Decoloniality and The Politics of Living Haiti: Writing Haiti With Haitian Women

Abstract

The Lakou is traditionally viewed as a movement of resistance by former slaves in response to pressures to return to the plantation in post-slavery Haiti. This dissertation engages with the Haitian Lakou as a creolized-decolonial feminist praxis that acknowledges first-hand the embedded, multilayered, and historical dimension of violence of contemporary and historical projects of colonialism on Haitian women’s lives. From Haitian women's storied lives, Haitian lifeworlds hold differentiated, oppositional, and intersectional world-making technologies and praxis of survival that stand as alternative ecologies in the transnational landscape of today. Working at the intersection of postcolonial literature, Indigenous studies, Afro-Caribbean philosophy and literature, and transnational decolonial feminist scholarship, this dissertation postulates that the way to write against and ultimately undo long-standing colonial dynamics and processes in Haitian lives is to uphold Haitian women’s storied lives from their own ecologies, aesthetics, imaginaries, and lifeworlds. To that end, grappling with how Haitian women negotiate the nation engages a phenomenological and onto-epistemological decolonial labor that rethinks the nature of subjectivity, politics, and worlds in uneven and unjust geographies. Ultimately, how Haitian women re-write the nation is a decolonial labor that bridges the gap between the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the metaphysical and the material, the human and the non-human. What emerges is a vision of the decolonial project worked across a shared transnational, intergenerational, multitemporal, human and non-human worlds in relation.