ABSTRACT
Edwidge Danticat’s work is widely celebrated and translated, and the scholarship on her writing’s engagement with social justice, in particular through the frameworks of Black feminism, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism, is vast. Critical readings, however, have struggled to contextualize her creative works’ political intervention. The chapter contends that Danticat’s fiction captures the contemporary abolitionist political imaginary, defined by the demands to reimagine the punitive, carceral structures of society that consequently permeate politics and social relations. I identify in “Without Inspection,” one of the short stories included in Danticat’s 2018 collection Everything Inside, an imaginative rendering of the possibilities of social justice for racialized, immigrant subjects within U.S. empire. Writing against juridically defined notions of personhood and belonging, I argue that Danticat’s staging of the ways in which her characters practice community, love, and care beyond the state and its institutions represents a narrative re-imagining of freedom. As the relationship between Haiti and the U.S. becomes increasingly central in political discourse concerning reparative frameworks, anti-imperialism, and racial/immigrant justice, Danticat’s work demands (re)assessment alongside the geopolitical context from which it emerges and the urgent political movements which it engages.
