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American Literary History 13.3 (2001) 407-444



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The Writing of Haiti:
Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Beyond

Anna Brickhouse

An overview of recent scholarship in the various fields of comparative American or New World studies reveals an implicit argument often assumed as fact: that literary transnationalism in the Americas and the critical perspectives it invites are natural outgrowths of the massive human migrations, urban pluralism, and cultural globalization the hemisphere has witnessed over the course of the twentieth century. 1 These convergent strands of literary inquiry reflect critical internationalist concerns within American studies more generally, which has begun to examine its own relation to what Priscilla Wald calls a "contemporary transnational era" by attending to "the effects and implications of the global economy and the decline of the form of the nation-state" (199). At the same time, comparative Americanists have joined prominent writers and critics of world literature, from Salman Rushdie to George Steiner, in plotting the "polylinguistic matrix" of global literary relations characterizing the modern and contemporary periods (Steiner 7). José David Saldívar points to the twentieth century as a privileged locus for inter-American investigation, invoking the Marxist literary center Casa de las Américas and its facilitation of "cultural conversations between Havana and the United States" as models for "a broader, oppositional American literary history and a new comparative cultural studies" (17). Bainard Cowan contends as well that "the structure of human relations in our time" has allowed "much of the literature of the New World" a recently available, metacritical relation to history, "an uncanny 'premonition of the past,' a new and intensified way of seeing the past of the Americas that is not just of antiquarian interest" (1). The implied presentism and uncharted futurity of such transnational analyses within comparative American literary studies is aptly summed up in the title of a panel organized for a recent meeting of the [End Page 407] Modern Language Association: "Globalization and the Possibilities for a Literature of the Americas." 2 As Michael Dash points out, the "capacity of literary movements, even the most parochial or defensively inward-looking, to create new configurations out of a process of adapting, incorporating, and ultimately modifying other literary phenomena is particularly strong today" (Other America 2).

Recent studies of Caribbean literary production, in particular, have initiated intraregional and transnationalist models of literary analysis that offer important correctives to prior literary-historiographical narratives of US exceptionalism--while similarly reflecting a nearly unwavering focus on the twentieth century. Anne Walmsley, documenting the history of the Caribbean Artists Movement as the first "genuinely Caribbean-wide cultural movement"--which embraced "one people among the continuing barriers of language" (315)--argues for understanding the wider emergence of Caribbean cultural production as a series of arts initiatives, beginning with the New Negro renaissance of the 1920s, "which have taken place since World War One" (311; emphasis added). Martiniquian critic and theorist Edouard Glissant also proposes a twentieth-century inter-American "irruption into [literary] modernity," a "brutal emergence" occurring in the absence of any "tradition that has slowly matured" and resulting in a truly "New World" writing that is itself "the product of a system of modernity" (149). Moving even closer to the current period, Cowan draws on Glissant's theorization of a Caribbean aesthetic to argue that new literary forms become uniquely possible in the Americas of "our present time" when "certainty of identity . . . is once again broken" (4-5). Indeed, "in our urban archipelagos," muses James Clifford of the contemporary moment, "we are all Caribbeans now" (173). 3

These and other accounts of inter-American cross-culturality have revealed a number of angles from which to question and revise earlier models of comparative literary analysis, often by implicitly exposing them as Eurocentric and nationalist in their parameters. Yet many of the literary configurations envisioned in such accounts as predominantly and even inherently tied to the twentieth century were in fact addressed by writers in the Americas as explicit questions and problems well before the modern and contemporary periods to which they have...

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