Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean

Carel de Haseth's novella Slave and Master (Katibu di Shon), written in the Creole language Papiamentu, dramatizes the August 17, 1795 slave revolt on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao. The story is told through an alternating series of dramatic monologues by two key characters: Luis, a slave, and a leader of the revolt; and Shon Welmu, his childhood friend and white heir to the slave plantation. The exposition begins shortly after the revolt has been crushed, as Luis awaits his brutal execution, and it ends with his preemptive suicide. The theme is the acceptance of the inevitablity of emancipation.
Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean: Carel de Haseth's Slave and Master (Katibu di Shon) is suitable for courses on Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature, and will be of great interest to readers of fiction in general.

Auteur

Carel de Haseth, born in Curaçao, is an award-winning author of poetry and fiction, who writes in both Papiamentu and Dutch. De Haseth is also a statesman, who has held important government posts, including as Minister Plenipotentiary of the Netherlands Antilles at The Hague, and as advisor to the Prime Minister of the Netherlands Antilles from 2006 to 2010.
Olga E. Rojer is Associate Professor of German Studies at American University in Washington, D.C. She is author of Exile in Argentina 1933-1945 (Peter Lang, 1989) and Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean: Cola Debrot's My Black Sister and Boeli van Leeuwen's A Stranger on Earth (Peter Lang, 2007).
Joseph O. Aimone is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston Downtown. His collaborative translations with Olga E. Rojer of Dutch and Papiamentu literature from the Dutch Caribbean have been published widely. He has also published poetry and literary criticism.