Kaiama L. Glover

New Narratives of Haiti; or, How to Empathize with a Zombie

The 2010 earthquake has given rise to and put into wide(r) circulation a narrative very much of a piece with the long-standing discourse of Haitian singularity. This recent, though not new, narrative is premised not only on the notion of Haitis endless suffering but also on a concomitant notion of the Haitian peoples endless capacity for suffering. Furthering the trope of Haitian resilience, this narrative functions in tandem with that of Haitian barbarism, situating the country and its populace in a space—a state?—of exception; it subtly disables true empathy, so allowing the rest of the not-Haiti world to imagine and accept Haitians as somehow other than human. It is this positioning of Haiti at the extreme poles of the human condition that Glover calls into question in Haiti Unbound. In this essay, she attempts to respond to and push further the insightful points of inquiry proposed by Alessandra Benedicty, Laurent Dubois, and Rachel Douglas in their compelling and multivalent engagements with her book.

“Flesh like One’s Own”: Benign Denials of Legitimate Complaint

There is no shortage of known global “bad guys.” They are the racists, the sexists, and the otherwise intolerant. They are the ethnocentrists and the bullies, the fanatical and the profiteering, the closeminded and the cruel. They are easily recognized. Their exploitative, scaremongering, and willfully ignorant tactics can be contested and sometimes even contained by any number of compelling progressive discourses. Less discernibly dangerous are those plat-

“Black” Radicalism in Haiti and the Disorderly Feminine: The Case of Marie Vieux Chauvet

This essay reflects on Haitian radicalism by looking at the life and the works of novelist Marie Vieux Chauvet (1916–73). Though increasingly a subject of interest for scholars of Haitian womens literature and of Haitian feminism, Chauvets work is only rarely considered alongside that of more politically visible figures such as Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, and René Depestre. Chauvets exceptionalized status has much to do with her nonparticipation in the gender-bound political culture of her time. This essay seeks to tease out how this pointedly nonaligned woman writer fits into the picture and historiography of Haitian radicalism.

Tituba's Fall: Maryse Condé's Counter-narrative of the Female Slave Self

Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba . . . Black Witch of Salem consistently evokes the most recognizable tropes of the American slave narrative as it troubles and outright up-ends them. Engaging provocatively with a genre that is common to the Afroculture of both the Caribbean and North America, Condé’s novel exemplifies the linguistic and geographical breadth of this New World literary phenomenon. I look closely in the pages below at the specific mechanisms employed in Condé’s subversive refashioning of this literary form—at the means by which she critically interrogates and dramatically shines light on the hidden, subtextual anxieties that mark such narratives as Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince (1831) and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Complicating the relationship between sex and self embedded and so cautiously alluded to in these and other classics of the female slave narrative genre, Condé writes Tituba’s story with a freedom of expression and overt, unredeemed inconsistency that the slave woman’s literary ancestors could in no way afford to indulge. Specifically, where narratives by formerly enslaved women like Prince and Jacobs were premised on their narrators’ virtuous and untiring efforts to secure a liberated and enlightened future for themselves and others, the trajectory Condé traces for her remarkable heroine is decidedly unbound by predetermined models of freedom. Maryse Condé’s Tituba is born in Barbados of a black slave raped by a white sailor during the Middle Passage. Upon her mother’s death by hanging (for the crime of defending herself from being raped a second time by another white man) Tituba is de facto freed and begins a life in contented isolation, cultivating a

The consequences of “not‐Paris”?

Postcolonial modernity has meant the creation of a very unusual set of circumstances for writers of the French‐speaking Caribbean. Called upon to insert themselves forcibly into a space from which, historically, they have been excluded, many of these writers have sharpened their revolutionary horns in Paris, political and cultural capital of the former imperial power. Indeed, throughout the 20th century, Paris has been a veritable inevitability for the francophone elite, a seemingly unavoidable destination that has served at once as a space of painful disillusionment, self‐interrogation, and even community‐building catharsis. While the quandary of negotiating this difficult relationship has been widely discussed, what has been less thoroughly considered is how the very framework in which this tension is negotiated has had an impact on canon formation in the region. In effect, more attention must be paid to the correlation between a refusal of theory and a certain degree of marginalization; to the possibility that an unquestioning acceptance – expectation – of theory as paradigm sets problematic boundaries and subtly undercuts regional unity in the postcolonial Americas.

Beyond the Post|Colonial Canon: A Pedagogical Approach to Embodiment in Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother

Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother begins with an image. It is an incomplete image—or, rather, an image that signals incompleteness. The reader can make out the very top of a person’s head, covered in some sort of scarf, three-quarters’ worth of a forehead, a fragment of an eye and eyebrow. As the narrative unfolds, so does this image constitute itself ever more fully. Forty pages into the novel, we find this same image. Now, though, we can see the whole of a woman’s face, brown-skinned and of unreadable expression. Her eyes meet our own. Another forty pages—part of her upper torso is revealed. She wears many scarves. Necklaces. Her right arm is buried to the elbow in the deep fold of what appears to be a skirt. Forty pages more, then another forty, and forty more still—the fullness of her breasts, her left arm akimbo, the whole of her billowing, rose-patterned peasant skirt. Then finally, only twenty pages further this time, twenty pages before the novel’s conclusion, the image is complete. We see the whole woman, fully constituted. By now we recognize this woman as Xuela, the narrative’s self-telling central character. We understand that Xuela has been constituting herself— completing herself—from the very beginning and that she has taken us along with her on what amounts to her journey of embodiment. The seven images provide a rhythm and a blueprint. They are a reminder of the slow and deliberate process of self-construction that is at the very heart of this narrative. They suggest a point of entry for understanding, and thus for teaching, Xuela’s self-told story. Questions of self-creation—of authorship and authority—have been much theorized in the postcolonial Caribbean literary context and figure in the very foundations of women and gender studies programs, Caribbean studies curricula, and programs in postcolonial and diasporic literature and culture, among other pedagogical fields. To write the self is an exercise in controlled

Translating the Caribbean

These introductory remarks frame the special section “Translating the Caribbean” and discuss the impetus behind the project as well as its future iterations. Each of the five essays in the special section is outlined in its broad strokes, and specific reference is made to Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and Lawrence Venuti’s Rethinking Translation and The Translator’s Invisibility.