An article by Jason Herbeck, a professor of French in the Department of World Languages, was published in a special issue of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender and the Black International devoted to award-winning Haitian author Évelyne Trouillot.
Palimpsest is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship and creative work by and about women of the African Diaspora and their communities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.
Herbeck’s article, “History, Humanity, and the Literary Construction of Haiti in Évelyne Trouillot’s Works,” examines the more than 250 years of Haitian history in which Trouillot’s works are set, and, in particular, the unexpected spaces and situations to which she calls readers’ attention. By imagining the perspectives and stories of under-represented groups that have been all but lost over time, Trouillot opens the door to “forbidden rooms” that have remained closed, hidden, or merely overlooked within and by the country’s dominant historical narratives.