There is a present-day tendency to retreat into the realms of dystopia, of catastrophe and disaster, of failed states and fascism, of environmental collapse and economic apocalypse. This tendency is neither wrong nor mistaken. Yet it is often suffocating, only adding to the pressurized dread of the era, offering no antidote to the plague of […]
Tag Archives: literature
Anarchy / Autonomy / Utopia
Posted in Haiti
Also tagged anarchism, archive, autonomy, Caribbean, freedom, liberation, libraries, pan-africanism, reading, Trinidad
Leave a comment
We Are Not All Haitians
Reading and re-reading The Public Archive’s 2012 interview with the late J. Michael Dash I was struck by Dash’s refusal to talk about himself. In the interview Dash described many of the moments and encounters that shaped him as an intellectual. But he offered little in the way of personal motivation. There is nothing of the […]
Posted in Haiti
Also tagged archives, Caribbean, Haiti, representation, solidarity, sovereignty
Leave a comment
Dread and Dispossession: An interview with Colin Dayan
Colin Dayan, the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has written on the literature and literary histories of the United States, Haiti, and Jamaica; on law, ritual, and anthropology; on prisons, torture, and the nature of the person. Her first book was an introduction to and translation […]
Insularity & Internationalism: An Interview with Kaiama L. Glover
Kaiama L. Glover is an associate professor of French at Barnard College and the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon. Published by Liverpool University Press in 2010, Haiti Unbound is the first full-length critical study of the Spiralists: an extraordinary Haitian and Caribbean literary movement whose principle players are writers […]
Detours and Distance: An Interview with J. Michael Dash
Born in Trinidad, J. Michael Dash (20 July 1948 – 2 June 2019) was a professor in the Departments of French and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University who has written extensively on Haitian and French Caribbean literature. His publications include Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001), The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a […]
Reading Haiti
“Haiti Urban Voids,” from Emergenc(e-y): Design Tactics for Post Traumatic Urban Landscapes Last year at about this time, The Public Archive posted a summer reading list of “those daunting, guilt-inducing, impossible to finish accumulations of never-read classics, recently-published near-sensations, and occasionally-frustrating volumes you feel you should read if only to say you’ve read them.” A […]
Paulette Poujol-Oriol
Paulette Poujol-Oriol, who died March 11 at age 84, left her birth country, Haiti, a legacy that is immeasurable. She was one of Haiti’s most ardent feminist leaders, as well as an unmatched cultural producer and worker. Gina Ulysse, “The Legacy of Haitian Feminist Paulette Poujol-Oriol,” Ms Magazine (29 March 2011) In addition to her […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Also tagged 1926, 2011, archives, feminism, Haiti, history, representation, women
4 Responses
Haiti: Rebuilding
“What are we? Since that’s your question, I’m going to answer you. We’re this country, and it wouldn’t be a thing without us, nothing at all. Who does the planting? Who does the watering? Who does the harvesting? Coffee, cotton, rice, sugar cane, caco, corn, bananas, vegetables, and all the fruits, who’s going to grow […]
Posted in Uncategorized
Also tagged economy, elites, Haiti, Jacques Roumain, Langston Hughes, Mercer Cook, peasantry, rebuilding, sovereignty
2 Responses