Issues

Critical work on Glissant often divides his writing into two periods: before and after the publication of Le Discours antillais in 1981. In the first he focuses mainly on Martinique and its social, political and cultural problems, while the second broadens out, via the concept of the `Tout-monde', to the postcolonial world as a whole; and this second period coincides with his becoming a much better known figure, particularly in the United States. As an illustration of Glissant's influence beyond the francophone Caribbean, I compare the analyses of his trajectory given by Chris Bongie (Islands and Exiles, 1998) and Peter Hallward (Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific, 2002), and argue that, contrary to their assumption that `late' Glissant has abandoned political commitment, the later texts explore the possibilities of new kinds of political action that will be effective in the era of globalization.

The Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and social revolutionary Frantz Fanon is considered one of the pioneering figures of postcolonial studies. As an icon of postcolonialism, an increasingly institutionalized field, Fanon has thus come to be associated with what is primarily an anglophone critical enterprise and area of study. The resulting “anglicization” of this important francophone figure overlooks, I argue, the ways in which Fanon's Martinican and francophone background is integral to his intellectual and political contributions and to his influence on later generations of writers and political figures. Most notably, I will show the ways in which his legacy can be traced in the work of the contemporary Caribbean philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant, whose brand of transnationalism in Le discours antillais develops the ramifications of Fanon's thought in a way that has been obscured by anglophone criticism. This lacuna, I argue, is partly due to the unavailability of an unabridged translation in English of Glissant's Discours as well as to the failure of Fanonian critics to account for his grounding in a specifically francophone Caribbean setting and culture.

“Memory” has become one of the buzzwords of contemporary historiography. Sparked by the atrocities of the Holocaust and intimately bound up with the concept of trauma, memory studies has gained increasing prominence in many intellectual circles and is particularly useful when considering postcolonial issues. A number of key commemorative dates over the past two decades have set the scene for a re-visioning of French and francophone history - 1992 was the 500^thanniversary of the new world's “discovery” by Christopher Columbus, 1998 was the 150^th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, 2004 was the 200^thanniversary of the Haitian Declaration of Independence and 2006 marked 60 years since Martinique and Guadeloupe became part of metropolitan France as overseas departments. French Caribbean writers have been vital to the public activities associated with remembrance of slavery and yet their work has been little studied in the anglophone world. This article focuses on Martinican intellectual Edouard Glissant's contribution to memory studies through his combined role as theoretician (in works such as his 2007 publication Mémoires des esclavages) and practician (in his role establishing a national memorial centre in Paris). While many critics have focused on Glissant's influence on postcolonial studies, this article assesses his importance in the burgeoning field of cultural memory.

This essay sheds light on family relations in Octavia Butler's fantasy neo-slave narrative Kindred (1979) through Édouard Glissant's theories of kinship and Relation. This comparative gesture thus relate Glissant's Caribbean texts to an unlikely kin, a Californian African American science-fiction writer, preoccupied with the hybridity of the android and the androgynous, with femininity and reproduction, and with dystopian worlds. Glissant and Butler do not refer to each other's works. Their kinship lies instead in their common realization that the postslavery family is a brutal yet inescapable enmeshment of blackness and whiteness within the Plantation walls.

La voix de la romancière haïtienne Marie Vieux-Chauvet, réduite au silence pendant des années, se fait aujourd'hui entendre sur la scène théâtrale internationale grâce à l'adaptation de la trilogie Amour Colère et Folie offerte par le dramaturge franco-béninois José Pliya en 2007. Cet article analyse les différentes étapes du voyage du premier volet Amour à travers le temps et l'espace (d'Haïti à l'Amérique du nord en passant par les Antilles françaises, Paris, et même l'Afrique, d'où est originaire Pliya) ainsi qu'à travers les genres (le passage du roman au théâtre, du dialogue et du récit au monologue, de l'écriture à la mise en voix et en mouvement par la mise en scène hybride de Vincent Goethals qui explore les frontières mouvantes entres les arts.)

This article shows how Patrick Chamoiseau's struggle against neocolonial forms of domination of Martinique is remarkably similar to French Regionalism, a movement fighting for political and cultural autonomy of the French Provinces in the early XXth Century. Given the fate of French Regionalism which did not to secure political autonomy of the Provinces and became a mere illustration of their cultural and literary diversity, the failure of the Chamoiseau's campaign to preserve and liberate the martiniquan imaginary is almost inevitable. Ultimately, instead of asserting an national identity and inserting Martinique more fully within the Caribbean Region, the literary strategies of Chamoiseau reinforce ties with France.

In an interview which took place in the Maison Française, Oxford, on 10 May 2008, the day instituted by the Chirac government to commemorate the crime of slavery, Patrick Chamoiseau discusses his attempts to raise consciousness of slavery among young Antilleans. He reflects on his relationship with a number of Caribbean writers, including Edouard Glissant, Derek Walcott and the recently-deceased Aimé Césaire. Working out of a number of familiar theoretical concepts (`créolité', `relation'), he articulates his vision of `mondialité', a global dynamic according to which the peoples of the world are in constant connectedness to each other, capitalism being only the crudest example of this reality. Finally Chamoiseau queries the extent to which the term `postcolonial' can be a useful one for formerly colonised peoples, given the risk that it might sanctify or give undue prominence to the colonial experience.

The titles of the exhibitions and works of visual artists from the Francophone Caribbean often underline the extent to which the theme of memory remains at the heart of their work. This problematic is broken down into three branches. The feeling of an irremediable loss provokes resistance to amnesia and the willful reconstitution of an occulted past. Their works, like those of other, non-Francophone artists from the Caribbean or from the diaspora place “identity in the interstices,” stigmatize the caricatured representation of blacks, are frequently founded on historical documents, and propose a reading of the slave societies of the Caribbean. Does the unity of Caribbean art not reside in its critical function, in this contemporary look towards a shared memory that until now has been lost, hidden, denied, and unacknowledged?

A discussion of Alex Dupuy's The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti and Peter Hallward'sDamming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment.

The contemporaneous publication of Alex Dupuy's The Prophet and the Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment in 2007 marks a watershed in contemporary Haitian Studies. Together, these two critically engaged volumes extensively document the complex and contentious path of the post-Duvalier era in Haitian politics. These volumes together describe the invention of a post-authoritarian populist political sequence, one that after 1990 coalesced around the charismatic leadership of a previously unknown Roman Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The article contrasts the authors' fundamentally different understandings of democracy, one based on consensus and the just distribution of goods and benefits and the other invoking the participation of the excluded.

This article analyzes the topic of dictatorship, political violence, and popular struggle in two recent works that treat the rise and fall of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide: Alex Dupuy's The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti and Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. In discussing these works, I interrogate the extent to which traditional categories of liberal political analysis, democracy, national sovereignty, consensus, popular struggle, rule of law, as well as their putative opposites, dictatorship and terror< must be seen as situated categories, at best only relevant to the conditions of the United States and Europe, and, at worst, part of ideologies that justify the continued global economic and political dominance of the West. Taking Dupuy and Hallward¹s books as two case studies, I show the ways that these authors¹disagreements over Aristide¹s relationship to violence and popular struggle are inseparable from the methods and categories that each applies to his subject.

This article analyzes the shifts in the balance of power between Aristide and the Haitian dominant and middle classes and the foreign powers (the United States, France, and Canada) during the two periods of Aristide's presidency (1991/1994-1996, and 2001-2004). In the first period, an energized popular movement led Aristide to power with significant support among progressive sectors of the middle class and signaled a potential realignment of forces that the Haitian bourgeoisie and its foreign backers believed threatened their interests. The coup d'état of September 1991 was the dominant class's response to that perceived threat. The article considers the role of Aristide's erratic behavior in justify the coup d'état that would have happened in any case. In the second period, the popular movement was divided and weak, the progressive middle class parties broke with him to form an alliance with the bourgeoisie and the foreign troika. The article assesses the role of corruption and violence by Aristide and his Lavalas Family party in his second overthrow.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was re-elected president of Haiti in 2000, with a massive parliamentary majority. My book Damming the Flood (2007) tried to explain how and why his government overthrown, several years later, in an internationally-sponsored coup-d'état. Novelist Lyonel Trouillot helped prepare the ground for this coup by deriding Aristide as a corrupt and brutal dictator with no popular support, and in his contribution to thisSmall Axe forum he dismisses Damming the Flood as racist and dishonest propaganda. My response to Trouillot aims to refute these accusations, and to demonstrate that Trouillot's apparent commitment to `formal democracy' is a contradiction in terms.