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

Haiti, History, and the Gods by Dayan, Joan (1998) Paperback PDF

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