ABSTRACT
Teaching Create Dangerously is an opportunity to help students grapple with the increasingly exigent issue of immigration and the fraught nature of home and belonging for black migratory subjects. Danticat performs the construction of the “floating homeland” through the structure of her memoir, and through representations of communities defying national borders.
In the classroom, we can make two entry points into discussing Danticat’s postnational imaginary, the floating homeland, to address contemporary immigration issues: we can discuss form, and we can discuss content. Through both of these, Danticat furthers the floating homeland as a response to black immigrants’ marginalization within the geopolitical boundaries of the nation. We can encourage students to consider how the essays within the memoir weave together fragmented experiences—Danticat’s and others’—of navigating belonging within Haiti and its diaspora. We can consider the impact of storytelling and the journalistic mode on the construction of the text, and when considering the content, provide support to students pursuing the cultural and historical contexts of immigration Danticat describes in the essays.
