Search results for ""Author Martin Munro""

The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 thrust the nation into the public consciousness as never before. That terrible event piqued interest in a remarkable country with a rich history as both the first black republic in the world and the first country to break free of European imperialism in Latin America. Haiti Rising brings together more than 20 of the most prominent authorities on Haiti in to provide both a historical and cultural introduction to Haiti and a chance for earthquake survivors to testify to their experiences. Ranging widely across politics, society, history, art and culture, contributors such as Maryse Condé, Yanick Lahens, Evelyne Trouillot, J. Michael Dash and Laurent Dubois illuminate this most extraordinary of countries and the tragedy that befell it in 2010. Haiti Rising will stand as a written document of this cataclysmic event in Haitian history and as a monument to the experiences of those who were in Haiti at the time of the earthquake. It is vital reading for anyone who wants to find out more about Haiti, and the prospects for its future. All royalties from the book will be donated to the Haitian Art Relief Fund.

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We are all now entering into a new region of the world, which designates its sites on all the given and imaginable expanses, and of which only a few had been able to foresee in the distance its wanderings and obscurities. […] This region itself, we soon foresee, as difficult as it may seem to formulate its partition, is mixed in time as much as in space, a common site which hides another gap. Time has changed and space has changed. A steep separation of time and space, overwhelming one another. A new region that is an epoch, mixing all times and all durations, an epoch also which is an inexhaustible country, accumulating expanses, which are looking for other limits, in incalculable but always finite number, as has been said of atoms. […] we are entering into this new region of the world, of totalized space, of relativized time, where everyone already admits that differences are determinant, but most often they refuse to recognize that their sum, their realized quantity, sketches another Relation, quite different because we have so long ignored it, but we know that it is made and brewed from inextricable and propitious contaminants. […] And we enter into the Whole-World, which always for us covers the totality of the world, but here it is that this Whole-World is also in our actuality another region of the world, a whole new region, and the world is there, it is right-here, it is ahead of us, who say it without saying it while saying it again, undertaking a new category of literature. None of the regions of the world is really unknown, the explorers have driven their trains to their endpoint, yet there is another region of the world in the world, which we have not traveled so much, for we will have to cross it all together, it is this very improbable Whole-World, and a few had knowledge of it. Well then, the world is completely recognized, and the Whole-World covers entirely the world, however and for us the Whole-World is to be discovered and known. It is a part of the world, which right-here transcends the world and designates it.

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We are all now entering into a new region of the world, which designates its sites on all the given and imaginable expanses, and of which only a few had been able to foresee in the distance its wanderings and obscurities. [] This region itself, we soon foresee, as difficult as it may seem to formulate its partition, is mixed in time as much as in space, a common site which hides another gap. Time has changed and space has changed. A steep separation of time and space, overwhelming one another. A new region that is an epoch, mixing all times and all durations, an epoch also which is an inexhaustible country, accumulating expanses, which are looking for other limits, in incalculable but always finite number, as has been said of atoms. [] we are entering into this new region of the world, of totalized space, of relativized time, where everyone already admits that differences are determinant, but most often they refuse to recognize that their sum, their realized quantity, sketches another

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Long a taboo subject among critics, rhythm finally takes center stage in this book's dazzling, wide-ranging examination of diverse black cultures across the New World. Martin Munro's groundbreaking work traces the central - and contested - role of music in shaping identities, politics, social history, and artistic expression. Starting with enslaved African musicians, Munro takes us to Haiti, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, and to the civil rights era in the United States. Along the way, he highlights such figures as Toussaint Louverture, Jacques Roumain, Jean Price-Mars, The Mighty Sparrow, Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Joseph Zobel, Daniel Maximin, James Brown, and Amiri Baraka. Bringing to light new connections among black cultures, Munro shows how rhythm has been both a persistent marker of race as well as a dynamic force for change at virtually every major turning point in black New World history.

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Griselda is the mother of three children, two boys and one girl. On a winter day in the mid-1980s, while exiled in France, she drowned her two sons in the bathtub. After a lapse of more than thirty years, the narrator tracks down the survivors of this family tragedy. She delves into their story in an attempt to approach these barely credible events, and ends up – in the depths of darkness – getting a glimpse of love and life. Laura Alcoba’s subtle, gentle writing accurately captures her characters’ humanity, without any overwrought sentiment, nor emphasis, in spite of the horrific facts. We feel the presence of beings resonating without, however, anyone ever being able to unlock the mystery of Griselda’s act – even Griselda herself.

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A blank voice in the middle of the night tells Michaël Ferrier of the deaths of his friend François and his daughter Bahia. In the following devastation, speech resumes and memories return: how two young loners meet and connect, their years of study, their passion for cinema and radio. Memories unfold and gradually come together in a chronicle of friendship and a memorial to a lost friend. François, Portrait of an Absent Friend is both an elegy to a friend and a wonderfully delicate, poetic look at friendship in general. Ferrier tells us how friendships are formed, how they are lost, how they are maintained, and what happens when they are taken from us. From Paris to Japan, Ferrier transports us to the writer’s time and the place as we feel the pain, the bitterness, and the longing left by François’ death.

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“But when I close my eyes, I first fall as if drowning into the silty waters of the Chari River, which traces the border between Chad and Cameroon, and into which so many men, women and even children were thrown, sometimes still alive, their hands knotted behind their backs, or tied up in a shoulder bag. I sink with them towards the sand and the clay, down amidst the green and the brown, passing purple weeds, shards of pottery, and crocodile scales. My head is heavier than a cannonball and carries me toward the abyss: I dive into a bottomless bag where the letters collide or slip away, call out to or ignore each other, I bathe in an unlimited space free from the constraints of cycles and dates, and I enter into the time of childhood, which indeed has no concept of time. […] all my memories take flight in the wind of the sands, the past flows in the river, plays out in the branches, explodes in the foliage. The past is all around me now - and I laugh when I say ‘the past,’ because none of all this is past.” Michaël FerrierIn 1979, two young boys play Scrabble in a hot, dusty district of N’Djamena, Chad, while around them war rages, apparently destroying all in its path: people, places, and memories. And yet, just as the boys take their letters from the depths of the pouch, so Michaël Ferrier draws from the darkness words and images that he reassembles into a beautiful and moving tribute to the city, its people, and the childhood that seemed to end there in those days of chaos and destruction but which he brings miraculously back to life in a defiant, poetic statement on the power of friendship, family, and memory.

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Based loosely on the author’s life, this novel recounts the narrator’s journey following the footsteps of his Mauritius-born grandfather, Maxime, who abruptly boarded a boat bound for Madagascar in 1922 and never returned. Michaël Ferrier tells a tale of discovery as well as the elusive, colorful story of Maxime’s life in Madagascar, which included a stint as an acrobat in a traveling circus and, later, as a diver and artist on marine expeditions. Maxime’s story is one of adventure but also romance. He falls in love with a refined young Pauline Nuñes, Ferrier’s grandmother, whose well-to-do family of Indian merchants owns a hotel famous for playing the latest music—including American jazz—and throwing popular dances and parties. Over Seas of Memory weaves these personal stories with the island’s history, including its period as a Vichy-governed territory at the center of what was termed “Project Madagascar,” the Nazi plan to relocate Europe’s Jewish population to the island. As Ferrier interlaces his family’s intimate story with the larger story of colonialism’s lasting and complicated impact—including the racial and ethnic divisions it fomented—he engages with critical issues in contemporary France concerning national and cultural identity.

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This is an exploration of Francophone communities from the 19th century to the present. It is a special Issue of Paragraph edited in 2001 by Celia Britton and Michael Syrotinski on Francophone Texts and Postcolonial Theory played a determining role in shaping the research field it helped to map. Ten years later, this collection of ten articles provides an opportunity to explore Francophone communities from a range of perspectives which similarly engage with today's most pressing questions in Francophone-Caribbean studies and postcolonial studies more generally. The contributions draw on material from different historical moments, ranging from the 19th century to the contemporary period, and explore questions of literature, culture, society and thought from across the Francophone Caribbean and beyond. They will bring together original work by some of the leading scholars in those fields, including Charles Forsdick, Kate Hodgson, Martin Munro, Lorna Milne, Eli Park Sorenson, Mary Gallagher, Maeve McCusker and Michael Syrotinski.

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