Author Archives: April Shemak

About April Shemak

April Shemak is an associate professor of English at Sam Houston State University. Her first book is Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse (Fordham, 2011). She is an associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). She is currently at work on a book focusing on discourses of medical humanitarianism in the Caribbean.

Haitian Refugees and the Guantánamo Public Memory Project: Remembering Haitian Refugees

The United States military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, came under scrutiny in the early 1990s when it served as the site of detention for Haitian and Cuban refugees brought there following their interdiction at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard. Typically, after a few months at Guantánamo, Cuban refugees were taken to the U.S. mainland, where they received political asylum because they were seen as refugees fleeing a communist nation. Haitian refugees often languished much longer at Guantánamo, and few were granted asylum in Continue reading → Continue reading →