Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker between Aesthetics and Politics

Authors:

Pages: 133-152
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/QINX7484

Abstract:

The argument of the article unfolds in the ambit of recent surge of political novels in American literature which pay attention to postmodern globalist conditions but do it from the vantage point of Third World or peripheral participants and observers. One of the most conspicuous writers in this vein is Edwidge Danticat, Haitian American author, uniquely poised to explore the political implications of the historically laden relations between the United States and Haiti. Using the generic model of the political novel and the novel of human rights, both on the rise in recent decades, the article then proposes to analyze Danticat’s novel in stories The Dew Breaker (2004) as prime instance of the interweaving of particular political ideas and their aesthetic rendering as analysis invites us to get involved in narrative, thematic, and motivational clusters used by Danticat. The discussion intends to show that late modernity cannot so easily dispense with the idea of the political even though provided through the lens of postmodern suspicion of grand narratives. The recuperation of the political as a way to energize the literary form takes place on the backdrop of attendant methodological strains such as memory and trauma studies, and the representation of pain converging to reaffirm the idea of literature as a powerful way to discuss the political and its implications on today’s unstable and fluid global scene.

Keywords:

Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker, geopolitical writing, political novel, novel of human rights, aesthetics

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