Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature

Tom Hawkins, Associate Professor of Classics at Ohio State University (U.S.A), specializes in Greek literature and its legacies. He wrote Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire, serves on the Advisory Board of Eos, and is the faculty mentor for Black Students in Classics.

"The study of the past in the Caribbean and the Americas always needs new names and paradigms. In Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature Tom Hawkins repurposes a verb with supple historical resonances, from the harvesting of sugar cane on colonial plantations to renegade computer programming and other acts of deliberate interference with established systems. In this case, the system is the classical tradition of ancient Greece and Rome as imagined by modern European empires and shipped to the Caribbean, where it was hacked by Haitian writers and artists who repurposed the Greek and Roman classics in the expression of an anti-colonial modernity. A brilliant work of cultural criticism, Hacking Classical Forms is a milestone in the study of Black classicisms and an important contribution to Caribbean Studies." Emily Greenwood, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, Harvard University; author of Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century

• Introduction; Historical Segue 1: 1804-1822: Saturn’s Children; 1. ‘We are all Greeks’: President Boyer’s Letter to Greek Revolutionaries (1822); 2. The ‘Lake of Lies’: Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859); 3. On Haiti and Black Egypt: Anténor Firmin’s De l’Égalité des Races Humaines (1885); Historical Segue 2: From 19th c. Nationalism to 20th c. Populism; 4. A jumble of names: Fernand Hibbert’s Romulus (1908); 5. Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside: Jean Price-Mars, Ansi Parla l’Oncle (1928); 6. Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer: Félix Morisseau-Leroy, Antigòn en Creole (1953); Historical Segue 3: Duvalierism and the Haitian Diaspora; 7. Antigòn in West Africa: Morisseau-Leroy’s Wa Kreyon; 8. ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’: Dany Laferrière’s Le cri des oiseaux fous; 9. Edwidge Danticat and the Revolt against Silence – with Julia Nelson Hawkins; Coda.