Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. xii + 360 pp. (Paper US$ 39.50)

Looking for Other Worlds is all the things that characterize Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s contributions to Black feminist literary criticism over the past decade and a half: carefully curated conversations between a wide range of Black feminists; affirmation of Black women and girls’ multidimensional personhood; and a convincing case for fiction’s ability to promote mutual understanding and positive change.

In this, her second critical monograph, Jean-Charles’s stated aim is to draw Haitian feminists, Caribbean feminists, and Black feminists into a “rasanblaj,” a term she borrows from Gina Ulysse and translates as both “gathering,” evoking a sense of voluntary, purpose-filled togetherness, and “reassembly,” bringing to mind an atomized whole whose true nature can only be fully known upon its reunification. Twenty-first-century representations of Haitian women’s intersectional perspectives, she argues, stand to enrich Black feminism, which she describes as a “global project with an ethical imperative” (p. 7). “A Black feminist ethic,” expounds Jean-Charles, “embraces the process of looking for other worlds and eventually leads to the work of building them” (p. 7).

Looking for Other Worlds includes an introduction, five chapters (“Haitian Women’s Studies, Black Feminism, and Literary Ethics,” “Gran moun se moun: Aging and Intersectionality,” “The Ethical-Erotic,” “Geographies of Class Location,” and “An Environmental Ethic”), and a coda. Over the course of the book, Jean-Charles reads a total of eight novels (in various combinations) by Evelyne Trouillot, Kettly Mars, and Yanick Lahens for nuanced, Haitian understandings of Black women’s intersectionality.

The introduction and Chapter 1 root the target corpus in a Haitian feminist tradition that includes “feminist foremothers” (p. 23) and today’s most influential scholars. By demonstrating Lahens, Mars, and Trouillot’s commitment to a Black feminist ethic of “sharing, mutuality, sacrifice, and connection as opposed to competition, greed, hierarchies, and individualism” (p. 26) in a Haitian context, explains Jean-Charles, she intends to draw Haitian feminism (back, more deeply) into the fold of a global Black feminism.

Chapters 2 and 5 highlight overlooked aspects of Haitian women’s intersectionality: age/aging and spiritual/religious worldview. In Chapter 2, Jean-Charles reads Mars’s Kasalé and Trouillot’s L’œil-totem and Rosalie l’infâme with a focus on elderly female characters, concluding that these narratives “suggest that despite the prevailing idea that members of the older generation are to be honored, in practice as well as in cultural production, there is often a casual disregard for their individuated selves” (p. 63). The Black feminist ethic that emerges from this reading, she argues, asks that we acknowledge elderly women’s full humanity and “look beyond the age of elderly women to see them for what they are other than old” (p. 63). Meanwhile, in Chapter 5, Jean-Charles reads “Black women’s intimate relationships to nature according to a Vodou ethic” in Trouillot’s Rosalie l’infâme, Kasalé, and Bain de Lune, underscoring “the role of spirituality in subject formation” (p. 241).

Chapter 3 is a healing sequel to Jean-Charles’s well-known Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representations in the Francophone Imaginary, for she reads Mars’s Je suis vivant, Lahens’s Guillaume et Nathalie, and Trouillot’s Rosalie l’infâme for “the ethical-erotic,” in which sex is not violence, but intimacy and pleasure, creativity and self-expression, and “the quiet and quotidian unfolding of Black love” (p. 129).

In Chapter 4, Jean-Charles argues that in Je suis vivant, Le Rond-point, La Couleur de l’aube, and Dans la maison du père, Mars, Trouillot, and Lahens “pose ethical questions about the responsibility that people of different classes have toward one another based on their shared humanity and the endless possibilities for encounters” (p. 179). With its extremely loose definition of “geographies,” this chapter sometimes strays from its purported ambition (“theorizing class as geography—in relation to space and place rather than as a fixed marker of identity” [p. 184]).

In the coda, Jean-Charles touts the value of fiction that depicts Haitian women in human rather than political terms: “At a time when Haitian studies is theorized according to and through polarities—glory and devastation, poverty and elitism, crisis and romance—care, intimacy, and proximity generate opportunities to look for new articulations of how race, gender, class, religion and sexuality operate in Haitian fiction” (p. 295).

This volume will be of interest to those just discovering the latest wave of astonishing Haitian women’s writing as well as to those who will appreciate rereading this fiction with a renewed sense of care for Black women and their multidimensional, individuated personhood. After all, as Jean-Charles writes with a nod to Jennifer Nash, “Love is far from out of place in a scholarly exploration of Black feminism” (p. 47).