Introduction: The Unexpected Caribbean

Cécile Accilien is a professor and chair in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Her areas of studies are francophone African and Caribbean literatures and cultures, and film and media studies. Her primary research areas are Caribbean popular cultures, film and media studies, and women, gender, and sexuality studies. Author of Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures (2008), she has also coedited and contributed to two collections of essays: Revolutionary Freedoms: A History of Survival, Strength and Imagination in Haiti (2006) and Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South (2007); she cowrote, with Jowel Laguerre, The English-Haitian Creole Phrasebook (2010) and Francophone Cultures through Film, with Nabil Boudraa (2013). Accilien has published articles in the Journal of Haitian Studies, Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Revue française, Southern Quarterly, and Diaspora in Caribbean Art. She is finishing a co-edited volume Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives (forthcoming in 2021) and a monograph temporarily titled “Haitian Hollywood: Representing Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora in Popular Cinema.” In 2019, she became the chair of the editorial board of Women, Gender, and Families of Color. She is also on the advisory board of the Haitian Studies Association.

Giselle Liza Anatol is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. She is also the president of the international Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, which began in the late 1980s as a forum for female creative writers from the Caribbean and has evolved into a network of scholars who study their work, gender researchers and activists, and women of Caribbean heritage who write creatively and/or write about history, the law, music, social policy, physical and mental health, the STEM fields, and other academic and professional disciplines. Anatol teaches Caribbean and African diasporic literature at KU, as well as children’s and young adult literature. She has published numerous articles on the works of authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde, Nalo Hopkinson, Derek Walcott, Langston Hughes, and Jacqueline Woodson. Her most recent book is The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora (2015).