Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives ed. by Cécile Accilien and Valérie K. Orlando

Abstract

Reviewed by: Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives ed. by Cécile Accilien and Valérie K. Orlando Darlène Dubuisson Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives. Edited by Cécile Accilien and Valérie K. Orlando. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2021. ISBN 1683402103. 270 pp. $95 hardcover, $28 paper. Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives is not only a pedagogical toolkit for university instructors but also an interdisciplinary survey of Haitian culture, society, language, art, and artistic forms that reorients readers to new ways of appreciating “Haiti in relation with and to others—their histories and their cultures” (1). The edited volume, which finds its conceptual framing in Édouard Glissant’s notion of relation en tout-monde (“a world in motion” or global interconnectedness) and bell hooks’s engaged pedagogy (student-centered, interactive, and peer-based teaching and learning), models a fruitful and reciprocal relationship between scholarship and teaching. [End Page 124] The editors group the book chapters in three sections based on teaching subject areas: 1. Teaching about Haitian Art, Literature, and Language 2. Teaching about Haitian History and Politics 3. Teaching about Haiti in American Studies, Latin American Studies, and General Studies Contexts Following Gina Athena Ulysse’s 2015 call for new narratives of Haiti, Teaching Haiti is the first book about Haiti that focuses exclusively on pedagogy—the method and practice of teaching. The book grapples with how instructors can employ critical pedagogy to foster narratives of Haiti that combat the exclusionary epistemologies that operate within higher education institutions in the Global North. But more than providing strategies and resources (including sample lesson plans and syllabi) for furthering new narratives, Teaching Haiti is itself a compilation of such narratives. The book is a direct engagement with Haitian proverbs, particularly Ayiti se tè glise (“Haiti is a slippery land”) (1). This adage points to Haiti’s complexity but does not suggest Haiti is unknowable. Instead, it challenges surface-level approaches to Haiti and demands deeper, layered analyses that refuse to reduce Haiti/Haitians to fixed, rigid stereotypes. Each chapter, therefore, follows the format of narrative/counternarrative, speaking to and against stereotypical approaches to Haiti while drawing readers toward more profound and complete understandings. Section 1, “Teaching about Haitian Art, Literature, and Language,” draws on Haitian creative, artistic, and scholarly production to dismantle hegemonic discourses and deconstruct disciplinary boundaries. The section begins with Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s engagement with and challenge to the notion of Haitian women as poto mitan—that is, pillars of society. Jean-Charles offers an intersectional (Black feminist) approach that asks students to engage and analyze the interplay between discourse and counterdiscourse through film and texts written by Haitian women, among others. In chapter 2, Bonnie Thomas refers to historical and textual analyses of Rodney Saint-Éloi’s writings to reframe salient literary themes of exile, diaspora, home, and belonging. The chapter proposes ways to lead students in understanding how Saint-Éloi’s work as an écrivan engagé (engaged writer) “offers new insights into issues affecting Haiti and the wider world” (45). In the following chapter, Joubert Satyre discusses how to introduce students to modern Haitian theater, situating two dramatic genres: historical drama and comedy of manners. The lessons [End Page 125] Satyre provides use contextualized readings of Franck Fouché’s Bouqui au Paradis (Bouqui in Paradise) to combat misconceptions of Haitian Vodou and folklore. In chapter 4, Cécile Accilien, one of the co-editors of the volume, examines the intersection of art and religion, highlighting modes of teaching Vodou iconography in Haitian contemporary art. Section 1 ends with Don Walicek’s chapter on teaching Kreyòl using interdisciplinary and decolonial methods. Walicek’s contribution, like the others in the section, challenges derisive ways of (mis)comprehending Haiti, or in the case of Walicek’s chapter, Kreyòl. Section 2, “Teaching about Haitian History and Politics,” directly confronts misguided and racist depictions of Haitian history and politics in North American and European media. The section opens with a historical analysis of Haiti-US relations during the presidencies of John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams. In this chapter, Darren Staloff and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken center Haiti...