Abstract

Abstract:

Novelist Dany Laferrière develops narratives of diaspora while eluding binary paradigms often applied to migrant writers, such as home country/host country or native/migrant. This article argues that Laferrière’s imagistic, self-described “primitive writing” in his novel Pays sans chapeau (1996) and his drawings in his graphic novel Vers d’autres rives (2019) become vehicles to process displacement, while resisting sociopolitical or autobiographical readings of his work. By mimicking traits of Haitian painting, such as spontaneity and distortion, he underlines tensions that are present throughout his work and critical reception, such as conflicts between return and nomadism, and between artifice and labels of authenticity.

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