Framing genre trouble (McKenzie 1998) as a decolonial methodology, this paper considers the relevance of Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones (1998) for reading migrant texts against the grain of straight temporality which sustains the coloniality of power (Lugones 2007). Scrutinizing historiographic suppression, Danticat's migrant text interrupts the chrononormative portrayal of the Trujillo genocide of Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic as a reality pertaining to an obsolete past and to the geocultural margins alone. Read in the aftermath of the testimonio controversy, it may thus decenter the ongoing deflection of attention from Rigoberta Menchú's impact on the geocultural structures that sanction ongoing military intervention and genocide by refocusing on historiography as a terrain of relentless decolonial contestation rather than prescriptive narrative closure.
Migrant text; Edwidge Danticat; genre trouble; Haitian literature; decolonial chronopolitics.