Carole Sweeney

The Unmaking of the World: Haiti, History and Writing in Edouard Glissant and Edwige Danticat

Abstract This article reads Edouard Glissants notion of a Caribbean nonhistory through the lens of the Haitian slave revolution of 1791 and its subsequent disappearance from, or distortion in, various intellectual discourses. It argues that the historical and political dislocations produced by the slave trade and subsequent histories of violence and rupture have resulted in a Haitian history centred on a central notion of absence and disappearance. This has produced a crisis in the ability to render traumatic experience into narrative, as history is only able to be experienced as a latent symptomatic injury. Reading Edwige Danticats novel Breath, Eyes, Memory and its representation of the transgenerational transmission of sexual trauma from mother to daughter, the article suggests that the novel adopts Glissants idea of a “tormented chronology” in order to narrate the history of violence for Haitian women. The reading of Glissant and Danticat uses both the insights of trauma theory and the work of Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain in which she observes that intense pain or trauma has the effect of unmaking the world of the sufferer and destroys the relationship between language and body. Danticats novel considers this broken relationship through womens experiences at the “edges of history” and in doing so addresses Glissants problematic of the “dislocation of the continuum.”

‘One of them, but white’: The disappearance of Negro: An anthology (1934)

FTER three years in the making and repeated difficulties in securing a publisher, Nancy Cunard’s Negro : An Anthology was finally published in London in 1934. The anthology was a generically eclectic document of 855 pages of poetry, essays, ethnography, art history, music, proverbs, maps and historical accounts of the African diaspora around the world. Part ethnographic project, part literary study, all underwritten by a fervent Communist polemic, Negro was a considerable editorial undertaking that would preoccupy Cunard for four years, see her through libel suits with the British press, a vicious hate mail campaign in the United A w C A R O L E S W E E N E Y .......................................................................................................

'Keeping the Ruins Private: Anna Kavan and Heroin Addiction'

Abstract In 1964, the number of registered heroin addicts in Britain was 753. One of these was Anna Kavan, née Helen Woods. Beginning her writing career under the name Helen Ferguson, she wrote conventionally realist novels that enjoyed modest commercial success. In 1939–40, after a number of serious breakdowns and suicide attempts, and now calling herself Anna Kavan, Woods/Ferguson left a Swiss sanatorium addicted to heroin, which had almost certainly been therapeutically prescribed for sleeping disorders and severe depression. From then until her death in 1968, when she was found collapsed over a box of heroin, Kavan had an intermittent but intense relationship with the drug. This essay examines the ways in which Kavan has been constructed as an ‘addict writer’, both by her biographers and critics, and how this designation has influenced critical readings of her work.

Fin de millénaire French Fiction: The Aesthetics of Crisis

représentation sociale est en fait partagée entre le fabricant et le consommateur; la deuxième est que même en présentant ses analyses de manière neutre et objective, le fabricant de représentations sociales peut transmettre ses propres convictions morales, car la logique du genre conduira l’utilisateur aux mêmes conclusions que lui. Becker insiste également sur le fait que toute représentation sociale est le produit d’une organisation sociale, et qu’une étude sociologique doit donc analyser tous les aspects de cette organisation: le sociologue doit tenir compte du contexte dans lequel la représentation sociale est produite et analysée, et, par souci d’objectivité il doit aussi s’efforcer de faire entendre d’autres voix que la sienne. Les chapitres de la deuxième section sont non seulement une illustration efficace des théories énoncées dans la première section, mais ils sont également intéressants individuellement pour quiconque s’intéresse plus particulièrement à chacun des genres traités. Becker invite son lecteur à cesser de se demander ‘ce type de représentation sociale est-il le meilleur ?’ et à se poser la question ‘pour quoi ce type de représentation est-il le meilleur ?’ Une telle approche encourage à s’interroger sur la valeur sociologique de produits qui ne sont pas traditionnellement étudiés comme des objets sociologiques, ce qui ne peut qu’enrichir la réflexion de tout lecteur de cet ouvrage stimulant.

Race, Modernism, and Institutions

That aesthetic modernism was a thoroughly heterogeneous set of practices and movements ocurring in diverse urban centres across Europe has become something of a commonplace in post-1960s modernist scholarship. Indeed, the most stimulating and field-defining studies in the last two decades have eloquently insisted upon the inherent heterogeneity of modernism’s internationalist impetus.1 Less constrained by previous intellectual and institutional divisions between an Eliotic-Pound inflected Anglo-American modernism versus a more European avantgardism, these newer studies of modernism broadened the scope of intellectual inquiry to encompass Czech, Russian, Italian, and French (beyond Proust and Mallarme) variants of modernism. This increasingly comparative approach to the variegated terrains of modernism has provoked significant changes in the ways in which canonicity in modernist studies has been defined, researched, and taught in the university classroom. While the core of a modernist poetry curriculum remains inevitably, and quite properly, based around the ‘men of 1914’, new theoretical approaches to what constitutes ‘English as a discipline have altered the ways in which we think about cultural authority and the politics of literary canons. Catalysed by the emergence and subsequent intellectual consolidation of post-structuralism in the 1960s and an accompanying theoretical concern with ruptures and margins, scholarly research in modernism has increasingly concerned itself with defining the movement in a more expansive matrix of production, dissemination, and consumption.