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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

"Migrant Deaths, Borderscapes, and Necropolitics in Edwidge Danticat's (Non)Fiction"

Résumé

Edwidge Danticat’s eclectic oeuvre, that includes novels and short stories, a family memoir, a travelogue, personal essays and articles, sheds light in various ways on the tormented transnational history of Haiti and its American-based diaspora. It is also a militant work that resonates with the current global concerns such as migration issues and recent debates on state “brutalism” and systemic racism or ethnicism in both neoliberal democracies and authoritarian regimes. As an “immigrant artist at work,” Danticat feels she must “quantify the price of the American Dream in flesh and bone.”1 She thereby claims her social responsibility as a writer to reflect upon and expose the genealogy of sufferings intricately connected with a long history of displacements and border crossings. She focuses on the corporeality of life and death to deal with the figure of the postcolonial migrant and the human as a “biopolitical” subject reduced to matter. In our presentation, we will therefore adopt a transversal approach to her works of nonfiction and fiction, in which aesthetics, ethics, and politics intersect. We will critically examine Danticat’s literary representation of dying, missing, or dead migrant bodies and their forced (im)mobilities resulting from necropolitical practices. We will explore how the author depicts heterotopic spaces and liminal borderscapes that entrap Haitian migrants, exclude them, and endanger their precarious, “disposable” lives, away from home. At the same time, Danticat’s texts aim to show how the living (including herself) face grief, perform rituals, deliver personal testimonials, and fight absence, silence, and oblivion in a resilient way.

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Littératures
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Dates et versions

hal-03348369 , version 1 (18-09-2021)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03348369 , version 1

Citer

Corinne Duboin. "Migrant Deaths, Borderscapes, and Necropolitics in Edwidge Danticat's (Non)Fiction". Thanatic Ethics (Workshop #2), Education University of Hong Kong, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Maison Française d'Oxford (CNRS), Sep 2021, Montpellier, France. ⟨hal-03348369⟩
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