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.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Clitandre, Nadège T., 1977- author of foreword.

Davis, Thadious M., 1944- author of afterword.

Contributor:

Butler, Maia L., editor.

Davis-McElligatt, Joanna, editor.

Feifer, Megan, editor.

Rosengarten Family Fund.

Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Danticat, Edwidge, 1969---Criticism and interpretation.

Danticat, Edwidge.

Danticat, Edwidge, 1969-.

Haitian American authors--Criticism and interpretation.

Haitian American authors.

American literature--Haitian American authors--Criticism and interpretation.

American literature.

American literature--Haitian American authors.

Genre:

essays.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Essays.

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

xv, 266 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2022]

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.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: pt. I Another Country: Nation and Dyaspora

ch. One From Her "Little Middle Place": Edwidge Danticat's Diasporic Identity and Poetics / Maria Rice Bellamy

ch. Two Lot Bd Dlo, the Other Side of the Water: Examining the Kongo Cosmogram in Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones / Joyce White

ch. Three "Cast Lot Bd Dlo, Across the Seas": Re/Writing Home and Nation in Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work / Dlga Blomgren

ch. Four Lot Bd Dlo and the Spatial Relations of Dyaspora / Gwen Bergner

pt. II Welcoming Ghosts: Memory and Historicity

ch. Five Writing Amerindian Ayiti: Edwidge Danticat's Reclaimed Memory and Shifting Homes / Erika V. Serrato

ch. Six Intertextually Weaving a Home-Place: Viewing the Past as Present in Breath, Eyes, Memory and Untwine / Tammie Jenkins

ch. Seven Untwine: Navigating Memories through Healing and Self-Definition / Shewonda Leger

ch. Eight Collecting and Releasing Embodied Memories: Redefining Shame in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory / Akia Jackson

pt. III I Speak Out: Storytelling and Narrative Structure

ch. Nine "The Listening Gets Too Loud": The Reader's Task in Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying / Laura Dawkins

ch. Ten Reading Edwidge Danticat's Essays in Light of Her Fiction: Diaspora, Ethics, Aesthetics / Thomas Rothe

ch. Eleven Home Exile, Language, and the Paratext in Anacaona: Golden Flower and Mama's Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation / Cecile Accilien

ch. Twelve "Quietly, Quietly": Thinking and Teaching the Global South through Edwidge Danticat's Intertextual Writing, Reading, and Witnessing / Jennifer M. Lozano

pt. IV "Create Dangerously": Trauma, Resilience, and the Way Forward

ch. Thirteen Edwidge Danticat: The Ethics of Disobedient Writing / Isabel Caldeira

ch. Fourteen More than a Phrase: Fighting Silence and Objectification in Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light / Delphine Gras

ch. Fifteen Black Butterflies: Survival, Transformation, and the Invention of Home in Edwidge Danticat's Fiction and Nonfiction / Marion Christina Rohrleitner.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Narrating history, home, and dyaspora

ISBN:

9781496839879

1496839870

9781496839886

1496839889

OCLC:

1282009021