The Haiti Reader

The Haiti Reader PDF Author: Laurent Dubois
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9781478006770
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
While Haiti established the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere and was the first black country to gain independence from European colonizers, its history is not well known in the Anglophone world. The Haiti Reader introduces readers to Haiti's dynamic history and culture from the viewpoint of Haitians from all walks of life. Its dozens of selections—most of which appear here in English for the first time—are representative of Haiti's scholarly, literary, religious, visual, musical, and political cultures, and range from poems, novels, and political tracts to essays, legislation, songs, and folk tales. Spanning the centuries between precontact indigenous Haiti and the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, the Reader covers widely known episodes in Haiti's history, such as the U.S. military occupation and the Duvalier dictatorship, as well as overlooked periods such as the decades immediately following Haiti's “second independence” in 1934. Whether examining issues of political upheaval, the environment, or modernization, The Haiti Reader provides an unparalleled look at Haiti's history, culture, and politics.

The Haiti Reader

The Haiti Reader PDF Author: Laurent Dubois
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9781478006770
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
While Haiti established the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere and was the first black country to gain independence from European colonizers, its history is not well known in the Anglophone world. The Haiti Reader introduces readers to Haiti's dynamic history and culture from the viewpoint of Haitians from all walks of life. Its dozens of selections—most of which appear here in English for the first time—are representative of Haiti's scholarly, literary, religious, visual, musical, and political cultures, and range from poems, novels, and political tracts to essays, legislation, songs, and folk tales. Spanning the centuries between precontact indigenous Haiti and the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, the Reader covers widely known episodes in Haiti's history, such as the U.S. military occupation and the Duvalier dictatorship, as well as overlooked periods such as the decades immediately following Haiti's “second independence” in 1934. Whether examining issues of political upheaval, the environment, or modernization, The Haiti Reader provides an unparalleled look at Haiti's history, culture, and politics.

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History PDF Author: Laurent Dubois
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 0805095624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
A passionate and insightful account by a leading historian of Haiti that traces the sources of the country's devastating present back to its turbulent and traumatic history Even before the 2010 earthquake destroyed much of the country, Haiti was known as a benighted place of poverty and corruption. Maligned and misunderstood, the nation has long been blamed by many for its own wretchedness. But as acclaimed historian Laurent Dubois makes clear, Haiti's troubled present can only be understood by examining its complex past. The country's difficulties are inextricably rooted in its founding revolution—the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world; the hostility that this rebellion generated among the colonial powers surrounding the island nation; and the intense struggle within Haiti itself to define its newfound freedom and realize its promise. Dubois vividly depicts the isolation and impoverishment that followed the 1804 uprising. He details how the crushing indemnity imposed by the former French rulers initiated a devastating cycle of debt, while frequent interventions by the United States—including a twenty-year military occupation—further undermined Haiti's independence. At the same time, Dubois shows, the internal debates about what Haiti should do with its hard-won liberty alienated the nation's leaders from the broader population, setting the stage for enduring political conflict. Yet as Dubois demonstrates, the Haitian people have never given up on their struggle for true democracy, creating a powerful culture insistent on autonomy and equality for all. Revealing what lies behind the familiar moniker of "the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere," this indispensable book illuminates the foundations on which a new Haiti might yet emerge.

Taking Haiti

Taking Haiti PDF Author: Mary A. Renda
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807862185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
The U.S. invasion of Haiti in July 1915 marked the start of a military occupation that lasted for nineteen years--and fed an American fascination with Haiti that flourished even longer. Exploring the cultural dimensions of U.S. contact with Haiti during the occupation and its aftermath, Mary Renda shows that what Americans thought and wrote about Haiti during those years contributed in crucial and unexpected ways to an emerging culture of U.S. imperialism. At the heart of this emerging culture, Renda argues, was American paternalism, which saw Haitians as wards of the United States. She explores the ways in which diverse Americans--including activists, intellectuals, artists, missionaries, marines, and politicians--responded to paternalist constructs, shaping new versions of American culture along the way. Her analysis draws on a rich record of U.S. discourses on Haiti, including the writings of policymakers; the diaries, letters, songs, and memoirs of marines stationed in Haiti; and literary works by such writers as Eugene O'Neill, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Pathbreaking and provocative, Taking Haiti illuminates the complex interplay between culture and acts of violence in the making of the American empire.

Culture and Customs of Haiti

Culture and Customs of Haiti PDF Author: J. Michael Dash
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1567507395
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Culture and Customs of Haiti begins with an overview of the mountainous island that seemed forbidding to European colonizers. Historical periods, including French colonization, U.S. occupation in the early 20th century, Independence and the Duvaliers' reigns, until today, are reviewed and provide the framework for the volume. A chapter on the people and society details the pride of the black state that managed the only successful slave revolution in history. The extremes of society from the elite to the peasantry and slum dwellers are depicted, along with Haitians in diaspora. Religion in Haiti, with the strong amalgamation of Roman Catholicism and vaudou, a West African import, is then explained. A Social Customs chapter notes the joy that is found in such an economically depressed culture. The media and literature and language chapters necessarily unfold in the context of Haiti's political history. A section on writing in Creole is especially intriguing. Finally, chapters on the performing arts and visual arts evoke the energy and color of the people in such forms as vaudou jazz and dance, contemporary rara rock, and the folkloric influence on Haitian painting. A chronology and glossary supplement the text.

Modernity Disavowed

Modernity Disavowed PDF Author: Sibylle Fischer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822385503
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Modernity Disavowed is a pathbreaking study of the cultural, political, and philosophical significance of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Revealing how the radical antislavery politics of this seminal event have been suppressed and ignored in historical and cultural records over the past two hundred years, Sibylle Fischer contends that revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal are central to the formation and understanding of Western modernity. She develops a powerful argument that the denial of revolutionary antislavery eventually became a crucial ingredient in a range of hegemonic thought, including Creole nationalism in the Caribbean and G. W. F. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Fischer draws on history, literary scholarship, political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory to examine a range of material, including Haitian political and legal documents and nineteenth-century Cuban and Dominican literature and art. She demonstrates that at a time when racial taxonomies were beginning to mutate into scientific racism and racist biology, the Haitian revolutionaries recognized the question of race as political. Yet, as the cultural records of neighboring Cuba and the Dominican Republic show, the story of the Haitian Revolution has been told as one outside politics and beyond human language, as a tale of barbarism and unspeakable violence. From the time of the revolution onward, the story has been confined to the margins of history: to rumors, oral histories, and confidential letters. Fischer maintains that without accounting for revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal, Western modernity—including its hierarchy of values, depoliticization of social goals having to do with racial differences, and privileging of claims of national sovereignty—cannot be fully understood.

Teaching Haiti

Teaching Haiti PDF Author: Cécile Accilien
Publisher: University of Florida Press
ISBN: 9781683403999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume provides guidance on teaching about Haiti's history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective, offering ways of reshaping old narratives through women's and gender studies, poetry, theater, art, religion, language, politics, history, and popular culture.

A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou

A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou PDF Author: Benjamin Hebblethwaite
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496835646
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Connecting four centuries of political, social, and religious history with fieldwork and language documentation, A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou analyzes Haitian Vodou’s African origins, transmission to Saint-Domingue, and promulgation through song in contemporary Haiti. Split into two sections, the African chapters focus on history, economics, and culture in Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda while scrutinizing the role of Europeans in fomenting tensions. The political, military, and slave trading histories of the kingdoms in the Bight of Benin reveal the circumstances of enslavement, including the geographies, ethnicities, languages, and cultures of enslavers and enslaved. The study of the spirits, rituals, structure, and music of the region’s religions sheds light on important sources for Haitian Vodou. Having royal, public, and private expressions, Vodun spirit-based traditions served as cultural systems that supported or contested power and enslavement. At once suppliers and victims of the European slave trade, the people of Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda deeply shaped the emergence of Haiti’s creolized culture. The Haitian chapters focus on Vodou’s Rada Rite (from Allada) and Gede Rite (from Abomey) through the songs of Rasin Figuier’s Vodou Lakay and Rasin Bwa Kayiman’s Guede, legendary rasin compact discs released on Jean Altidor’s Miami label, Mass Konpa Records. All the Vodou songs on the discs are analyzed with a method dubbed “Vodou hermeneutics” that harnesses history, religious studies, linguistics, literary criticism, and ethnomusicology in order to advance a scholarly approach to Vodou songs.

The Haitians

The Haitians PDF Author: Jean Casimir
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
In this sweeping history, leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupation in 1915. The Haitians also critically retheorizes the very nature of slavery, colonialism, and sovereignty. Here, Casimir centers the perspectives of Haiti's moun andeyo—the largely African-descended rural peasantry. Asking how these systematically marginalized and silenced people survived in the face of almost complete political disenfranchisement, Casimir identifies what he calls a counter-plantation system. Derived from Caribbean political and cultural practices, the counter-plantation encompassed consistent reliance on small-scale landholding. Casimir shows how lakou, small plots of land often inhabited by generations of the same family, were and continue to be sites of resistance even in the face of structural disadvantages originating in colonial times, some of which continue to be maintained by the Haitian government with support from outside powers.

Haiti, History, and the Gods

Haiti, History, and the Gods PDF Author: Joan Dayan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520213685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Reprint. Originally published: Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Best Nightmare on Earth

Best Nightmare on Earth PDF Author: Herbert Gold
Publisher: Touchstone Books
ISBN: 9780671755164
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A kaleidoscopic memoir of a 35-year love affair with mysterious, exotic Haiti. The dialogue the author conducts with this beleaguered island is rich with surprising revelations and startling juxtapositions. "The best all-encompassing explanation of this . . . tragic island country that I have read".--Digby Diehl, Playboy.