Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State: A Caribbean Rhizomatic Novel Reflecting the New Transmodern Paradigm

This article explores Haitian American writer Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State (2014) as a novel that represents our intricate and rhizomatic transmodern era. In order to prove this contention, it focuses on the novel’s amalgamation of different literary genres and modes from previous cultural paradigms—namely, the postmodern fairy-tale retelling and the social realist novel—with Euro-American as well as Haitian/Caribbean literary and sociocultural elements. The result of this mélange is a complex narrative of multiple interconnections that offers a nuanced portrait of new millennium Haitian diasporas and locals, and that most especially, recuperates subaltern Haitian voices so as to denounce the “untamed state” of the country. The article concludes by arguing that Gay’s hybrid and relational text effaces an either/or episteme which, although considerably used in Western and postcolonial theories for a while, has now become obsolete and inoperative in such a globalised and entangled world.

Keeping it in the family: Cultural socialization among Haitian American families

The broad areas of ethnic and racial socialization have been studied as essential aspects of immigrant and African American families. Yet, there has been less understanding of how these processes intersect, specifically within second-generation Black immigrant families. This article draws on 41 interviews and 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork to explore how ethnically-identified Haitian American parents transmit ethnicity and prepare their children to navigate systems of racial oppression. Findings demonstrate how these processes operate concurrently within second-generation Black immigrant families amidst parental motivation for transmitting ethnicity across generations and the realities of raising Black children in a majority-minority city.

Sounding displaced memories: Narrative soundscapes in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!

In her short story collection Krik? Krak!, the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat realizes new formal strategies that integrate vernacular orality into her writings. She does so to construct evocative narrative soundscapes through which difficult memories can be processed. This article examines Danticat’s approach to otherness, migration, and displacement in an attempt to disentangle the function of language, sound, and memory in the development of authentic Caribbean identities and literatures. It aims to trace the workings of sound and mobility in the literary spaces Danticat creates to revisit colonial and patriarchal history and, in so doing, reroot and reroute cultural memories previously lost to violence and organized forgetting. In crossing and replicating the oceanic routes in which past and present intersect, Krik? Krak! opens critical sites of (d)enunciation that rework personal and collective memories of displacement by means of language and sound.

ENVIRONMENT AND THE SOMATIC BODY IN CHERRÍE MORAGA’S HEROES AND SAINTS AND EDWIDGE DANTICAT’S THE FARMING OF BONES

The paper offers a cross-cultural literary analysis of Chicana Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1992) and Haitian American Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) and compares the play and the novel on the basis of their shared thematic link of interwoven environmental and racial violence directed against marginalized people of color. Despite the works’ geographically distant contexts—set in the US Southwest and the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, respectively—and the differing collective traumas of genocide the texts dramatize, both narratives foreground the motif of violated nature as a primary critical lens to unveil and critique the ongoing practices of colonialism permeating twentieth-century US and Caribbean politics. The interlocking images of women-of-colors’ disfigured bodies and the environmental devastation caused by (post)colonial violence underline the pervasiveness of harm done to both the earth and the somatic body.

Constructing Catholic Propriety on North Eighth Street

This chapter examines how Italian Americans negotiate a diversifying Church and urban landscape and contend with sharing their saint with Haitian and Haitian American devotees of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. While the feast is a site where Catholics of different races and ethnicities share devotional space, it is also a site of intra-Catholic boundary making. Devotional celebrations are sites of religious evaluation, racializing, and territoriality, where onlookers judge who is and who is not acting as a “good Catholic” and whose devotional affinities verge on “superstition.” Public performances of devotion are where people judge, construct, and enact Catholic propriety. Through everyday talk and boundary-making practices, Italian American Catholics construct ideas of “good” American Catholic practice and label the practices of ethnic and racial others as admirable yet foreign and excessive, echoing the very same discourses that placed their ancestors outside the bounds of “good” Catholic practice.

The Effective and the Controversial Uses of Code-Switching: Edwidge Danticat’s 'Claire of the Sea Light' as Case Study

This article explores the different uses that Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat makes of code-switching in her last novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013). It also delves into the effects Danticat seeks to produce on her readers by the introduction of Creole words and expressions. While the incorporation of the mother tongue is not new in Danticat’s fiction, critics have paid little attention to the diverse purposes such a tongue purports to serve in her books and to the kind of responses it has aroused from her audience. Her uses of code-switching are observed to pursue various purposes: some purely mimetic, others more closely related to her stylistic ambitions, and still others out of motivations that may be deemed debatable, as they pertain to the “exoticization” of her homeland. Ultimately, the use of code-switching in Claire of the Sea Light should be viewed as one of the most effective strategies that diasporic writers envisage to satisfy a number of important socio-pragmatic and rhetorical functions that are usually expected in ethnic fiction. These strategies also aim to guide the (mainstream) readers’ affective responses to their work in the way(s) “minority” authors believe best suit their aesthetic and ethical goals.

The Immigrant Experience

The first chapter examines physical and psychic fragmentation in Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak! In Danticat’s work, folklore and flight intersect to highlight the relationship between dissociation, flight, and transformation. The works position the navigation of trauma as central to the protagonists’ emotional growth. Danticat’s work illustrates the transformative nature of flight and features Haitian and Haitian American characters who learn how to reconcile the effects of traumatic events. The works showcase women in various states of imprisonment, with flight, whether imagined or literal, serving as the vehicle for escape. Danticat fuses print and oral cultures and positions folklore as a tool for communicating values, solidifying relationships, and navigating trauma.