The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat

Jana Evans Braziel, Nadège T. Clitandre, Jana Evans Braziel, Nadège T. Clitandre

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350123533
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literatura
• Sous-sujet: Crítica literaria norteamericana

Edwidge Danticat's prolific body of work has established her as one of the most important voices in 21st-century literary culture. Across such novels as Breath, Eyes, Memory, Farming the Bones and short story collections such as Krik? Krak! and most recently Everything Inside, essays, and writing for children, the Haitian-American writer has throughout her oeuvre tackled important contemporary themes including racism, imperialism, anti-immigrant politics, and sexual violence. With chapters written by leading and emerging international scholars, this is the most up-to-date and in-depth reference guide to 21st-century scholarship on Edwidge Danticat's work. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat covers such topics as: · The full range of Danticat's writing from her novels and short stories to essays, life writing and writing for children and young adults.
· Major interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives including from establishing fields fields of literary studies, Caribbean Studies Political Science, Latin American Studies, feminist and gender studies, African Diaspora Studies, and emerging fields such as Environmental Studies.
· Danticat's literary sources and influences from Haitian authors such as Marie Chauvet, Jacques Roumain and Jacques-Stéphen Alexis to African American authors like Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Caribbean American writers Audre Lorde to Paule Marshall.
· Known and unknown Historical moments in experiences of slavery and imperialism, the consequence of internal and external migration, and the formation of diasporic communities The book also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Danticat's work and key works of secondary criticism, and an interview with the author, as well as and essays by Danticat herself.

PART I
LITERARY BEGINNINGS

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION: A LITERARY LIFE AND LEGACY: DANTICAT’S WRITERLY INHERITANCES

Jana Evans Braziel and Nadège T. Clitandre

Celebrated writer, passionate activist, literary voice, imaginative wordsmith, and heartfelt conscience of a generation who is an outspoken critic of racism, anti-immigrant politics, police brutality, sexual violence, military interventions, and hemispheric imperialism, Edwidge Danticat is a beloved writer who has an extensive literary oeuvre that moves across multiple genres (short story, novella, novel, memoir, travel narrative, essay, and hybrid, experimental forms). An award-winning author (Neustadt International Prize, Ford Fellowship, Pushcart Prize) and a MacArthur Fellow, Danticat is also an accomplished and well-known author; and her work merits comprehensive and transcontinental engagement. Edwidge Danticat is the most important Haitian-American writer today, and she was a pioneering voice among Haitian diasporic writers writing in English, rather than French or Créole. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969, Danticat was raised by an aunt in Belair, before migrating to the United States to join her parents in Brooklyn in 1981. She was twelve years old at the time. Like so many other Haitian diasporic writers, Danticat’s works stand in the shadows cast by Duvalierism, the regimes of François Duvalier (from 1957 to 1971) and Jean-Claude Duvalier (from 1971 to 1986), and post-Duvalier militarism and dictatorship in the nation. Danticat studied French literature at Barnard College, where she graduated with a BA in 1990, before studying creative writing at Brown University and earning the MFA degree in 1993. A prolific and beloved writer, Danticat’s works of fiction and nonfiction include Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak! (1996), a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones (1998); After the Dance (2002); Behind the Mountains (2002); The Dew Breaker (2004); Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (2005); Brother, I’m Dying (2007); Create Dangerously (2010); Eight Days: A Story of Haiti (2010); Tent Life: Haiti (2011); Claire of the Sea Light (2013); The Last Mapou (with Édouard Duval-Carrié) (2013); Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation (2015); Untwine: A Novel (2015); The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story (2017); My Mommy Medicine (2019); and Everything Inside (2019). Danticat has also edited four collections of short stories, poems, and essays: The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (2003); Haiti Noir (2010); Best American Essays 2011; and Haiti Noir 2 (2013).

Edwidge Danticat is one of the most celebrated and beloved contemporary writers, yet, to date, there exists only one monograph (Clitandre’s Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (2018)), one edited collection, and one collection of interviews on Danticat even though she is arguably one of the most important writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Author of more than eighteen books—including six works of fiction, five works of nonfiction, seven young adult and children’s books, as well as scores of essays and articles—Edwidge Danticat is one of the most important contemporary writers: she is also one of the most celebrated and award-winning authors of our era, having won ten literary prizes and awards and having been nominee and finalist for many more. Among her distinctions include the high honor of MacArthur Fellow (2009), Ford Foundation Fellow (2017), and the Prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2018), and the Vilcek Prize for Literature (2020). Danticat has also edited four volumes of fiction and penned numerous prefaces and introductions to other books. Books addressing Danticat’s literary and historical importance include Martin Munro’s Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide (2010), Nadège T. Clitandre’s Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary (2018), Maxine Lavon Montgomery’s Conversations with Edwidge Danticat (2017), a collection of interviews with the author, and the volume Narrating History, Home, and Nation: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat, edited by Megan Feifer, Maia Butler, and Joanna Davis-McElligatt (forthcoming). All of these works mark the beginning of a serious, engaged scholarship on the fiction and nonfiction writings of Edwidge Danticat and augment hundreds of literary critical essays about her work. The Bloomsbury Companion to Edwidge Danticat builds on this literary reception and will be the only comprehensive volume on her writings that tackles the literary oeuvre in its entirety, cross-genre, and organized around myriad themes in her corpus.

Providing an extensive and comprehensive overview to the fiction and nonfiction oeuvre of Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, the book deploys literary, cultural, historical, political, and social analyses to her literary corpus; and the book is organized around key themes and concepts in her body of work. Three key features of The Bloomsbury Companion to Edwidge Danticat include comparative and multidisciplinary analyses of Danticat’s literary oeuvre; an expansive engagement with multiple genres—short stories, essays, novels, memoirs, and young adult and children’s literatures—and the full corpus of her writing; and an encyclopedic and comprehensive companion to her literary corpus and its location within Haitian history, folklore, religion, and politics, as well as within circum-Caribbean, inter-American, and hemispheric frames.

Structure of the Book

In Part I, “Literary Beginnings,” we include (following this editors’ introduction) a nonfiction essay by Edwidge Danticat (“ ‘All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt”) and an interview with the author by Nadège T. Clitandre (first published in her 2018 monograph Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary). Discussing a wide range of issues and authors, Clitandre and Danticat address the literary influences on her own fiction, the political and philosophical problems confronted in her nonfiction, the importance of mentors and representation for women and girls, and myriad other ideas. In the nonfiction essay, “ ‘All Geography Is within Me’: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt,” Danticat explores the impact of literary imagination, geography, and the relations to life, death, survival, and experience in her homeland Haiti. Danticat also probes the literary influences of Zora Neale Hurston and others on her own literary imaginary, inherited genealogies, and imagined geographies.

Part II is entitled “On Violence and Violated Bodies: Biopolitics in Danticat’s Texts.” The chapters included in this second section are by contributors Judith Misrahi-Barak, Myriam J. A Chancy, and Jana Evans Braziel. Judith Misrahi-Barak’s chapter, “Reconstructive Textual Surgery in Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and The Dew Breaker,” foregrounds literary poetics and body politics through the concept of biopolitics, a term first introduced by Michel Foucault and later elaborated by Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Sibylle Fischer, and myriad other political theorists, philosophers, and cultural critics. Tying the concept of biopolitics and tortured, maimed, mutilated, fragmented bodies or body parts to Danticat’s textual forms, particularly the short story and short story cycle, Misrahi-Barak asserts that the author performs a “reconstructive textual surgery” that reconstitutes the body and the body politics, however injured and wounded.

Beginning with a powerful anecdote and a cautionary tale about racial, ethnic, and immigrant presuppositions, Myriam J. A. Chancy, in her chapter “ ‘I Might Lose All My Life’: Brother, I’m Dying and (Black) Immigration Discourse in the United States,” tackles the geopolitics and imaginary terrains of contemporary immigrant politics in the United States and in Canada. From this account, and drawing from and textually analyzing Danticat’s literary memoir, Brother, I’m Dying (2007), she stages a literary debate about contemporary immigrant politics and policies in North America, specifically the United States and Canada, foregrounding diasporic approaches that center on Haitian immigrant experiences in the two countries. Chancy importantly reminds readers that Black biopolitics in North America need to incorporate African and Caribbean diasporic experiences, and that not doing so demonstrates the devaluation of Black existence in the body politic.

In the chapter, “Alleys, Capillaries, Thorns: The Violated Terre-Natale of Ville Rose,” Braziel explores the ville imaginé of Ville Rose in Danticat’s literary oeuvre as the historical ground of sexual violence in Haiti. Rereading all of Danticat’s literary texts for their treatments of sexual violence, maternal death, and dead babies, Braziel illustrates the ways in which these violences are foundational not only for understanding Haiti’s entangled histories of slavery, colonial domination, and rape but also for understanding the ways in which Danticat’s literary reimaginings of these histories create alternative spaces for women and children within that violated historical ground: by demonstrating the violences that transpired, the author points to women and children’s absences, or presences as violated terrains, and demonstrates that Haitian futures must unearth these violated terrains and create new spaces—not just imagined spaces but ones that are social and political and economic—for women and children as historical actors and political agents.

Part III is entitled “On Death and Dying: Necropolitics in Danticat’s Texts” and includes chapters written by Simone A. James Alexander, Anne Brüske, and Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo. Simone A. James Alexander, in her chapter “Losing Your (M)Other: Danticat’s Narratives of Un/Belonging and Un/Dying,” foregrounds Danticat’s literary and philosophical engagements with death and dying: in the chapter, Alexander adopts Danticat’s ideas of “living dyingly” (from The Art of Death) to conceptualize the spiritual and transcendent terrain of dying through the term “necro-transcendence.” For Alexander, necro-transcendence captures the processes of un/belonging and un/dying; and she analyzes death through this lens in several literary works by Danticat—Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; The Art of Death; and Untwine—as well as draws parallels to literary treatments of death and dying in works by American literary authors, particularly Toni Morrison’s Sula and Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”

Further developing the discussion of Danticat’s literary preoccupations with death and dying, Anne Brüske, in her chapter “Lòt bò dlo: Producing Haitian Spaces of Death and Diaspora in Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, examines the ways in which death (as theme and trope) informs not only the content of Danticat’s texts but also the author’s “aesthetic form.” Brüske draws on Thomas Macho’s concept of “presence in absence” to do so; and she focuses her analyses of death and dying as aesthetics in The Dew Breaker, though she also surveys the “spaces” of death throughout myriad texts—The Farming of Bones; Create Dangerously; Claire of the Sea Light; and The Art of Death. Using Danticat’s Haitian Kreyòl phrase, “lòt bò dlo,” “the other side of the water,” Brüske explores the mythical spaces of death in diaspora, centering her reading through Vodou understandings of death and the spaces of death.

Extending discussions of death and dying in Danticat’s oeuvre, Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo, in her chapter entitled “Death and the Maiden: Writing Death in Danticat’s Fiction,” delves into literary treatments of death as “exorcism” of the “fear of death,” as the author herself first introduces in The Art of Death. Probing this recurrent theme—death, dying—in several different literary texts (Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; The Farming of Bones; The Dew Breaker; and Claire of the Sealight; as well as in The Art of Death), Nzengou-Tayo offers readers a “typology” of death in Danticat’s literary corpus as well as its role in narration and in the writer’s narrative forms. Nzengou-Tayo thus builds on what Brüske defines as the “aesthetics” of death in Danticat’s literature. Finally, and by focusing on processes of mourning, grief, and bereavement, Nzengou-Tayo, like Alexander, attends to the philosophical dimensions of death and dying in Danticat’s work.

Part IV, entitled “Tifi ak Fanm, Girls and Women,” foregrounds the relationship of women and girls through feminist lenses and includes contributions by Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, and Cara Byrne. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, in her chapter “ ‘Somebody, Anybody Sing a Black Girl’s Song …’: Danticat and Haitian Girlhood,” centers the lives and lived experiences of Black girls in Danticat’s literary texts. Foregrounding analyses of Breath, Eyes, Memory and Claire of the Sea Light, Jean-Charles examines the ways in which Danticat writes for and about tifi, girls in Haiti and in Haiti’s diaspora. Building on the interdisciplinary field of Black girlhood studies, Jean-Charles demonstrates how Black girls are too often rendered invisible culturally, historically, socially, and politically, and offers, through Danticat, a counter-narrative that places Black girls at the literary and imaginary center.

In “The Good Daughter: Danticat’s Migrating Memories,” Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw takes up the theme of tifi ak fanm, girls and women, through the figure of the daughter. By focusing on the “daughter” as a literary, philosophical, and historical trope (as do other French and francophone writers, notably Simone de Beauvoir in Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, translated into English as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter), Walcott-Hackshaw offers literary critical readin...