Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak

Only when ethnic literature liberates its sources of meaning from hegemonic impositions and begins to inform theory and subvert traditional signifying strategies can it begin to reconfigure cultural interpretation. As though responding to this challenge, ethnic fiction demonstrates a proliferation of the short story cycle, a form that many ethnic writers have adapted for the formulation of their processes of subjectivity. Davis explores the short story cycle as a vehicle for the development of ethnic literature by analyzing Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! to show how the drama of identity and community is mediated through a genre that is linked to the oral narrative.