Jeanne Jégousso – författare

Teaching, Reading, and Theorizing Caribbean Texts explores alternative approaches to Caribbean texts from transnational and multilingual perspectives. The authors query what new systems and criteria can be implemented to rethink and remodel our theoretical and pedagogical corpus and alter the lenses through which we study Caribbean texts. Pulling from the Caribbean’s global diaspora, the authors examine writers such as Roxane Gay, Esmeralda Santiago, Wilson Harris, and Gloria Anzaldúa in order to resituate the place of Caribbean texts in the classroom. Each chapter argues for a reunification of Caribbean literature studies—rather than studying this body of text only in terms of a certain aspect of its history or culture, the authors necessitate the importance of analyzing these works from a pan-Caribbean perspective. This collection discusses the ideas of transcending individual disciplines and specialties to create global theories, overcoming pedagogical challenges when bringing Caribbean texts into the classroom, and (re)reading texts with the purpose of discovering new symbols, themes, and meanings.

ClÉante Desgraves Valcin (1891-1956) was a poet, writer, and feminist-most prominently Haiti’s first published female novelist, who employed her sentimental fiction to explore matters of race, gender, nationalism, and sovereignty. A contemporary of Harlem Renaissance writers such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, Valcin emerged as an influential writer and political figure among the Black Atlantic diaspora.  Now, for the first time, her two acclaimed novels are available in English translation.   Cruel Destiny (1929) tells the tragic love story of Armand and Adeline, drawn together by a magnetic attraction, yet kept apart by a dark family secret. Depicting the heavy expectations placed upon women in Haiti’s elite society, it also explores the troubled and twisted relationships between the Haitians and their former colonial masters, the French.   In The White Negress (1934), a Frenchwoman moves to Haiti and is torn between two very different men, a Black Haitian lawyer, and a white American carpetbagger. Putting a fresh spin on the tired tragic mulatta trope, Valcin reveals the racial prejudices, class tensions, and anti-colonial resentments of an island under American occupation.   Together, these two novels expand our understanding of Caribbean literature, as well as the political struggles and artistic triumphs of Black women in the Americas.