Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives

This book offers an interdisciplinary discussion of a wide range of narrative responses to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. By putting postcolonial literary studies in dialogue with disaster studies, the monograph excavates the multiple tensions within these narratives, while also demonstrating how together they can help us to navigate the complicated past, present, and future of this and other similarly complex disasters. This book examines the potentials and limitations of these texts as they attempt to forge a narrative form that approximates the experience of the event challenging, in the process, current definitions of ‘disaster’, ‘reconstruction’, and ‘recovery.’