Alternate Coda

Régine Jean-Charles’s Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022) is part of a refreshing trend in Haitian studies of books that center a Haitian perspective. This review essay takes the liberty of offering reflections toward an alternate coda. What kind of texts are uniquely possible in the twenty-first century written by authors inspired by a tradition that includes feminist foremothers like Kettly Mars, Yanick Lahens, and Évelyne Trouillot? For as much as Looking for Other Worlds looks backward and horizontally, it does not really look forward. Jean-Charles enriches her readings by evoking earlier works like those by Poujol Oriol, highlighting the continuities between twentieth-century works by Haitian women and those produced by the authors of her corpus. The nonliterary cultural productions included by Jean-Charles—songs, paintings, photographs—are contemporary to the novels being analyzed and make an important point about these literary works being in conversation with pop music and visual arts. The author expected the book to end with a look forward into the work currently being created and published by younger women writers. It did not; this essay attempts to provide such a glimpse.