Introduction

This special issue marks a decade of collaborations across multiple configurations. It grows from years of work among scholars, activists, and artists around issues of sovereignty, queerness, and artistic expression in Haiti and its diasporas. Foregrounding the intellectual and cultural labors of our interlocutor-comrades, we take very seriously the import of Kreyòl vernaculars, Haitian concepts, and Vodou epistemologies. In tandem with commitments to Haitian thought and practice, we follow the footsteps of Black/queer/feminist/Caribbean thinkers who have theorized Caribbean personhood in ways that lay bare and oppose the discursive, epistemic, and physicalized violence Western regimes inflict, just as we also uplift the ingenious ways Black Caribbean peoples reinvent possibilities through embodied practices and creative modalities. Gender and sexuality have long been relegated as distractions from the purview of "real" liberationist politics. Within Haitian studies, sexuality in general, and nonnormative genders/sexualities in particular, are finally beginning to receive the attention they deserve. Nevertheless, in popular discourses, particularly with regard to human rights, sexuality has been reduced to issues of violence and disease. Pleasure and desire are lost; vitality and creative living are negated. But since forms of domination mete themselves out on the body, the body must become a crucial site to rescript and revise freedoms. As Josué Azor has stated, "We must stop this narrative of victimhood. We have fòs too." Accordingly, we can look to those who critically contest such entwined violences through proposals of alternative political subjectivities premised on expanded conceptions of moun , or Haitian personhood

Political science · Sociology · Cultural Industries and Urban Development