Introduction: Appreciating Difference

Are we a narrative nation, imagined and connected mentally, tied by a common history of disruption if not by contiguous geography? Lorick-Wilmot suggests that the stories we tell offer the basis of mutual understanding across distance and cultures and generations. In a reconfigured mental Diasporic cartography, where is our citadel, our castle (not to be confused with what Europeans named as slave castles of Africa)? The remains and monuments built in this hemisphere by iron will and the drive to change yesterday, uprooting it from the ground of inequality, still stand on the highest hill in northern Haiti, reminding us that the challenge legacy is long and tall but incomplete. And suggesting, through the lessons of history that undid the men (and women) who took part in that long-ago revolution, that the way forward cannot be through divide and conquer but with the rubric of unite and win, which requires appreciating difference in full measure