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Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
... Finally, there have been incisive explorations of the colonial experience in the making of the modern world, especially considering the linkages between Enlightenment and empire and race and reason (Agnani 2013;Baucom 2005;Berman 2004;Dubois 2004Dubois , 2006Fischer 2004;Gregory 2007; see also Muthu 2003; as well as formidable rethinking of the past and the present of the disciplines in view of their linkages with colony and empire alongside their connections with gender and nation (Chakrabarty 2000;Mohanty 2003). ...
... ;Poole 1997;Rappaport 2005;Redfield 2000;Trouillot 2010; van der Veer 2001;Voekel 2002; see alsoMbembe 2001;Saler 2012;Taussig 1997Taussig , 2004. At the same time, exactly such diversity, its vernacular and plural character, arrive as already influenced by likenesses of an imaginary yet tangible Western modernity(Chakrabarty 2000(Chakrabarty , 2002 Coronil 1996 Coronil , 1997 Dube 2009Dube and Banerjee-Dube 2019;Ferguson 1999;Fischer 2004;Harootunian 2002;Mitchell 2000; Overmeyer-Velázquez 2006;Rao 2009;Saldaña-Portillo 2003;Seth 2007; ...
Pervasive presumptions in the human sciences project anthropology and history as taken-for-granted divisions of knowledge, whose relationship is then tracked as being vexed but constructive. At the same time, it is more useful today to rethink history and anthropology as disciplines of modernity-in their formation, elaboration, and transformation. To begin with, going back to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, historical and anthropological knowledge each appeared as mutually if variously shaped by overarching distinctions between the "primitive/native" and the "civilized/modern." It followed that the wide-ranging dynamic of empire and nation, race and reason, and analytical and hermeneutical orientations underlay the emergence of anthropology and history as institutionalized enquiries in the second half of the nineteenth century. Further, across much of the twentieth century and through its wider upheavals, it was by attempting uneasily to break with these genealogies yet never fully even escaping their impress that history and anthropology staked their claims as modern disciplines. This entailed especially their discrete expressions of time and space, culture and change, tradition and modernity. Finally, the mutual makeovers of history and anthropology since the 1970s have thought through the formidable conceits of both these disciplines while reconsidering questions of theory and method, object and subject, and the archive and the field. Based upon salient intersections with a range of critical understandings-for instance, postfoundational and postcolonial perspectives, considerations of gender and sexuality, and subaltern and decolonial frames-the newer emphases have imaginatively articulated issues of historical consciousness and marginal communities, colony and nation, empire and modernity, race and slavery, alterity and identity, indigeneity and heritage, and the state and the secular. At the same time, considering that such disciplinary changes are themselves embedded within wider shifts in social worlds, the haunting terms of the antinomies between the "savage/native" and the "civilized/modern" unsurprisingly find newer expressions within ever emergent hierarchies of otherness.
... Finally, there have been incisive explorations of the colonial experience in the making of the modern world, especially considering the linkages between Enlightenment and empire and race and reason (Agnani 2013;Baucom 2005;Berman 2004;Dubois 2004Dubois , 2006Fischer 2004;Gregory 2007; see also Muthu 2003; as well as formidable rethinking of the past and the present of the disciplines in view of their linkages with colony and empire alongside their connections with gender and nation (Chakrabarty 2000;Mohanty 2003). ...
... ;Poole 1997;Rappaport 2005;Redfield 2000;Trouillot 2010; van der Veer 2001;Voekel 2002; see alsoMbembe 2001;Saler 2012;Taussig 1997Taussig , 2004. At the same time, exactly such diversity, its vernacular and plural character, arrive as already influenced by likenesses of an imaginary yet tangible Western modernity(Chakrabarty 2000(Chakrabarty , 2002 Coronil 1996 Coronil , 1997 Dube 2009Dube and Banerjee-Dube 2019;Ferguson 1999;Fischer 2004;Harootunian 2002;Mitchell 2000; Overmeyer-Velázquez 2006;Rao 2009;Saldaña-Portillo 2003;Seth 2007; ...
In discussing together history and anthropology, it is often argued that the relationship between the two has been contradictory and contentious, but that their interplay has also been prescient and productive. At the same time, such considerations are principally premised upon framing anthropology and history as already known disciplines. Arguably, what is needed is another approach to the subjects of history and anthropology, sieving them against their disciplinary conceits. Moreover, this requires exploring the constitutive linkages of the two with empire and nation, time and space, race and reason as well as with wider transformations of the human sciences. These reveal curious connections as much as mutual makeovers. Finally, all of this suggests thinking through received configurations of tradition and temporality, culture and power, and hermeneutic and analytical procedures. These make possible the tracking of astute articulations of subaltern formations and historical conceptions, gender and sexuality, colony and nation, slavery and heritage, and empire and modernity-based on the shared sensibilities of anthropology, history, and associated enquiries. In discussing together history and anthropology, it is often acknowledged that the relationship between the two has been contradictory and contentious, but that their interplay has also been prescient and productive. At the same time, such considerations, turning on dissension and dialogue, are principally premised upon framing anthropology and history as already known,
... En consonancia con esta conversación sobre temporalidades alternativas, en esta sección me interesa comentar brevemente dos momentos diferentes en que la idea de confederación se presenta como imaginario predominante: la Confederación Antillana en el Caribe hispano y francés en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, y el La conceptualización de la región como un colectivo mulato o afro-criollo es fundamental para la constitución de estos imaginarios multi-insulares y multiestatales. Esta conceptualización se desarrolló a su vez en colaboración y tensión con los imaginarios asiáticos y afro-asiáticos de la región (Buscaglia-Salgado, 2003;James, 1958;Lewis, 1957;Fischer, 2004). Daylet Domínguez nota que, a principios del siglo XIX, Humboldt predice la formación de una confederación antillana negra si el imperio español no hace un esfuerzo concertado para incluir a las poblaciones negras y mulatas en los proyectos imperiales/coloniales para la zona (Ensayos (1827) en Domínguez, 2015, p. 150). ...
... 8 El discurso separatista en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX frecuentemente se confunde con discursos independentistas, pero sabemos que había movimientos separatistas de España y anexionistas con Estados Unidos. En el siglo XIX, el discurso político en los archipiélagos coloniales incluye debates sobre emancipación abolicionismo, separatismo, anexionismo e independencia política (Buck-Morss, 2009;Fischer, 2004;Scott, 2004;Lazo, 2002;Matibag, 1995). (2016). ...
In this paper I meditate on how to study colonialism in the case of the overseas insular territories, and what are the implications for the postcolonial and decolonial debates. I use archipelagic thinking as a lens that informs my conceptualization of the Caribbean, one of the multiple insular regions that have been conceived as overseas possesions. The argument of this essay is developed in three thematic nodes. The first section studies imperial and colonial representations of the Caribbean in maps produced between 1492 and 1800. The second section reviews two historical moments in which the Caribbean considers a multi-state project as alternative to the sovereign state, and I analyze the colonial and decolonial contexts that make possible and hinder these political articulations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The last section analyzes the colonial notion of the territory in the Latin American and U.S. American contexts.
... The French prevented ships from trading with Haiti, not a single government recognized Haitian independence at the time of the declaration, and for decades after, Haiti was not an invited guest at diplomatic tables (Ferrer 2014;Sheller 2000). However, the Constitution of May 20, 1805, reasserting the establishment of an antislavery Haiti, was widely publicized in the United States (Fischer 2004;Gaffield 2007). It proclaims, once more: "Article 1: The people inhabiting the island formerly called St. Domingo, hereby agree to form themselves into a free state sovereign and independent of any other power in the universe, under the name of empire of Hayti" (Corbett 1999). ...
... In resignifying blackness as a political stance against slavery, Haitians saw Haiti as a safe haven for all black subjects, granting asylum to "all Africans and Indians, and those of their blood" (Fischer 2004;Getachew 2016). According to Getachew (2016), about 6,000 to 13,000 African Americans took refuge in Haiti. ...
The authors seek to connect global historical sociology with racial formation theory to examine how antislavery movements fostered novel forms of self-government and justifications for state formation. The cases of Haiti and Liberia demonstrate how enslaved and formerly enslaved actors rethought modern politics at the time, producing novel political subjects in the process. Prior to the existence of these nations, self-determination by black subjects in colonial spaces was impossible, and each sought to carve out that possibility in the face of a transatlantic structure of slavery. This work demonstrates how Haitian and Liberian American founders responded to colonial structures, though in Liberia reproducing them albeit for their own ends. The authors demonstrate the importance of colonial subjectivities to the discernment of racial structures and counter-racist action. They highlight how anticolonial actors challenged global antiblack oppression and how they legitimated their self-governance and freedom on the world stage. Theorizing from colonized subjectivities allows sociology to begin to understand the politics around global racial formations and starts to incorporate histories of black agency into the sociological canon.
... Another obstacle lies in the fact that Afrodescendant artistic efforts were often curtailed or denigrated by creole elites. Deans-Smith (2009), Fischer (2004), andNiell (2012) have analyzed the exclusionary activities of guilds and artistic academies in Mexico City and Havana, as well as the racialized nature of artistic taste to favor academic art. The suppressive efforts by academicians also hinder scholarly endeavors to recover the names and objects produced by Afrodescendant artists as they were excluded from official institutions and their record-keeping practices (Fischer 2004, 69-70). ...
... For all these reasons and more, the political currency of these events must be forgotten in order for the North/West to claim modernity for itself (Fischer, 2004). And so, we let slip from our minds that a combination of French ex-slave owners' demands for reparations from their former slaves (essentially, payment for freedom), a series of US occupations and interference, and the imposition of IMF austerity programs have created the 'neighbor nobody wants,' 'a basket case,' 'the most wretched place on the earth,' the 'backwaters' of the Caribbean, and, most recently, the 'worst' place for an earthquake. ...
... Second is the corpus of writings stressing the critical place of the colonial experience in the making of the modern world. In addition to perspectives on the coloniality/decoloniality of power/ knowledge that will be discussed later, important here have been distinct studies focusing on the linkages of Enlightenment and empire, race and reason, the past and the present (Agnani, 2013;Baucom, 2005;Berman, 1998;Fischer, 2004;Gregory, 2004;Muthu, 2003;Scott, 2004;Simpson, 2014). Questions of modernity assume salience here. ...
In this new introduction, we propose to undertake three tasks. Each of these moves imaginatively extends and critically supplements the discussion in the earlier introduction to the volume. These considerations crucially concerned the pressing requirements of: (1) historically grounding colonialisms; (2) adequately specifying the terms of modernity; and (3) prudently addressing the imperatives of power and difference in critical endeavor. Unsurprisingly, on offer ahead are deeper historical specifications of colonial cultures, succinct understandings of the contradictions of modernity as well as the contentions of its subjects, and prudent readings of de-colonial claims. These themes are reflected in the title of this introductory essay. After this prologue, they are presented as an act in three scenes, followed by an epilogue.
... From the beginning, James's focus on Toussaint responds to the historiographic "silencing," "erasure," "disavowal," "banalization," and "trivialization" of the Haitian Revolution; this silencing process would be later outlined by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), Sibylle Fischer (2004), and Susan Buck-Morss (2009), among others. 11 As Trouillot has argued, this silencing is an active and transitive processsomething that is actively done to someone or something elseat all stages of the production of history, including the four crucial moments of fact creation (making sources), moments of fact assembly (making archives), moments of fact retrieval (making narratives), and the moment of retrospective significance (making history in the final instance). ...
Exploring the genesis, transformation and afterlives of The Black Jacobins, this article follows the revision trail of James’s evolving interest in Toussaint Louverture. How does James “show” as drama versus “tell” as history? Building on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s idea of “silencing the past,” this article argues that James engages in an equally active and transitive reverse process of unsilencing the past. James’s own unsilencing of certain negative representations of the Haitian Revolution is evaluated, as is James’s move away from presenting the colonized as passive objects, instead turning them instead into active subjects. James should be recognized as a precursor to “history from below.” It uncovers James’s “writing in” of more popular leaders, masses and Haitian crowd scenes, of whom there is little archival trace. James’s own making of The Black Jacobins over nearly sixty years is linked to the process of rasanblaj (re-assembly, gathering) and the search for Caribbean identity.
... Much of contemporary Caribbean historiography, according to her, has pointed out that the events in Haiti had a less direct impact on influencing other revolts than it is otherwise commonly thought. "But as phantasma and nightmare, " Fischer (2004) continues, "its ubiquity can hardly be doubted" (p. 5). ...
This essay revisits the case of the earthquake that shook Port-au-Prince, Haiti—which completed ten years in January 2020—to discuss the enduring, and often unaccounted for, colonial links between representation and contemporary humanitarian practices that are present in different ways in both North-South (in this case, between US and Haiti) and South-South relations (Brazil-Haiti). Unlike conventional approaches to natural disasters, which tend to focus their object of study in one particular place and time, I would like to propose an approach that instead engages multiple spaces, temporalities and agencies. In the context of this critical approach, and as a background question, I invite us to ask: what does international solidarity mean? The result is a more complex lens with which to look at events that are likely to become more frequent, and to affect the socio-economically disadvantaged in disproportional numbers in the near future due to the climate crisis.
... More recent scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1997) and Sibylle Fischer (2004) have demonstrated that the Haitian Revolution has been systematically silenced from intellectual histories of the Age of Revolutions. Trouillot argues in Silencing the Past that the notion of black selfdetermination developed through the Haitian revolutionaries' actions was so radical as to be unthinkable in philosophical terms until after they had taken place (1997, pp. ...
This essay puts forward a theory of gesture in relationship to temporality. The essay explores gestures as ongoing body-jumping performances that have the potential to carry history in different directions, toward alternative futures and re-remembered pasts, with each re-irruptive singularity.
... The recent focus on Haiti within contemporary scholarship is due in no small part to the endeavours of scholars such as Trouillot (1995), Geggus (2002), Fischer (2004), and Dubois (2004Dubois ( , 2005 among many others. Building on the seminal work of James (1989James ( [1963James ( , 1938), they have retrieved and made accessible to wider audiences the histories of the Haitian Revolution. ...
... (2006) makes clear that from some of these historians' perspective any person with proper training must give up "jejune" and "novelette-like" popular accounts. 3 Here I reference and draw on Michel-Rolph Trouillot's (2015) well-known discussion of the silencing of Haitian history and on critics like Sibylle Fischer (2005) and Sophie Sapp Moore (2018), who provide accounts of the effects of silencing and disavowing certain parts of Haitian history. Marlene L. Daut's (2015) Tropics of Haiti also offers an important addition to Trouillot's work. ...
In this article I collate vernacular and elite academic stories about François Makandal, focusing particularly on his production of fetishes, which I (following his usage) call macandal. I show that the codes at work in macandal artifacts involve a materialism and semiotics that together constitute a critical methodology. I then use the methodology at work in macandal artifacts to read one key piece of the archive pertaining to Makandal: his judge and executioner Sébastien-Jacques Courtin’s Mémoire.
... In this sense, a desire to have the French revolutionary project contribute to a universal project of cosmopolitanism would require engaging with the revolution's normative assessment of external and internal others. For example, it would be important to engage with the alternative ways in which French revolutionary thought sought to address the question of slavery and empire (Fischer 2004), or with internal critiques of American "democracy" that conceptualized the racist character of its founding and development as a liberal hegemonic power (Du Bois CDCP). Regarding projects of European or Western peace, their importance is beyond doubt against the background of historical rivalries and bloodshed that characterized this continent. ...
... In this sense, a desire to have the French revolutionary project contribute to a universal project of cosmopolitanism would require engaging with the revolution's normative assessment of external and internal others. For example, it would be important to engage with the alternative ways in which French revolutionary thought sought to address the question of slavery and empire (Fischer 2004), or with internal critiques of American "democracy" that conceptualized the racist character of its founding and development as a liberal hegemonic power (Du Bois CDCP). Regarding projects of European or Western peace, their importance is beyond doubt against the background of historical rivalries and bloodshed that characterized this continent. ...
Cambridge Core - Political Theory - Transnational Cosmopolitanism - by Inés Valdez
... In work on the British Atlantic and the American Revolution, scholars both recovered the loyalist presence and outlined the vibrant intersection of empire and politics in the revolutionary age (Blackstock; O'Gorman, 2014;Calloway, 1995;Chopra, 2011;Frey, 1991;Jasanoff, 2008;McConville, 2006;Nash, 2006;Nelson, 2014;Norton, 1972;O'Shaughnessy, 2013;Pybus, 2006;Schama, 2006). The Haitian Revolution has become the focus of much research, because it is a case that joins France and its Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue in a single Atlantic revolution, also bringing to the forefront issues of slavery and race that were central to the more broadly defined revolutionary dynamics (Childs, 2006;Dubois, 2004;Ferrer, 2012;Fischer, 2004). It is clear, however, that the Haitian Revolution exemplifies the impossibility to think of revolution as a linear process. ...
... Antes que una modernidad, lo realmente existente son modernidades históricamente situadas articuladas desde unos ideales normativos de la Europa hiperreal (Chakrabarty, 2008). Muchas de estas modernidades, incluso, son modernidades desmentidas (Fischer, 2004). Para referir a una conocida expresión (Latour, 2007), no es tanto que no hayamos sido modernos, sino que la modernidad no es lo que dice ser (Trouillot, 2002) 11 . ...
... Recordemos que las críticas de Englud y Leach (2000) a ciertos trabajos de las modernidades alternativas versaban sobre los efectos de las asumidas 'metanarrativas' de la modernidad en la orientación del trabajo etnográfico constituyendo lo que empíricamente aparece como 'modernidad', con todos los riesgos de las proyecciones etnocéntricas. Por su parte, y a pesar de sus diferencias, los trabajos comentados de Kahn (2001), Fischer (2004) y Trouillot (2002) sugieren que las conceptualizaciones convencionales de modernidad (al igual que sus retoricas historicistas) obliteran unas modernidades que devienen silenciadas por la práctica etnográfica o que han sido modernidades denegadas (mas que impensadas, impensables) en la imaginación histórica. Los tres autores abogan por la adecuación del principio de inteligibilidad (ya sea mediante la apelación a la teoría crítica de la modernidad en Kahn, o la redefinición misma de la imaginación histórica europea de la modernidad en el caso de Fischer y Trouillot). ...
... Eis aqui o principal argumento de Fischer (2004) quando sinaliza que no Haiti se gerou uma modernidade alvo de negação absoluta, algo do qual não se fala, que "se recusa a reconhecer". Uma modernidade que não é necessariamente silenciada, pois ela agia sub-repticiamente na gestão da produção cultural e na construção de projetos de modernidade em países do Caribe (FISCHER, 2004). ...
Este trabalho segue as pistas de um comentário realizado por Stuart Hall acerca de sua própria trajetória, que qualifica a partir da ideia de “prisma de formação caribenha”. O tema é abordado aqui pelo escopo da emancipação, argumentando que a busca pela realização de universais políticos, em particular o de liberdade, ganha tons específicos no mar do Caribe. Esses tons são, em última instância, onde reside o potencial descolonizador do ser, tal como fora desenvolvido por Nelson Maldonado-Torres. Discute-se como uma tradição de discussão sobre a temática da emancipação que remonta a Hegel é nas mãos de um autor caribenho, Fanon, deslocada por tal prisma de formação caribenha. Por fim, argumenta-se que o movimento realizado por Fanon não se limita apenas à sua obra, mas encontra expressão intelectual em outros autores da região, e que uma Sociologia Política do Atlântico Negro deve levar a sério esse engajamento específico possibilitado pelo “prisma” como categoria analítica.
Resumen En este artículo analizaremos la relación de Hegel con la Revolución haitiana y su lugar en el contexto narrativo de la filosofía de la historia mundial. Para esto nos enfocaremos en las nociones de coherencia, consistencia, validez y representatividad como criterios lógicos e históricos para analizar la ambigüedad de la filosofía hegeliana y su pretensión explícita de universalidad. Para ello, el artículo aborda la conceptualización hegeliana de la economía política-como marco general de su análisis del colonialismo-y propone un panorama de la recepción de la Revolución haitiana en la escena intelectual alemana de comienzos del siglo XIX, con el fin de exponer los repliegues REVISTA DE HUMANIDADES Nº 47: 85-112
Jeff Strickland tells the powerful story of Nicholas Kelly, the enslaved craftsman who led the Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion, the largest slave revolt in the history of the antebellum American South. With two accomplices, some sledgehammers, and pickaxes, Nicholas risked his life and helped thirty-six fellow enslaved people escape the workhouse where they had been sent by their enslavers to be tortured. While Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey remain the most recognizable rebels, the pivotal role of Nicholas Kelly is often forgotten. All for Liberty centers his rebellion as a decisive moment leading up to the secession of South Carolina from the United States in 1861. This compelling micro-history navigates between Nicholas's story and the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, while also considering the parallels between race and incarceration in the nineteenth century and in modern America. Never before has the story of Nicholas Kelly been so eloquently told.
One of the major arguments made in the current boom in Haitian revolutionary studies connects today’s conditions of possibility for modern democracy and human rights to the abolition of slavery during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). During the last decade, however, this connection between the Haitian Revolutionary period and our own age has been questioned by an increasing number of scholars: a phenomenon that this article conceptualizes as the ‘sceptical turn’. The article argues that the sceptical turn consummates its critique through unacknowledged rearrangements of abstractions, and therefore misses its target. A corresponding critique of the sceptical turn is formulated here using Bertell Ollman’s tripartite concept of the abstractions of vantage point, extension, and generality. Ollman’s notion enables a shift of focus onto modes – instead of the more common focus on levels – of abstraction. Thus, the author argues, contra the sceptical turn, not only that the connection between the Haitian Revolution and the political and social situation of today is plausible, but that it also provides a more profound conceptual basis for analyses of revolutionary events in general.
Between 1822 and 1844, the former Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, today the Dominican Republic, was unified with the post-revolutionary Republic of Haiti, bringing the end of legal slavery across the entire island. This dissertation argues that the reforms proclaimed by Haitian leaders provoked adaptation, strategic alliances, and local political contests rather than any crystallization of nationalized or racialized divisions among the Spanish and Kreyòl-speaking populations of Haiti and Santo Domingo. The notarial records, judicial documents, and administrative correspondence produced on both sides of the island show that Santo Domingo’s Afro-descended majority took advantage of emancipation and the elimination of colonial-era terminology of socioracial classification to make claims to land and movable property after 1822. Together, formerly enslaved people, rural inhabitants, and local administrators in Santo Domingo mediated the application of Haitian law rather than simply accepting or rejecting it. Indeed, their loyalties and identities transcended the narrow categories of “Dominican” and “Haitian.” The structure of the dissertation follows the projection and negotiation of Haitian sovereignty in eastern Hispaniola after 1822, both chronologically and geographically. The first chapter follows the regiments of Haitian troops through the “livestock borderlands” of the center island region and into the capital city of Santo Domingo. The next three chapters follow the application of Haitian property law from the walled city of Santo Domingo to the larger estates of the southeastern riverine regions, and eventually into the more remote montes of the rural communes. The final chapter turns outward to the Pan-Caribbean dimensions of the annexation of eastern Hispaniola, focusing in particular on the participation of maritime maroons from surrounding islands in the ongoing juridical unification of the island. The end results of these negotiations were in the short term, the formation of a Haitian state whose authority was limited by local practices of law and longstanding struggles over resources, and in the long term, the political mobilization of the sparse, overwhelmingly rural population of eastern Haiti around a shared commitment to the permanent and universal abolition of slavery.
This article engages a pervasive discourse on decency in twenty-first-century social mores and state prohibitions by examining artists’ work (2016–2019) that speaks to how material culture and aesthetic judgment feed into the aesthetic hegemony of the Cuban state. Attention is paid to three cases that unravel a national and international staging of a universal “decent” Cuban culture in the post-Obama era: (1) the 2017 intervention Where is Mella? by “amateur” artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who called attention to the Cuban military’s commercial alliance with Kempinksi, the Swiss/German hotel group, critiquing Cuba’s new landscape of luxury; (2) Pluto (2016 “Mesa Redonda: El pronóstico para Cuba de la revista Sport Illustrated en Rio 2016”. 2016. Mesa Redonda, August 17. Accessed 2 February 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZkNjbTVr6M. [Google Scholar]), video art by Geandy Pavón that alludes to a chain of embezzlements and substitutions; and (3) the performances of two “amateur” musicians: Chocolate MC, who, though popular, is also deemed repulsive on both sides of the Florida Straits, and Cimafunk, celebrated as a cultural ambassador. A contemplation on “excess” – a 5-star hotel, junk jewellery, or bling bling – allows for questions of who the Cuban state recognises as an artist, how artists appropriate and expropriate ideas of luxury and refinement, and whether these substitutions can sufficiently erode colonial legacies that continue to contain those subjectivities perceived as excessive.
This essay explores how the classic narrative of Haitian zombification is refashioned within a postcolonial Haitian-Dominican context as a passing narrative in Pedro Cabiya’s 2011 Cabiya, Pedro. 2011. Malas hierbas. New York: Zemí Book. [Google Scholar] science fantasy novel Malas hierbas. In its depiction of a nameless zombie scientist who pretends to be a living being and successfully assimilates into the community of the living without detection, Cabiya’s text not only departs from the traditional zombie archetype. It also unfolds as a philosophical exploration of what it means to be alive when one is born into a political ontology that has always already defined and marked some as dead. Interrogating the disjuncture between the vital signs of life codified in Western scientific discourse and the zombie’s simulation of life, the essay argues that Malas hierbas adapts the trope of racial passing to show how the meaning of life moves from ontology of existence to a category of identity, like race, legal personhood, and citizenship. Situating the novel in its Haitian and Dominican contexts, where race constitutes markers of national identity and juridical status, the essay connects the zombie’s passing life to contemporary representations of Haitians as impostors who must play dead, on both sides of Hispaniola, as a means of survival.
This book explores how the social sciences became entangled with the global Cold War. While duly recognizing the realities of nation states, national power, and national aspirations, the studies gathered here open up new lines of transnational investigation. Considering developments in a wide array of fields – anthropology, development studies, economics, education, political science, psychology, science studies, and sociology – that involved the movement of people, projects, funding, and ideas across diverse national contexts, this volume pushes scholars to rethink certain fundamental points about how we should understand – and thus how we should study – Cold War social science itself.
Mark Solovey is Associate Professor in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, Canada.
Christian Dayé is a sociologist at the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Unit of Graz University of Technology, Austria.
This review examines two recently published studies about decolonial struggles in the Americas, Anne Garland Mahler’s From the Tricontinental to the Global South (Duke University Press, 2018) and George Ciccariello-Maher’s Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke University Press, 2017). The volumes reexamine current decolonial upheavals from two different perspectives. Mahler traces the cultural and aesthetic production of the Tricontinental movement, and Ciccariello-Maher analyses a dialectics that refuses Eurocentrism, teleology, and totality. Reading the two volumes together brings forth the expansive character of revolutionary movements in the Americas both from its material and aesthetic practices and from its theoretical implications.
Dans la région des Caraïbes, sur presque toutes les îles, naquit – il y a environ deux cents ans – une culture de l’art dramatique qui sut, bien plus que tout ouvrage imprimé, toucher un vaste public, et remettre en question le colonialisme, même dans les sociétés pratiquant l’esclavage. En Haïti aussi, le théâtre permit aux auteurs d’aborder et de traiter des thèmes sociopolitiques. Différents exemples, tirés sur le volet, montrent que, dès 1789, des événements historiques tels que la Révolution française, les débats politiques sur le colonialisme, les guerres, ou encore la déclaration d’indépendance sont immédiatement mis en scène au théâtre. En revanche, il fallut attendre quatre décennies avant de voir les traumatismes de l’Histoire haïtienne (violence engendrée par le colonialisme ou mouvements sanglants de la résistance) faire leur entrée sur la scène théâtrale. En même temps, et cela jusqu’à la fin du XIXe siècle, bien que le régime colonial ait été aboli, le théâtre haïtien officiel continua à s’inspirer pleinement de l’esthétique du théâtre français.
This essay comparatively reads the intellectual contributions of Luisa Capetillo and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta. I argue that Capetillo and Rodríguez Acosta offer unique and under-appreciated perspectives on what I term the assemblages of belonging that resist the regulatory normalization of sexuality and the reduction of the maternal body as the source of home and place making in the context of Puerto Rico and Cuba respectively. As the paper demonstrates, what it means to belong, in the context of Antillean women writers, is not entirely tied to a particular place or the identity of people. Rather, belonging is assembled through tactics that are always already decentered given the status of womanhood and its interpellations in the Caribbean at the turn of the 20th century, which was performatively accomplished through the acts of writing and reading. I argue that Capetillo and Rodríguez Acosta assemble notions of belonging through performative mechanisms that place them at the cross-roads between the affective, embodied, and relational dimensions of what it means to belong in a place that is not and continues not to be for any(body). Thus, they both betray the idea of being on one side or another.
From prophecy to thinking the unthinkable to scenarios of disruption and to transformative narratives, the future and the field that examines the future, Futures Studies, has continued to evolve. This entry examines the genealogy of Futures Studies and the epistemological approaches it is founded on.
Prevailing social scientific definitions view citizenship as a modern institution for the distribution of civil, political, and social rights meant to counterbalance social inequalities among members of the same polity. For a long time, citizenship was considered to reflect changes occurring in Western societies in the wake of the French and U.S.-American revolutions and to be derived in a straight line from the industrialization of the Western world and the subsequent processes of urbanization and secularization accompanying it (Turner and Hamilton 1994; Turner 2014). As a result, sociologists analyzed the institutionalization of citizenship as part of a sequence of social change characterizing modern, democratic societies. As a modern institution, citizenship was considered a mechanism of inclusion through which particularities of birth such as ethnicity, status, or gender play an ever-smaller part in deciding an individual’s social mobility once all citizens are equal before the law. However, in a global perspective, citizenship has been shown to function as a mechanism of exclusion along race, class, and gender lines from the moment of its institutionalization (Brubaker 1992, Korzeniewicz/Moran 2009, Shachar 2009). When seen from the Americas, the emergence of citizenship rights is revealed to be not only the result of modernity, the French and U.S.-American revolutions, and industrialization, but also, and more importantly, premised on colonialism, the Haitian revolution, and the institution of chattel slavery. This article traces the different moments in the theorization of citizenship from nation-state to global perspectives before turning to citizenship as viewed from the Americas and from coloniality as “the underside of modernity” (Dussel).
The colonial heritage and its renewed aftermaths – expressed in the inter-American experiences of slavery, indigeneity, dependence, and freedom movements, to mention only a few aspects – form a common ground of experience in the Western Hemisphere. The flow of peoples, goods, knowledge, and finances have promoted interdependence and integration that cut across borders and link the countries of North and South America together. The nature of this transversally related and multiply interconnected region can only be captured through a transnational, multidisciplinary, and comprehensive approach.
The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas explores the history and society of the Americas, placing particular emphasis on collective and intertwined experiences. Forty-four entries cover a range of concepts and dynamics in the Americas from the colonial period until the present century:
• The shared histories and dynamics of inter-American relationships are considered through pre-Hispanic empires, colonization, European hegemony, migration, multiculturalism, and political and economic interdependences.
• Key concepts are selected and explored from different geopolitical, disciplinary, and epistemo-logical perspectives.
• Highlighting the contested character of key concepts that are usually defined in strict disciplinary terms, the Handbook provides the basis for a better and deeper understanding of inter-American entanglements.
This multidisciplinary approach will be of interest to a broad array of academic scholars and students in history, sociology, political science, cultural, postcolonial, gender, literary, and globalization studies.
El ensayo es un intento de construir otra perspectiva sobre la modernidad desde el Caribe. Buscando percibir una historia de larga duración, en la que la Revolución Haitiana y la Revolución Cubana emergen como claves interpretativas, se revisan temas, categorías y conceptos fundamentales de descripción del mundo moderno. Los flujos caribeños son traídos para encarar los silencios, pausas y contratiempos articulados en las narrativas hegemónicas sobre el Occidente, así como para pensar otra historia global que dé cuenta de la polifonía política engendrada por la expansión imperialista y por la respectiva resistencia anticolonial.
How does racial ideology contribute to the exploration of narrative voice? How does narrative reliability help in the production and critique of racial ideologies? Through a refreshing comparative analysis of well-established novels by Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, Albert Camus and Alejo Carpentier, this book explores the racial politics of literary form. "Narrative Reliability, Racial Conflicts and Ideology in the Modern Novel" contributes to the emergent attention in literary studies to the interrelation of form and politics, which has been underexplored in narrative theory and comparative racial studies. Bridging cultural, postcolonial, racial studies and narratology, this book brings context specificity and awareness to the production of ideological, ambivalent narrative texts that, through technical innovation in narrative reliability, deeply engage with extremely violent episodes of colonial origin in the United Kingdom, the United States, Algeria, and the French and Spanish Caribbean. In this manner, the book reformulates and expands the problem of narrative reliability, and highlights the key uses and production of racial discourses so as to reveal the participation of experimental novels in early and mid-20th century racial conflicts, which function as a test case to display a broad, new area of study in cultural and political narrative theory.
https://www.routledge.com/Narrative-Reliability-Racial-Conflicts-and-Ideology-in-the-Modern-Novel/Puxan-Oliva/p/book/9780367140878
Focussing on Cirilo Villaverde’s canonical novel Cecilia Valdés (1882), this article explores the neglected spectral dimension of its realism. I argue that, while explicitly denying the existence of ghosts, Villaverde engages with their false but real appearance as the only way to accurately represent a world marked by the invisibilization of certain lives. I call this dimension of his writing spectral realism: a mode of representing socially produced absences that is deeply dependent on the ‘world of illusions’ that the realist writer claims to have left behind and, in particular, on the interweaving of Gothic tropes and Catholic imagery.
In Caribbean historiography, the concept of the “great fear” is defined as the fear of uprisings by afrodescendants following the Haitian Revolution. Based on a case in the province of Yucatan, this article reflects on the importance and the use of the discourse of fear in the context of the era of the Latin American independence movements. By analising the local dynamics of the case study it argues that rather than representing a mental disposition of the “Haiti trauma”, the stereotypes of the discourse of fear were used strategically in order to justify local political decisions. © 2018 Sello editorial Universidad del Atlantico. All rights reserved.
En este artículo propongo una lectura de los diferentes componentes audio-visuales y textuales de la obra de la artista dominicana Rita Indiana Hernández, enfatizando su intervención en los debates sobre ciudadanía y frontera entre la República Dominicana y Haití. Propongo que a partir del uso de la yuxtaposición y la (re) mediación –pasar de un medio audiovisual a otro– el proyecto multimedia de Rita Indiana puede entenderse como una exploración de las posibilidades discursivas y críticas tanto dentro de los confines de la nación, como en respuesta a las redes de producción y circulación artísticas globales. Esta posibilidad de intervenir en lo nacional y lo transnacional se da de la mano con una crítica a la naturaleza racializada del discurso nacional dominicano, así como también de las formas de producción neoliberales. El llamado “problema haitiano” cobra centralidad en la obra de Rita como epicentro de imaginarios, prácticas e identidades que permiten entender la construcción de la ciudadanía de manera retro-activa, es decir, como un contrapunteo conflictivo entre los legados del pasado histórico y las demandas de la actualidad.
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