Narrating history, home, and dyaspora : critical essays on Edwidge Danticat / edited by Maia L. Butler, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, and Megan Feifer ; foreword by Nadège T. Clitandre ; afterword by Thadious M. Davis.
Afterword. To breathe a collective air / Thadious M. Davis. Introduction / Maia L. Butler, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, and Megan Feifer -- Part I. Another country: nation and dyaspora. From her "little middle place": Edwidge Danticat's diasporic identity and poetics / Maria Rice Bellamy ; Lòt Bò Dlo, the other side of the water: examining the Kongo Cosmogram in Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones / Joyce White ; "Cast Lòt Bò Dlo, across the seas": re/writing home and nation in Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work / Olga Blomgren ; Lòt Bò Dlo and the spatial relations of dyaspora / Gwen Bergner -- Part II. Welcoming ghosts: memory and historicity. Writing Amerindian Ayiti: Edwidge Danticat's reclaimed memory and shifting homes / Erika V. Serrato ; Intertextually weaving a home-place: viewing the past as present in Breath, Eyes, Memory and Untwine / Tammie Jenkins ; Untwine: navigating memories through healing and self-definition / Shewonda Leger ; Collecting and releasing embodied memories: redefining shame in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory / Akia Jackson -- Part III. I speak out: storytelling and narrative structure. "The listening gets too loud": the reader's task in Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying / Laura Dawkins ; Reading Edwidge Danticat's essays in light of her fiction: diaspora, ethics, aesthetics / Lucía Stecher and Thomás Rothe ; Home exile, language, and the paratext in Anacaona: Golden Flower and Mama's Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation / Cécile Accilien ; "Quietly, quietly": thinking and teaching the global South through Edwidge Danticat's intertextual writing, reading, and witnessing / Jennifer M. Lozano -- Part IV. "Create dangerously": trauma, resilience, and the way forward. Edwidge Danticat: the ethics of disobedient writing / Isabel Caldeira ; More than a phrase: fighting silence and objectification in Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light / Delphine Gras ; Black butterflies: survival, transformation, and the invention of home in Edwidge Danticat's fiction and nonfiction / Marion Christina Rohrleitner -- Afterword. To breathe a collective air / Thadious M. Davis.
Summary:
"Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat contains fifteen essays addressing how Edwidge Danticat's writing, anthologizing, and storytelling trace, (re)construct, and develop alternate histories, narratives of nation building, and conceptions of home and belonging. The prolific Danticat is renowned for novels, collections of short fiction, nonfiction, and editorial writing. As her experimentation in form expands, so does her force as a public intellectual. Danticat's literary representations, political commentary, and personal activism have proven vital to classroom and community work imagining radical futures. Among increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and containment and rampant ecological volatility, Danticat's contributions to public discourse, art, and culture deserve sustained critical attention. These essays offer essential perspectives to scholars, public intellectuals, and students interested in African diasporic, Haitian, Caribbean, and transnational American literary studies. This collection frames Danticat's work as an indictment of statelessness, racialized and gendered state violence, the persistence of political and economic margins, and the essential vitality of life in and as dyaspora. The first section of this volume, 'The Other Side of the Water,' engages with Danticat's construction and negotiation of nation, both in Haiti and the United States; the broader dyaspora; and her own, her family's, and her fictional characters' places within them. The second section, 'Welcoming Ghosts,' delves into the ever-present specter of history and memory, prominent themes found throughout Danticat's work. From origin stories to broader Haitian histories, this section addresses the underlying traumas involved when remembering the past and its relationship to the present. The third section, 'I Speak Out,' explores the imperative to speak, paying particular attention to the narrative form with which such telling occurs. The fourth and final section, 'Create Dangerously,' contends with Haitians' activism, community building, and the political and ecological climate of Haiti and its dyaspora"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.