Architextual Authenticity

Reviewed by: Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean by Jason Herbeck Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean. By Jason Herbeck. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-I-78694-039-I. 330 pp. £85.00 hardcover. In Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-quake Chronicle, Gina Ulysse asks readers to consider the implications of narratives for people's lives. What stories do we tell about a place? Why do those stories matter? Describing the narratives about Haiti presented in mainstream media in the United States, Ulysse asserts that these representations of Haiti are often constructions that aim to legitimize ongoing inequality. She notes: "Haiti and Haitians remain a manifestation of blackness in its worst form because, simply put, the unruly enfant terrible of the Americas defied all European odds and created a disorder of things colonial. Haiti had to become colonialism's bête noir if the sanctity of whiteness were to remain unquestioned."1 Constructing new narratives, then, is a political act. For Haiti in particular, it is an act of refusal to succumb to the onslaught of externally imposed labels of failed states and disaster zones. Jason Herbeck's new book Architextual Authenticity, although not only about Haiti, contributes to the larger project that Ulysse envisions by examining how writers in Haiti and the rest of the French Caribbean have engaged in this act of constructing narratives and identities in and through their texts. In many ways, Herbeck takes the notion of construction quite literally to productively explore architecture as a key site for making and contesting identities in French Caribbean literature. Two central terms frame his reading. "Architexture" is the structure, the frame, the blueprint from which a text emerges and that situates it within one literary tradition or another. If the terms of this definition are all linked to architecture, it is deliberate. Alongside architexture, this focus on the form and construction of the text, Herbeck presents a complementary focus on architecture by examining the physical structures that proliferate in Antillean literature: the dwelling spaces that readers might easily dismiss as backdrop unless their eyes are trained to look for them. Herbeck's exploration of architecture starts from the Haitian gingerbread house, which "serve(s) to exemplify the inherent contradictions involved when attempting to ascertain how, precisely, identity is or [End Page 158] might be understood in the region" (33). The gingerbread houses of Port-au-Prince, Jacmel, and Cap-Haïtien are difficult to classify, he argues. Presumably, one can easily identify a gingerbread house. But architecturally speaking, this designation applies to an eclectic collection of buildings—what is it that unites them? In chapter 1, Herbeck explores the concept of authenticity through the example of these houses. Beyond emphasizing their architectural specificities, he notes that the structural integrity that has assured their longevity through devastating earthquakes speaks to "a localized aggregate of traditions, (technological and/or cultural) experiences, and craftsmanship" (40). There is a profound link, therefore, between architecture and the construction of identity. Yanick Lahens's and Évelyne Trouillot's short stories "Les Survivants" and "Ma maison en dentelle de bois," respectively, and Raphaël Confiant's novel Le Meutre du Samedi-Gloria provide the textual evidence for Herbeck's examination of this link. Exploring the authors' representations of microspaces such as family houses and macrospaces such as entire neighborhoods, Herbeck shows that the construction of identity occurs precisely through individual characters' efforts to define their relationships to dwelling places, and through communities' resistance to the destruction and transformation of their neighborhoods. For many of the authors whose works are the focus of Architextual Authenticity, critical historical moments such as the Duvalier regimes in Haiti or the transition from colony to department in Martinique and Guadeloupe serve as the temporal settings for their explorations of identity construction. In chapter 2, Édouard Glissant's novel La Lézarde places the discussion of identity in the context of a revolutionary movement that sought to shape Martinique's political future in the years preceding departmentalization in 1946. The profound link between identity and architecture that Herbeck establishes in the first chapter

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