Régine Jean-Charles’s Black Feminist Ethical Reading of Twenty-First-Century Haitian Women’s Fiction

Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022) by Régine Jean-Charles engages scholarship across multiple disciplines and fields—Haitian studies, Caribbean studies, Black feminist studies, media studies, ecofeminism, anthropology, geography, and history—and employs diverse methods that include archival research, social media and artwork analysis, and literary critique. This review essay posits that Jean-Charles uses Black feminism rather than Haitian feminism, arguing for a Black feminist project that is transnational and global and that allows for both/and. Jean-Charles’s analyses of the works of Évelyne Trouillot, Yanick Lahens, and Kettly Mars focus on the ways these writers creatively deal with issues of gender, race, color, class, sexuality, Vodou, and nature. Yet despite her recognition of the impact of political crises on their novels’ characters, Jean-Charles emphasizes the ordinariness of the characters’ lives. She identifies joy, care, and the erotic as central to the other worlds the writers invite readers to imagine.