By Célia Romulus
”This dissertation explores Haitian feminism from a transnational perspective, examining the intergenerational memory of political violence perpetrated under the Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier (1971–1986) and the ways in which it shaped Haitian men and women’s experiences in the diaspora in Montreal from the 1960s to 1980s. Drawing on scholarship centring Duvalierism, the memory of political violence, and epistemologies of ignorance as they relate to migration, diaspora, and citizenship, this dissertation develops an analytical framework that centres memory and experience within the context of displacement and racial violence. Using a decolonial feminist ethnography and life stories of former political prisoners in Haiti, two generations of Haitian migrants in Montreal, and Haitian feminists based in Montreal, this research co-creates a repository of narratives – centring Haitian women’s experiences – that work to gender and trouble Duvalierist, Quebec, and Cold War historiographies. Drawing from these accounts as well as archival research, my findings shed light on the production and transmission of narratives on the dictatorship and what they reveal regarding gendered experiences of repression, migration, and transnational citizenship. The analysis unearths complex individual and collective memorial mechanisms that illuminate how Haitians experienced and remember political violence under Duvalier, and how those lived experiences have shaped resistance strategies to the regime in Haiti and to systemic racism in Montreal. These narratives and my research debunk the broadly adopted working hypothesis of political amnesia on the thirty-year-long dictatorship.”
