Militantisme littéraire, sujets mobiles et poétiques de la figuration dans The Farming of Bones d’Edwidge Danticat et We Need New Names de NoViolet Bulawayo
Throughout this comparative study, I examine the figurative poetics in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names. The writers draw on cinematic and poetry writing techniques to promote a literary militancy. This creative militancy allows them to critique the extreme brutality rooted in the different structures of power such as the nation-state and the global economy.  By elucidating the mechanisms of power, I study their impact on the individuals’ formation of subjectivity. The first chapter of my work examines the mechanisms of brutality visible through the expulsive campaigns orchestrated by the nation-state. Through my close reading, I focus on Bulawayo’s cinematic poetic of chaos and Danticat’s genocidal imaginary. The second chapter deals with the context of post-expulsion. I study the relationship between the political and international helpers and the subaltern migrants and diasporas. The abusive and repressive behavior of the helpers reveals their profound inability to communicate and to act with human values. I also reflect on the value and the limits of the protagonists’ survival strategies. Finally, I compare the alienation of the foreign worker in economic systems such as the Dominican sugar plantation (20th century) and the global neoliberalism at the national scale. Contrary to the other chapters, the brutality is not perpetrated by a repressive actor because it is rooted in the economic system. One of my conclusions is that these figurative poetics are not only aesthetic tools, but they are potential instruments of awareness that help the reader to improve his critical thinking.
diaspora migrant Bulawayo Danticat Literary militancy diaspora migrant Poetics of figuration power Bulawayo Danticat reader awareness subjectivity