Transculture, Transgenre: Stanley Péan’s Fantastic Detective Fiction

Abstract

This chapter examines how one Haitian-Canadian writer uses his genre-blurring writing to explore the contradictions of minority existence in a nation that flaunts its official multiculturalism against the context of the two solitudes. In the novels Zombi Blues (2007) and Bizango (2011), Stanley Péan blithely ignores the traditional rules of the detective genre, infusing them with a deep sense of the “fantastique maléfique” (malevolent fantastic). The image of the zombie, taken from Haitian folklore, is key to Péan’s social critique of injustice and his detective characters’ search for justice. In the end, Péan blends the fantastic and the crime narrative in an attempt to bridge the cultural divisions between members of Montréal’s ethnic communities.