Evangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their respective causes despite the country’s traumatic past with European colonialism and American imperialism. As Erin L. Durban shows, two discourses dominate discussions of intervention.

This essay examines the ideas and activism of a woman calling herself Madame Parque, who traveled across the United States giving lectures to black and white audiences during the 1870s. Claiming to be a well-educated, multilingual, and mixed-race Haitian educator, Parque spoke at courthouses, black churches, and black schools throughout the United States, mocking racism and sexism and celebrating Afro-diasporic history and black identity.

From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black women’s queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference.

In this chapter of Higasida’s book, the author discusses Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996), a novel that shares themes of female rejuvenation with Rosa Guy’s novel The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of Wind (1995). The plot and different themes in the novel are explored against the political and social Haitian background and the centrality of American imperialism.