The Haitian Revolution in Interstices and Shadows: A Re-reading of Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World

Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth

doi:10.1353/ral.2004.0052

Cited by 15 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert argues that Carpentier's historical omissions are intentional erasures that sensationalize Vodou at the expense of historical accuracy. 47 She describes Carpentier's narrative as "a fractured tale whose fissures may be read as subverting the adherence to the facts of Haitian history and its primary sources that the author claims for his text." 48 Where Paravisini-Gebert concludes that Carpentier's omission of the national heroes reveals a "hopelessness concerning the Haitian land and its people," 49 we could also say that the historical details that Carpentier either chose to include or silence reflect his relational identity to Haiti as voyager/traveler/ visitor.…”

Section: Carpentier As Traveler/visitormentioning

confidence: 99%

Voyage to the Marvelous: A Traveler’s Guide to The Kingdom of This World

Tal-Mason¹

2019

Postcolon. Lit. inq

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Following a legacy of four and a half centuries of literature written by foreign travelers landing on Haiti’s shores, Alejo Carpentier’s seminal novel about the Haitian Revolution is predicated upon Carpentier’s voyage to Haiti six years earlier. This article attends to the role of voyage in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, revealing the ways in which Carpentier’s storytelling and rendering of Haiti in both the novel and its prologue, and his accompanying theory of the marvelous real, adhere to Eurocentric conceptions of time that reinscribe this neocolonial space as anachronistic space. Because Carpentier can only perceive Haiti in the past, he replicates the role of the imperial travel writer in fashioning metropolitan conceptions of colonial spaces and reproduces the imbalance of power between visitor/visited. This perspective reinforces a dominant Euro-American image of Haiti as a strange and magical object of consumption and fails to imagine it as an independent, post-revolution state.

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Section: Carpentier As Traveler/visitormentioning

confidence: 99%