Martin Munro

Interdependence and Intertextuality in Lyonel Trouillot's Bicentenaire

Evoking the persistence of themes of revenge and animosity in Haitian literature, this article considers how Lyonel Trouillot radically reconceptualizes them, and considers how his work is pushing toward a more complex understanding of personal and collective identity and destiny in Haiti. The article argues that, in suggesting the interdependencies that exist between individuals and groups in Haiti, Trouillots work offers a potential way out of the repetitive, circular history that revenge and hatred tend to create.

Haitian Novels and Novels of Haiti: History, Haitian Writing, and Madison Smartt Bell's Trilogy

This essay reads Madison Smartt Bells Haitian trilogy in the context of contemporary Haitian literature, and considers why Haitian writers have tended not to evoke the revolution in their work, and why it is an American author has produced the most ambitious work of Haitian historical fiction of recent times.

Slaves to the Rhythm: the Rhythmic Evolution of Plantation Societies

The transportation of slaves from Africa to the circum-Caribbean was marked by processes of cultural dislocation, destruction, and renewal in which rhythm played a central role not only in resistance to colonial domination but also as a kind of lingua franca binding together peoples of disparate origins. Rhythm was able to transcend not only differences of origin but also geographical and linguistic differences across the circum-Caribbean, the cultural and historical space that encompasses the islands of the Caribbean Sea and the countries that border it, or which can be said to share certain societal and cultural traits. Rhythm is one of these common features, a force that, as I will argue in this article, transcends linguistic and national barriers (in this case across the Francophone Caribbean and Anglophone North America), and is a key element in understanding the evolution of circum-Caribbean cultures. It may seem strange at first to say that rhythm plays a fundamental role in the creation and establishment of stable, functioning individuals or societies. Rhythm is conventionally thought of as an element of music, or as a feature of poetic style, something external to the body, a supplement to experience rather than an essential element of it. If we think however, of where rhythm comes from, and notwithstanding Derrida’s idea that rhythm’s origins are ‘‘incalculable’’ (81), we turn inevitably to the body, even to the womb, and our first encounters with the rhythmic workings of human bodies. Rhythm as we know it seems to originate in the body, from psycho-physiological urges, from the impulse to perform continuous, regular movements, which in turn create ‘‘the awareness of greater ease and gusto through constant evenness in motion’’ (Sachs 112). The human body itself can be seen as a set of rhythms that are different, but which act in harmony with each other, particularly when the body moves in

Eulogizing Creoleness? Éloge de la créolité and Caribbean Identity, Culture, and Politics

This essay introduces part 1 of a special section on the créolité movement—“Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Éloge de la créolité”—in which a variety of essays explore and assess the impact, twenty-five-plus years on, of the controversial manifesto by Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Jean Bernabé. Éloge de la créolité has been much discussed and critiqued in relation to Antillean politics and literature; its claim to replace essentialist racial identities with an ever-evolving diversalité has been disputed by a variety of other authors from the Caribbean and beyond. The essays here fall broadly into four categories—intellectual contexts, politics, literature, and ethnography. This introduction asks, does the concept of créolité have a future in the current situation of Antillean writing, which has lost much of its momentum, especially in relation to writing from Haiti? (Part 2 of “Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Éloge de la créolité” will appear in Small Axe 55, in March 2018.)

Haiti in a Globalized Frame

I have just returned from Florida State University, Tallahassee, where I had co-organized an international conference, ‘Haiti in a Globalized Frame’. The main organizer was Martin Munro, who has recently been appointed as Director of FSUs Winthrop King Institute. Martin is one of the leading international specialists on Francophone Caribbean literature, and this was the first of what is likely to be a number of major Caribbean events at the Winthrop King under his directorship, as the Instit...

Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic by Jennifer L. Palmer (review)

One wonders what the late Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who wrote famously of the historical ‘silencing’ of the Haitian Revolution, would make of the great proliferation of works on Haiti and the Revolution that have appeared over the last decade or so — books, articles, and edited volumes by scholars such as Laurent Dubois, Deborah Jenson, Marlene Daut, Jeremy D. Popkin, Nick Nesbitt, Charles Forsdick, Kaiama L. Glover, and many others. Collectively, this body of recent work, building on previous landmark publications by, among others, C. L. R. James, David Geggus, Michael Dash, and Trouillot himself, has had the effect of promoting Haiti to the forefront of debates on race and revolution during and after the Enlightenment era, to the extent that it has become an unavoidable point of reference for any scholar working on those themes and periods. A primary concern has been to investigate what Nesbitt terms ‘The Idea of Haiti’ (see ‘The Idea of 1804’, in The Haiti Issue: 1804 and Nineteenth-Century French Studies (1⁄4 special issue Yale French Studies, 107 (2005)), 6–38), the philosophical and political underpinnings and ramifications of the Revolution, and to assert the primary importance of Haiti to emerging ideas on race, human rights, slavery, and other contemporary concerns. Arguably, the drive to promote Haiti in this way has rather ignored some of the complexities and contradictions of the Revolution, and paid relatively little attention to the everyday, lived experience of slavery and colonialism in Saint-Domingue. Jennifer L. Palmer’s fine study of that very experience complements some of the other recent work on Haiti, and also subtly critiques its tendency to reach for the overarching political-philosophical meanings of the Revolution while ignoring, and indeed ‘silencing’, accounts of the quotidian reality of slavery. Tellingly — and in this regard she echoes Geggus — she argues that the Revolution, just as it challenged notions of white, European superiority, also had the effect of solidifying race as a political and social category, and of curtailing the fluidity that had previously characterized social relations — the ways in which bonds were formed across racial lines, in the ‘intimate’ settings that she writes about: in workplaces, homes, families, commercial relations, and other situations in which Africans, Europeans, and Creoles inevitably met and formed bonds. As the Revolution progressed, so the personal ties that had bound different groups together began to dissolve and to be replaced by more clearly oppositional, binary understandings of race. Palmer’s meticulous research uncovers a range of intimate connections that go beyond the usual interest in sexual intimacy to include bonds of, for example, common masculinity, shared work, kinship, and neighbourliness, and which, she says, characterized the lived experience of colonial rule. In ranging broadly from Saint-Domingue to La Rochelle, she suggests the ways in which such intimacies were transatlantic in nature and implication, and, again, how such bonds were curtailed as binary notions of race established themselves across the Atlantic world. Palmer’s arguments are persuasive, and should be incorporated into the broader debates on race and revolution, while we remain aware that the historical accounts of such ties remain inevitably one-sided, and that the silencing of the enslaved created one intimate reality that even the most sophisticated study is unable to enter.

Reorienting Cultural Flows

In his essay entitled: “France-Japan: The Coral Writers,” Micha€el Ferrier proposes a major rethinking of intellectual strategies in dealing with Japan. For him what is needed is a “genuine epistemological overhaul of approaches.” This refocusing will also involve a reexamination of “Europe’s relationship to the ‘other’” since the biggest obstacle hindering a more accurate appreciation of Japanese culture and society is “the persistence and ... predominance in France and elsewhere of a traditionally uniform representation of Japanese society.” Characteristic of this misrepresentation are worn-out clich es proclaiming in various ways that Japan is “a mysterious blend of tradition and modernity.” With this criticism, Ferrier is consciously challenging the positions of some of France’s most celebrated commentators on Japan, notably Pierre Loti, Claude L evi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Henri Michaux. What Ferrier finds unhelpful and even misleading in these writers’ approaches is their tendency to be ahistorical and essentialist, to ignore Japanese history, and glorify the putative superiority of Japanese country life, which supposedly remains, unlike the nation’s urban centers, untouched by the stain of modernity. Ferrier draws attention to a Eurocentric bias which permits such distinguished writers to implicitly measure Japanese culture and society from the perspective of Western superiority. Ultimately, the idea is that while Japan might have much to admire, it nevertheless remains subtly inferior to its European counterparts. In order to move scholarship in more challenging directions which will lead to more complex, even if tentative conclusions, Ferrier argues for an end to simplistic dichotomies such as “East/West, Us/Them, Japan/France.” He wishes to replace such categories by what he terms “the triangulation of cultures” where “no culture can be considered the gauge of another.” To

'Who Stole the Soul?' Rhythm and Race in the Digital Age

This essay asks the following basic questions: What happens to the relationship between rhythm and race in the digital age? What happens when mastery of rhythm is no longer necessarily tied to ritual, to manual drumming, and to the physical, bodily re-creation of rhythm? When electronic and digital media give virtually anyone the ability to ‘drum’ and to create rhythmic music, what happens to the longstanding association between blackness and rhythm? Referring to David Scott’s recent arguments on a stalled, tragic time in the Caribbean in particular, the author draws connections between the apparent redundancy of revolutionary, anticolonial thinking in the present and the perhaps less apparent decoupling of rhythm and race in contemporary musical styles. If, as Scott says, the teleologies of anticolonial politics no longer hold true, has rhythm as a marker of time, and as an integral element in the poetics of resistance, lost its association with radical blackness and become a deracialized, dehistoricized commodity?

Thirsting to Write

What constitutes a Haitian postearthquake novel? Does such a work require the author to present to a greater or lesser degree people and situations that relate to the disaster and its ongoing effects? Is a work written after the earthquake but which does not mention it still a postearthquake novel? This article engages with some of the issues facing Haitian writers following the earthquake through a close discussion of a novel that does in fact write directly of the disaster and its aftermath: Kettly Mars’s Aux frontieres de la soif.

Littérature-fin-du-monde: Time-crossings, prophecy, and the apocalypse in Haiti

Abstract This paper argues that Haitian literature is a kind of successor to littérature-monde, through arguing that in contrast to the generally positive, future-oriented thrust of the manifesto and the book, much recent and contemporary writing from Haiti presents a dystopian view of time and history in which the idea of the future is relatively absent and often figured around sentiments of an imminent apocalyptic collapse.