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From Sugar to Revolution

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Sovereignty. Sugar. Revolution. These are the three axes this book uses to link the works of contemporary women artists from Haiti—a country excluded in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean li...
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  • 05 February 2013
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Sovereignty. Sugar. Revolution. These are the three axes this book uses to link the works of contemporary women artists from Haiti—a country excluded in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literary studies—the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. In From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, Myriam Chancy aims to show that Haiti’s exclusion is grounded in its historical role as a site of ontological defiance. Her premise is that writers Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Zoé Valdés, Loida Maritza Pérez, Marilyn Bobes, Achy Obejas, Nancy Morejón, and visual artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons attempt to defy fears of “otherness” by assuming the role of “archaeologists of amnesia.” They seek to elucidate women’s variegated lives within the confining walls of their national identifications—identifications wholly defined as male. They reach beyond the confining limits of national borders to discuss gender, race, sexuality, and class in ways that render possible the linking of all three nations. Nations such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba are still locked in battles over self-determination, but, as Chancy demonstrates, women’s gendered revisionings may open doors to less exclusionary imaginings of social and political realities for Caribbean people in general.

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Price: $46.99
Pages: 392
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Imprint: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication Date: 05 February 2013
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781554586127
Format: Paperback
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In this original and provocative study, Myriam Chancy reads the catastrophic history of the Caribbean in the narrative and visual fictions of a number of remarkable women artists, disclosing hitherto uncharted maps of time and voice and remembrance. A work of studied insight, engaged criticism, and graceful sentences, it will alter not only the frames in which Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic are represented, but the very conditions for a gendered and transnational inquiry into the Caribbean present.
Myriam J.A. Chancy is the author of both non-fiction and fiction, including Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997), which won a Choice OAB Award for 1998, and Spirit of Haiti (2003), shortlisted for Best First Book, Canada/Caribbean region, Commonwealth Prize 2004. The Loneliness of Angels (2010) was shortlisted in the fiction category of the OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature 2011 and won the 2011 Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award, Best Fiction 2010. Chancy is HBA Chair in the Humanities, Scripps College, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Table of Contents for From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, by Myriam J.A. Chancy
Preface The Stories We Cannot Tell
Introduction ¿Y donde esta tu abuela?: On the Respective Racial (Mis)Idendifications of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic in the Context of Latin America and the Caribbean
PART I SUGAR: Haiti
Facing the Mountains: Dominican Suppression and the Haitian Imaginary in the Works of Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat
Recovering History “Bone by Bone”: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat
PART II SOVEREIGNTY: Cuba
Travesía: Crossings of Sovereignty, Sexuality, and Race in the Cuban Female Imaginaries of Zoé Valdés, Nancy Moréjon, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Recovering Origins: A Conversation with María Magdalena Campos-Pons
PART III REVOLUTION: The Dominican Republic
Subversive Sexualities: Marilyn Bobes, Achy Obejas, and Loida Maritza Pérez on Revolutionizing Gendered Indentities Against Cuban and Dominican Landscapes
The Heart of Home: A Conversation with Loida Maritza Pérez
Conclusion Non progredi regredi est: The Making of Transformative Visions
Acknowledgements
Notes
Works Cited
Index