SX Blog

Small Axe editorial committee member Régine Michelle Jean-Charles has a new book out this month!  We asked her to tell us a bit about this project. Read what she has to say about her latest book: 

My third book, Looking for Other Words: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022) stems from my longstanding commitment to two related fields—Black feminist studies and Haitian literary studies—and was published this month by University of Virginia Press. This book explores the “ethical imagination” of three contemporary Haitian authors—Yanick Lahens, Kettly Mars, and Évelyne Trouillot—to argue that ethics and aesthetics operate in relation to one another in each of the novels under consideration and that the turn to ethics is essential in reading 21st-century Haitian literature. My intervention situates Lahens, Trouillot, and Mars within a longer tradition of Black feminist writing that is both specific to Haiti and globally relevant. As such, I engage and incorporate the work of thinkers like Paulette Poujol-Oriol, Carolle Charles, Gina Athéna Ulysse, Edwidge Danticat, and Sabine Lamour all of whom have made unique contributions to Haitian feminist studies. Throughout the book, I also consider how popular culture, visual culture, and contemporary feminist organizing in Haiti offer unique points of entry into understanding feminism in the Haitian context. To this end, the activism of Pascale Solages, the art of Tessa Mars, and the photography of Régine Romain all play a role in my inquiry and determination to gather and create a rasanblaj, to use to words of Ulysse, of diverse Haitian feminist creatives.