Martin Munro. Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat.
Liverpool University Press – Contemporary French & Francophone Cultures 7.
Cloth NAM $80.00spec ISBN: 978-1-84631-079-9 (ISBN-10: 1-84631-079-2) Spring 2007.
Haitian writing is one of the richest literary traditions in the Americas, and yet is little known outside of Haiti. This book is an introduction to this literature, focusing on the period from 1946 to the present, a time in which exile has become the dominant theme in Haitian writing. Reading post–1946 Haitian writing as a literature of exile, the chapters analyze key novels by the most important figures of each generation: Jacques–Stephen Alexis, René Depestre, Émile Ollivier, Dany Laferrière, and Edwidge Danticat. Martin Munro also considers Haitian literature in the context of broader exiled writing from the Caribbean and elsewhere, and argues that the story of post–1946 Haitian fiction is one that demands to be re–read, re–interpreted, and relayed to a wider, global audience that is only just awakening to the long–held concerns of Haiti's writers.
“The most sophisticated and up–to–date study of contemporary and recent Haitian literature… [Munro's] theoretical insights are matched by his excellent close readings of the major authors. Munro's book should make a significant contribution to postcolonial theory.”
Professor A. James Arnold, University of Virginia
Martin Munro is Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Literatures at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. His previous publications include Shaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre (2000) and (as co–editor) Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks (2006).
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