Foreword

Abstract

Extract There, in that pale region, beneath that essential cover, the twin incompatibility of an oeuvre and madness is unveiled; it is the blind spot of each one’s possibility, and of their mutual exclusion.—michel foucault1Close In 2018 I received tenure, and by the end of that year my monograph on Edwidge Danticat, the first of its kind, was published.2Close The process of arriving at these two most important events in my professional career to date was not exactly a descent into madness, but the moments of confusion, insecurity, uncertainty, and restlessness at times made me feel like I was getting close. In retrospect, the many years I have spent reading, teaching, and analyzing Danticat’s work has led to a number of epiphanies at various phases of both my professional and my personal life. By the time I had completed my book on Danticat, I realized that I no longer examined her work as individual texts but as a collection of her life’s work. I would from that point refer to her oeuvre. I would speak of her fictional and nonfictional texts in relation to each other. It’s the reason why I developed the idea of the “echo chamber” as a theory of relation and analytical framework in my book. In the process of organizing Danticat’s oeuvre by looking at its parts in relation to a whole, I had another epiphany. I was also sorting out and ordering my own life. I was beginning to ask questions about my own life work and the myriad ways in which Danticat’s work has led me to a reconsideration of the meaning of an oeuvre not only in the literary sense but also in a spiritual sense.