it is this very improbable Whole-World, and a few had knowledge of it. Well then, the world is completely recognized, and the Whole-World covers entirely the world, however and for us the Whole-World is to be discovered and known. It is a part of the world, which right-here transcends the world and designates it.

The primary aim of Listening to the Caribbean: Sounds of Slavery, Revolt, and Race is quite ambitious: to open up the Caribbean to a "sound studies" approach, and to thereby effect a shift in Caribbean studies away from the predominantly visual biases of most scholarly works and towards a fuller understanding of early Caribbean societies through listening in to the past. Paying close attention to auditory elements in written accounts of slavery and revolts allows us to unlock the sounds that are registered and recorded there, so that not only does one gain a more sensorially full understanding of the society, but also to a considerable extent, the voices and subjectivities of the enslaved are brought out of the silence to which they have been largely consigned. Reading texts in this way, listening to the sounds of language, work, festivity, music, laughter, mourning, and warfare, for example, allows one to know better the lives of the enslaved people, and how, counter to the largely visual power of the planters, the people developed a highly sophisticated auditory culture that in large part ensured their survival and indeed their final victories over the institution of slavery.

Despite being a major figure of Haitian literature, Jean-Claude Charles (1949-2008) has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. The present volume seeks to serve as an introduction to the work and universe of this unique and capital writer to an English-language readership. The essays in the collection are organized along three major axes: contextual articles, placing Charles' work within the larger Haitian literary landscape, punctual articles, addressing specific themes in a selection of Charles' books, and author testimonials, attesting to Charles' work's importance both to his contemporaries and to a new generation of writers. With the ongoing republication of Charles' work by Memoire d'encrier in Montreal, and the increasing interest in the author, the proposed volume is timely and necessary, and is in large part a critical accompaniment to the republishing programme. Described by Dany Laferriere as "most brilliant Haitian author of his generation," Charles has until recently remained largely unread and little understood. As the various chapters in the volume show, Charles is an author for now, and the collection will accompany readers seeking strikingly original insights on issues such as race, migration, and exile, and the role of the author and literature in times of crisis.

What are the effects of a catastrophic earthquake on a society, its culture and politics? Which of these effects are temporary, and which endure? Are the various effects immediately discernible, or do they manifest themselves over time? What roles do artists, and writers in particular have in witnessing, bearing testimony to, and gauging the effects of natural disasters? What is the worth of literature in a time of disaster? These are the fundamental questions addressed in this book, which examines the case of the Haitian earthquake of 12 January 2010, a uniquely destructive event in the recent history of cataclysmic disasters, in Haiti and the broader world. The book argues that Haitian literature since 2010 has played a primary role in recording, bearing testimony to, and engaging with the social and psychological effects of the disaster. It further shows that daring literary invention-what Edwidge Danticat calls "dangerous creation"-constitutes one of the most striking and important means of communicating the effects of such a disaster, and that close engagement with the creative imagination is one of the most privileged ways for the outsider in particular to begin to comprehend the experience of living in and through a time of catastrophe.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. The Francophone Caribbean and the American South are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. This book takes as its premise that the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Essays written by leading authorities in the field examine the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South, including Louisiana, which among the Southern states has had a quite particular attachment to France and the Francophone world. The essays focus on issues of history, language, politics and culture in various forms, notably literature, music and theatre. Considering figures as diverse as Barack Obama, Frantz Fanon, Miles Davis, James Brown, Edouard Glissant, William Faulkner, Maryse Conde and Lafcadio Hearn, the essays explore in innovative ways the notions of creole culture and creolization, terms rooted in and indicative of contact between European and African people and cultures in the Americas, and which are promoted here as some of the most productive ways for conceiving of the circum-Caribbean as a cultural and historical entity.

"But when I close my eyes, I first fall as if drowning into the silty waters of the Chari River, which traces the border between Chad and Cameroon, and into which so many men, women and even children were thrown, sometimes still alive, their hands knotted behind their backs, or tied up in a shoulder bag. I sink with them towards the sand and the clay, down amidst the green and the brown, passing purple weeds, shards of pottery, and crocodile scales. My head is heavier than a cannonball and carries me toward the abyss: I dive into a bottomless bag where the letters collide or slip away, call out to or ignore each other, I bathe in an unlimited space free from the constraints of cycles and dates, and I enter into the time of childhood, which indeed has no concept of time. [...] all my memories take flight in the wind of the sands, the past flows in the river, plays out in the branches, explodes in the foliage. The past is all around me now - and I laugh when I say 'the past,' because none of all this is past." Michael Ferrier In 1979, two young boys play Scrabble in a hot, dusty district of N'Djamena, Chad, while around them war rages, apparently destroying all in its path: people, places, and memories. And yet, just as the boys take their letters from the depths of the pouch, so Michael Ferrier draws from the darkness words and images that he reassembles into a beautiful and moving tribute to the city, its people, and the childhood that seemed to end there in those days of chaos and destruction but which he brings miraculously back to life in a defiant, poetic statement on the power of friendship, family, and memory.

"But when I close my eyes, I first fall as if drowning into the silty waters of the Chari River, which traces the border between Chad and Cameroon, and into which so many men, women and even children were thrown, sometimes still alive, their hands knotted behind their backs, or tied up in a shoulder bag. I sink with them towards the sand and the clay, down amidst the green and the brown, passing purple weeds, shards of pottery, and crocodile scales. My head is heavier than a cannonball and carries me toward the abyss: I dive into a bottomless bag where the letters collide or slip away, call out to or ignore each other, I bathe in an unlimited space free from the constraints of cycles and dates, and I enter into the time of childhood, which indeed has no concept of time. [...] all my memories take flight in the wind of the sands, the past flows in the river, plays out in the branches, explodes in the foliage. The past is all around me now - and I laugh when I say 'the past,' because none of all this is past." Michael Ferrier In 1979, two young boys play Scrabble in a hot, dusty district of N'Djamena, Chad, while around them war rages, apparently destroying all in its path: people, places, and memories. And yet, just as the boys take their letters from the depths of the pouch, so Michael Ferrier draws from the darkness words and images that he reassembles into a beautiful and moving tribute to the city, its people, and the childhood that seemed to end there in those days of chaos and destruction but which he brings miraculously back to life in a defiant, poetic statement on the power of friendship, family, and memory.

A cross-disciplinary volume that combines and puts into dialogue perspectives on disasters, this book includes contributions from anthropology, history, cultural studies, sociology, and literary studies. Offering a rich and diverse set of arguments and analyses on the ever-relevant theme of catastrophe in the circum-Caribbean, it will encourage debate and collaboration between scholars working on disasters from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

Based on transnational France-Asia approaches, this book studies Asian cultures once steeped in French civilisation but free of a colonial mode in order to highlight the transliterary examples of cultural transfer. This book is a pioneering study of the Francophone phenomenon within the context of cultures categorised as non-Francophone. Espousing a transcultural approach, Francophonie and the Orient examines the emergence of French heritage in the Far-East, the various forms of its manifestation, and the modes of its identification. Several thematic signposts guide the diverse pathways of the research. Firstly, the question is posed as to whether colonisation is the ultimate coat of arms for entry into Francophonie? Secondly, the book raises issues relative to Asian Francophone works: the emergence of literatures with French expression from Asian countries historically free of French domination. Finally, the study reconfigures the Asian Francophone heritage with new paradigms (transnational/global studies), which redefine the frontiers of Francophonie in Asia.

Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature reinterprets and analyses post-1946 Haitian writing as a literature of exile. It moves between texts that have emerged out of different places and different times, and outlines generational shifts and changes in Haitian exiled writing. The breadth and scope of this book will attract scholars and students with interests in fields such as Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, francophone studies, migration studies, and African-American studies.

The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 thrust the nation into the public consciousness as never before. That terrible event piqued interest in a remarkable country with a rich history as both the first black republic in the world and the first country to break free of European imperialism in Latin America. Haiti Rising brings together more than 20 of the most prominent authorities on Haiti in to provide both a historical and cultural introduction to Haiti and a chance for earthquake survivors to testify to their experiences. Ranging widely across politics, society, history, art and culture, contributors such as Maryse Conde, Yanick Lahens, Evelyne Trouillot, J. Michael Dash and Laurent Dubois illuminate this most extraordinary of countries and the tragedy that befell it in 2010. Haiti Rising will stand as a written document of this cataclysmic event in Haitian history and as a monument to the experiences of those who were in Haiti at the time of the earthquake. It is vital reading for anyone who wants to find out more about Haiti, and the prospects for its future. All royalties from the book will be donated to the Haitian Art Relief Fund.

In Tropical Apocalypse, Martin Munro engages with the contemporary apocalyptic turn in Caribbean studies and lived reality, not only providing important historical contextualization for a general understanding of apocalypse in the region but also offering an account of the state of Haitian society and culture in the decades before the 2010 earthquake. Through an interdisciplinary exploration, the author situates the question of the Caribbean apocalypse in relation to broader, global narratives of the apocalyptic present-notably Slavoj Zizek's Living in the End Times- and traces the evolution of apocalyptic thought in the work of Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Edouard Glissant, Michael Dash, David Scott, and others.

This is an exploration of Francophone communities from the 19th century to the present. It is a special Issue of Paragraph edited in 2001 by Celia Britton and Michael Syrotinski on Francophone Texts and Postcolonial Theory played a determining role in shaping the research field it helped to map. Ten years later, this collection of ten articles provides an opportunity to explore Francophone communities from a range of perspectives which similarly engage with today's most pressing questions in Francophone-Caribbean studies and postcolonial studies more generally. The contributions draw on material from different historical moments, ranging from the 19th century to the contemporary period, and explore questions of literature, culture, society and thought from across the Francophone Caribbean and beyond. They will bring together original work by some of the leading scholars in those fields, including Charles Forsdick, Kate Hodgson, Martin Munro, Lorna Milne, Eli Park Sorenson, Mary Gallagher, Maeve McCusker and Michael Syrotinski.

"Every island of the Caribbean is the site of a deep haunting. Before Columbus, the various indigenous peoples - the Arawaks, the Caribs, the Tainos - lived in relative harmony with the land, the sea and each other. Everything changed in 1492: the Amerindian people quickly were decimated, their presence erased by disease, wars and overwork. These are the Caribbean's oldest ghosts, almost invisible in history yet still present in the form of place names, fragments of language, ancient foods, and pockets of descendants speckling the islands. . . . "Given the history of the Caribbean, it is not surprising that much of the region's literature bears a haunted quality: ghosts are everywhere, be they of the Amerindians, the African ancestors, the slaves, the planters, the indentured workers, the victims of dictatorships, foreign invasions and natural disasters, or the modern exiles. To a large extent, Caribbean fiction in general is a collection of ghost stories, tales of haunted people, memories and places. . . . "This book brings together some of the region's leading contemporary authors, from the anglophone, francophone and hispanophone Caribbean, as well as the United States and Canada, and constitutes a unique, transcultural anthology in which living authors evoke the dead, the undead and the dying, the ghosts that haunt their experiences and their works as modern writers of the Caribbean."-From the introduction by Martin Munro

"Breath, Eyes, Memory" (1994), the novel born from Edwidge Danticat's childhood in Haiti and immigration to New York City, was one of the great literary debuts of recent times, marking the emergence of an impressive talent in addition to opening up an entire culture to a broad general readership. This gifted author went on to win the American Book Award in 1999 for her novel, "The Farming of Bones" (1998), attracting further critical acclaim.

Offering an accessible guide for readers and critics alike, this book is the first publication devoted entirely to Danticat's unique and remarkable work. It is also distinctive in that it addresses all of her published writing up to "The Dew Breaker "(2004), including her writing for children, her travel writing, her short fiction, and her novels. The book contains an exclusive interview with Danticat, in which she discusses her recent memoir, "Brother, I'm Dying" (2007), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. It also includes an extensive bibliography.

With contributions from Danticat's fellow creative writers from both the Caribbean and the United States as well as leading scholars of Caribbean literature, this collection of essays aims to enrich readers' understanding of the various geographical, literary, and cultural contexts of her work and to demonstrate how it both influences and is influenced by them.

Contributors

Madison Smartt Bell * Myriam J. A. Chancy * Maryse Conde * J. Michael Dash * Charles Forsdick * Mary Gallagher * Regine Michelle Jean-Charles * Carine Mardorossian * Nadeve Menard * Martin Munro * Nick Nesbitt * Mireille Rosello * Renee H. Shea * Evelyne Trouillot * Lyonel Trouillot * Kiera Vaclavik

The bicentenary of Haitian independence in 2004 triggered a renewed interest in Haitian history and culture. In many ways, however, much work is still required in this fertile field. Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks, the first collection of essays edited by Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, addressed the repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Haiti, the Caribbean, North America and Europe. This present volume develops and complements the previous collection to meet the growing demand for original scholarly work on Haiti. Widening the cultural lens to include diasporic studies, art, and questions of race and gender, Echoes of the Haitian Revolution exposes how the history of Haiti has shaped our ideas of race, nation and civilization in ways that we are often unaware of. Haiti's lessons continue to engage us in a dynamic dialog that compels us to question and revisit received arguments. The essays collected here provoke and stimulate these necessary conversations by approaching the legacies and repercussions of the revolution from a cultural perspective.

Long a taboo subject among critics, rhythm finally takes center stage in this book's dazzling, wide-ranging examination of diverse black cultures across the New World. Martin MunroOCOs groundbreaking work traces the centralOCoand contestedOCorole of music in shaping identities, politics, social history, and artistic expression. Starting with enslaved African musicians, Munro takes us to Haiti, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, and to the civil rights era in the United States. Along the way, he highlights such figures as Toussaint Louverture, Jacques Roumain, Jean Price-Mars, The Mighty Sparrow, Aim(r) C(r)saire, Edouard Glissant, Joseph Zobel, Daniel Maximin, James Brown, and Amiri Baraka. Bringing to light new connections among black cultures, Munro shows how rhythm has been both a persistent marker of race as well as a dynamic force for change at virtually every major turning point in black New World hist

Based loosely on the author's life, this novel recounts the narrator's journey following the footsteps of his Mauritius-born grandfather, Maxime, who abruptly boarded a boat bound for Madagascar in 1922 and never returned. Michael Ferrier tells a tale of discovery as well as the elusive, colorful story of Maxime's life in Madagascar, which included a stint as an acrobat in a traveling circus and, later, as a diver and artist on marine expeditions. Maxime's story is one of adventure but also romance. He falls in love with a refined young Pauline Nunes, Ferrier's grandmother, whose well-to-do family of Indian merchants owns a hotel famous for playing the latest music-including American jazz-and throwing popular dances and parties. Over Seas of Memory weaves these personal stories with the island's history, including its period as a Vichy-governed territory at the center of what was termed "Project Madagascar," the Nazi plan to relocate Europe's Jewish population to the island. As Ferrier interlaces his family's intimate story with the larger story of colonialism's lasting and complicated impact-including the racial and ethnic divisions it fomented-he engages with critical issues in contemporary France concerning national and cultural identity.

Long a taboo subject among critics, rhythm finally takes center stage in this book's dazzling, wide-ranging examination of diverse black cultures across the New World. Martin MunroOCOs groundbreaking work traces the centralOCoand contestedOCorole of music in shaping identities, politics, social history, and artistic expression. Starting with enslaved African musicians, Munro takes us to Haiti, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, and to the civil rights era in the United States. Along the way, he highlights such figures as Toussaint Louverture, Jacques Roumain, Jean Price-Mars, The Mighty Sparrow, Aim(r) C(r)saire, Edouard Glissant, Joseph Zobel, Daniel Maximin, James Brown, and Amiri Baraka. Bringing to light new connections among black cultures, Munro shows how rhythm has been both a persistent marker of race as well as a dynamic force for change at virtually every major turning point in black New World hist

The year 2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of May '68, a startling, by now almost mythic event which combined seriousness, courage, humor and theatrics. The contributions of this volume-based on papers presented the conference Does "la lutte continue"? The Global Afterlife of May '68 at Florida State University in March 2019-explore the ramifications of that springtime protest in the contemporary world. What has widely become known as the movement of '68 consisted, in fact, of many synchronous movements in different nations that promoted a great variety of political, social, and cultural agendas. While it is impossible to write a global history of '68, this volume presents a kaleidoscope of different perceptions, reflections, and receptions of protest in France, Italy, and other nations that share in common a global utopian imaginary as expressed, for example, in the slogan: "All power to the imagination!" The contributions of this collection show that, while all social struggles are political, many lasting changes in individual mentalities and social structures originated from utopian ideas that were realized first in artistic productions and their aesthetic reception. In this respect the various protests of May '68 continue.