Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre

Abstract

Reviewed by: Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre Jana Evans Braziel Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. By Nadège T. Clitandre. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2018. New World Studies. ISBN- 10: 0813941873. 272 pp. US $29.50, paperback. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, Nadège T. Clitandre's first book, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2018, is a comprehensive analysis of the literary oeuvre of the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat. Clitandre explores the "tropic permutation[s] of [End Page 290] echo" (5), the Ovidian myth of Echo and Narcissus, and the philosophical reverberations of echo (notably, Édouard Glissant's echo-monde) as a trope for the "doublings" of home and diaspora, local and global, and literary and material registers in Danticat's literary corpus. Situated at the theoretical interstices of globalization, postcolonialism, diasporas, and Black feminist thought, Clitandre's intellectual project foregrounds the geopolitical dimensions of the local and the national (Haiti) to render global insights; in the process, she also meditates on the tenuous and perilous nature of borders; the long-distance tentacles of nations in diaspora; and the literary as a lens into material and political, indeed arduous realities. As an extended case study that proffers global lessons, Clitandre writes, Danticat's "reconstitution of nation through a diasporic imaginary" (3) allows her readers to discern and reimagine the complicated and deterritorialized terrains of diasporas, the transnational engagements with home and homeland, the interstitial border zones across geopolitical boundaries, and the fractured and fragmented lenses wrought by the multifarious fissures of globalization, international migration, landlocked fixity, impoverished immobility, and the hard lived realities of neoliberal economics. Of note is the book's appendix, a dialogic conversation, as Clitandre closes her brilliant first book with an interview with Danticat herself. The discussion moves across a wide range of literary and political issues pertaining to nation and diaspora. Clitandre's and Danticat's voices thus register two voices in this polyphonic community. Given the book's essential and riveting contribution to contextualizing Danticat's work in its multiple connections to feminism, philosophy, politics, psychology, and religion, what follows is a thorough summary and assessment of each part. Clitandre's "Introduction" places Danticat's literary oeuvre in several theoretical contexts—classical myth and literature, Lacanian psychoanalysis, diaspora and diasporic studies, globalization and the global imaginary, Caribbean feminism, and, more broadly, African diasporic feminisms. The introduction painstakingly elucidates for Danticat's readers (and Clitandre's also) key critical terms and conceptual frames that are integral to the latter's reception of the former's literary work. Clitandre carefully overviews scholarly contributions to and theorizations of diaspora and the field of diaspora studies before coining her own critical vocabulary, including concepts like "diasporic imaginary" (constructed from ideas about "diasporic consciousness" and "home spaces"), the "echo," the "echo chamber," and "écho-monde" and "relational poetics" (both of which are directly indebted to the late Édouard Glissant's writings). In doing so, Clitandre reveals a studied relationship to the interdisciplinary fields of diaspora studies and globalization, as well as French structuralism and [End Page 291] poststructuralism and African diasporic feminisms, demonstrating her intimate knowledge of a wide range of critical theorists (Mikhail Bakhtin, Kobena Mercer, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Roland Robertson, Arjun Appadurai, Manfred Steger, Saskia Sassen, Éduardo Galeano, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Benedict Anderson, Charles Taylor, Édouard Glissant, Homi Bhabha, Simon Gikandi, Paul Gilroy, Caren Kaplan, Stuart Hall, Vijay Mishra, Carole Boyce-Davies, bell hooks, Michelle Wallace, Patricia Hill Collins, and James Clifford) as well as literary critics (Anita Mannur, Carine M. Mardorossian, Yanick Lahens, Myriam Chancy, Belinda Edmondson, Barbara Smith) and creative writers (Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker). Chapter 1, "Recall: The Echo Effect of Historical Silences," centers on history and historical echoes of nation and national narratives as recalled in diasporic locations, notably the United States but also the Bahamas, Canada, and other parts of the Caribbean archipelago. As Clitandre powerfully and palpably demonstrates, an understanding of Danticat's literary corpus is not possible without an understanding of her diasporic imaginary and the national, historical narratives that are inextricable from her literary texts. Chapter...