J. Michael Dash

Provides an overview of the history and culture of Haiti, and includes discussion of the country's religion, people and society, social customs, media and cinema, literature and language, performing arts, and visual arts and architecture.

In this first full-length study of Glissant's creative and theoretical work J. Michael Dash examines his poems, novels, plays and essays in the context of modern French literary movements and the post-negritude Caribbean situation, providing both a useful introduction to, and a challenging assessment of, Glissant's work to date. Dash shows how Glissant has focused in an unprecedented way on the Caribbean in terms of the diverse and hybrid culture that has been created in the region, and how his ideas on a cross-cultural poetics are the shaping force in the francophone Caribbean 'Creolite' movement.

"Highly stimulating history of Haitian and US perceptions of each other as seen in each country's literature from 1850s-1990s. Dash sets these texts in political context and repeatedly demonstrates the narrow line between 'imaginative' and 'objective' descriptions of Haiti by US writers. This critical perspective, combined with the author's knowledge of 20th-century Haitian literature, makes this study a particularly valuable one"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.