DECOLONIAL HOPE AGAINST THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN EDWIDGE DANTICAT’S CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT (2013)

Abstract

This article explores Edwidge Danticat’s last novel, Claire of the Sea Light (2013), as a response to Modern/colonial ideologies of progress that continue to emanate from predictions of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. After an analysis of the work of Danticat as literature of the American hemisphere instead of merely Haitian or Caribbean literature, this article contends that the text’s portrayal of nature, the environment, and the past aligns with visions of decolonial hope rather than with the linear progress of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Through the stories of a small community in Haiti, Claire of the Sea Light portrays the degradation of the environment that ravishes the country and does so in relation to the external forces that affect it, presenting a coloniality of climate associated to racial dynamics of the American hemisphere. The blending of human narratives and environmental ones in the novel nevertheless offers possibilities for resistance and a hopeful vision of the country rooted in decolonial ecologies and Caribbean epistemology. Granting equal importance to the stories of non-human actors in the narrative, the novel positions itself outside the Modern/colonial tradition to embrace a decolonial poetics that offers hope in a world which has proved to continually reproduce its own coloniality as new technology is developed