Greetings Fellow Caribbeanists:
I assigned Joan Dayan's "Haiti, History and the Gods" (a very under-read
text) to my graduate class and we found ourselves confronting the following
question: why is there such silence about Haiti in Anglophone Caribbean
studies? Am I wrong in this? James tried to center Haiti and the Haitian
revolution as crucial to New World black identity in is classic text and
Lamming took up the call by discussing James in his own now classic text,
"The Pleasures of Exile" but there seems to be very little that has tried to
find an anchor in the event that is Haiti. Is Haiti a kind of traumatic
kernel in West Indian identity? If Anglophone intellectuals were able to
"journey" epistemologically and literally to Castro's Cuba why have they not
done so with Haiti? Of course perhaps the most basic barrier here is language
but language does not seem to have prevented an encounter with Cuba? I'd be
interested in hearing other's thoughts on this. I'm hoping that its a case of
my simply not knowing the literature.
Best
Joseph N. Clarke
Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literatures
in English
The University of Pennsylvania
English Department, Bennett Hall 119
3340 Walnut Street
Philadelphia PA 19104-6273 USA
[log in to unmask]
|