FUMAGALLI, MARIA CRISTINA
Professor @ University of Essex
Bio
Professor in Literature at the University of Essex and author of On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2015), Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa's Gaze (2009), The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante (2001) and of numerous articles and book chapters. Her new book, Derek Walcott Painters: A Life with Pictures is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.
Geographical location : London
Research Area and Interest : Caribbean literatures and the visual arts, border studies (particularly the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic), literature and the environment, migration/human rights and literature,
Social Media
Panel
Politics and Community
Presentation
Dar a la luz: Haitian and Dominican Women of Haitian descent and the politics of ‘bordering’
In Clap When You Land (2020) the Dominican writer Elizabeth Acevedo tells the story of Camino, a young girl who lives in the Dominican Republic. When Camino’s best friend Carline, who is of Haitian descent, goes into premature labour, she is not taken to a hospital to give birth. The decision to have a home-birth, as Acevedo briefly points out, is dictated by the huge difficulties that many Haitian women and Dominican women of Haitian descent encounter when they give birth in the Dominican Republic. In this paper we will put Acevedo’s fictional text in dialogue with lived experience and then present ‘on-the-ground’ research to shed light on the current situation.