Abstract
This paper presentation will explore how Kettly Mars’s novel L’heure hybride (2005) considers the various implications of hospitality systems and economies through the narrator’s engagement with sex work during the final Duvalier years of Haiti. As queer subject, Rico is engaged in various modes of hospitality that disrupt (hetero) normative global spaces. As world subject, he activates alternatives for navigating national, visual and linguistic barriers of their respective cultural and political worlds, what Alec Hargreaves et al. (2005) similarly note as transnational French and Francophone spaces. Through his sex-work, he also engages with what Irina Aristarkhova calls “microcourtesies” or actions and attitudes within hospitality that affect social change and well as the limits of hosting traditions in her monograph Arrested Welcome (2020) as they relate to contemporary influences of globalization upon French metropole and non-metropole spaces. His participation in sex tourism economies further disrupts the normative notions of how Mimi Sheller (2012) explains Caribbean tourism’s “top-down” hierarchies within Mars’s larger social and literary critique of Haiti.
Presenters
Matthew SkrzypczykActing Assistant Professor, French, University of Washington at Seattle, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Kettly Mars, Sex Work, Haiti, Contemporary Literature, Francophone Literature
