ABSTRACT
I submit that literature is an important mode of reappropriating history and offering a counterhegemonic perspective to create social awareness and promote a critical competence to resist the entanglements of wealth and power. In this chapter I propose to reflect on the ways literature works in this regard and how profoundly we need it in our disorderly and inhumane world. The work of two writers – Toni Morrison and Edwidge Danticat – will serve as examples of the role literature may still have in our times. I propose to reflect on the ways their political and ethical posture lead to ‘a radical opening of the margins,’ capable of both disrupting our hegemonic perception and worldview and re-humanizing our world through the kind of “intimate intervention” hooks describes (147).
