Haiti, History, and the Gods

Joan Dayan

Published by University of California Press 1996

Haiti, History, and the Gods

Joan Dayan

https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520920965

Overview
Contents

About this book

In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Joan Dayan charts the cultural imagination of Haiti not only by reconstructing the island's history but by highlighting ambiguities and complexities that have been ignored. She investigates the confrontational space in which Haiti is created and recreated in fiction and fact, text and ritual, discourse and practice. Dayan's ambitious project is a research tour de force that gives human dimensions to this eighteenth-century French colony and provides a template for understanding the Haiti of today.

In examining the complex social fabric of French Saint-Domingue, which in 1804 became Haiti, Dayan uncovers a silenced, submerged past. Instead of relying on familiar sources to reconstruct Haitian history, she uses a startling diversity of voices that have previously been unheard. Many of the materials recovered here—overlooked or repressed historical texts, legal documents, religious works, secret memoirs, letters, and literary fictions—have never been translated into English. Others, such as Marie Vieux Chauvet's radical novel of vodou, Fonds des Nègres, are seldom used as historical sources.

Dayan also argues provocatively for the consideration of both vodou rituals and narrative fiction as repositories of history. Her scholarship is enriched by the insights she has gleaned from conversations and experiences during her many trips to Haiti over the past twenty years. Taken together, the material presented in Haiti, History, and the Gods not only restores a lost chapter of Haitian history but suggests necessary revisions to the accepted histories of the New World.

Author / Editor information

Dayan Joan :

Joan Dayan, Professor of English at the University of Arizona, is the author of Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (1987) and A Rainbow for the Christian West (1977).

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Prologue Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xxi
Note on Orthography Publicly Available Download PDF	xxiii
PART ONE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART TWO Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
PART THREE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Chronology Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	287
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	329

Language: English
Publisher: University of California Press
Pages
- Main content: 362

eBook

Published: January 30, 1996
ISBN: 9780520920965