Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wbk2r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-17T03:24:01.880Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

4 - Dany Laferrière. Master of the New

Martin Munro
Affiliation:
University of the West Indies
Get access

Summary

[The] postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently.

(Umberto Eco)

A nation that remembers its traditions is by definition a virtuous nation.

(François Duvalier)

Dany Laferrière is not a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer, a francophone writer, or an exiled writer. He is, he insists, a writer from Haiti and the Americas, who writes in French, and who was initially compelled to leave his homeland, but who now chooses to live on the outside. Eschewing all national and racial labels, he has famously stated that: “I am from my readers' country. When someone from Japan reads me, I become a Japanese writer.” There is something audaciously postmodern in this statement, something archly defiant in Laferrière's insistence that authorial identity is not “natural” or given, but is fluid and always to be made and remade, particularly when this author comes from Haiti, a country where writers have long been charged with the task of glorifying history, race, and nation. At the risk of imposing one more restrictive classification, this chapter reads Laferrière's work, and in particular his 1996 book, Pays sans chapeau, as a bold leap away from Haitian modernism, and into denationalized, deracialized, broadly American postmodernism.

Type
Chapter
Information
Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature
Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat
, pp. 178 - 205
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×