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This collection ponders the personal and political implications for Haitians at home and abroad resulting from the devastating 2010 earthquake. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 was a debilitating event that followed decades of political, social, and financial issues. Leaving over 250,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, and 1.5 million people homeless, the earthquake has had lasting repercussions on a struggling nation. As the post-earthquake political situation unfolded, Myriam Chancy worked to illuminate on-the-ground concerns, from the vulnerable position of Haitian women to the failures of international aid. Originally presented at invited campus talks, published as columns for a newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago, and circulated in other ways, her essays and creative responses preserve the reactions and urgencies of the years following the disaster. In Harvesting Haiti , Chancy examines the structures that have resulted in Haiti's post-earthquake conditions and reflects at key points after the earthquake on its effects on vulnerable communities. Her essays make clear the importance of sustaining and supporting the dignity of Haitian lives and of creating a better, contextualized understanding of the issues that mark Haitians' historical and present realities, from gender parity to the vexed relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

2023 Best Book in the Humanities, Latin American Studies Association Mexico Section Challenging conventional narratives of Mexican history, this book establishes race-making as a central instrument for the repression of social upheaval in nineteenth-century Mexico rather than a relic of the colonial-era caste system. Many scholars assert that Mexico's complex racial hierarchy, inherited from Spanish colonialism, became obsolete by the turn of the nineteenth century as class-based distinctions became more prominent and a largely mestizo population emerged. But the residues of the colonial caste system did not simply dissolve after Mexico gained independence. Rather, Ana Sabau argues, ever-present fears of racial uprising among elites and authorities led to persistent governmental techniques and ideologies designed to separate and control people based on their perceived racial status, as well as to the implementation of projects for development in fringe areas of the country. Riot and Rebellion in Mexico traces this race-based narrative through three historical flashpoints: the Bajío riots, the Haitian Revolution, and the Yucatan's caste war. Sabau shows how rebellions were treated as racially motivated events rather than political acts and how the racialization of popular and indigenous sectors coincided with the construction of \"whiteness\" in Mexico. Drawing on diverse primary sources, Sabau demonstrates how the race war paradigm was mobilized in foreign and domestic affairs and reveals the foundations of a racial state and racially stratified society that persist today.

Marronnage, or escape from slavery, was a longue-durée form of resistance to slavery in Haiti and was also, as Sylvia Wynter argues, a “dialectical response to the capitalist plantation system”—a system that aimed to deny humanity, sever social and cultural ties, and commodified people and their labor power. This article, as well as works by others such as Cedric Robinson (1983), Sylvia Wynter (n.d.), and Jean Casimir (2020), argues that marronnage was a fundamentally anti-capitalist mode of resistance, socio-political critique, and grassroots mobilizing. In the immediate moments when enslaved people fled plantations, they reclaimed possession of themselves and other tangible and intangible resources, such as their time, social relationships, forms of knowledge, and labor skills that enslavers stole from them. When maroons re-appropriated resources and mobilized themselves, they challenged and subverted colonial plantation structures, contributing to the downfall of both Spanish and French imperial slaveries in Haiti. During and after the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, Africa-born rebels and maroons were central to the mobilizing structures that successfully fought to abolish slavery and overturn colonialism—representing an astounding rupture to the prevailing Atlantic world-system that was dependent upon enslaved labor. Even after the post-independence Haitian government replicated aspects of the colonial administration, as Casimir (2020) points out, the formerly enslaved masses of Haiti organized themselves into communal social arrangements that prioritized subsistence labor and extended kin networks, and continued to rely on marronnage to protest exploitative economic practices. This article explores the trajectory of marronnage in Haiti as a continuous struggle, emphasizing the ways that it exposed the violence, exploitation, and oppression inherently embedded in the Atlantic world-system, and exposed the limits of the governing Haitian states.

This essay explores the possibilities and limits of decentering Europe by examining the Haitian Revolution and contemporary invocations of its legacy among political theorists and historians. Recent accounts of the Haitian Revolution have celebrated its universalism as a realization of French revolutionary ideals. As I argue in the essay, this interpretation undermines the Haitian Revolution’s specificity as the first and only successful revolution against colonial slavery. I offer an alternative interpretation that begins from the specificity of colonial slavery and explores how Haitian revolutionaries inaugurated another universalism linked to individual and collective autonomy. Haitian revolutionaries offered a radical account of black citizenship and envisioned a world order in which both slavery and colonial rule would be transcended. This reinterpretation of the Haitian Revolution offers an alternative approach to what it might mean to decenter Europe—one that begins from the specific political problems subaltern actors encountered and illustrates how ideals are remade in diverse contexts.

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). This essay analyzes selected passages from Ti difé boulé that explicitly incorporate Vodou songs, prayers, and terminology to illustrate how Trouillot provocatively deploys oral sources of historical narrative and memory in his groundbreaking work. The young activist, writing in Haitian Kreyòl from New York City during the Duvalier régime, powerfully contests official versions of Haitian history by emphasizing the agency of the Haitian people. Vodou and Kreyòl, born out of struggle within a repressive colonial framework, are the cohesive forces underlying Haitian resistance. Ti difé boulé examines neocolonial patterns of oppression emerging during the nineteenth century and reassesses revolutionary icon Toussaint Louverture. The government that Louverture established harnessed Vodou to continue systematically subjugating the Haitian people; these class interest-based patterns evolved into Haiti’s deep-rooted predatory State. Trouillot’s innovative yet understudied masterpiece offers contemporary readers “new narratives” of Haiti, recentering its people, spiritual practices, and native language. Vodou and Kreyòl, as twin pillars of Haitian resistance and cultural identity, 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.

This essay surveys the appropriations and transformations of the modern concept of citizenship by the actors of the Haitian Revolution, analyzed through the intertwining of race, plantation labor, and the postcolonial state. The concept of citizenship is interpreted as an instrument of emancipative struggles as well as of practices of government. The reconstruction is focused around four moments: the liberal critique by free people of color of the racial boundaries of French citizenship; the strategic uses of citizenship by the insurgent slaves to secure their freedom; the inclusion of former slaves into citizenship to preserve the plantation system within the republican order; and postcolonial Haitian citizenship. By analyzing the constitutional shifts and the political thinking of different figures, such as Julien Raimond, Georges Biassou, Jean-François, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the essay shows the conceptual originality of Haitian political thought and its relevance for the history of modern political concepts.

The Fear of French Negroes is an interdisciplinary study that explores how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1845). Using visual culture, popular music and dance, periodical literature, historical memoirs, and state papers, Sara E. Johnson examines the migration of people, ideas, and practices across imperial boundaries. Building on previous scholarship on black internationalism, she traces expressions of both aesthetic and experiential transcolonial black politics across the Caribbean world, including Hispaniola, Louisiana and the Gulf South, Jamaica, and Cuba. Johnson examines the lives and work of figures as diverse as armed black soldiers and privateers, female performers, and newspaper editors to argue for the existence of \"competing inter-Americanisms\" as she uncovers the struggle for unity amidst the realities of class, territorial, and linguistic diversity. These stories move beyond a consideration of the well-documented anxiety insurgent blacks occasioned in slaveholding systems to refocus attention on the wide variety of strategic alliances they generated in their quests for freedom, equality and profit.

The Haitian Revolution introduced a seismic shift in political constellations, leading to the constitution of the first free Black republic within the New World. Revolutionary Haiti communicated the content of that freedom as it embarked along the path of revolutionary liberation. This article examines the nature of that communication by demonstrating how political speech is implicated at the formative levels of Black selfhood and statehood through the construction of a Black universalism, which disavows speechlessness and its sublimation as Black barbarism. Ultimately, the article contends a decisive shift transpires from Euromodernity to Afromodernity and with it, the (re)humanization of Blackness.

This paper argues, first, that despite the transnational impact of the Haitian Revolution, it remains mostly unknown in the Western hemisphere. This is primarily the result of an international racist project to repress the idea of Black Revolution and undermine Haiti’s progress. Second, I argue that, since the second half of the 19th century, intellectuals and social scientists have contributed to this racial project, and thus that scientific racism was born primarily as a response to the Haitian Revolution. The proliferation of racially oriented pseudosciences was part of significant efforts on the part of European and American intellectuals to undermine the notion of Black Revolution and Black power, and to demonstrate that Blacks were not capable of self-governance.

Marronnage, or escape from slavery, was a longue-durée form of resistance to slavery in Haiti and was also, as Sylvia Wynter argues, a “dialectical response to the capitalist plantation system”—a system that aimed to deny humanity, sever social and cultural ties, and commodified people and their labor power. This article, as well as works by others such as Cedric Robinson (1983), Sylvia Wynter (n.d.), and Jean Casimir (2020), argues that marronnage was a fundamentally anti-capitalist mode of resistance, socio-political critique, and grassroots mobilizing. In the immediate moments when enslaved people fled plantations, they reclaimed possession of themselves and other tangible and intangible resources, such as their time, social relationships, forms of knowledge, and labor skills that enslavers stole from them. When maroons re-appropriated resources and mobilized themselves, they challenged and subverted colonial plantation structures, contributing to the downfall of both Spanish and French imperial slaveries in Haiti. During and after the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, Africa-born rebels and maroons were central to the mobilizing structures that successfully fought to abolish slavery and overturn colonialism—representing an astounding rupture to the prevailing Atlantic world-system that was dependent upon enslaved labor. Even after the post-independence Haitian government replicated aspects of the colonial administration, as Casimir (2020) points out, the formerly enslaved masses of Haiti organized themselves into communal social arrangements that prioritized subsistence labor and extended kin networks, and continued to rely on marronnage to protest exploitative economic practices. This article explores the trajectory of marronnage in Haiti as a continuous struggle, emphasizing the ways that it exposed the violence, exploitation, and oppression inherently embedded in the Atlantic world-system, and exposed the limits of the governing Haitian states.