Œuvres complètes de Jacques Roumain by Léon-François Hoffman; Jacques RoumainReview by: Jean JonassaintResearch in African Literatures, Vol. 36, No. 3, Edward Said, Africa, and Cultural Criticism(Autumn, 2005), pp. 153-154Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3821371 .Accessed: 29/02/2012 13:21

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KAIAMA L. GLOVER * 153

Looking at nineteenth-century Cuba, Fischer begins her inquiry with the trial of the free black antislavery conspirator Jose Aponte and then continues with a discussion of Cuban popular and elite artistic expression of the period. In part 2 of her study, she uses a psychoanalytic lens to examine the Dominican response to the trauma of "having been modernized by those who were meant to be slaves" (168). The third and final part of Fischer's study concerns Haiti itself. Here Fischer sets out to counter past dismissiveness and to establish the Haitian Revolution as intrinsi-

cally modern. Emphasizing the complexity of Haiti's postrevolutionary agenda?its juxtaposing of universalism and particularism, engagement in acts of renaming, and

explicit politicization of racial categories?Fischer reveals the at once republican and pan-Africanist objectives at the heart of Haitian nationalism. In effect, Modernity Disavowed reconciles these and other strands of Haitian modernity, highlighting the Revolution's profound historical resonance and refusing to accept the long history of its disavowal.

?Kaiama L. Glover

Barnard College, Columbia University

CEuvres completes de Jacques Roumain

Ed. Leon-Frangois Hoffman

Collection Archivos. Madrid: UNESCO, 2003.

li + 1690 pp. ISBN 84-89666-68-7 cloth.

The publication of the critical edition of Jacques Roumain's complete works is the

great literary event of the Haitian Revolution bicentennial, and one of the most sig? nificant achievements of francophone studies in 2003-04. Indeed, the release of those 1700 pages in the prestigious collection "Archivos," until now devoted to Spanish and

Portuguese Latin-American writers, is a first, but also a tribute to one of the oldest American literatures in Latin languages as well to a model Caribbean writer.

This monumental publication is even more important in that it allows access for the first time not only to Roumain's complete published works, but also to unpub? lished poems and tales, a great part of his correspondence, and so many rare texts scattered about in newspapers or journals of his time. To this set of primary texts is added an important number of critical texts on Roumain by Haitians and foreign nationals, presented at the end of the volume under the title "Dossier de l'oeuvre."

There, one finds, among others, the complete text of the famous book of 1974, Sur Gouverneurs de la Rosee de facques Roumain by Jean-Claude Fignole, and its 1975 review by the Haitian journalist and activist Jean Dominique, "Delire ou delivrance." In addition, we find an incredible number of comments on Roumain's work or life that are of great historical interest, such as those by Stephen Alexis, Frangois Duvalier, Anthony Lespes, Alfred Metraux, Langston Hughes, and Anna Seghers. This section

together with the one entitled "Lectures du texte," which brings together unpublished studies by Jean Michael Dash, Andre-Marcel dAns, and Alessandro Costantiti, is

surely one of the most useful and impressive of this book. Finally, one must highlight the articles by Yasmina Tippenhauer and Regis Antoine on Roumain's reception in

154 * RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES

Haiti and France in the section "Histoire du texte," where we can also find an article

by Ulrich Fleishmann, "Jacques Roumain dans la litterature d'Haiti." Up to a certain

point, those studies are successful in resituating Roumain in Haitian and French

literary contexts. This important enterprise, like any other, is not perfect. A few remarks or

footnotes are not always accurate, showing a certain ignorance of some subtleties of Haitian expressions, but mainly the weaknesses of Caribbean francophone literary studies, which suffer from a terrible lack of reliable reference books. For example, one can cite the footnote by Fleischmann on the patronymics of Fernand Hibbert's novel Sena (p. 1240, note 28) and most obviously the remarks by Hoffmann on Roumain's title Gouverneurs de la Rosee (pp. 257-58), which the critic argues wrongly to be a

calque of a rural Haitian expression, met lawouze.

Finally, it is quite regrettable that we do not have a table of concordances of even the main editions of the famous works by Roumain, or even a general index of the volume. Despite those reservations, when we understand the many obstacles in

attempting to show any Haitian achievement, we should not underestimate the value of this premiere in francophone studies or the determination ofthe scholars in charge of Archivos and this volume.

?Jean Jonassaint Duke University

Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in

Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee

By Stefan Helgesson Scottsville: U of KwaZulu P, 2004.

ISBN 1-86914-044-3.

The most conflict-ridden decade in the fraught history of apartheid South Africa was the 1980s, and many works of fiction reflected the violent conditions directly and

powerfully. But literature can do more than reflect external events, and in this astute

study of three writers of the period, Stefan Helgesson argues that some novels, by the inventive use of generic and formal properties, opened a space that, while remaining responsive to the effects of the formidable historical pressures of the time, was not

entirely subject to them. In order to pursue this argument with the necessary degree of close textual analysis, Helgesson examines one novel by each of the three writers:

Njabulo Ndebele's Fools and Other Stories (1983), Nadine Gordimer's A Sport of Nature (1987), and J. M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K (1983).

In an introductory section, Helgesson presents the theoretical armature of his

approach, holding that "history" and "writing" exist in tension with one another, with the latter seeking to resist not just the discourse of history but its own historicity. One important way in which it does this?at least in the novels under discussion?is

through the body's resistance to the racist constructions placed upon it. This resis- tant body is marked by what Helgesson calls "blankness," a quality he relates closely to ambivalence, catachresis, and irony?all ways in which the body, as represented