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Joe and everyone else, Not at all: I think you have hit the nail on the head. I remember a SPLENDID round table at an ALA meeting (African Literature Association) in Columbus (Ohio State University) in the 1990s, during which Dayan genty but firmly pointed out all of the missing blocks in Gilroy's Black Atlantic; the most glaring one being the so-called Francophone Caribbean and Cesaire's foundational influence. Perhaps one of your students might care to do a comparative reading and track down her paper; it must have been published eventually. Would love to see this list exchange serious musings about this. I'll throw in one or two imperfect ideas in the pot: Walcott, who speaks French island patois and often refers to Cesaire's poetry in private as well as in his work: little if any is ever made of this connection, and of the complex multi-layered, multi-glossic Ste Lucia. And, on Haiti's score, perhaps, the fact that until the end of the 20th century, the majority of the intellectuals' life was oriented toward Paris (where Depestre still publishes) rather than New York or Toronto (even though New York and Toronto and Montreal have a far greater number of diasporic Haitians). You'll note that EXILE is Lamming's postcolonial challenge to Shakespeare, that is, to the British Empire's enormous juggernaut effect. Until DANTICAT made it big enough in the US, little interest for Haitian lit. seemed to have permeated outside of academia, little awareness that there was another rich tradition there, and a complex corpus in another language (Anyone read the scathing DE SI JOLIES PETITES PLAGES?). Well, would love to see some responses. I guess what I am unfelicitously trying to imply is that we are still, readers and writers alike, stuck in the colonial time warp. Thanks Joe for a provocative post. cz On Sunday, March 2, 2003, at 07:28 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote: > 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? Clarisse Zimra English Lit. and Comp. theory private line 453 58 37 secretary 453 53 21