Marie Vieux Chauvet's Theatres: Thought, Form, and Performance of Revolt ed. by Christian Flaugh and Lena Taub Robles (review)

Christian Flaugh and Lena Taub Robles's edited collection Marie Vieux Chauvet's Theatres: Thought, Form, and Performance of Revolt is the most recent iteration of the exciting burgeoning scholarship recognizing Chauvet as one of the most important voices in twentieth-century Francophone Caribbean literature. Engaging with gender studies, performance studies, and Africana studies, the volume underscores two fundamental aspects of her work: theatricality and revolt. The emphasis on theatricality offers a new critical lens of analysis for Chauvet's fiction as it explores the tribulations of life in both colonial Saint-Domingue and Haiti in the twentieth century. Chauvet's only plays, La Légende des fleurs (1947) and Samba (unpublished, staged in 1948), are less known, but the editors make a compelling case that performance and theatricality are salient features in Chauvet's fiction, recalling for instance, how the protagonist of her 1957 novel La Danse sur le volcan, Minette, reaches stardom as an opera singer in prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue, or how the narrative in Folie (1968) morphs into a play, complete with stage directions. Theatricality also foregrounds revolt, the affective register that perhaps most clearly characterizes Chauvet's life and work. As the editors point out in the introduction, Chauvet's revolt against adversity appears multiplied and pliable, resonating with the long history of rebellion in Haiti. Her revolt is also apparent in her refusal to be co-opted, as she strove to maintain her autonomy and dignity even when it meant having to live in exile and poverty.¹

Constituting a deliberation on most of Chauvet's works, the volume is organized in four sections covering theatricality, performance, form, and revolt in four key texts: La Légende des fleurs (1947), La Danse sur le volcan (1957), Amour, colère, folie (1968), and Les Rapaces (1970). La Légende is explored by Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, and Christian Flaugh. Building on Lizabeth Paravisini-Gébert's notion of Chauvet's "environmental imagination," Jean-Charles meditates on La Légende's gendered representation of biodiversity, concluding that despite its protests against patriarchal power, the play reiterates stereotypes of feminine passivity, submission, and desire for male recognition and approval.² However, it also announces the themes that will permeate Chauvet's later works. Through her translation and analysis of La Légende's last scene, Benedicty-Kokken illustrates Jean-Charles's last point as she explores Chauvet's revolt against unequal relations marked by gendered and racialized dynamics. As Benedicty-Kokken observes, this scene "encourages reflection on the tragically violent and humiliating consequences of Whiteness," including expressions of Whiteness as "'innocent,' clueless, and as such fatal" (222). Revolt is further expounded by Flaugh, who compares La Légende to Guy Régis Jr.'s De toute la terre le grand effarement (2011) and considers how "revolting subjects" resist "enfleshment"—that is, "deep systemic processes" that consume, dispossess, and defile black and brown materials, be they human bodies or earthly matter (50). Central to Flaugh's argument is the notion of "dirty love," or the performance of revolt through and against "enfleshment" (55–63).

Cae Joseph-Massena, Stéphanie Bérard, Jeremy Matthew Glick, and Nehanda Loiseau examine La Danse sur le volcan, expanding notions of the theatrical and of revolt as they explore the novel's historical context, the phonic skills of its characters, its narrative devices, and its visual and spatial components. Together, they contribute to what Marlene Daut has called the growing field of Haitian Revolutionary literary studies.³ Joseph-Massena brings her training as a jazz musician to bear on her analysis of the performative through "the figuration of voice" (32). Engaging with subaltern speech theories, she contrasts Minette's extraordinary talent as an opera singer in colonial Saint-Domingue with the voicelessness associated with the experience of...