“Laissez circuler le monde entier!”: <i>enracinerrance</i> and the neoliberal eighties in Jean-Claude Charles’s <i>Manhattan Blues</i>

Building upon renewed critical interest in Haitian author Jean-Claude Charles, this article offers a different account of the political dimension of Charles’s writings. Most discussion of the latter focuses on broadly postmodern questions of nomadism, migration, and the refusal of fixed identities, and strong contrasts are drawn between Charles and the more directly militant, collectivist orientation of an earlier generation of Haitian literature. Through an analysis of Charles’s best-known novel, Manhattan Blues (1984), this article argues for a greater continuity with radical political traditions than has previously been acknowledged. It suggests that the novel offers a radical critique of specifically neoliberal capitalism in the period of its rise to hegemony, the 1980s. The main threads of the critique suggested in this article are: 1) making visible neoliberalism’s constraints upon the free circulation of people, especially in urban space; 2) charting the affects and structures of feeling that define this period of reaction; and 3) maintaining an attachment in the 1980s to the unfulfilled radical hopes of the 1960s.