Narrating History, Home and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

Narrating History, Home and Dyaspora, edited by Maia L. Butler, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, and Megan Feifer—the founders and members of the Edwidge Danticat Society—is a thought-provoking collection of cutting-edge research articles on Danticat’s works by both emerging and established scholars. Alongside recent publications, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Edwidge Danticat (2020) and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat (2021), it ushers in a new stage of scholarship on Danticat. Danticat, with her bicultural background and transnational vision, has created many works set in both Haiti and America, which—as the various authors in this collection demonstrate—have earnt her reputation as the “voice of Caribbean dyaspora.” The first three parts of this collection, with “dyaspora” always as the underlying context, address the title’s keywords, namely: home and nation, memory and history, and storytelling and narration. The first part investigates Danticat’s engagement with the idea of nation, and her navigation between Haiti and the USA as a diasporic writer, discussing the strategies she adopts to transcend both physical and psychological boundaries. Part two delves into the prominent themes of “history” and “memory,” as well as the underlying trauma and trauma-healing in Danticat’s works. Part three focuses on “narrating,” that is, narrative form and narrative structure, investigating the role of the “active and responsible reader” in imparting meaning to the text (142); it also examines the essay as a space for Danticat’s self-reflection, the paratextual elements at work in her infusion of personal experience into her literary creation, as well as Danticat’s “intertextual Global South thinking” in influencing the teaching of literary works from the Global South. The final section, part four, explores Danticat’s advocacy of activism and community building as a form of resistance, with the goal of defending citizenship rights, mitigating the effects of colonialism, giving voice to the silenced, and emphasizing the resilience of the Haitian people.