ABSTRACT
This article is grounded on the premise that any critical discussion of the formation and intellectualization of the African Diaspora as discourse and field of study must confront the place and displacement of Haiti as a constitutive element of global black diasporic identity and consciousness. Since one of the tenets of African Diaspora Studies is the examination of the impact of displaced peoples of African descent, hence the significant tropes of displacement in African Diasporic literature, I argue that further research on Haiti in the field that attempts to tackle the paradox of Haiti would do well to consider the notion of Haiti as both displaced subject and object of intellectual inquiry. Such perspective not only contributes to critical investigation into global discourses of racialization and the erasure of global black histories, but also, more broadly, articulations of displacement in Diaspora Studies.
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Notes
7 See, for example, Munro and Walcott-Hackshaw (Citation2006).
15 During the 1930s, Herskovits traveled to Dutch Guiana (Surinam), Ghana, Nigeria, Dahomey (Benin), Haiti, and Trinidad. Viewing the social structures as part of culture, Herskovits stressed transference, cultural transmission, transformation and continuity of cultural practices surviving from Africa in his analysis of various social forms in black diasporic communities. Data from his trip to Haiti is found in his work Life in a Haitian Valley, which was published in 1937.
16 Institut d’ethnologie should not be mistaken with Bureau d’ethnologie founded the same year by Haitian writer Jacques Roumain.
17 See Stephen (Citation2005, 103–104). In fact, Michelle Stephen critiques The Practice of Diaspora for relying too heavily on literature, putting at stake a more materialist theory/analysis of black internationalism.
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