Caribbean History Research Articles

Staging Diaspora: Memory, Writing, and Antagonism in Maryse Condé's Desirada

Staging Diaspora:Memory, Writing, and Antagonism in Maryse Condé's Desirada Laurie Edson Born on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe to a 15-year-old mother who first tries to kill herself and then abandons her daughter to find work in France, the child Marie-Noëlle is blissfully unaware of the history of abuse, rape, and violence embedded in her family. When she turns 10, however, Marie-Noëlle learns that she must leave her Caribbean island and travel to France to rejoin the mother who had abandoned her as a child and now reclaims her. Marie-Noëlle suffers violent convulsions and falls into a coma for one week. From this traumatic emotional and physical dislocation, Maryse Condé weaves a novel of Marie-Noëlle's travels from the Caribbean to France and the United States, and back to the Caribbean, in a quest for the "truth" of the story of her birth, mysteriously entwined in the history of violence, rape, and abuse that permeates not only her own family but also the history of her people. Marie-Noëlle's personal story produces echoes of the history of the Caribbean, that always-already hybrid place whose "origins" are long gone—a space repopulated by Africans torn from their own land to be unwillingly transported elsewhere. As Desirada unfolds, we follow Marie-Noëlle as she travels through the diaspora forging new networks of relations with other displaced people, a phenomenon that Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih have called "minor transnationalism." As Lionnet and Shih write, "minor transnationalism" focuses on lateral networks that exist among (minor) people of different nations, and differs from "postcolonial studies," which have tended to focus on vertical relations between colonizer and colonized (11). Maryse Condé saturates her novel with a multiplicity of these minor transnationalisms, ever-shifting and life-sustaining horizontal relations, even though the novel ostensibly presents itself as one character's quest for origin. It is the antagonism between this transnationalism, grounded in an ethics/aesthetics of relationality, and the quest for origin, grounded in a metaphysics of presence, that I will be exploring here. Theoretically, with its focus on the always-already hybrid nature of culture, Minor Transnationalism continues the work of Edouard Glissant's Poétique de la relation as well as Deleuze and Guattari's work on the rhizome. Lionnet and Shih describe the transnational as "conceived as a space of exchange and participation [End Page 71] wherever processes of hybridization occur," and underscore its difference from the logic of globalization, which "assumes a universal core or norm, which spreads out across the world while pulling into its vortex other forms of culture to be tested by its norm" (5). To situate my reading of Desirada a bit more, I would like to turn to the introduction of The Black Atlantic, where Paul Gilroy explains his focus on "the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation I call the black Atlantic" (4). Here, Gilroy introduces his project as a theoretical intervention into the work of scholars whose ideas remained grounded in unexamined concepts of nationalism, cultural nationalism, and ethnic particularism: "Marked by its European origins, modern black political culture has always been more interested in the relationship of identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation . . ." (19). In order to shift focus away from theories grounded in an assumed purity or integrity of modern nation states, and to move attention to a relationality, a movement between spaces, Gilroy chooses the image of ships traveling through the spaces between Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and America: "Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, . . . on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artifacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs" (4). The image of ships traveling, then, serves to call attention to the reality of cultural, artistic, and political diffusion, influence, and integration at the same time as it keeps in human memory the historical atrocity of slave ships. Maryse Condé's Desirada performs and sustains that same tension between the ever-present reality of hybridity and the past reality of...

The Marvelous History of the Dominican Republic in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Few things are as noticeable in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as its references to a wide variety of movies, TV series, comics, and most centrally to fantasy, the genre in which worlds are created that allow for the existence of magic, monsters, and other elements of the marvelous. Interweaving the story of the fictional Cabral family in the Dominican Republic and in the diaspora with the history of the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930–1961), the novel offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Caribbean history in a way that is completely intelligible only if one understands the relevance of its primary fantasy intertext, The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), both for the reader and for the characters. It is the growing familiarity of the novel’s main narrator, Yunior, with the (Western) genre of fantasy that makes possible in the first place the novel’s reinterpretation of Caribbean history: in Diaz’s novel, fantasy is the closest approximation of the truly marvelous nature of the Caribbean, almost completely forgotten in an increasingly secular Dominican diaspora. The Lord of the Rings offers an already accepted fantasy narrative capable of undermining the reader’s resistance to a marvelous reading of Caribbean reality. However, Diaz’s novel does not totally distance itself from any of the influences of Dominican tradition, Western fantasy, or Western realism and its Caribbean and Latin American adaptations. Instead, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao offers a uniquely Dominican-American fantasy perspective that enables Dominicans to recover in the diaspora a sense of how to relate to their history, even as that history remains tantalizingly out of reach. Contemporary Caribbean literature offers a great number of novels concerned with diaspora, identity, and history, and the Trujillo regime has inspired many writers, such as the Dominican American Julia Alvarez and Haitian American Edwidge Danticat. In contrast to these texts, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao the Caribbean homeland is not a privileged space in which to recover an identity lost in the diaspora. The novel’s historical narrative is the product of the discovery of a unique explanatory mode by Yunior, which foregrounds the ostensible outsider’s perspective to what may be called “Dominicanness.” Dominicans, and especially Dominican males in the diaspora, are revealed to have no appreciation of the marvelous historical aspects of the Dominican Republic. Yet the diaspora itself offers ways of recovering a Caribbean historical identity; indeed it becomes a necessary precursor to recovering that identity because it enables access to the mediating genre of fantasy. It is only Yunior’s immersion in fantasy that enables him to perceive the “real” marvelous nature of Caribbean history, even if fantasy does not ultimately suffice to fully

Haitian History: New Perspectives by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (review)

Haitian History: New Perspectives. By Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall. New York: Routledge, 2012. 352 pp. $37.95 hardcover.When historians teach historiography, they sometimes present it as a relatively tidy process, shaped by institutional and personal lineages, theoretical movements, and the rise and fall of certain methodologies. In fact, of course, the writing of history is a fragmented and messy process. This is perhaps nowhere more true than in the writing of Haitian history, transected as it is not only by ideological divisions but also by barriers between publication languages and venues, institutional locations, and even discursive universes. Any good account of historiographical change is also a historical account, for identifying the web of forces that lead to the emergence, stabilization, and reproduction of particular approaches and paradigms is itself a complex task of intellectual, social, and cultural history.Where is the history of Haiti being written today? The French scholarly establishment lags notoriously behind in this regard, despite the fact that the French Archives are literally bursting with material about the colonial and revolutionary history of Haiti. The writing of history within Haiti continues, of course, in relation to an extremely rich and complex tradition going back to the early nineteenth century, though the absence of a doctoral program in History has limited the expansion of the field. In terms of the sheer volume of pages, however, it is scholars based in the United States, and US presses, that have-especially since 2004-been the most productive in this area.Why is it that, for the past decades, there has been an explosion of scholarship on Haiti within North America? The presence of a large Haitian diaspora is of course one key reason, and out of this diaspora have emerged many of this generation's most important voices in the field. Within the discipline of history itself, the crossroads of Atlantic, African-American, and Caribbean history has been a particularly exciting area for recent research and debate. For those interested in the history of the institution of slavery and especially in the culture and resistance of the enslaved, Haiti is of course incontournable. Or, at least, it should be. And we are finally getting to the point where its importance is broadly acknowledged within the scholarly community, though there are still plenty of battles to be fought in this regard.But the interests of US scholars, and the chronological divisions in the field, have also meant that the longue duree national history of Haiti has in a way been neglected. The scholarly landscape around Haitian history is one in which the revolutionary period has received tremendous attention, the colonial period a bit less, and other periods-most notably Haiti's nineteenth century but also much of its twentieth-startlingly little, at least on the part of historians. In this sense it is notable that two of the critical exceptions to this trend, Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Haiti: State Against Nation and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith's Haiti: The Breached Citadel, were written by anthropologists rather than historians.All of this makes the new collection by Alyssa Sepinwall, Haitian History: New Perspectives, a particularly useful and valuable contribution. It is part of a Routledge series called Rewriting Histories, whose goal is to present both classic and recent texts of historical writing relating to a particular topic. One other book in the series, Origins of the Black Atlantic (which I coedited with Julius Scott) includes some material on Haiti and other parts of the Caribbean. Here, however, Sepinwall provides an excellent selection of works that take us from the colonial period to contemporary Haiti.The contributors, and many of the pieces, will be familiar to Haitianist scholars as critical contributions to the field. The book opens with a classic piece by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in which he first articulated his thesis about the unthinkable nature of the Haitian Revolution, and is followed by contributions by Carolyn Fick, David Geggus, and John Thornton. …

History and identity across small islands: a Caribbean and a personal journey

Abstract This paper is largely autobiographical: I chart my own intellectual journey across the history, culture and identity of so-called `small` islands, with a special reference to the Caribbean. To do so, I reflect on my own forays into literature that discussed Caribbean history and culture; my own research experience in Barbados in connection with my doctoral research; and coming up to the present with insights that have emerged in the pursuit of an island studies imagination in my professional work. The paper concludes with a calling, and a justification, for the pursuit of island studies.

History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World by Frank Moya Pons (review)

History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World by Frank Moya Pons (review)

The Power of Caribbean Poetry: Word and Sound

If anything can be said to define West Indian poetry it is that sense of an engagement with the diverse and often hidden sources of Caribbean history and culture and the determination to refashion those materials into poetry which speaks of and into the present in voices that the peoples of the region would recognise as their own. (Brown 155)

Para além das revoluções açucareiras: repensando o Caribe espanhol nos séculos XVII e XVIII

As Antilhas espanholas figuram pouco na historiografia caribenha dos séculos XVII e XVIII, cujas protagonistas são, em geral, as Antilhas de língua inglesa, francesa e holandesa. A escassa importância das plantations escravistas nas Antilhas hispanas durante esses séculos parece excluí-las da história da região. Entretanto, uma análise mais integrada da história do Caribe revela uma interação importante entre a produção de provisões, gado e madeira das Antilhas hispanas e as vizinhas ‘ilhas açucareiras”, mediadas, sobretudo, pelo comércio de contrabando.

Ariel over the airwaves: George Lamming’s rituals of revenant history

This article, from the perspective of discussing the role of ghostly presences in the text, takes the opportunity to reconsider George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile. Published in 1960, Pleasures offers a nuanced reading of the global networks of literary political connection in its time and can be classified through both its locations and scope as “world literature”. Tracing and testing out key interrelations between three of the central organizing episodes – the Haitian ceremony of souls, the history of the BBC’s Caribbean Voices broadcasts and, briefly, Shakespeare’s The Tempest – it argues that Lamming is intimately concerned with mapping the characteristic inequalities of colonial cultural traffic on the eve of decolonization across the anglophone Caribbean. It seeks to negotiate a new pathway through the text, focussing on how Lamming deploys and works through ghostly conversations with history and between various communities. The Pleasures of Exile provides its readers with a variety of voices – spectral, airborne and mobile in their different ways – which act as the revenants of Caribbean history and allow us to fully realize the materially uneven and psychically traumatic history that Lamming announces.

From sugar to revolution: women's visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic

In this original and provocative study, Myriam Chancy reads the catastrophic history of the Caribbean in the narrative and visual fictions of a number of remarkable women artists, disclosing hitherto uncharted maps of time and voice and remembrance. A work of studied insight, engaged criticism, and graceful sentences, it will alter not only the frames in which Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic are represented, but the very conditions for a gendered and transnational inquiry into the Caribbean present. – David Scott, Columbia University; Editor,

Julia E. Rodriguez (ed.), History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean Digital Archive (Durham: University of New Hampshire, 2010) (www.hoslac.org)

Julia E. Rodriguez (ed.), History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean Digital Archive (Durham: University of New Hampshire, 2010) (www.hoslac.org)

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Derek Walcott, White Egrets

White Egrets is Derek Walcott’s fourteenth collection of poems and is composed of 54 poems of varying lengths which address a number of themes and issues which recur constantly in Walcott’s poetry. It is a cosmopolitan collection with a broad thematic range, but a number of key Walcottian concerns crop up again and again like love, the demise of the British empire, the Caribbean landscape, Caribbean history and death. All these themes are held together or united by the overarching themes of m...

The Caribbean: a history of the region and its peoples

Stephan Palmie and Francisco A. Scarano (editors), Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, xv + 660 pp.The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples edited by anthropologist Stephan Palmie, and historian Francisco A. Scarano, offers an overview of Caribbean history in forty chapters written by an impressive array of experts including historians, sociologists, political scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and geographers. Attempting to compile comprehensive overview of region as diverse as the Caribbean risks becoming mired in the backwaters, eddies and obstacles along the way (p. 1). Yet the editors of this volume have successfully assembled survey of historical and contemporary issues which serves as an excellent introductory text for newcomers to the region, as well as resource for more experienced researchers searching for concise reference to any historical period.The volume's editors have divided the chapters into seven parts. Each of these parts is united thematically and chronologically. This thematic approach is admirable and the contributors have indeed delivered works that are very thorough in details, and adequately discussed without losing sight of the big picture. In addition the writing style is accessible, as the editors restrict the contributors to a minimum of scholarly clutter (p. 3). To further acquaint the reader with the region, there are five pages of maps preceding the chapters and an introductory chapter by the co-authors.Part 1 of the work, The Caribbean Stage, depicts the physical and cultural background in four chapters written by specialists in geography, ecology, prehistoric archaeology, and history. Much of this material is descriptive, as necessary preamble to the subsequent parts. Only Antonio Curet's chapter on the region's prehistory considers future archaeological findings and analyses. five chapters in part 2, The Making of Sphere, cover the Old World and Atlantic antecedents which shaped the encounter during the Columbus voyages and the Spanish colonial project that followed. authors in this part have attempted restoration of the agency of indigenous peoples, which can be obscured in the chronicles and secondary sources. Notable in this section is Jalil Sued Badillo's critique of the misuse of the chronicles and early histories which have characterized previous interpretations, as he reminds readers that the documents cannot always be taken at face value. six chapters that make up part 3, Colonial Designs in Flux, cover the entry of competing European nation-states (England, France and the Netherlands) to the region as colonial powers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the resultant decline of Spanish hegemony. myriad and multiscalar transitions with the development of the slave/sugar plantation system as the region's dominant socioeconomic institution are well explored in these chapters.Part 4, Capitalism, Slavery, and Revolution, which I think includes some of the book's strongest and best contributions, comprises six entries. This section focuses on the crumbling and final collapse of the slave system. …

Talking Taíno: Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective Myths and Realities of Caribbean History

Book Review| April 01 2012 Talking Taíno: Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective Myths and Realities of Caribbean History Talking Taíno: Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective. By Keegan, William F. and Carlson, Lisabeth A.. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. xv + 136 pp., introduction, maps, photographs, appendixes, bibliography, index. $49.75 cloth, $29.95 paper.)Myths and Realities of Caribbean History. By Reed, Basil A.. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. xiv + 130 pp., glossary, bibliography, index. $15.95 paper.) Terry Rugeley Terry Rugeley Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2012) 59 (2): 430–431. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-1537020 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Terry Rugeley; Talking Taíno: Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective Myths and Realities of Caribbean History. Ethnohistory 1 April 2012; 59 (2): 430–431. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-1537020 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEthnohistory Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2012 by American Society for Ethnohistory2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

René Maran, Forgotten Father of the Francophone Novel

In 2010, Susan Rubin Suleiman and Christie McDonald co-edited impressive collection of essays entitled Global: A New Approach to Literary History. In their book, Suleiman and McDonald envisioned an approach to literary history, as defined by multiple implications and resonances of 'global' (ix.). Within this global worldview close attention is paid to transactions between and among cultures and peoples, both outside and inside France's national boundaries which are every period of French (x). The transaction between and among cultures is particularly relevant, as it is necessary component of study of from former colonies-the broad category offrancophone literature. In particular, Global raises questions about relation of (territorial) center to its extraterritorial peripheries, as analysis of this network of relations has become crucial to discussions of Francophonie (xi). It is focus on continuing tension between relation of center (I. 'Hexagone) to colonies Global that has brought Rene Maran's Batouala back to global literary stage.The inclusion of essay on Maran's 1921 novel Batouala within this collection is remarkable, as it is not particularly well-known novel outside of francophone specialists. What is proposed within Global is reconsideration of this novel, and others, within dynamic and more inclusive model, both spatial and temporal that emphasizes points of contact (xix). This global view allows us to re-read novels such as Batouala through lens other than classic binary paradigm of colonizer/colonized or master/ slave. Accordingly, Suleiman and McDonald propose analysis that echoes work of David Damrosch What is World Literature? Damrosch proposes more dynamic model of literary analysis: a more elliptical approach, to use image of geometric figure that is generated from two foci at (133). Undoubtedly, re-examination of Maran's Batouala would certainly benefit from such different approach. That said, though we should certainly favor dynamic model of literary analysis, as engaged readers we must remain conscious of following:We never truly cease to be ourselves as we read, and our present concerns and modes of reading will always provide one focus of our understanding, but of other and eras presents us with another focus as well, and we read field of force generated between these two foci, (ibid.)This dynamic approach is remarkable that, although it permits new scholarly analysis of somewhat forgotten text, it helps one avoid trap of presentism and dealing only with contemporary (Suleiman and McDonald xvii). Thus, challenge is to re-read work such as Maran's Batouala in relation to globe: as world, as sphere, as space of encounter with others and with very idea of otherness {ibid.).However, we might ask question: Why Batouala and why now? In introduction to A History of Literature Caribbean, J. Michael Dash suggests that literary history, much like contemporary history, is inevitably conditioned by present, by preoccupations, intellectual fashions and crises of our own times (309). Dash further elaborates on variability of literary history by stating:If this proposition is valid general terms, it is even more true francophone Caribbean. Part of problem stems from fact that we are dealing with less than two centuries of writing [... ] It is consequently, difficult to have clear sense of what are moments of this [... ] These questions are even further complicated by fact that we are not dealing with homogeneous corpus of literary works, {ibid.)If it is, as Dash suggests, quite difficult to pinpoint great moments of literature within francophonie and its varied corpus, then one might be led to once again ask why seemingly obscure author like Maran was included modern analysis of and Francophone within what Suleiman and McDonald describe as the multiple implications and resonances of 'global' (ix. …

West Indian Variations: New Histories of the Early Caribbean

West Indian Variations: New Histories of the Early Caribbean

Globalization and the Post-creole Imagination: Notes on fleeing the plantation (review)

Reviewed by: Globalization and the Post-creole Imagination: Notes on fleeing the plantation Pratima Prasad Globalization and the Post-creole Imagination: Notes on fleeing the plantation By Michaeline A. Crichlow. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. In Globalization and the Post-creole Imagination: Notes on fleeing the plantation, Michaeline A. Crichlow argues that any understanding of Caribbean histories and cultural processes must be expanded beyond the plantation. She calls for a decentering of discussions about creolization, one that is not only redirected away from the geographic confines of the site of the plantation, but that also challenges accepted notions of power relations associated with plantation societies. Chichlow's subtitle ("Notes on fleeing the plantation"), then, works both as a metaphor and a methodology in the book. She contends that creole consciousness at large, and creole subjects' ways of making place and space in particular, must be viewed as multidirectional, open, dynamic, and pluralistic in both time and in space. The book brings into focus a complex view of creolization that transcends the boundaries of Caribbean nation-states in favor of transnational ethnographies and a global analytic. At the same time, it is mindful of slave/plantation material histories and of the attachments that the subjects of its study may hold to national imaginaries and maps. Working through Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus, Crichlow explores how, within and beyond the black Atlantic, Caribbeans remake themselves by borrowing, challenging, and reworking older forms of creolization. The first two chapters of the book set down the theoretical and methodological paradigms of creolization as a process that is "best understood as an ongoing dynamic within complex open systems" (3). In the subsequent chapters, Crichlow illustrates this methodology through a series of ethnographic and historical analyses. The geographical and temporal span that Crichlow covers in this process is impressive: the agents of her study range from Afro-Creoles living under British colonialism to contemporary St. Lucian television performers to the Caribbean diaspora in neoliberal Western societies. In her chapter on Afro-Creoles, she relies on oral, historical, and archival sources to describe Caribbean smallholders' layered forms of resistance during British colonialism: through practices of freedom that both accommodated and subverted symbolic forms of respectability in the colonial world, they guaranteed their human dignity and long-term economic survival. In another chapter, she explores how nationalisms and transnationalisms intersect with each other in the global travels of the "gens anglaises," a rural, land-based working people from St. Lucia who migrated to England and subsequently returned to the Caribbean. Crichlow's study of the "gens anglaises" is a perfect example of post-plantation productions of creole culture by populations that live in and negotiate economies of unequal power relations, both in the (colonial and postcolonial) Caribbean and in neoliberal European contexts. Yet another chapter examines the postcolonial creole imaginations of urban middle class youth in an irreverent, ribald, and satirical television performance called the "Lucians," which emerged a few years ago on the St. Lucian cultural scene. In what can be best described as "local globalized theater" (120), this popular performance draws upon projects of the Creole nation-state, onto which it grafts parodies borrowed from performative styles developed in other parts of the Americas. In this way, these young St. Lucians engage in a democratic practice of citizenship in which they call to question and protest state-sanctioned notions of culture, economy, elite knowledge, and politics. Crichlow makes her case by drawing upon the work of a dizzying array of theorists, both within and outside Caribbean and creolization studies: Pierre Bourdieu, Lila Abu-Lugodh, Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, and Saskia Sassen, to name a few. But perhaps the book's chief success lies in the ways in which it questions and makes complex a number of binarisms that have been reified in discussions of creolization, and, for that matter, in postcolonial studies at large: western/non-western, "folk"/"elite," local/global, transnational/national, etc. By steering away from these dualisms, the book reveals creolization as a truly nuanced process and as a set of creative practices of fashioning the self, and of making one's time and space in the world. Moreover...

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (review)

Toussaint and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution. Matthew J. Clavin. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. 248, $39.95.)Reviewed by Laurent DuboisI will admit from the first my bias: I operate from the basic assumption that the Haitian Revolution is one of the most important events in the history of the world, and go around talking about it to pretty much anyone who will listen. So I was a particularly receptive audience for the arguments in Clavin's impassioned book about the ways in which Haiti - as example, referent, ghost, nightmare, prophesy, and much else - shaped politics and culture in the decades leading up to the Civil War.This is not the first time this story has been told: The book returns to a terrain explored in Alfred Hunt's 1988 book Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Vokano in the Caribbean, reissued by Louisiana State University Press in 2006. In some ways, his argument is about extending and further emphasizing these earlier arguments: The Haitian Revolution, he writes, a much a greater impact on slavery and abolition than has been suggested (4). But Clavin also brings out new material as well as a different energy and angle to the story, making this a vital contribution. Before and during the Civil War, he argues, Louverture and the Haitian Revolution were resonant, polarizing, and ultimately subversive symbols, which antislavery and proslavery groups exploited to both provoke violent confrontation and determine the fete of slavery in the United States (5). I appreciated the way Clavin illuminates how complex, slippery, and multivalent the Haitian Revolution was as a symbol. He remains attuned throughout to the often contradictory way in which it could surface in various types of debates and discourse, and does a nice job of leading us through its various appearances. At the same time, he also preserves a line of attack and argument throughout, with a drive and urgency that made it exciting reading. To my mind, alongside works like Ashli White's Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore, 2010) and a series of recent works on U.S. foreign policy toward Haiti during the Revolution, this book is required reading for anyone interested in thinking about the ways U.S. and Caribbean histories of slavery and antislavery shaped one another.I didn't - and couldn't - read it this work the way a specialist on antebellum U.S. history would, and will have to leave to others to respond to and evaluate the specific claims Clavin makes about the extent and impact evocations of Haiti had on debates about secession. More familiar with the history of slave revolt and abolitionism in the United States, however, I was impressed by the way in which is his study illuminates the way the symbolism surrounding Haiti really shaped the political imaginary of antislavery activism. …

Beyond Ethnicity: Writing Caribbean Histories through Social Spaces

Ethnic groups have frequently functioned as building blocks for the narration of Surinamese and, more generally, Caribbean social histories. This focus on ethnicity may lead to the portrayal of society as made up exclusively of racial/ethnic groups with primordial loyalties and attachments and pure, distinct cultures. Such an approach makes it impossible to understand social life but through an ethnic lens, while barring us from asking how ethnicity has been construed, deployed and contested. This article attempts to formulate an alternative vantage point and methodology for narrating Surinamese and Caribbean social histories. It argues for historical narratives that take differentiated geographies, rather than naturalized ethnic groupings as their vantage point.