Haitian History Research Articles

“A saint, a heroine, and a town”: The incarnation of “rose” and poetics of resistance in Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light

AbstractEdwidge Danticat in her novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013) delineates a group of determined women who actively challenge the patriarchal norms prevalent in Haiti. This article conducts a thorough textual analysis focusing on the imagery of the “rose” and its intricate connections with women in the narrative. Through the elaborate naming of Ville Rose, the incarnation of rose as female figures in the novel, as well as the resistance and resilience that rose represents in the female genealogy, Danticat places women at the center of the stage, reclaiming the often neglected, silenced, and marginalized roles of women in Haitian history. This article argues that by foregrounding the unique perspective and experience of Haitian women, Danticat questions the patriarchal hegemonic discourse, reformulates the female discursive system, and reshapes the male‐dominated Haitian literary tradition. This exploration of her poetics of resistance not only contributes to the understanding of Haitian (women's) literature and Caribbean diasporic studies but also provides a new perspective for plant studies within the realm of literature.

What did Christopher Columbus once mean to Haiti? Émile Nau’s Histoire des Caciques d’Haïti and Irving’s Columbus in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World

ABSTRACT This essay responds to scholarship on nineteenth-century representations of Christopher Columbus, by reinscribing Haitian writing on Columbus into transnational approaches largely focused on the US and Latin America. Throughout this essay, I contend that Émile Nau’s Histoire des caciques d’Haïti (1854) was profoundly influenced by Washington Irving’s A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). In particular, I show how Nau reframed Irving’s text in nationalist terms to reimagine Columbus as the catalyst of modernity while asserting the centrality of Haiti to his life. To do so, I compare key passages in Nau and Irving to reconstitute Nau’s enigmatic methodology and to show how Nau adapted Irving’s text to inscribe Columbus within his vision of Haitian history that included the Spanish colonization of Hispaniola. This analysis reveals the ways in which Haitian cultural nationalism drew from and spoke back to the larger network of nineteenth-century Atlantic nationalisms.

Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte

This deeply researched, thoughtfully crafted, and unapologetically argued work reveals how protest and revolution are at the core of Haitian national identity. Historian Yveline Alexis's compelling account of Haitian history and Haitian-US relations between 1915 and 2008 focuses on Charlemagne Péralte and those inspired by his anti-imperial campaign, most notably Haitian women and artists, as well as exiles mobilizing in New York City. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in Haitian nationalism, US imperialism, popular resistance, historical memory, and methodology, to name several of Alexis's foremost areas of contribution.Whereas most scholarship on Péralte focuses on his assassination by marines in 1919 and their strategy of publicly displaying his cadaver to squash a Haitian resistance operation (cacos) to the 1915 US military invasion of Haiti, Alexis challenges the image of Péralte as a “lawless bandit” by introducing readers to Péralte as a man who also gained prominence because of how he used “his pen” and because of the nationwide recognition of “his political portraiture” (p. 3). Ten chronological chapters survey pivotal and prominent moments from the existing historiography: the 1915 US military invasion of Haiti, the US military mission's official end in 1934, the 29-year dictatorship of François and then Jean-Claude Duvalier, and the transition to popular democratic rule after Duvalier's 1986 exile, which resulted in ongoing foreign intervention.Alexis's source base is abundant, interdisciplinary, and original: traditional records from Haiti and the United States (most notably, from the US Marines, Navy, and State Department archives), letters and other writings from Péralte, his eldest brother (Saül), and his mother (Anne-Marie Claire Emmanuel, also known as Madame Masséna), oral histories (including conversations with three of Péralte's descendants and residents of Péralte's hometown, Hinche), newspapers, published primary sources, murals, paintings, literature (particularly by Haitian women), radio transmissions, and ethnographic observations. These primary sources allow Alexis to foreground how the “subaltern speak and act” (p. 3). She discusses them alongside an equally diverse secondary literature, particularly grounded in Haitian-authored historiography and scholarship based outside Haiti on resistance.Through Alexis's efforts, we learn about Péralte's leadership style, how he came to lead the cacos, and how his enduring legacy epitomizes the fact that historical memory is central in Haitian nationalism. Alexis points to Péralte's privileged economic background (due to military positions that he and his family members held), his prestigious schooling, his nationwide and diplomatic political appointments, and family bonds as factors that helped Péralte garner widespread respect for himself. Moreover, Péralte's ability to convey profound connections between past and present, combined with his vast knowledge of Haiti's terrain and communities, allowed him to recruit fighters and establish strategies that generated support for anti-imperial campaigns across cities, regions, social classes, and gender lines.Alexis goes beyond the “man-made boundary” of most narratives by foregrounding the Haitian women in the cacos and broader anti-invasion campaign (p. 18). She introduces letters from Péralte's mother to her son that offered Péralte strategy and encouragement during his missions, women who took up arms, women who produced literary writing as a form of protest, and women who mobilized against both the invasion and domestic forms of gender-based oppression, including disenfranchisement.Alexis also documents how enduring Péralte's legacy is and the centrality of historical memory to diverse articulations of Haitian nationalism by engaging diverse ethnographic sources. Haitian artist Philomé Obin's paintings of Péralte between 1944 and 1970, the 1982 founding of the Charlemagne Péralte Center in New York City by activist priests in exile, the inclusion of anti-imperialist ideas in the manifesto of the Port-au-Prince–based political party named Front Charlemagne Péralte de Liberation Nationale, and the inclusion of Péralte's name and image on the painted facades of a barbershop in Brooklyn, New York, and a Haitian schoolhouse in 2008 are among the ways that Alexis demonstrates how Péralte is remembered or “resurrected” (a word she uses in chapter 8's title) to critique foreign intervention and the authoritarianism of Haitian heads of state, in addition to extending a bond that Alexis names “patriotic kinship” (p. 7). Alexis contributed to such memory making by commissioning original art for the book's vivid cover, which conveys the dignity and power that she argues for in the book.Readers might appreciate anticipating Alexis's stylistic decision to interject Haitian Kreyòl throughout the narrative. Translations and wordplay accentuate the authenticity of Alexis's overall writing tone. Still, amid brilliant turns of phrases and concepts, most readers may need to pace themselves to capture the many layers in Alexis's argument.Overall, Haiti Fights Back is a groundbreaking work of interdisciplinary history based on conscientious methodology, abundant findings, pointed arguments, and numerous paths for academic and nonacademic readers to deepen their study of Haiti, Haitian experiences, US imperialism, and the resistance practices of women and men in anti-oppression campaigns that transcend time and space.

Ecological Disquisitions on Six Paintings by Edouard Jean

Abstract: Capois artist Edouard Jean (1953–) created this group of paintings especially for a Haitian Studies Association conference, held in Cap-Haïtien in 2016, with the environment as its central theme. Jean is among the artists who were students and then colleagues of Philomé Obin, founder of the “School of the North History Painters.” Many of Jean’s works depict scenes of Haitian history, and he has been observed walking about with a rolled-up copy of a paperback book on Haitian history sticking out from his back pocket. His history paintings always include keenly observed and finely executed flowers and trees, and he has created many works where these are the subject. When he heard of the conference on the environment, he wanted to make a set of works that would tell some of the story, often distressing, that he was observing around him. With the collaboration of his main collector, Laetitia Schuett, Jean has made the paintings available for this special issue of the journal.

Archiving Black Diasporas

Archiving Black Diasporas

La Maison d’Haïti: Haitian Stories of Resistance and Black Diasporic Activism in Montréal, 1972–1986

La Maison d’Haïti, a community-based organization in Montréal founded in 1972, was an important locus of Haitian diasporic activism during the era of Duvalier’s dictatorship (1957–1986). Part of this activism relied on mobilizing Haitian history in the Canadian context. Activists revived histories of Haitian resistance and transmitted them through a variety of educational, cultural, and advocacy activities. This historical transmission aimed to mobilize, politicize, and connect community members. It also served in the struggle against racism and discrimination and helped to value community members’ knowledge and experiences. Primary research into La Maison d’Haïti’s archives along with oral history interviews with nine activists involved in the organization demonstrate how their work of community-based historical transmission and activation is inscribed within a longer tradition of Black diasporic activism.

Stirring the Pot of Haitian History , by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Stirring the Pot of Haitian History , by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Uterine fibroid: a socially malignant illness in Haiti

This qualitative study documented the effects of uterine fibroids on the suffering of women in Haiti. It makes a unique contribution by re-socializing this disease, by making visible the social inequalities and what is at stake for the women, for their families, and for healthcare delivery. Uterine fibroid is a benign tumor of the uterus, common in gynecology, but profoundly malignant in how it affects women’s lives. Little has been reported on their lived experiences. Haiti has historical, social, and economic factors that hinder the search for treatment. The study explores how and why patients seek surgical care for uterine fibroids at Mirebalais University Hospital. Seventeen in-depth interviews with patients and seven accompanying family members were conducted and recorded in Creole and translated into English, along with participant observations in two patients’ homes. Content and narrative analysis were done iteratively, and the processual ethnographic method was used to relate our findings to Haitian history, to the context of the study, and to future implications. The women’s experience of accompaniment, their suffering in their pèlerinage (care-seeking journey), and the troubling social impact of uterine fibroids make it a socially malignant illness. The study shows that it is critical to address the suffering of women afflicted with uterine fibroids by strengthening the Haitian health system, improving economic advantages, and establishing ways for them to gain access to social goods and participate in community activities.

Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives ed. by Cécile Accilien and Valérie K. Orlando

Reviewed by: Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives ed. by Cécile Accilien and Valérie K. Orlando Darlène Dubuisson Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives. Edited by Cécile Accilien and Valérie K. Orlando. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2021. ISBN 1683402103. 270 pp. $95 hardcover, $28 paper. Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives is not only a pedagogical toolkit for university instructors but also an interdisciplinary survey of Haitian culture, society, language, art, and artistic forms that reorients readers to new ways of appreciating “Haiti in relation with and to others—their histories and their cultures” (1). The edited volume, which finds its conceptual framing in Édouard Glissant’s notion of relation en tout-monde (“a world in motion” or global interconnectedness) and bell hooks’s engaged pedagogy (student-centered, interactive, and peer-based teaching and learning), models a fruitful and reciprocal relationship between scholarship and teaching. [End Page 124] The editors group the book chapters in three sections based on teaching subject areas: 1. Teaching about Haitian Art, Literature, and Language 2. Teaching about Haitian History and Politics 3. Teaching about Haiti in American Studies, Latin American Studies, and General Studies Contexts Following Gina Athena Ulysse’s 2015 call for new narratives of Haiti, Teaching Haiti is the first book about Haiti that focuses exclusively on pedagogy—the method and practice of teaching. The book grapples with how instructors can employ critical pedagogy to foster narratives of Haiti that combat the exclusionary epistemologies that operate within higher education institutions in the Global North. But more than providing strategies and resources (including sample lesson plans and syllabi) for furthering new narratives, Teaching Haiti is itself a compilation of such narratives. The book is a direct engagement with Haitian proverbs, particularly Ayiti se tè glise (“Haiti is a slippery land”) (1). This adage points to Haiti’s complexity but does not suggest Haiti is unknowable. Instead, it challenges surface-level approaches to Haiti and demands deeper, layered analyses that refuse to reduce Haiti/Haitians to fixed, rigid stereotypes. Each chapter, therefore, follows the format of narrative/counternarrative, speaking to and against stereotypical approaches to Haiti while drawing readers toward more profound and complete understandings. Section 1, “Teaching about Haitian Art, Literature, and Language,” draws on Haitian creative, artistic, and scholarly production to dismantle hegemonic discourses and deconstruct disciplinary boundaries. The section begins with Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s engagement with and challenge to the notion of Haitian women as poto mitan—that is, pillars of society. Jean-Charles offers an intersectional (Black feminist) approach that asks students to engage and analyze the interplay between discourse and counterdiscourse through film and texts written by Haitian women, among others. In chapter 2, Bonnie Thomas refers to historical and textual analyses of Rodney Saint-Éloi’s writings to reframe salient literary themes of exile, diaspora, home, and belonging. The chapter proposes ways to lead students in understanding how Saint-Éloi’s work as an écrivan engagé (engaged writer) “offers new insights into issues affecting Haiti and the wider world” (45). In the following chapter, Joubert Satyre discusses how to introduce students to modern Haitian theater, situating two dramatic genres: historical drama and comedy of manners. The lessons [End Page 125] Satyre provides use contextualized readings of Franck Fouché’s Bouqui au Paradis (Bouqui in Paradise) to combat misconceptions of Haitian Vodou and folklore. In chapter 4, Cécile Accilien, one of the co-editors of the volume, examines the intersection of art and religion, highlighting modes of teaching Vodou iconography in Haitian contemporary art. Section 1 ends with Don Walicek’s chapter on teaching Kreyòl using interdisciplinary and decolonial methods. Walicek’s contribution, like the others in the section, challenges derisive ways of (mis)comprehending Haiti, or in the case of Walicek’s chapter, Kreyòl. Section 2, “Teaching about Haitian History and Politics,” directly confronts misguided and racist depictions of Haitian history and politics in North American and European media. The section opens with a historical analysis of Haiti-US relations during the presidencies of John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams. In this chapter, Darren Staloff and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken center Haiti...

The Political Project of Marie Sainte Dédée Bazile (Défilée): Reappropriating This Heritage to Build the Present

The Political Project of Marie Sainte Dédée Bazile (Défilée): Reappropriating This Heritage to Build the Present Sabine Lamour On January 31, 2020, a gathering was held to remember the massacre that had occurred in La Saline, the second-largest slum in Port-au-Prince, on November 13 and 14, 2018.1 Attended by family members of the victims as well as Haitian civil society representatives, feminists, and activists from human rights organizations including Solidarite Fanm Ayisyèn (SOFA) and the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), the event was titled Ann Refè Jès Défilée a! (Let us repeat Défilée’s gesture!).2 According to a report published by RNDDH (2018), several state dignitaries had participated in plotting and carrying out the carnage in La Saline. This service functioned as a symbolic gesture that enabled the living to mourn and provided an appropriate burial for the dead—similar to the duty that Défilée had fulfilled in 1806 when she gathered the remains of Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines and gave him an honorable burial after his assassination on October 17, 1806. Défilée prevented the body of Dessalines, the founder of the Haitian nation, from being left on the street and eaten by animals. Haitian historiography has erased the political dimension of Défilée’s civilizing act and humanizing intervention. This historiography seems to disregard the accomplishments of women; their narratives do not hold historical value, nor do they provide meanings to Haiti’s collective dynamics in the same way as men who are, in contrast, revered as the fathers of the nation. Studies that mention women’s actions and recount their lives3 as part of Haiti’s national epic are almost nonexistent. Instead, scholars of Haitian history devote their attention to the biographies and [End Page 62] thoughts of Toussaint, Dessalines, Pétion, and Christophe. Venerated as ancestors and elevated to the rank of fathers of the nation, these four men occupy the most prominent places in Haitian memorial celebrations. Their actions, deeds, and gestures are analyzed and examined by academics in Haiti and abroad. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Défilée la folle. Painting by Patricia Brintle, reprinted with permission. Women do not have the status of mothers of the Haitian nation,4 nor are they considered ancestors whose actions are worth remembering. When they appear in accounts of Haitian history, scholars tend to list their actions in footnotes; their political positions are often linked to those of men, or their decisions are perceived as being influenced by men. Pushed to the side, women’s words and actions reach current generations through anecdotes and jokes whose historical significance is overlooked. Unknown or nicknamed with sobriquets, women are discredited as ancestors and their contributions devalued. Similar to dominant epistemologies of the Global North, Haitian history ignores gender relations and women’s accomplishments. However, in Haiti and abroad, and in various fields of research, some scholars are striving to excavate the contributions of women in the [End Page 63] history of Haiti. The earliest discussion began with the publication of Madeleine Sylvain Bouchereau’s thesis Haïti et ses femmes in 1957; Grace Louise Sanders (2013, 2023) undertook a systematic review of women’s activism during and after the United States Occupation of 1915–1934. In Haitian literature, Évelyne Trouillot (2001, 2003, 2010, 2020) and Marie-Célie Agnant (2007, 2015) stand out among those who use history to expose the erasure of women and give a voice to them. In addition to these novelists, Yveline Alexis (2021) highlights the contributions of women to the Caco movement in her study Fight Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte. Like Sabine Manigat (2013), Alexis explains that Haitian historiography constrains women to the roles of wives, mistresses, or lovers of those considered heroes. Similarly, Jasmine Claude-Narcisse (1997) explains in an interview with Radio Haiti that even such figures as Joute Lachenais, who was the wife of President Pétion and then of President Boyer, are wholly ignored in the examination of Haitian history between 1806 and 1843. In analyzing...

Twin Pillars of Resistance: Vodou and Haitian Kreyòl in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti [Stirring the Pot of Haitian History

Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s first book, Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti [Stirring the Pot of Haitian History] (1977), exposes the foundational role of Haitian Vodou and the Kreyòl language in Haiti’s Revolution (1791-1804). The unprecedented victory achieved by the enslaved people in the former French colony of Saint Domingue was a useful paradigm for subsequent Latin American independence movements, starting with Simón Bolívar’s liberation of Venezuela (1811-19). This essay analyzes selected passages from Ti difé boulé that explicitly incorporate Vodou songs, prayers, and terminology to show how Trouillot provocatively deploys oral sources of historical narrative and memory. The young activist, writing in Haitian Kreyòl from New York City during the darkest days of the Duvalier régime, powerfully contests official versions of Haitian history by emphasizing the Haitian people’s agency. Vodou and Kreyòl, born out of struggle within a repressive colonial framework, are the great coherencies underlying Haitian resistance. Ti difé boulé examines neocolonial patterns of oppression emerging during the nineteenth century and critiques revolutionary icon Toussaint Louverture, revealing how Haiti’s predatory State harnessed Vodou to continue systematically subjugating the Haitian people. Trouillot’s innovative yet understudied masterpiece offers contemporary readers “new narratives” of Haiti. As twin pillars of Haitian resistance and cultural identity, Vodou and Kreyòl remain a vital and vibrant part of the American heritage. They merit more nuanced understandings within a cultural and political context where they have increasingly come under siege, inside and outside of Haiti.

Stirring the Pot of Haitian History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Reviewed by: Stirring the Pot of Haitian History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot Jean-Ederson Jean-Pierre Stirring the Pot of Haitian History. By Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Translated and edited by Mariana Past and Benjamin Hebblethwaite. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-800-85967-8. 240 pp. €90.00 hardback; €90.00 e-book. Forty-four years after its first publication, Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti (1977), originally written in Kreyòl by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, is now available [End Page 190] to an English-speaking readership thanks to its brilliant translation by Mariana Past and Benjamin Hebblethwaite under the title Stirring the Pot of Haitian History. This seminal work of seven chapters is an in-depth analysis of the Haitian Revolution through the lens of Marxism and demonstrates how conflicts between and among social classes in Saint-Domingue have determined the future of the country. The first chapter introduces a gathering organized by the character Lamèsi on the return of Grinn Prominnin, whose mission was to investigate the roots of his community’s hardships. Arguing that the community’s issues are deeply grounded in the past, Grinn Prominnin begins to narrate Haiti’s history, starting with the settlement of the French in Saint-Domingue. Hence, chapter 2 focuses on the Kòd Noua, which is “the first major law that took shape in Haiti” (10). The storyteller argues that, despite its pretension of being in the interest of enslaved people, this sixty-article legal document “primarily served the interest of the classes controlling the State” (10). Chapter 3 is devoted to identifying the classes involved in the main conflict in Saint-Domingue’s society. To do this, the storyteller pinpoints the plantation system as the society’s primary industry. After revealing the features of this industry, Grinn Prominnin concludes that the primary conflict in Saint-Domingue was a dual one: enslaved people versus both plantation owners and French commissioners (38). He also emphasizes that this twin conflict was what led to the collapse of the colonial society. Chapter 4 is dedicated to the three coalitions that supported the power of the upper classes: the big colonists’ coalition, the free coalition, and the white coalition. During the 1789–1791 period, these coalitions split. Consequently, “the upper classes’ power was unraveling” (49). However, Grinn Prominnin argues, “that stumble wouldn’t have mattered if the slaves hadn’t gotten involved” (49). In other words, although the upper classes were losing ground, the revolution would not have taken place if the enslaved people had not revolted. With that being said, the storyteller identifies what mainly made the enslaved people decide to stand up for their freedom. First, the conflicts among other classes showed the enslaved people “how much power they could have with weapons in their hands” (51). Second, the idea of equality among all people outlined in the Declaration of the French bourgeoisie was one of the enslaved people’s sources of inspiration. Finally, and this is the most important point, the native-born culture strengthens the enslaved people’s conviction and enables them to better organize themselves by means of its three main features: land, Vodou, and the Creole language (53). Chapter 5 is centered on the Civil Commission of July 1792. Composed of Sonthonax, Polverel, [End Page 191] and Ailhaud, this commission was sent by the French government to keep Saint-Domingue under France’s control. However, because of what was happening in France, as well as Saint-Domingue’s political situation, the commissioners did not manage to establish a coalition between white and mulatto plantation owners to bring peace in the colony. Faced with the threat of other colonial powers at that time, the commissioners had to rely on the masses of enslaved people to keep Saint-Domingue under the control of France. That is why Sonthonax finally decided to honor the right of the enslaved to their legal freedom in August 1793. Chapter 6 is divided in three sections, elaborating on how Toussaint ended up taking control of Saint-Domingue. The first section unveils the political agenda and tactics of Toussaint’s organization. On the one hand, Toussaint demanded freedom and equality for all. On...

Inheriting Haitian History: Communal Memory and Diasporic Arts of Resistance

Inheriting Haitian History: Communal Memory and Diasporic Arts of Resistance

Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination by Toni Pressley-Sanon

Reviewed by: Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination by Toni Pressley-Sanon Angela Watkins Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination. By Toni Pressley-Sanon. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. ISBN 0-8130-5440-7. 192 pp. $74.95 hardcover. In Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination, Toni Pressley-Sanon foregrounds her examination of cultural production and cultural memory in the African diaspora within three theoretical concepts: tidalectics (the figurative ebb and flow of water that symbolizes the transatlantic dispersal of enslaved Africans and the resulting physical/metaphysical displacement), La Marassa (the sacred twins in Haitian Vodou), and istwa (history, story, and memory).1 Tracing the origins of enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) to Dahomey (present-day Benin) and the Kongo, Pressley-Sanon explores how African belief systems were sustained and redefined in the New World despite the attempted erasure by slave owners and colonists. At times poetic in her explanation of the African diaspora as both fractured and reinvented in an attempt to be made whole, Pressley-Sanon reimagines the capture and survival of enslaved Africans and the transformation of cultural practices that preceded slavery. Beginning with the significance of Haiti's bicolor flag, legendarily created by removing the French flag's white stripe—which, according to Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, had once symbolized the white, slave-owning population of Saint-Domingue (1–2)—Pressley-Sanon contextualizes the fight for independence during the Haitian Revolution as the reclamation of African roots among free and enslaved people of color and the (re)invention of Haitian identity. According to the author, the blue and red of the Haitian flag, which represent the Black and mulatto populations, respectively, also symbolize "two lwa who were invoked most strongly during the Haitian Revolution: Èzili Dantò and Ogou Feray" (1). Bolstered by faith in the African deities from whom they sought guidance and protection, the insurgents defeated their oppressors. [End Page 208] In her book, Pressley-Sanon examines storytelling as an integral part of African and African diasporic culture. She recalls the story of Bokofio, which Melville Herskovits writes about in Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (1938) after an anthropological field study in the 1930s. Bokofio is taken on a treacherous journey before he is freed and allowed to return home. Pressley-Sanon presents three scenarios through which the story may be understood. She reinscribes the protagonist as someone uprooted from his homeland as a result of the transatlantic slave trade, who is taken to new lands and forced to adapt to a new way of life. Alternatively, she interprets Bokofio's "return" as the physical return to Africa after the end of slavery, in reference to documented cases in which newly freed people were sent back to their native land. Finally, she suggests that Bokofio's return to his homeland is an allusion to the belief that after death the souls of enslaved Africans return to Ginen, the spiritual underworld. She argues that both the oral tradition and the material culture specific to certain regions of the African continent and its diaspora reveal a deeper understanding of how enslaved people "died to one way of being as a result of their contact with the transatlantic slave trade [and] were also reborn to another" (11). According to Pressley-Sanon, the forced assimilation involved the act of forgetting (due to the passage of time or as a survival technique) or maintaining one's cultural beliefs by adopting Western religions and practices as a guise. Pressley-Sanon focuses on material culture in explaining tidalectics in terms of the cyclical nature of history, specifically focusing on how the past informs the present and the recognition of contemporary iterations of bondage and racial oppression. She also explores how these ruptures, as a consequence of chattel slavery, led to a fusion and reinterpretation of various African cultural practices. For example, she refers both to a performance group in Haiti whose costumes consist of cords that represent the power of bociọ, sculptures crafted "to 'work' for their owners to shield them against harm and function in conjunction with vodun [sic] energies to protect humans and...

Peasant Resistance in Post-Revolutionary Haiti

Peasant Resistance in Post-Revolutionary Haiti Miranda Frances Spieler (bio) Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xii + 302 pp. $40.00. Jean Alix René, Haïti après l’esclavage : formation de l’état et culture politique populaire (1804–1846). Port-au-Prince: Communication Plus, 2019. CAD50.00. As this essay goes to press, Haiti, the subject of both books under review, is in turmoil after the slaying of its president, Jovenel Moïse (“I am not a dictator”), by Colombian hitmen.1 At least three people have put themselves forward as successors. The country is under martial law and without a government. Meanwhile, in quite a different spirit, Haiti has been an unusually prominent theme of discussion in France, Haiti’s defrocked overlord, for months. In April 2021, the French media and political class began reckoning with the legacy of Napoleon on the two hundredth anniversary of his death. The link between Bonaparte and Haiti opens from the first consul’s failed attempt to reenslave the Haitian people. In 1802, a French expeditionary force comprised of fifty thousand soldiers reached the island of Hispaniola under the command of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, General Charles-Victor Emmanuel Leclerc. Tasked with reimposing slavery, the invaders triggered an anti-colonial war. By making reenslavement a key to French colonial policy, Napoleon hastened the founding of the independent Haitian state.2 With Haiti paralyzed by gang violence and political infighting, it seems fitting that both books under review should chronicle the survival strategies of Haitian peasants in their struggle against Haitian officialdom since independence. ________ In the era of slavery, the word maroon or marron denoted slaves who fled from his master, temporarily or permanently. In some colonies—Surinam, Jamaica, French Saint Domingue, French Guiana, Mauritius—maroons lived in remote forests or mountains, grouped around charismatic leaders or in small kingdoms. In Maroon Nation, Johnhenry Gonzalez uses a term associated with the era of slavery to describe the identity of nineteenth-century peasants, who [End Page 413] exited bondage and attained national sovereignty and yet remained unfree. For Gonzalez, rural folk after the abolition of slavery and especially after 1804, when Haiti declared independence, created a social, religious, and economic world based on clandestine anti-institutional practices. The ruses of Haiti’s peasantry made it possible for them to resist and evade Haiti’s predatory post-colonial state. In writing of rural life this way, Gonzalez challenges stereotypes of Haitians that are commonplace in the literature of underdevelopment, in which rural Haitians figure as hide-bound traditionalists who refuse all agricultural innovation, to their peril, out of mere stubborness. For Gonzalez, by contrast, Haitian peasant culture is defined by stealthy modernity. Marronnage, originally a term for slave flight, looms large over Haitian history, first as historical experience, later as metaphor and national myth. The mid-20th-century dictator François Duvalier (“Papa Doc”) turned the figure of the marron or runaway slave into the embodiment of the Haitian state, including his own regime, with the inauguration in Port-au-Prince of the now famed monument by Albert Mangonès, Le marron inconnu (1967). Haitian historians of their Revolution, beginning with Jean Fouchard, have traced the origins of the 1791 slave revolt, which lauched the Haitian revolution, to maroon resistance. 3 The supposed importance of maroon groups to the 1791 revolt has been debunked by the historian David Geggus and is unrelated to Gonzalez’s book, which focuses on the period after slavery and independence.4 The use of the word marronnage as a metaphor for the struggle of emancipated peasants against the Haitian state originates with the Haitian historian Gérard Barthélémy, in his classic work L’univers rural haitien: le pays en dehors (1989) [Rural life in Haiti: The country outside]. Gonzalez is indebted to the work of earlier Haitian historians, but takes an original approach to marronnage. Where Barthélémy emphasizes continuity between the folkways of African slaves and peasants in independent Haiti, Gonzalez is interested in marronnage as a form of modernity. The new marronnage was a reaction against authoritarian regimes of the post-emancipation and post...

Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean ed. by Vanessa K. Valdés

Reviewed by: Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean ed. by Vanessa K. Valdés John T. Maddox IV Valdés, Vanessa K., editor. Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean. SUNY P, 2020. Pp. 276. ISBN 978-1-438-48103-6. Once again, Vanessa K. Valdés has proven herself a leader in Afro-Latin American and Latinx studies in this bound volume of essays on Haiti in the Hispanic Caribbean. While William Luis's Voices from Under (1984) already recognizes the importance of the Haitian Revolution in the Spanish-speaking islands, followed by the Afro-Hispanic Review 32.2 (2013), to name two examples, Valdés et alia do the necessary work of showing how the First Black Republic changed the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the world. In Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, Valdés includes a consolidated timeline to show key events of the three Antilles' shared history. A forward from Myriam J. A. Chancy, author of From Sugar to Revolution (2012), passes the torch to Valdés of recognizing Haiti's far-reaching, revolutionary impact through scholarship. The editor's introduction argues that, despite centuries of "racialized visions" that presented the Haitian nation as barbaric, it is a symbol of black liberation. Leaders like Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Miranda visited the republic for inspiration. Sadly, this epic history includes France's charging Haitians for their own freedom after fighting off their enslavers, sinking it into debt. Afterward, invasions, dictatorships, and disasters made Haiti the poorest nation in the Americas and a source of vulnerable migrant labor. Cuba is the topic of contributions by Natalie Marie Léger, Philip Kaisary, and Erika V. Serrato. Léger revisits Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World (1949) to show that the novel, like today's Haitian migrants to Cuba, belongs to both nations. She shows the deep influence of black people on what Carpentier called the marvelous real, one of Latin American literature's most-studied aspects. She notes the historical ties between the exodus from Saint-Domingue and Santiago de Cuba. Tying the erudite canonical work to one of the most marginalized diaspora is unique. Kaisary revisits Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's classic film La última cena (1976) to indicate how an enslaver's recreation of the Last Supper devolves into violence as the enslaved rise up, mimicking the Haitian Revolution. Ultimately, the captives are crucified. The close reading draws interesting connections. Serrato compares Nicolás Guillén to the post-Revolutionary voice of Jesús Cos Causse. The latter was deeply inspired by the founder of Haitian indigenisme Jacque Roumain, whom Cos Causse called "The Quijote Negro." He seeks to link the two iconic Caribbean uprisings. Serrato contributes to forming a Afro-Caribbean canon. Puerto Rico is the focus for Valdés and Mariana Past's chapters. Valdés unearths an all-but-forgotten series of texts of lectures by Haitian diplomat Dantès Bellegarde, who visited the United States-controlled island during the time of independentista Pedro Albizu Campos and draws parallels between their thought. This connection is innovative and will lead to more discoveries at the Río Piedras archive she consulted. Past intersperses Haitian history into her close reading of a short story by Ana Lydia Vega. In Vega's allegory, the Caribbean nations are individuals on a boat that cannot achieve unity to reach their destination, a metaphor for South-South solidarity. These chapters will interest historians and literary scholars. The Dominican Republic is, understandably, the most-discussed region, since it shares a border with Haiti and centuries of conflicted and contradictory negotiations with it. Claudy Delné traces the fluctuating and permeable western border of the Hispanic republic in history and literature since 1791. Since 2013, it has become contentious as numerous Haitians and those "accused" of being from that nation must show documentation or be deported to Haiti. Since the ruling requires investigating records going back to 1929 and prosecuting those born from 1984 onward, it seems to be a return to Trujillo-era policies that came to a head in 1937 with the "Parsley Massacre" of thousands of Haitians at the border...

Silencing the Present? Decolonization, Nationalization, and Natural Right(s) in Émeric Bergeaud’sStella(1859)

AbstractÉmeric Bergeaud wroteStella(1859), his novelistic account of the Haitian revolution (1791–1804), at a most turbulent moment in Haitian history. Faustin Soulouque rose to power in the late 1840 s and soon began to pursue his political opponents with violent means. Coming from a “Boyerist” background, Bergeaud fled the country in 1848 and settled in St. Thomas where he worked on his novel while his health deteriorated. Despite his precarious life in exile, Bergeaud remained silent about Soulouque in his decisively political novelStella. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Madeleine Dobie, and others have shown, the history of slavery has often been silenced in literature and public debate, but what does it mean for Bergeaud to silence the present and focus on the past? I argue thatStellain fact makes a significant intervention in the debates about mid-19th-century Haiti. Instead of confronting Soulouque directly, however, Bergeaud addresses a pair of structural problems of which I consider Soulouque and his policy emblematic expressions: decolonization and nationalization. Most existing readings have emphasized Bergeaud’s reflections on history, but in this contextualized analysis, I show that Bergeaud looks not only to the past but also and importantly to nature and natural right(s) philosophy in his novelistic search for a way forward for Haiti.

Haitian Archaeological Heritage: Understanding Its Loss and Paths to Future Preservation

Haitian archaeological heritage is expressed through multiple traces of Amerindian cultures, enslaved African legacies, ruins of old colonial plantations and fortresses, and post-Haitian independence. Despite the existence of legal institutions engaged in the protection of this heritage, Haitian archaeological sites are becoming more threatened because of looting, appropriation of spaces, and lands management, as well as natural hazards. This paper aims to explore the current state of archaeological heritage with the broader context of the politics of heritage in Haiti. We analyzed the conditions of archaeological sites from the northern region and addressed their place in official heritage practices. The results of this study revealed that most of the archaeological sites that reflect the complexity of Haitian history are not given much attention in the politics of heritage that prioritize the nationalistic and emblematic character of historic traces. This study highlighted the importance of a new approach that prioritizes multiple voices to address heritage matters for the future.

The benefits of diplomatic recognition: Haitian abolitionism and Dominican sovereignty in the Atlantic world, 1822–1830

ABSTRACT In 1825, France recognized its former colony Haiti's independence, ending an over twenty-year struggle for the black republic to obtain legal recognition as a sovereign state but saddling it with a financial indemnity that crippled its economy. This article argues that France's formal recognition of the republic gave Haiti an important advantage to defend its sovereignty as a legitimate nation, as well as its political union with Santo Domingo in 1822. In doing so, the study brings together two bodies of literature that rarely speak to one another: nineteenth-century Haitian diplomatic history and works treating Dominicans’ experience under Haitian rule. This article will focus on the aftermath of French recognition of Haitian independence that affected British commercial negotiations with Haiti. Finally, it will examine how Haiti's recognized independence forced the Spanish to enter diplomatic talks with the Haitians over sovereignty and rule in Santo Domingo.

There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince by Greg Beckett

Reviewed by: There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince by Greg Beckett Erica Caple James Greg Beckett. There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 312 pp. Greg Beckett. There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 312 pp. In this ethnography, researched during intermittent periods of fieldwork in Haiti from 2002 until after the 2010 earthquake, Greg Beckett shows how phenomena I characterized as ensekirite ("insecurity" in Haitian Creole)—the unpredictability, violence, and resulting embodied vulnerability of Haitians (and to lesser degree, others residing in the nation)—have become routine rather than exceptional. Beckett uses a similar concept of dezòd (disorder) to characterize the unpredictability of social, political, environmental, and economic ruptures across chapters anchored by the experiences of intrepid individuals. The work is sprawling, both temporally and geographically, but centers primarily in Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital. Beckett launches his study of the lived experience of vulnerability from Martissant, a community in which I also conducted ethnographic work (from 1996–2000). The neighborhood, residing along both sides of a national route to southern Haiti, is a highly densely populated coastal area that ranges from seaside shanties to older established middle-class homes, as well as squatter settlements in the ravines and higher elevations of the mountain range that parallels the sea. The continuities in the phenomena Beckett describes (and even the theoretical frameworks employed to contextualize them) provide uncanny and heartbreaking confirmation of my own witnessing and analysis of "routines of rupture," and the "ontological insecurity" that enduring social precarity produces, in the lived experience of many Haitians (James 2008, 2010). It is challenging to offer reflections on a work whose themes, events, theoretical orientation, [End Page 811] and locales overlap deeply with my own. What follows is a reflection not only on the book, but also on the ethics and practice of ethnography. With its provocative (and dispiriting) title, There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince, Beckett aims to describe how environmental and urban crises are intertwined with the ongoing crisis of the state. The author takes great pains to articulate his struggles to tell a story of "crisis" rooted in the experiences of people who lived in, advocated for, and attempted to control a forest in Martissant. In early chapters, the lens through which the reader comes to understand these dynamics is Beckett's narration of the lives of a range of intimate associates—predominantly younger and middle-aged men—who attempt to survive and seek life (chache lavi) amidst the unpredictable ebbs and flows of ensekirite. He also portrays the views of some Haitian and expatriate elites whose political and economic interests are vested in controlling the political economy of crisis. The methodological choice of focusing on stories recounted and remembered give the ethnography more of a novelistic style in which the context and deep historical roots that frame the situations narrated are enfolded within the story. Beckett's theoretical analyses are largely contained in the endnotes. For readers who are new to Haiti's history and the unfolding of various contemporary crises, this mode of writing creates an accessible text that is engaging to read, but may also leave some of the empirical and theoretical nuance in the background and to be sought in referenced texts. Beckett's voice (and role) is at times that of the omniscient narrator, and at others one of a concerned friend who is willing to risk personal safety to seek the story, to witness, and to support others in need materially and emotionally. But a shift occurs between the initial and later chapters that may reflect the author's dilemma of how to capture an encompassing, rather than "ethnographically intimate" (10) and more localized story. The book culminates in detailed descriptions of a succession of "unnatural" disasters that strike the nation over a decade and continues a narrative of unending crisis that can be experienced as debilitating to his resilient colleagues. But in detailing these stories, Beckett may also be perpetuating...