Thammasat University students interested in history, political science, Latin American studies, Haiti, sociology, colonialism, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 29 April Zoom webinar on Reimagining Haiti: Decolonial Visions.
The event, on Monday, 29 April 2024 at 5:30pm Bangkok time, is presented by the College of Social Sciences, The University of Glasgow, Scotland, the United Kingdom.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of the history of Haiti.
Haiti is located in Latin America, which refers to countries and territories in North, Central, South America, and the Caribbean where Spanish, French, and Portuguese are primarily spoken.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://www.gla.ac.uk/events/listings/index.html/event/13301
According to the event webpage:
Rewriting or rasanblaj (gathering/re-assembling in Haitian Kreyòl) is a fundamental process at the heart of Haitian-style culture and rebuilding. The book on which this talk is based reorients Haitian studies around rasanblaj, testing its value as a methodological tool for interpreting Haitian culture and other cultures of the Global South.
Rewriting in postcolonial contexts is often viewed as ‘writing back’ to metropolitan literary classics; here we turn instead to Haitians’ self-rewriting. This focus can change our understanding by centring on Haiti’s own worldview, and develops a decolonial lens of rasanblaj.
The talk builds on a deconstructionist postcolonial approach that counteracts incomplete accounts of colonial literature, history and archives. It reveals Haitian culture’s core dynamics by involving communal oral storytelling, artistic practices and transformative visions of the Haitian Revolution’s contemporary relevance. The talk contributes to the creation of new narratives about Haiti and reconstruction by gathering voices of rasanblaj from writers, filmmakers, visual artists, activists and scholars.
The speaker will be Dr. Rachel Douglas of the School of Modern Languages & Cultures, the University of Glasgow.
In 2022, Dr. Douglas published an article, Futures in the presents: decolonial visions of the Haitian Revolution.
The article’s abstract follows:
How to decolonize time from the perspective of the Caribbean, particularly Haiti? This essay tackles the question of decolonial temporalities in narratives of Haitian pasts, presents, and futures. For Caribbean historians, the past of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) provides a transformative set of coordinates for projecting anti- and decolonial visions. This essay pays special attention to the layered histories and temporal condensations entailed in James, Trouillot, and Casimir’s interventions. To discuss decolonial time, this essay analyzes a range of histories, dramas, literary texts, and oral storytelling. Connections across these different texts, and, especially, their various iterations over the decades will be used to explore the shifting understandings of time and historical change. The essay will illustrate how new visions of the past are understood through the changing lenses of the present. How, the essay asks, are imagined futures grounded in, shaped by, and how do they refashion in turn, historical pasts and contemporary presents? Rasanblaj – meaning gathering/reassembling/rebuilding in Haitian Kreyòl – is the central decolonial concept and process for this essay, which builds on Gina Athena Ulysse’s previous articulations. This essay’s argument links space to time and relates to the specific spaces of Haiti and the Caribbean, and to rewriting literary and historical narratives. Such is the power of rewriting and rasanblaj that they completely refashion any discussion of time and space in the postcolonial Caribbean literary and historiographical narratives discussed here.
The article begins:
How to decolonize time from the perspective of the Caribbean, particularly Haiti? This essay tackles the question of decolonial temporalities in narratives of Haitian pasts, presents, and futures. For Caribbean historians including C. L. R. James, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Jean Casimir, the past of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) provides a transformative set of coordinates for projecting anti- and decolonial visions. This essay pays special attention to the layered histories and temporal condensations entailed in James, Trouillot, and Casimir’s interventions.1 James was the anticolonial trailblazer who was constantly reworking the existing coordinates of the Haitian Revolution in both the 1938 and 1963 editions of The Black Jacobins history, as well as his two dramas based on these events from 1936 and 1967. It was James’s visionary potential and his attempts to glimpse new possible futures that triggered the type of deconstructionist postcolonial historiography popularized by Trouillot in Silencing the Past (1995), but also present in his earliest book Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti (1977a)– the first history book to be published in Haitian Kreyòl– now published in English as Stirring the Pot of Haitian History (2021). It is also James, the essay argues, who initiates Casimir’s still later decolonial visions of the Haitian Revolution in The Haitians: A Decolonial History (2020). James was long engaged with the world-making history of revolution. He was profoundly engaged in politics at all stages of his life, always seeking to relate the political tenses of past, present, and alternative futures. After James, later historians like Trouillot, Casimir and others have repeatedly sought to relate pasts and presents dynamically. Theatre has also been used by James and Trouillot to rethink how past, present and alternative futures relate to one another. Todiscuss decolonial time, this essay analyzes a range of histories, dramas, literary texts, and oral storytelling. Connections across these different texts, and, especially, their various iterations over the decades will be used to explore the shifting understandings of time and historical change. The essay will illustrate how new visions of the past are understood through the changing lenses of the present. How, the essay asks, are imagined futures grounded in, shaped by, and how do they refashion in turn, historical pasts and contemporary presents? Rasanblaj– meaning gathering/reassembling/rebuilding in Haitian Kreyòl– is the central decolonial concept and process for this essay, which builds on Gina Athena Ulysse’s previous articulations (see Ulysse 2016, 2017). This essay’s argument links space to time and relates to the specific spaces of Haiti and the Caribbean, and to rewriting literary and historical narratives. Such is the power of rewriting and rasanblaj that they completely refashion any discussion of time and space in the postcolonial Caribbean literary and historiographical narratives discussed in here. Rasanblaj can be conceptualized as a fundamental decolonial methodological tool, concept and process, which is useful for reimagining Haitian, Caribbean, and potentially other cultures of the global South too.
Rewriting in postcolonial contexts has often been viewed as the Empire ‘writing back’ to metropolitan literary classics. Yet, Haitian rewriting/rasanblaj is not derivative, nor does it only respond to the global North. Instead, the self-fashioning rasanblaj dynamic takes Haiti as its own starting point for shaping Haiti and the Caribbean’s own cultures. This essay turns to Caribbean self rewriting; a decolonial type of rewriting that is self-referential and centres on Haiti and the Caribbean’s own world views. The essay develops the deconstructionist postcolonial approach of Trouillot in particular that counteracts incomplete accounts of colonial literature, history and archives. Here, the objective is to reveal Haitian and Caribbean cultures’ core dynamics by studying transformative visions of the Haitian Revolution and its contemporary relevance. By gathering together voices of rasanblaj from Haitian or Caribbean writers and scholars, the essay investigates how new Haitian- or Caribbean-led narratives about Haiti and the reconstruction of time and/or space are continuing to be created. […]
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)