ABSTRACT

Edward Said’s use of Morrison’s quotation at the beginning of his eloquent work Culture and Imperialism dramatically connects the imperial endeavor to the culture that it reects and reinforces, a culture well represented in any country through the genre of the novel.1 e novel also introduces the silence of “the invisible Other” in a profound way, as a silence not indicative of indierence to the authority imposed from without, but a silence hiding an oen violent voice. Said acknowledges that he is not telling us that the novel “caused imperialism, but that the novel, as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society, and imperialism, are unthinkable without each other.”2 e novel as a genre contains an “entire system of social reference that depends on the existing institutions of bourgeois society, their authority and power.”3 I am focusing here on the literature of Latin America and Haiti, arguing that literary works are denite reections of the frequent political upheavals one nds in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. For years little read in the US, the novels of the Americas now have made major impacts on the world literary scene, but they also tell more than a story, with a plot, characters and romantic development. e political atrocities, and the investments by American corporate interests, are very real and very present in many of the novels and allow the student of the US and its world inuence to nd it reected in ction, but nonetheless authentic. It is important to explore the subject of historical commentary in literary work by examining

only a few of the plethora of signicant novels that are now available in translation in the US, along with those now being written in English, like those of Edwidge Danticat from Haiti, tying them to the academic nonction sources that expose the plight of the poor and the colonized.