Synopses & Reviews
In
Haiti, History, and the Gods, Joan Dayan charts the cultural imagination of Haiti not only by reconstructing the island's history but by highlighting ambiguities and complexities that have been ignored. She investigates the confrontational space in which Haiti is created and recreated in fiction and fact, text and ritual, discourse and practice. Dayan's ambitious project is a research tour de force that gives human dimensions to this eighteenth-century French colony and provides a template for understanding the Haiti of today.
In examining the complex social fabric of French Saint-Domingue, which in 1804 became Haiti, Dayan uncovers a silenced, submerged past. Instead of relying on familiar sources to reconstruct Haitian history, she uses a startling diversity of voices that have previously been unheard. Many of the materials recovered hereoverlooked or repressed historical texts, legal documents, religious works, secret memoirs, letters, and literary fictionshave never been translated into English. Others, such as Marie Vieux Chauvet's radical novel of vodou, Fonds des Nègres, are seldom used as historical sources.
Dayan also argues provocatively for the consideration of both vodou rituals and narrative fiction as repositories of history. Her scholarship is enriched by the insights she has gleaned from conversations and experiences during her many trips to Haiti over the past twenty years. Taken together, the material presented in Haiti, History, and the Gods not only restores a lost chapter of Haitian history but suggests necessary revisions to the accepted histories of the New World.
Synopsis
Charting the cultural imagination of Haiti, Joan Dayan argues for the recognition of both vodou rituals and narrative fictions as repositories of history. A research tour de force, this work gives human dimensions to the eighteenth-century French colony and provides a template for understanding the Haiti of today.
"A voluminous, interdisciplinary treatment of diverse aspects of Haiti's history and culture....An original and provocative discussion of several topics, among them the Vaudou religion, colonial society in St. Domingue, the depiction of women, the mythification of Haiti, the rehabilitation of the novelist Marie Chauvet and much, much more". -- J. M. Dash, Slavery and Abolition
Synopsis
"By viewing Revolutionary-era Haiti through the lenses of gender and sexuality, Joan Dayan breathes life into an important slice of history."Karen McCarthy Brown, author of Mama Lola
About the Author
Joan Dayan, Professor of English at the University of Arizona, is the author of Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (1987) and A Rainbow for the Christian West (1977).