Abstract
Ours is a century marked by massacre. There is a tendency to let history swallow massacres whole or allow only “legitimate” portions to be seen by posterity. I am interested in uncovering the erased populations caught in the tentacles of disremembering. I raise the question of Haiti, its awe-inspiring blackness, and a massacre that clouded its historical imagination for the entire century just passed. Excavating the detritus of history, I am curious about what is left, the materials with which a ravaged people navigate their current course. Theories of history, mourning, and memory proposed by Lois Parkinson Zamora, Deborah Cohn, and George Handley provide critical apparatus for this study.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Charters, Mallay. “Edwidge Danticat: A Bitter Legacy Revisited.” Publisher’s Weekly, 245.33 (August 1998): 42–43.
Cohn, Deborah N. History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.
Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones (special large print edition). Maine: Thorndike Press, 1998.
Danticat, Edwidge. “We are Ugly, but We are Here.” The Caribbean Writer, 10 (1996). http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/literature/danticatugly.htm
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Diederich, Bernard. Trujillo: The Death of the Dictator. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1978.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1968.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XIV. London: Hogarth, 1957.
Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981.
Handley, George B. Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
Sagás, Ernesto. Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Boca Raton: University Press of Florida, 2000.
Said, Edward. “Traveling Theory.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2005 Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Subramanian, S. (2005). Blood, Memory, and Nation: Massacre and Mourning in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. In: Isfahani-Hammond, A. (eds) The Masters and the Slaves. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8162-2_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8162-2_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-6708-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8162-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)