Cruel Destiny and The White Negress: Two Novels by Cléante Desgraves Valcin
Editat de Adam Nemmers, Jeanne Jégousso Autor Cléante D. Valcin Cuvânt înainte de Myriam J. A. Chancyen Limba Engleză Paperback – 14 iun 2024
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.
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.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781978837584
ISBN-10: 1978837585
Pagini: 336
Ilustrații: 1 B-W images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Rutgers University Press
Colecția Rutgers University Press
ISBN-10: 1978837585
Pagini: 336
Ilustrații: 1 B-W images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Rutgers University Press
Colecția Rutgers University Press
Notă biografică
CLÉANTE VALCIN (1891-1956) was a Haitian novelist and activist who co-founded the journal Voix des femmes (Voice of women) and served as president for the country’s leading feminist organization La Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale. After publishing the poetry collection Fleurs et Pleurs (1924), she wrote the first two novels ever published by a Haitian woman.
JEANNE JÉGOUSSO is an assistant professor of French at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, where she specializes in Francophone literatures from the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. She co-edited the volume Teaching, Reading, and Theorizing Caribbean Texts, and is the co-director of the digital project The Library of Glissant Studies.
ADAM NEMMERS is an associate professor of English at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, whose research focuses on multi-ethnic American literature. He is author of American Modern(ist) Epic: Novels to Refound a Nation and the coeditor of Yours in Filial Regards: THe Civil War Letters of a Texan Family.
MYRIAM J.A.. CHANCY is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She is the author of multiple academic works and novels, including Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers University Press), From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions from Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and What Storm, What Thunder.
JEANNE JÉGOUSSO is an assistant professor of French at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, where she specializes in Francophone literatures from the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. She co-edited the volume Teaching, Reading, and Theorizing Caribbean Texts, and is the co-director of the digital project The Library of Glissant Studies.
ADAM NEMMERS is an associate professor of English at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, whose research focuses on multi-ethnic American literature. He is author of American Modern(ist) Epic: Novels to Refound a Nation and the coeditor of Yours in Filial Regards: THe Civil War Letters of a Texan Family.
MYRIAM J.A.. CHANCY is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She is the author of multiple academic works and novels, including Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers University Press), From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions from Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and What Storm, What Thunder.
Cuprins
Foreword by Myriam J. A. Chancy
Introduction
Translator’s Note
Cruel Destiny
The White Negress
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Translator’s Note
Cruel Destiny
The White Negress
Acknowledgements
Recenzii
"Cléante Desgraves Valcin’s Cruel Destiny and The White Negress are two extraordinary works of twentieth century Haitian feminist literature that merit our attention today. Thanks to Jégousso and Nemmers’s elegant and clear-eyed rendering of Valcin’s sentimental prose, present-day readers have a truly precious opportunity to consider both race and gender in ways that transgress the stubborn borders of the Atlantic world."
"A founding member of Haiti’s first formal feminist organization, La Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale, Cléante Desgraves Valcin was the first Haitian woman to publish a novel, Cruelle Destinée in 1929. This first complete translation into English of both of her captivating novels will contribute to ensuring her recognition as a pivotal figure of Haitian feminism and literature."
"These first published novels by a Haitian woman are groundbreaking, both as acts of cultural resistance to colonialism and occupation and as vehicles to explore the island’s paradoxes of colorism, class, race and gender. Although cloaked in an aura of sentimentality, their social portraits demonstrate clearly the central role of women in the construction of Haitian national identity."
"A founding member of Haiti’s first formal feminist organization, La Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale, Cléante Desgraves Valcin was the first Haitian woman to publish a novel, Cruelle Destinée in 1929. This first complete translation into English of both of her captivating novels will contribute to ensuring her recognition as a pivotal figure of Haitian feminism and literature."
"These first published novels by a Haitian woman are groundbreaking, both as acts of cultural resistance to colonialism and occupation and as vehicles to explore the island’s paradoxes of colorism, class, race and gender. Although cloaked in an aura of sentimentality, their social portraits demonstrate clearly the central role of women in the construction of Haitian national identity."
Descriere
Cruel Destiny (Cruelle Destinée) and The White Negress (La Blanche Négresse) are the first and second novels published by a Haitian woman, Cléante Valcin. Translated to English now for the first time by Jeanne Jégousso, these novels offer an incisive perspective on the fate, romance, and reversals of characters in Haiti, the Pearl of the Antilles, during the 1920s and 1930s.