Abstract
Framing genre trouble (McKenzie 2006) as a decolonial methodology, this paper considers the relevance of Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) for reading migrant texts against the grain of straight temporality which sustains the coloniality of power (Lugones 2007). Scrutinizing historiographic suppression, Danticat’s migrant text interrupts the chrononormative portrayal of the Trujillo genocide of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic as a reality pertaining to an obsolete past and to the geocultural margins alone. Read in the aftermath of the testimonio controversy, it may thus decenter the ongoing deflection of attention from Rigoberta Menchú’s impact on the geocultural structures that sanction ongoing military intervention and genocide by refocusing on historiography as a terrain of relentless decolonial contestation rather than prescriptive narrative closure.
Highlights
Coloniality of Power and ChronopoliticsMigration is clearly thought of as a spatial event
Considering Quijano’s argument that the perpetuation of racism is at the roots of the coloniality of power, Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) scrutinizes the latter’s inception in the wake of colonialism by asking how the Haitian Revolution could be undermined just two years ater the discourses of human equality, fraternity, and liberty had been won for the French Revolution
While normative chronopolitics fabricates a linear progression from a primitive, underdeveloped past to a civilized, developed present, migrant texts are legitimized in discourse only as they anachronize that past within interlocking discourses warranting its obliteration: such texts must come from a space-time described either as virgin, to be developed for proit pending on the penetration of capital, or as hopelessly deiled and let behind history. hese gendered tropes of straight temporality pervade migrant texts and their racialization, even as they straddle established geocultural perspectives in order to re-negotiate and re-signify them
Summary
Migration is clearly thought of as a spatial event It is taken for granted as an inherent shit from the past to the present, from a pre-modern. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. While normative chronopolitics fabricates a linear progression from a primitive, underdeveloped past to a civilized, developed present, migrant texts are legitimized in discourse only as they anachronize that past within interlocking discourses warranting its (and their) obliteration: such texts must come from a space-time described either as virgin, to be developed for proit pending on the penetration of capital, or as hopelessly deiled and let behind history. While normative chronopolitics fabricates a linear progression from a primitive, underdeveloped past to a civilized, developed present, migrant texts are legitimized in discourse only as they anachronize that past within interlocking discourses warranting its (and their) obliteration: such texts must come from a space-time described either as virgin, to be developed for proit pending on the penetration of capital, or as hopelessly deiled and let behind history. hese gendered tropes of straight temporality pervade migrant texts and their racialization, even as they straddle established geocultural perspectives in order to re-negotiate and re-signify them.
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