Conclusion. The Missing People: Theorizing Haitian and Caribbean Exiles

Summary

I am not too crazy about the notion of fixed nationalities. I think all that is changing with migration, especially in our region. Nothing is as rigid and permanent as it used to be.

(Edwidge Danticat)

Like Danticat, few contemporary authors or theorists are “too crazy” about fixed, immutable notions of nationality, race, or identity. This is especially true in the Caribbean, where diverse histories of exile have engendered a quite singular, fluid, and evolving relationship between place and subjectivity. On the “outside,” too, postmodern theory tends to celebrate cultural and identitary hybridity as open-ended manifestations of a world where traditional ideas of nation and home are increasingly discarded in favor of less fixed, ever-multiplying understandings of what it means to belong in the contemporary age. The world, as Édouard Glissant constantly reminds us, is creolizing. But does this mean that we can now talk of a universal experience of exile? And how do the Haitian exiles analyzed in this book finally relate to other contemporary narratives and theories of exile, both from the Caribbean and from the wider world?

Exile in European and North American theory

Let us think of displacement. Displacement does not only signify the loss of one's place, but also a more authentic way of living, of inhabiting without habits; exile is the affirmation of a new relationship with the outside.

(Maurice Blanchot)