Introduction

‘Francophone Postcolonial Theory’, the Special Issue of Paragraph edited in 2001 by Celia Britton and Michael Syrotinski, played a determining role in shaping the research field it sought to map. Much has changed in the decade since then, both in Francophone postcolonial criticism and in the specific context of Caribbean literature and thought. From at least the late 1980s, the greater part of Francophone Caribbean criticism tended to deal primarily with the French Departments of Martinique, Guadeloupe and, to a lesser extent, Guyane. The considerable intellectual energy that underpinned the great literary and cultural movements from those regions—Negritude, Antillanite and Creolite—drew the majority of critical attention from Francophone Caribbeanists. Haiti, by contrast, was relatively ignored and deemed to be somewhat on the margins of the intellectual movements that seemed to be arranged teleologically, or even dialectically, marking a specific point in a trajectory that appeared to lead irresistibly to a future, or futures, characterized by infinite reinventions of Francophone Caribbean identities, and a general openness to the ever-creolizing world— ‘le monde se creolise’ in Glissant’s well-known phrase.1 Remarkably, then, the last ten years or so have seen an almost complete reversal in this AntilleanHaitian dynamic. Since at least 2004, the year of the bicentenary of Haitian independence and of the controversial departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, there has been a decided ‘Haitian turn’ in Francophone Caribbean studies, a rush of scholars from multiple disciplines taking a new interest in Haiti, and a turn among many more established Caribbeanists towards Haiti. The earthquake of 2010

French · Linguistics · Sociology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Migration, Identity, and Health · Philosophy

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