Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives

by Cécile Accilien (Editor), Valérie K. Orlando (Editor)

Overview

Approaching Haiti’s history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective

This volume is the first to focus on teaching about Haiti’s complex history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective. Making broad connections between Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean, contributors provide pedagogical guidance on how to approach the country from different lenses in course curricula. They offer practical suggestions, theories on a wide variety of texts, examples of syllabi, and classroom experiences.

Teaching Haiti dispels stereotypes associating Haiti with disaster, poverty, and negative ideas of Vodou, going beyond the simplistic neocolonial, imperialist, and racist descriptions often found in literary and historical accounts. Instructors in diverse subject areas discuss ways of reshaping old narratives through women’s and gender studies, poetry, theater, art, religion, language, politics, history, and popular culture, and they advocate for including Haiti in American and Latin American studies courses.

Portraying Haiti not as “the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere” but as a nation with a multifaceted culture that plays an important part on the world’s stage, this volume offers valuable lessons about Haiti’s past and present related to immigration, migration, locality, and globality. The essays remind us that these themes are increasingly relevant in an era in which teachers are often called to address neoliberalist views and practices and isolationist politics.

Contributors:

Cécile Accilien | Jessica Adams | Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken | Anne M. François | Régine Michelle Jean-Charles | Elizabeth Langley | Valérie K. Orlando | Agnès Peysson-Zeiss | John D. Ribó | Joubert Satyre | Darren Staloff | Bonnie Thomas | Don E. Walicek | Sophie Watt

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683402855
Publisher:	University Press of Florida
Publication date:	08/10/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	270
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Cécile Accilien, professor of African and African diaspora studies in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Kennesaw State University, is the author of Bay Lodyans: Haitian Popular Film Culture. 

Valérie K. Orlando, professor of French and Francophone literatures at the University of Maryland, College Park, is the author of The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950–1979, and New African Cinema.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Ayiti se tè glise: Intersectionalities of History, Politics, and Culture

Cécile Accilien and Valérie K. Orlando

I. Teaching About Haitian Art, Literature, and Language

1. Getting Around the Poto Mitan: Reconstructing Haitian Womanhood in the Classroom

Régine Jean-Charles

2. Teaching Haiti Through the Work of Rodney Saint-Eloi, écrivain engage

Bonnie Thomas

3. Teaching Haitian Theater: Franck Fouché’s Bouqui au paradis

Joubert Satyre

4. Engaging Haiti Through Art and Religion

Cécile Accilien

5. Creating Interdisciplinary Knowledge About Haiti’s Creole Language

Don E. Walicek

II. Teaching About Haitian History and Politics

6. Haiti in the Presidencies of John Adams and John Quincy Adams: Lesson Plans and Course Modules

Darren Staloff and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

7. Teaching the 2004 Coup in Haiti from a French Perspective: Insights into Global Neo-Imperial Culture and Practices

Sophie Watt

8. Peck’s Fatal Assistance: A Filmic Lesson on the Failures of Aid

Agnès Peysson-Zeiss

III. Teaching About Haiti in American Studies, Latin American Studies, and General Studies Contexts

9. Rendering Haiti Visible in an Introductory American Studies Course

Elizabeth Langley

10. Race and Culture on the Thrift Store Shift: Teaching About Haiti Inside and Outside the Academy

Jessica Adams

11. Rethinking Latinx Studies from Hispaniola’s Borderlands

John Ribó

12. Teaching Haiti and the Dominican Republic: Cultural Representations of Haitian Immigrant Experiences

Anne M. François

Index

Contributors

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Critical, informative, and forward-looking. An important and compelling volume that adds to the scholarship on Haiti while also providing valuable tools to responsibly engage Haiti in the classroom through sound pedagogical interventions.”—Claudine Michel, coeditor of Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, and Reality

Editorial Reviews

A timely effort to overcome stereotypes and decolonize knowledge. . . . This unparalleled contribution inserts seldom-heard Haitian voices and a much-needed postcolonial perspective into scholarly and personal narratives of Haiti. . . . Essential.”—Choice

From the Publisher