Jacques Stephen Alexis, Jacques Roumain, René Depestre, Marie Chauvet, Frankétienne, J. J. Dominique, Jean Métellus, Dany Laferrière, Yanick Lahens, Lyonel Trouillot et Edwidge Danticat sont quelques-uns des écrivains haïtiens dont l'écriture est marquée par le contexte politique d'Haïti. Les régimes dictatoriaux ont, en effet, affecté l'espace créatif, imposant un certain nombre de contraintes auxquelles ces écrivains, chacun à leur manière, ont ingénieusement riposté et réagi. Ce recueil d'essais critiques et d'entretiens tente d'illustrer et d'analyser comment les oeuvres romanesques, poétiques et théâtrales s'accommodent du « pays assiégé » et déploient des stratégies linguistiques et formelles permettant de transcender les forces d'oppression. Jacques Stephen Alexis, Jacques Roumain, René Depestre, Marie Chauvet, Frankétienne, J. J. Dominique, Jean Métellus, Dany Laferrière, Yanick Lahens, Lyonel Trouillot and Edwidge Danticat are some of the Haitian writers whose writing is marked by Haiti's political history. Successive dictatorships have indeed shaped Haiti's creative space, imposing constraints that the authors ingeniously counteract and against which they all react. This collection of essays and interviews illustrates and analyzes the various ways in which the fictional, poetic and theatrical texts transcend the forces of oppression through linguistic and formal strategies.

Today more than ever literature and the other arts make use of urban structures - it is in the city that the global and universal joins the local and individual. Babylon or New Jerusalem? Perceptions of the City in Literature draws a map of the concept of the city in literature and represents the major issues involved. Contributions to the volume revisit cities such as the London of Wordsworth, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf or Rilke's Paris, but also travel to the politics of power in Renaissance theatre at Ferrara and to deliberate urban erasures in post-apartheid South Africa. The texts represented range from Renaissance plays to contemporary novels and to poetry from various periods, with references to the visual arts, including film. The role of memory in contemplating the city and also specific urban metaphors developed in literature, such as boxing - the square ring - and jazz are also discussed. The transformation of cities by legislation on cemeteries, by lighting or by projects of urban renewal are the subject of articles, while others reflect on images of the city in worlds specifically forged by writers like William Blake and James Thomson. The contributors themselves live and work in many varied cities, thus representing a dynamic and real variety of critical approaches, and introducing a strong theoretical and comparative element.

'Rewriting' in the context of critical work on Caribbean literature has tended to be used to discuss revisionism from a variety of postcolonial perspectives, such as 'rewriting history' or 'rewriting canonical texts.' By shifting the focus to how Caribbean writers return to their own works in order to rework them, this book offers theoretical considerations to postcolonial studies on 'literariness' in relation to the near-obsessive degree of rewriting to which Caribbean writers have subjected their own literary texts. Focusing specifically on FrankZtienne, this book offers an overview of how the defining aesthetic and thematic components of FrankZtienne's major works have emerged over the course of his forty-year writing career. It reveals the marked development of key notions guiding his literary creation since the 1960s, and demonstrates that rewriting illustrates the central aesthetic of the Spiral which has always shaped his Iuvre. It is, the book argues, the constantly moving form of the Spiral which FrankZtienne explores through his constant reworking of his previously written texts. FrankZtienne and Rewriting negotiates between the literary and material ends of the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies, arguing that literary characteristics in FrankZtienne connect with changing political, social, economic, and cultural circumstances in the Haiti he rewrites.

Migration is both a demographic and a cultural phenomenon. As such, it both reshapes the global village and subverts the all-encompassing vision of the city, a space split between the blending of all new cultures and the need felt by many migrants to maintain their traditions and thereby contribute to a multicultural mosaic. This series of essays explores how the concepts of the melting-pot and the mosaic have shaped the representation of Paris and Montreal in francophone literatures. Migrant movements to these cities from the Caribbean, the Maghreb, Sub-Saharan Africa, Quebec, Indochina, and the Indian Ocean have produced new groups of intersecting cultures. Under the dual influences of their native and host countries, migrants have produced an innovative and multifaceted literature that reflects their composite world-view. Their writing poses pressing questions of ethnicity, immigration, integration, and citizenship, and challenges longstanding notions both of the concept of the city and of how its spaces embody and articulate Frenchness in the face of ongoing change. Such shifts produce changes not only in the diasporic culture, but in the national culture as well, through creolization processes. These shifting identities increasingly destabilize current notions of national membership and social and cultural belonging, since we can no longer presume a direct correspondence between place, culture, language and identity. They also pose new questions of national identity and difference as the immigrant presence expands and inflects the cosmopolitan pluralism of today’s societies.

Marie Vieux Chauvet’s Theatres: Thought, Form, and Performance of Revolt at once reflects and acts upon the praxis of theatre that inspired Haitian writer Marie Vieux Chauvet, while at the same time provides incisively new cultural studies readings about revolt in her theatre and prose. Chauvet – like many free-minded women of the Caribbean and the African diaspora – was banned from the public sphere, leaving her work largely ignored for decades. Following on a renewed interest in Chauvet, this collection makes essential contributions to Africana Studies, Theatre Studies, Performance Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Global South Feminisms. Contributors are: Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Stéphanie Bérard, Christian Flaugh, Gabrielle Gallo, Jeremy Matthew Glick, Kaiama L. Glover, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Cae Joseph-Massena, Nehanda Loiseau, Judith G. Miller, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Anthony Phelps, Ioana Pribiag, Charlee M. Redman Bezilla, Guy Régis Jr, and Lena Taub Robles. This collection is a beautiful gathering of voices exploring Chauvet’s theatrical work, along with the role of theatre in her novels. The richly textured and evocatively written essays offer many new and necessary insights into the work of one of Haiti’s greatest writers. — Laurent Dubois, Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History, Duke University. Author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History This collection draws necessary critical attention to how theatre and performance animate the work of a key figure in Caribbean fiction and drama. Using an innovative scholarly and artistic approach, the collection incorporates leading and new voices in Haitian studies and Francophone studies on Chauvet’s depictions of revolt. — Soyica Diggs Colbert, Professor of African American Studies and Theater & Performance Studies, Georgetown University. Author of Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics

Turns to the written record to re-examine the building blocks of a nation Picking up where most historians conclude, Chelsea Stieber explores the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of swords and of pens, waged in newspapers and periodicals, in literature, broadsheets, and fliers. In her analysis of Haitian writing that followed independence, Stieber composes a new literary history of Haiti, that challenges our interpretations of both freedom struggles and the postcolonial. By examining internal dissent during the revolution, Stieber reveals that the very concept of freedom was itself hotly contested in the public sphere, and it was this inherent tension that became the central battleground for the guerre de plume—the paper war—that vied to shape public sentiment and the very idea of Haiti. Stieber’s reading of post-independence Haitian writing reveals key insights into the nature of literature, its relation to freedom and politics, and how fraught and politically loaded the concepts of “literature” and “civilization” really are. The competing ideas of liberté, writing, and civilization at work within postcolonial Haiti have consequences for the way we think about Haiti’s role—as an idea and a discursive interlocutor—in the elaboration of black radicalism and black Atlantic, anticolonial, and decolonial thought. In so doing, Stieber reorders our previously homogeneous view of Haiti, teasing out warring conceptions of the new nation that continued to play out deep into the twentieth century.

"Very refreshing in the understanding of Caribbean literature . . . Succeeds in blending close readings of specific texts with a constant awareness of the larger picture. . . . From a theoretical complexity that calls on Glissant, Fanon, Ngugi, Benito-Rojo among others, this profoundly human exploration of autofiction and advocacy in Francophone Caribbean literature study does not succumb to the temptation of theory; that is, she does not demand texts illustrate a rigid theoretical frame; the reverse is true throughout the study."—Cilas Kemedjio, University of Rochester Larrier breaks new ground in analyzing first-person narratives by five Francophone Caribbean writers—Joseph Zobel, Patrick Chamoiseau, Gisele Pineau, Edwidge Danticat, and Maryse Conde—that manifest distinctive interaction among narrators, protagonists, characters, and readers through a layering of voices, languages, time, sources, and identities. Employing the Martinican combat dance—danmye—as a trope, the author argues that these narratives can be read as testimony to the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and patriarchy that denied Caribbean people their subjectivity. In chapters devoted to Zobel, Chamoiseau, Pineau, Danticat, and Conde—who come from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti—Larrier probes the presence, construction, and strategy of the first-person narrator, which sometimes shifts within the text itself. Providing a perspective different from European travel literature, these texts deliberately position the "I" as a witness and/or performer who articulates experiences ignored or misinterpreted by sojourners' more widely circulated chronicles. While not purporting to speak for others, the "I" is concerned with transmitting what he or she saw, heard, experienced, or endured, therefore disrupting conventional representations of the Francophone Caribbean. Moreover, in modeling authenticity and agency, autofiction is also a form of advocacy.