1800s
18th century
A01=Joan Dayan
Author_Joan Dayan
Category=JBCC
Category=JHM
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
colonial
colonialism
colonization
cultural context
discourse
diversity
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
french colonies
french colony
french language
haiti
haitian
haitian culture
haitian history
island
island country
island culture
legal documents
letters
literary fiction
memoirs
modern world
new world
postcolonial
race
racism
religious texts
translation
vodou
world history
Product details
- ISBN 9780520213685
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Mar 1998
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 here--overlooked or repressed historical texts, legal documents, religious works, secret memoirs, letters, and literary fictions--have never been translated into English. Others, such as Marie Vieux Chauvet's radical novel of vodou, Fonds des Negres, 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.
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).
