Issues

Sarah L. Lincoln is assistant professor of English at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, where she teaches postcolonial and other world literatures, along with global cinema and critical theory. She is the author of several essays on consumerism, waste, and the politics of form in postcolonial film and fiction and is currently at work on a book manuscript titled "Oikopoiesis: Postcolonial Literature and the Art of Survival," which studies anticonsumerism and sustainability in contemporary literatures.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of a number of works of nonfiction, including Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997), which received the Choice OAB Award in 1998, and Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997). She is also the author of the novels Spirit of Haiti (2003) and The Loneliness of Angels (2010). She sits on the advisory committee of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association of America.

Elvira Pulita no is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Her research and teaching interests include African diaspora literatures, Caribbean studies, indigenous studies, theories of race and ethnicity, migration, diaspora, and human rights. Among other subjects, she has published on the work of Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, and V. S. Naipaul, and she is currently completing a monograph exploring literary representations of diaspora in the work of Caribbean-born writers living in the United States. She is the author of Toward a Native American Critical Theory (2003).

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is an assistant professor of Romance languages and literatures and African and African diaspora studies at Boston College. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, and transnational feminisms in African and Caribbean literary and cultural studies. Her work has appeared most recently in Ecrire Haïti aujourd'hui(1986-2006). She is currently working on a book manuscript titled "Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary."

Dominique Aurélia is an associate professor in the Department of English at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, Martinique, where she teaches Caribbean and American literature, with a special focus on Middle Passage narratives written by women. She has published essays on Caribbean literature, postcolonial theory, transatlantic studies, and Caribbean art, in edited collections, and in the journals Macomère, Cercles, Arthème, and Carnets du Cerpac. She is also a short-story writer.

Franklyn Rodgers is a UK-based photographic artist best known for his unique and distinctive portraits that explore notions of identity. The recipient in 2001 of a Nesta fellowship, he was also nominated for the Arts Foundation award in 2008, and for the Paul Hamlyn fellowship in 2009. His recent exhibitions include Underexposed, a stand-alone installation at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and The Elders, launched as part of the commemorations of the Festival of Britain on the Southbank, London, in 2011. His first monograph, The Philosophy of Strangers, was published by Autograph ABP in 2007.

Kamau Brathwaite is a distinguished historian, literary-cultural critic, and poet, as well as a friend and colleague of Edouard Glissant. After a long career teaching in the Department of History at the University of the West Indies, Mona, he now teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. A founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement and a founding editor of Savacou, Brathwaite is the recipient of a number of awards and prizes, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Among his most recent books are Ancestors (2001), MR (Magical Realism) (2002), Words Need Love Too (2004), Born to Slow Horses (2005), and Elegguas (2010).

J. Michael Dash is professor of French and social and cultural analysis at New York University. Born in Trinidad, he has worked extensively on Haitian literature and French Caribbean writers, especially Edouard Glissant, many of whose works he has translated into English, including The Ripening (1985), Caribbean Discourse (1989), and Monsieur Toussaint (2005). Dash's publications include Literature and Ideology in Haiti (1981), Haiti and the United States (1988), Edouard Glissant (1995), and The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context(1998). He is also the translator of Gisèle Pineau's The Drifting of Spirits (1999). His most recent books are Libète: A Haiti Anthology (1999), a collection edited with Charles Arthur, and Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001). He is currently completing a book on the francophone Caribbean in the 1940s.

Celia Britton is a professor of French and francophone studies at University College, London, and a fellow of the British Academy. She has published widely on French Caribbean literature and thought, especially on the work of Edouard Glissant. Her recent publications include Race and the Unconscious: Freudianism in French Caribbean Thought (2002) and The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction (2008).

Roger Toumson was born in Guadeloupe in 1946. He is a writer, literary theorist, essayist, and poet. His earliest works engaged with those of his predecessors in the Negritude movement. Subsequently, he became interested in questions of cultural métissage and was one of the first of his generation to propose a vision of humanity as radically free from definitions of race or color, a theme suggested in the title of one of his most influential works, La transgression des couleurs (1990).

Daniel Morel was born in Haiti in 1951. On 12 November 1964 he witnessed the public execution in Port-au-Prince of Louis Drouin and Marcel Numa—the last two survivors of the group Jeune Haïti (Young Haiti), which had planned to overthrow the regime of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. The next day, a photographer who had recorded the rebels' deaths posted the frame-by-frame images in the front of his studio. According to Morel, it was a gruesome sight for a young child, but it made him realize that he wanted to take pictures, too: "I thought that by being a photographer I would learn not to be scared of anything." For over twenty years, Morel has documented his native country, capturing its culture, history, and people. His photographs have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the Wall Street Journal. He was the resident photographer for the Associated Press for fourteen years, until 2004, and has received a Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club of America, the AP Award of Excellence, and the Sam Chavkin Prize for Integrity in Latin American Journalism. He has been the recipient of grants from the Soros/Open Society Foundation Documentary Photo Project to host a series of photo exhibitions in Haiti and New York aimed at enabling Haitian Americans and Haitians in Haiti to address their past and collaborate toward a positive future. As a producer, his film projects include Unfinished Country, about the Haiti elections, aired on Wide Angle on PBS in 2006, and When the Drum Is Beating, a feature-length documentary, currently in postproduction, about the revered Haitian big band Septentrional.

Donald Cosentino is professor emeritus in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published widely on black Atlantic art, oral traditions, religion, and myth, based on fieldwork in Haiti, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria, as well as in Los Angeles. He is the author of Defiant Maids and Stubborn Farmers: Tradition and Invention in Mende Story Performance (1982) and Vodou Things: The Art of Pierrot Barra and Marie Cassaise (1998). He is the editor and chief writer of the award-winning catalog for The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou(1995), a traveling exhibition he curated for the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. He is currently writing on evolving religious traditions in urban Afro-Atlantis.

Michael Deibert is a journalist, author, and visiting fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Miami Herald, Le Monde diplomatique, and Folha de São Paulo, among other publications. In his role at Coventry University, he aids the center in its mission to increase and sustain dialogue on international peacebuliding and development issues, with a particular focus on Africa and Latin America. He is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (2005).

Millery Polyné is an assistant professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is the author of From Douglass to Duvalier: US African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964 (2010).

Matthew J. Smith is a senior lecturer in history at the University of the West Indies, Mona. His main research interests include Haitian political and social history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the history of Haitian migration. He is the author of Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 (2009).