From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic by Myriam J.A. Chancy (review)

The earthquake on 12 January 2010 that killed hundreds of thousands of Haitians is just the most recent cataclysmic event experienced by those living on the island of Hispaniola. Generally accepted as the first landing site by Columbus and his crew, the island hosted the first permanent European settlement in Latin America in 1492. The subsequent holocaust of the Amerindian population set the stage for the arrival of Africans whose slave labour in the cultivation of sugar cane created the basis of wealth for the French colonizers and centuries of misery for the enslaved. Haiti also became the centre of the most successful slave revolt in the Americas which resulted in its independence from French colonization, the first independent nation-state in Latin America and the Caribbean. In spite of this promising start, Haiti’s modern era has been dominated by dictatorial regimes and continued poverty and Haitians themselves have remained largely invisible as evidenced by the rapidity with which the 2010 earthquake itself receded from public memory.

It is this invisibility that Myriam Chancy addresses in her work From Sugar to Revolution. Using literature as her starting point, Chancy explores the exclusion of Haitian women writers arguing that their marginalization is due to a complex intersection of identities including ethnicity and gender. Believing that texts by women have the most to teach us about the limits of subjectivity and identity, Chancy fearlessly exposes the role of gender and the identity of Blackness in making women invisible. Her analysis playfully swirls throughout the text, an intellectual liveliness that defies its serious and challenging conclusions. Of the many poignant questions posed by the author, her ultimate quest is an exploration of how can the bodies of women in these three regions – Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic – be reclaimed, if at all, and can they, as figures of the nation, reformulate the body politic?

Ostensibly, Chancy has created a literary work exploring Haitian women’s exclusion from contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literary studies. However, the work erupts in a myriad of directions and academic disciplines in a marked departure from previous analysis which Chancy argues has been too departmentalized. Drawing on the work of scholars in history, geography, sociology, political science, anthropology, women’s sexuality, and gender studies, Chancy employs feminist, race, and literary theories to constructively reconceptualize the role of Black women. Moving effortlessly between these perspectives, Chancy arrives at a fundamentally different rationale for the absence of Black women in the historical record. Rather than identifying the notion of the degenerate African as the heart of the problem, she argues that it is the strong, courageous, adaptable, and living African, or in this case descendants of Africans, that remains the fundamental obstacle. This Blackness is menacing not because of racialist views of degeneracy, but rather because of the threat of the alternative epistemes and structures of power of the African presence, especially as embodied by the first constitution of the Haitian nation, upsetting the drive for “whiteness” reflected in the national discourses of Latin American countries. (10)

The book is organized into a series of triads. To substantiate her argument that Haitian literature and Black women have been excluded from the broader Caribbean and Latin American corpus, Chancy used a comparative approach creating three sections in which she analyzes writers and artists from Haiti and its island sister, the Dominican Republic, and from Cuba. For Haiti, Chancy analyzes writers Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat while for the Dominican Republic she highlights the work of Marilyn Bobes, Achy Obejas, and Loida Maritza Pérez. She tracks the work of Zoé Valdés, Nancy Moréjon, and artist Mar⊠a Magdalena Campos-Pons for Cuba. She argues that these women have created dialogues within their work and Chancy replicates this model by including transcripts of conversations with authors from each region.

The physical triad of island-nation writers is...