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Haiti, History, and the Gods
Joan Dayan
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Description for Haiti, History, and the Gods
paperback. Charting the cultural imagination of Haiti, this text argues for the recognition of both vodou rituals and narrative fictions as repositories of history. The book gives human dimensions to the 18th-century French colony and provides a template for understanding the Haiti of today. Num Pages: 362 pages, 34 b&w photographs, 1 map. BIC Classification: 1KJH; HBJK; HBTB; JFC; JHM. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 229 x 152 x 22. Weight in Grams: 467. Good clean copy with minor shelfwear, remains very good
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 Negres, 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.
Product Details
Format
Paperback
Publication date
1998
Publisher
University of California Press
Condition
Used, Very Good
Number of Pages
362
Place of Publication
Berkerley, United States
ISBN
9780520213685
SKU
KSG0034743
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
Ref
99-1
About Joan Dayan
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).
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