Gervais Charles

Sociality in the Haitian novel of the diaspora Gervais Charles

Sociality in the Haitian Diaspora Novel of the Duvalier Era examines, through a process of aestheticization, the revolutionary ethos of novelists exiled under the Duvalier dictatorship. This analysis of sociality demonstrates that the novelists are in fact engaged in a quest for self and identity in a foreign land, setting up their writing as an instrument of individual and collective liberation. To the point that they institute the novelistic genre as models of analysis and synthesis of social, political, spiritual and linguistic reality. This detailed analysis of sociality reveals that the novel of the diaspora fulfills the fundamental mission assigned to the novel, which is to reflect reality by merging the mythical with history to bring out the integral figure of man. Within the framework of ethics and aesthetics cultivated in a semiological universe linking social and religious reality to the linguistic signs that translate it, this study interprets Haitian social life in a comprehensive way, as a backdrop for semiological reflection.