Migrant Revolutions

Haitian Literature, Globalization, and U.S. Imperialism

By (author) Valerie Kaussen

Hardback - £104.00

Publication date:

24 December 2007

Length of book:

290 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739116364

Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization, and U.S. Imperialism interprets Haitian literature in a transnational context of anti-colonial—and anti-globalization—politics. Positing a materialist and historicized account of Haitian literary modernity, it traces the themes of slavery, labor migration, diaspora, and revolution in works by Jacques Roumain, Marie Chauvet, Edwidge Danticat, and others. Author Valerie Kaussen argues that the sociocultural effects of U.S. imperialism have renewed and expanded the relevance of the universal political ideals that informed Haiti's eighteenth-century slave revolt and war of decolonization. Finally, Migrant Revolutions defines Haitian literary modernity as located at the forefront of the struggles against transnational empire and global colonialism.
Professor Valerie Kaussen's Migrant Revolutions represents thoroughly researched and well-written scholarship. This book breaks new ground in its analysis of the various and contending forces that have shaped and subtended the production of Haitian literature in the twentieth century. By analyzing a set of key themes, including Haitian revolutionary traditions, labor practices under U.S. occupation, and global migrations of people and capital, she successfully challenges prevailing attitudes of colonialism and slavery, through global ideologies of materialism and capitalist modernity to the role of social movements like noirisme and indigenisme. I am confident that this work will make an important contribution to the fields of Francophone cultural studies and Haitian studies.