scholarly journals The Vulture of History in The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Fernando Valerio-Holguín
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Alejo Carpentier ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Paul Klee ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Angel Of Death

In thesis IX of the Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin indicates, from the painting “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee, that the Angel of History has his face turned back, contemplating a catastrophe. He wants to stay, but the great wind of progress is pushing him forward into the future, leaving rubble on its pass. The new historical novel The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier narrates the long and tortuous process of the Haitian Revolution and beyond. At the end of the novel, there is a great green wind that sweeps across the Northern Plain and the ruins of the old sugar mill. In Carpentier's novel, there is a “wet vulture”, which I will call the Vulture of History, which is thrown over Bois Caïman, the sacred space where the revolution originated. My purpose in this essay is to explore the Vulture of History as a baroque allegory of the Haitian Revolution. Unlike the angel from Benjamin's thesis, who wants to go back to the past to reconstruct history, Carpentier's vulture is an angel of death who feeds on the detritus of history.

Carpentier, Alejo (1904–1980)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Pardee
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Magical Realism ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Alejo Carpentier ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cuban Art ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Alejo Carpentier, Cuban novelist and musicologist, formed important connections between the European and Latin American modern literature of the 20th century. He was a founder of the avant-garde Afro-Cuban movement, incorporating African heritage into Cuban art, theater, and music. Exiled in France from 1929–1939 for political dissent, he associated with surrealists and was for a time heavily influenced by their work. In France, he finished the novel he had started in a Cuban prison: ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! [Praise be to God!] (1933). Following his return to Cuba, a trip to Haiti inspired his novel, El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of this World] (1948), an imaginative recreation of the Haitian revolution and its aftermath. In his prologue to this novel, he introduced the term lo real maravilloso Americano, or magical realism, as it was later known.

Voyage to the Marvelous: A Traveler’s Guide to The Kingdom of This World

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-68
Author(s):  
Ali Tal-mason
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Following a legacy of four and a half centuries of literature written by foreign travelers landing on Haiti’s shores, Alejo Carpentier’s seminal novel about the Haitian Revolution is predicated upon Carpentier’s voyage to Haiti six years earlier. This article attends to the role of voyage in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, revealing the ways in which Carpentier’s storytelling and rendering of Haiti in both the novel and its prologue, and his accompanying theory of the marvelous real, adhere to Eurocentric conceptions of time that reinscribe this neocolonial space as anachronistic space. Because Carpentier can only perceive Haiti in the past, he replicates the role of the imperial travel writer in fashioning metropolitan conceptions of colonial spaces and reproduces the imbalance of power between visitor/visited. This perspective reinforces a dominant Euro-American image of Haiti as a strange and magical object of consumption and fails to imagine it as an independent, post-revolution state.

“Murder, Robbery, Rape, Adultery, and Incest”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Faherty
Keyword(s):  
National Development ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Future ◽  
Before And After ◽  
True Source ◽  
Cultural Mores ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This essay considers how and why Federalist writers turned to the medium of fiction after the Revolution of 1800 in order to continue to express their concerns about the dangers of a Jeffersonian ascendency and the future of national development. By exploring the connections between rhetorical practices before and after Jefferson’s election, I argue that Federalist writers deployed the same tropes and metaphors to reflect on the loss of their authority despite the shift in genre from newspaper editorial to the novel form. Central to this practice was the use of reflections on the Haitian Revolution which served to represent the instabilities of plantation culture and its capacity to erode cultural mores. The essay focuses on Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta (1807) as an emblematic example of the ways in which Federalist writers sought to deploy representations of planter decadence as a means of critiquing Jeffersonian power. Yet more than simply critiquing Jeffersonianism, Read also seeks to reframe the tenets of Federalism by advocating that properly ordered domestic spheres are the true source of cultural stability.

Circuits

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-195
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Secret History

This chapter reads the dynamics of gender and racial violence in Leonora Sansay’s 1808 novel Secret History in transoceanic context. Even as the French Atlantic triangle generated enormous wealth through enormous exploitation, encounters and events in the transnational Pacific were laying bare the unequal terms and coercive relations that underpinned such triangles and the circuits that spun around them. Set in Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, the novel situates the violence of both marital and plantation intimacies within the turning global circuits of sexual-economic drive and their production of disproportion and inequality. By presenting French European and French creole desire in terms of a sexualized colonialism and a pornographic capitalism, Secret History exposes the rotations of capitalist drive as a violent obscenity, and revolution as its violent offspring.

History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich's Tracks

PMLA ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 109 (5) ◽  
pp. 982-994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
American History ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Native American History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Historical Accounts

The deconstruction of history by poststructuralists and some philosophers of history has occurred at the moment when women and indigenous peoples have begun to write their own historical accounts. Louise Erdrich's historical novel, Tracks, brings into focus the necessity and the difficulties of writing Native American history in a postmodern epoch. The novel addresses two crucial issues: the referential value of history (If it is impossible to know the past fully, is it impossible to know the past at all?) and the status of history as narrative (If history is just a story, how is it possible to discriminate between one story and another?). Erdrich's novel suggests the need for indigenous histories to counter the dominant narrative, in which the settling of America is “progress,” but also works toward a new historicity that is neither a simple return to historical realism nor a passive acceptance of postmodern historical fictionality.

Caribbean and Southern Literatures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wharton Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Global Studies ◽  
Mexican War ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Racial Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The U.S

Transnationalism and Global Studies have exploded old notions of artificial cultural boundaries, opening to view the myriad cross currents between the U.S. South and the Caribbean. Thus, the literature produced by the wider region of the circumCaribbean can be considered to reflect this interplay and as an alternative history to chronicles bounded by nationalism. While the age of contact and contest, the Haitian Revolution, and the U.S.–Mexican War were early focal points for interchange, the mutual influences of cultures have been dynamic, ongoing, and intricately connected to immigration, diaspora, racial conflict and mixing, and the creation of new forms of cultural expression. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in the literature of the circumCaribbean, especially in the new forms it has taken over the past fifty years.

scholarly journals The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackeray Novel

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Full Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.

Reading the Historical Novel: Reworking the Past and the Relation of Blackfeet History in James Welch's Fools Crow

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
SARAH MARTIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
James Welch ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Impact

The article considers the political impact of the historical novel by examining an example of the genre by Native American novelist James Welch. It discusses how the novel Fools Crow represents nineteenth-century Blackfeet experience, emphasizing how (retelling) the past can act in the present. To do this it engages with psychoanalytic readings of historical novels and the work of Foucault and Benjamin on memory and history. The article concludes by using Bhabha's notion of the “projective past” to understand the political strength of the novel's retelling of the story of a massacre of Native Americans.

scholarly journals ARTIKULASI IDENTITAS LOKAL CEPU DALAM NOVEL PENANGSANG: TEMBANG RINDU DENDAM KARYA NASSIRUN PURWOKARTUN (TINJAUAN NEW HISTORICISM)

SUAR BETANG ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78
Author(s):  
Sukarjo Waluyo
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Local Identity ◽  
Text Data ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Research

Literature of a cultural product always interacts with social problems, including issues of locality and local identity. The problem of local identity in the novel Penangsang: Tembang Rindu Dendam is the main concern in this study. The background of the local locality and identity of Cepu which became the center of the Duchy of Jipang in the past was the setting of a place, as well as a space where the final historical and cultural journey of the power of the Demak Sultanate took place. This novel was written in 2010 by Nassirun Purwokartun. This historical novel invites us to rethink Cepu's locality and local identity, which has been a legacy of past generations. Articulation of identity and locality issues seem to be the attention voiced in this novel as well as being an instrument or instrument of articulation. This study uses the New Historicism approach, one literary theory that views history, art, and other things in society has the same degree as the text data in literature. It is hoped that literary research will get the context of the problem in accordance with the situation of the community.

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