Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This chapter frames the book with the story of women’s presence at the 1946 Haitian Constitutional Congress. In a moment of heightened public discourse about the direction of the country, the chapter points to the national and international history of women’s strategies to physically, intellectually, and constitutionally insert themselves in and inform the parameters of Haitian citizenship. Taking women’s rights organizers’ political actions and archival practice as a focus, the chapter situates the book as a methodological invitation to think with women’s intersecting differences in the historical archive and how Haitian women’s theories of feminism germinated from their reflections on difference. Contributing to scholarship in Caribbean, transnational feminist, and African diasporic studies, the chapter establishes the book as an examination of the multiple intersections of women’s thought, practice, and performance as both an entry point to historicize modern Haiti and as a political orientation called political wayfaring. The chapter asks: How did Haitian women study each other? And was there a practice of study formulated between Haitian women?