Notes
Notes to Preface 1 I am speaking here of my work in Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile and Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. 2 For earlier work on which Connerton’s theories rest, I refer the reader to Halbwachs in On Collective Memory, an edited collection of writings. 3 Cooper elaborates: Enlightenment thinkers, from the Scottish David Hume and the American Thomas Jefferson to the Germans Georg Hegel and Immanuel Kant, all justified the enslavement of Africans on the premise that (following René Descartes’s propositions) Africans lacked reason. One proof of this was the absence of writing or the creation of a literature by them. The argument ran that Africans lacked reason because they were “inferior,” and thus were fit for slavery. This argument would be elaborated in the nineteenth century, especially between 1830 and 1860 in the United States, under the theory of slavery as a “positive good” for Africans. (299) 4 Our Nig by Harriet Wilson is normally claimed to be the first, with the poems of Phyllis Weatley published before that in 1773, thirty years after Angélique’s hanging. 5 Angélique was pardoned by the Canadian state through Governor General Michaëlle Jean in a ceremony held on April 8, 2006; Cooper’s text was shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award that same year. 6 For an accurate summation of the ways in which Haiti has served a variety of geopolitical purposes, I refer the reader to Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti. 7 Foreign policy instituted under Franklin Roosevelt toward Latin America (1933–1945). 8 In the original Spanish, morena refers to someone who has dark or brown hair; progressively , in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean, it has come to be synonymous with dark complexion or dark-skinned people, and is more often than not pejorative. NOTES 307 9 Including writers like Nelly Rosario, Sandra Benítez, and Mayra Montero, among many more. 10 An anonymous reader wondered why this work does not participate in a conversation regarding African diasporic “internationalism” or transnationalism, as explored by scholars such as Edwards in his instructive The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, a work that focuses primarily on demonstrating the modernityofearly-twentieth-centuryblackintellectualsandwriterswhocirculatedbetween the U.S., Paris, and French Africa. Simply put, Edwards’s exploration belongs to recent developments in African American literary studies, situating the latter within black atlantic studies following the work of Gilroy; as such it makes a valuable contribution, but one to an essentially different field. Haiti is but a footnote in the latter, whereas in this study, Haiti’s ideological place within the Caribbean and in terms of race theory is made central utilizing the accepted, interdisciplinary methodology of Caribbean studies. Furthermore, this study investigates how the case of Haiti destabilizes notions of race in the Americas, whereas a study such as Edwards’s demonstrates how black identity came to be constituted across differences of culture and nation within an essentialist understanding of race. 11 See the work of Clifford and Mignolo for more on notions of interchanges between the global and the local. Mignolo specifically discusses the imbrication of both as “glocal.” 12 This is not unlike the creation of a national literature for Haiti both in French and in exile by Haitian writers who had to flee the nation during the Duvalier years; such writers have made an incontestable contribution to the articulation of Haitian national identity, but the fact that they did so from other nation-states has never brought their contributions into doubt. I am following a similar strategy of inclusion here although the causes of displacement are dissimilar, owing rather to economics in the case of the Haitian and Dominican writers discussed, and to a different order of politics or political ideology in the case of Cuba. 13 One needs only to remember here that the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier introduced “marvellous realism” through a novel set in Haiti, In the Kingdom of This World (1949). 14 One has only to turn to Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to consider the implications of intellectual activities that appropriate the experience of “native” informants. 15 All interviews were conducted with the respective authors and artist when interest in the works under discussion had peaked, and are thus true time capsules of their intentions and visions. I chose to interview these three rather than others for reasons of accessibility and...
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