Traces d'histoire: Contours d'un insoutenable a l'oeuvre dans certains texts haitiens de la fin du XIXe siecle.
Item
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Title
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Traces d'histoire: Contours d'un insoutenable a l'oeuvre dans certains texts haitiens de la fin du XIXe siecle.
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Identifier
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AAI3159253
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identifier
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3159253
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Creator
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Ruiz, Maria-Luisa.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Lucienne Serrano
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Date
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2005
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Language
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French
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Caribbean
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Abstract
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In this dissertation, I examine three literary Haitian works, written in the ten last years of the nineteenth century: La Fille du Kacik by Henri Chauvet, Le Flibustier and Les Dix hommes noirs by Etzer Vilaire. Both writers recall in their texts the victory of general Jean-Jacques Dessalines against the French army, led by Napoleon's brother in law, general Leclerc. This victory brought freedom and independence to Haiti.;In Chauvet's and Vilaire's narratives, the Haitian military exploit takes a very particular temporal dimension. Even though it belongs to the past, writing makes it present and future at the same time. Analyzing this temporal aspect, I have found that the three texts written at the end of the nineteenth century share common links with the Haitian Proclamation of independence, composed and read in French by Boisrond-Tonnerre, the secretary of Dessalines, the first day of January 1804. As he wrote his discourse, according to the order of Dessalines, Boisrond-Tonnerre created a new word which does not exist in French, the verb "lugubrer". I consider this neologism as a symptom, in the psychoanalytical sense of the term: it functions as a trace of memory that deconstructs French discourse in order to testify to the unsustainable experience of resisting and fighting slavery.;Following a close reading of the Haitian proclamation of independence in the first chapter, I show how this text, considered Haiti's first literary work, functions as a matrix not only of the narratives under study, but also of the ideological discourses concerning nationhood and identity, which were constructed and sustained by Haitian writers and intellectuals, throughout the nineteenth century and until the occupation of the country by US marines in 1915.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
