How does one explain Haiti? What is Haiti? Haiti is the eldest daughter of France and Africa. It is a place of beauty, romance, mystery, kindness, humor, selfishness, betrayal, cruelty, bloodshed, hunger and poverty. It is a closed and withdrawn society whose apartness, unlike any other in New World, rejects its European roots". Nice passage, isn't it? Well, those of you who know my work may have guessed that I am trying to trick you. These words are not mine. They constitute the very first paragraph of Written in Blood, a sensationalist account of Haitian history written by Marine Colonel Robert Heinl and his wife Nancy 2. I quote this paragraph in lieu of an introduction because it typifies a viewpoint widely shared in Haitian studies, one that I wish to challenge, namely the fiction of Haiti's exceptionalism. Heinl and Heinl start with a question: "How does one explain Haiti?" The question is then set aside for a laundry list of particulars. Then, at the end of the list, the emphasis shifts to Haiti's apartness: Haiti is unique. It is unlike any other country in the New World. And indeed, if we keep reading the next 700 pages, we soon discover that it is unlike any other country-period. The notion of Haitian exceptionalism permeates both the academic and popular literature on Haiti under different guises and with different degrees of candidness. At first glance, this insistence on Haiti's special status seems to be a simple acknowledgement of the country's admittedly spectacular trajectory. I suggest, however, that there are hidden agendas-intellectual and political-behind this insistence, and that these agendas, rather than genuine interest in the particulars of Haitian history, underpin Haitian exceptionalism. Haiti is unique. Haiti is different. Haiti is special. At a superficial level, these sayings could simply mean that a particular set of environmental, historical, and social features contribute in varied ways to make Haiti quite different from other places: that Haiti is not Argentina, or Canada, or Germany, or Senegal. I have absolutely no quarrel with such a statement. I can assure you that no one born in Aquín, Gonaïves, or Cité Soleil thinks of them as Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, or Dakar. But those who insist most often on Haiti's uniqueness do not simply mean that Haiti is easily unique. For each and every society is unique, distinguishable from each and every other society. Indeed, regions within the same country can be distinguishable from other regions. Societies, countries, or regions are historical products and all historical products are unique-by definition and by necessity. And the more we know a place or a person, the more this place or this person appears unique. But we do not keep on repeating it: life is too short for that. To my knowledge, foreign or native writers who write about, say, the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Bolivia, Thailand, Madagascar, or Gabon-to cite only a few remarkable places-do not go on repeating ad nauseam how quite unique these societies are.
No abstract
Analizando la incapacidad de Occidente para comprender la revuelta esclava más importante de la Historia junto a la negación del Holocausto y los debates sobre El Álamo y Cristóbal Colón, Michel-Rolph Trouillot nos ofrece una sorprendente reflexión sobre cómo el poder funciona en la producción de la Historia. Con una introducción de la renombrada investigadora Hazel V. Carby, Silenciando el pasado es un análisis indispensable de los silencios de nuestras narrativas históricas, sobre lo que se omite y lo que se registra, sobre lo que se recuerda y lo que se olvida, y sobre lo que estos silencios revelan sobre las injusticias del poder. Porque la Historia es siempre fruto del poder, un poder invisible. Nuestro mayor reto es mostrar sus raíces.
Few scholars would contest that the fifty-odd islands of the Caribbean archipelago belong to the Americas on either cultural, political, social, or historical grounds. But as soon as one tries to flesh out the terms and the extent of that inclusion, difficulties and controversies arise. Is the Caribbean part of Latin America or Afro-America, or is it better perceived as one part of the Americas of the plantations? As is always the case with such attempts at classification, answers to the questions depend on one's perception of the subpart itself and also on the definition of the larger ensemble in which it is to be included. In the case of the Caribbean, however, the dialectics of history make the classifiers' task even more difficult: the same processes that ushered in the distinctive sociocultural features of the Antilles are also those that force acknowledgment of their links with the mainland. Caribbean peoples are, to differing degrees, peoples of African descent, just as Caribbean cultures bear varying degrees of influence from Africa. But the demographic majority of Afro-America lives in Brazil and the United States. Likewise, Plantation America originated on the archipelago but established a foothold on the mainland north and south of the Antilles long 246
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