Author Event: August 21, 3:00 p.m. The editors and contributors of Teaching Haiti will discuss their new book in a virtual event hosted by the Haitian Studies Association. Discussants will share aspects of their teaching practice and how they educate the wider public about Haitian culture, history, and contemporary politics. To register, click here.
“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
Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives is the first volume 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.
Cécile Accilien, professor and chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Kennesaw State University, is the author of Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures. 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.
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