Papers by Patrick Sylvain
Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is for... more Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form.Poetry2031-01-0
Politics and Power in Haiti
This chapter will explore the characteristics of what I will term here the " macoutized state" un... more This chapter will explore the characteristics of what I will term here the " macoutized state" under the Duvaliers, which includes exclusionary acts and repression, the collapse of distinctions between public and private spheres; the assertion of politics as a mystical force whether Christian, Vodoun, or both; and the construction of a noiriste and nationalist ideology to solidify power. In essence, political activity was seen as something that only a chosen few could partake in, with Fran ç ois Duvalier (and later his son) as the supreme guardian and patriarchal father of the nation. Peasants and the urban poor were treated as subjects of the state and were therefore excluded as participants in the discourse of nation building and equality. In the Duvalier macoutized state, just as in a traditional family, the "children" or its citizens were thought incapable of making complex decisions; only the father was regarded as competent enough to decide. Anyone who dared redefine the private and public spheres was systematically repressed. There were three dimensions of Duvalierist exclusionary politics and the entrenchment of the macoutized state: (1) deliberate ethnic policies against the traditional mulatto or white elites who maintained power along color and class lines, (2) systematic silencing, exiling, or imprisonment of university professors and students who did not adhere to the ideological framing of policies or the political leanings of the state apparatus, and (3) co-option and pressurizing of Catholic and small evangelical churches that had to adhere to the regime's policies, teachings, K. Quinn et al. (eds.
The Journal of Haitian Studies, 2020
Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 2007
As France and other colonial powers brought violence to the Caribbean and the colonized world, on... more As France and other colonial powers brought violence to the Caribbean and the colonized world, one colonial subject so understood his subjugated position that he was able to transcend the colonial confines of his homeland, Martinique, to assay and characterize the brutality and dehumanizing conditions suffered in another French colony, Algeria. In his view of the bloody decolonization of Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and member of the Front de Liberation Nationale, gave his thoughtful evaluation of the significance and structural impact of colonization in the book Les Damnes de la Terre. Through his informative and transformative writing, conservatives saw Fanon as the apostle of Third World violence who was potentially far more dangerous than the threat of communism. However, for the oppressed, he was a preacher, a beacon who brought to light the synthesis of their material and psychological conditions. As Fanon brought the personal and collective suf...
This article analyzes Darwish's creative dissidence and proposes a literary anthropological m... more This article analyzes Darwish's creative dissidence and proposes a literary anthropological map- ping that exposes his own relative historicity—his truth about Israel's occupation on the one hand, and his love for life and for his native land as a quintessentially locative human condition on the other. The existen- tial echo that reverberates through Darwish's language is a calling, a desire for home—home in the poetic corpus and home for the nation. Socio-critical analysis of Mahmoud Darwish's poetics about his homeland requires that the corpus of his works be treated almost as a literary anthropological philosophy by relativ- izing it within the homo-historical and social literary contexts in which it was produced. My assessment of assigned categories onto Darwish's poetic corpus is an interpretive ontological signifying in order to map his literary evolution as it pertains to the identified categories (1-Formative, 2-Sublime, 3-Global). This assessment is not ...
Journal of Haitian Studies
Journal of Haitian Studies
African American Review, 2016
Politics and Power in Haiti, 2013
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Papers by Patrick Sylvain