Sites of Rupture: Revisioning Cane and Girlhood in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory

• In Event: Modes of Violence: Silence and Rupture

Abstract

This paper analyzes Black women and girl protagonists’ engagement with cane fields in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory. I illustrate how their transgression of geographical boundaries reenvision and rechart trajectories towards girlhood. By recollecting girlhood and returning to cane fields, Danticat recasts girlhood as a threshold that can be crossed fluidly, unsettling white supremacist notions of western linear age progression and confronting violent, racial, and sexual histories of cane fields.

Presenter

• Stephanie Rambo, George Mason University