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Acknowledgements
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Unlike most of my previous academic work, which was produced in very compressed periods of time, this book was developed over a ten-year span and during two very distinct periods of my professional life. As such, it has been a journey as well as a collaborative process through the exchange of ideas with colleagues, students, and editors that took place at conferences, during invited speaking engagements, and in refereed publications of excerpts from the work in progress between 1998–2003 and 2008–2011. The text has benefited greatly from the editorial advice of Lisa Quinn, acquisitions editor of the Wilfrid Laurier University Press, as well as from the expert readings of two sets of reviewers over a three-year period while the manuscript was in WLUP’s hands. Work on this study began in 1998, following the publication of my previous academic texts in Caribbean women’s literature and the production of two novels. Although several talks and publications resulted from a hybrid text that included memoir pieces of my travels in Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, critical chapters and interviews that make up the main part of the book were still incomplete. Having left academia for an extended period starting in 2001 due to an illness and returning fully only in 2007, I did not expect to resurrect the text until I found that the scholarship I had previously generated on this topic remained original and useful to others in a number of respects. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 303 Between 1998 and 2003 I presented conference papers in Grenada, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Egypt that allowed me to receive thought-provoking cross-cultural and cross-national questions and affirmations that lead to further fine-tuning of the work. Of these, I am particularly indebted to Ifeoma Nwankwo for being invited to present a campus talk as a visiting Martin Luther King, Jr., César Chàvez, Rosa Parks professor, entitled “Indigo Dreams: Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba,” at the University of Michigan in the winter of 2000; and Irmary Santos Reyes, who invited me to present the Bartolomé de Las Casas Lecture in Latin American Studies underthetitle“SubmissionorOmission:Haiti’sChallengeinLatinAmerica,” at the University of Oregon in April 2011. I am very thankful for the opportunity to breathe new life into an old project , one whose themes of gender and race is related to the omission of Haiti in many disciplines studying the Caribbean. It resonated more profoundly in the aftermath of the January 12, 2010, earthquake, since the majority of Haiti’s feminist leadership perished in the rubble of flattened buildings. I am glad that this text will, in some way, contribute to the work of previous generations of Haitian women who are no longer with us, and who, largely unacknowledged ,haveworkswaitingtobeplumbedinvariousinstitutionalarchives around the world. I want to acknowledge the following books and journals for publishing excerpts from this book when it was a work in progress: “The Violence of Nationhood and the ‘politicization of memory’ in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” The Edwidge Danticat Reader. Ed. Martin Munro. U of Virginia P, 2010. 130–46. Print. “Subversive Sexualities: Revolutionizing Gendered Identities.” Frontiers 29.1 (2008): 51–75. Print. “Facing the Mountains: Dominican Suppression and the Haitian Imagination .” Journal of Haitian Studies 9.1 (2003): 4–22. “Diasporic Disconnections: Insurrection and Forgetfulness in Contemporary Haitian and Latin-Caribbean Women’s Literature.” Beyond the Borders :AmericanLiteratureandPost-ColonialTheory.Ed.DeborahL.Madsen. London: Pluto Press, 2003. 167–83. Loida Maritza Pérez. “The Heart of Home: Loida Maritza Pérez in Dialogue.” MaComère, Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 5 (2002): 6–18. Edwidge Danticat. “Recovering History ‘Bone by Bone’: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” Calabash (NYU) 1.2 (2001): 15–24. 304 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS [3.235.22.225] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:27 GMT) I am also grateful to Guillermo Ferreyra, former Dean of the College of Arts & Science at Louisiana State University, for providing a subvention grant in spring 2009 to offset the cost of reproducing images for this publication. Finally, I thank my mother, Adeline L. Chancy, for enduring endless conversations about developments along the course of my discoveries and revisions. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 305 This page intentionally left blank ...