Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature

The way in which Haiti has been represented by both colonial novelists and contemporary politicians is one of the central concerns of the “sequel” to Islands and Exiles, Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. The main preoccupations of Friends and Enemies can be summed up in the title of its Introduction: “Politics, Memory, Literature.” This book, which examines—both to question and to promote—the “political turn” of postcolonial studies in the first decade of the twenty-first century, is a three-pronged study primarily focused on (1) early (1798-1833) and (2) recent (1998-2004) representations of the abolition of slavery in general, and the Haitian Revolution in particular; and (3) the marketing of canonical Caribbean literature (Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant).