Preface
Summary
Such a spiral is human being! Within this spiral, nothing but self-inverting dynamisms. One no longer knows if one is rushing towards the center or escaping from it. That which characterizes the spiral is, therefore, the fact that it obeys no predetermined order and, perhaps even more so, the fact that this figure describes only one specific instance of disorder.
—Gaston BachelardIf someone needed a visual explanation, a graphic picture of what the Caribbean is, I would refer him to the spiral chaos of the Milky Way, the unpredictable flux of transformative plasma that spins calmly in our globe's firmament, that sketches in an “other” shape that keeps changing, with some objects born to light while others disappear into the womb of darkness—change, transit, return, fluxes of sidereal matter.
—Antonio Benítez-RojoFirst black republic in the world, first independent country in Latin America, and first autonomous non-European state to carve itself out of Europe's universalist empires, Haiti has been central to the very concept of socio-political modernity. Its profoundly hybrid people and traditions, represented over the past two centuries by an exceptionally prolific community of writers and artists, affirm its relevance to cultural and aesthetic conceptions of modernity as well. From Indigenism and marvelous realism to the implementation of a politicized practice of Surrealism, the Haitian aesthetic tradition has been marked by a fearless capacity to imagine alternatives—alternatives that recall the revolutionary origins of the island nation and that firmly insist on Haiti's presence on a global stage. Despite this should-be centrality, however, Haiti has in many ways been relegated to the periphery of the so-called “New World”—historically and contemporarily, politically and literarily. Marked by exceptionalism, the voices of some of its most important writers have been muted by the geopolitical realities of the nation's fraught post-revolutionary history. In Haiti Unbound, I offer a close look at the works of three such writers: the Haitian Spiralists Frankétienne, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and René Philoctète. Interred physically within the nightmare of “Papa Doc” Duvalier's totalitarian regime but unwilling to be silent in the face of unsatisfying creative and social realities, these three individuals began in 1965 to re-imagine their world—the world— as a spiral.
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- Haiti UnboundA Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, pp. vii - xxivPublisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010