The Haitians

Prominent Haitian diplomat and writer Jean Casimir offers students and scholars of the Caribbean a corrective to some prevalent depictions of Haiti, beginning this book not with the early degradations of enslavement nor later narratives of incomplete modernity-ideas derived from Western normativity that have tended to occupy other texts.Also, rather than state or biographical focuses, he investigates the resilience and perspectives of those enslaved people who defeated imperialism and the way their descendants defied diplomatic and financial impositions.Casimir emphasizes the inventiveness of a Haitian people "born from our ancestors' response to a triple crime: the abusive appropriation of the lands of America by the European states, the ignominy of the massacre of the original nations, and the criminal slave trade" (p.98).He also questions how the Haitian populace received this West while crafting a resilient, unique society.The book focuses on the chronology of 1697-1915, yet pursues analysis through chapters organized around themes such as production, thought, citizenship, segregation, property, public and communal life, sovereignty, and the state.Translated by Laurent Dubois, it also features a useful foreword by Walter Mignolo.Rather than relying upon archival revelations or bounds of historiography, it employs historical sociology to examine tensions between the state and a sovereign people.Casimir argues that governing classes were born, unfortunately, from free people of color or emancipated slaves who had worked as intermediaries for the abusive French.When France chose annihilation, they became independence leaders with their own survival in the balance, though many remained "prisoners of metropolitan thought," and they "could not rid themselves of these tools" (p.100).Nevertheless, early national complexities revolved around unresolved class and ethnic tensions.Over generations, Eurocentric affect and influence persisted among elites and behind certain constructs.Casimir notes that "the concept of the black person" obscures both "the intersection between the interests of property owners, whether free blacks or free people of color" and workers (p.17).He contends that another conundrum revolved around presentations of Haiti as the first "Black Republic," which oligarchs wielded as a stand against racism and to show their equality to the white "race."However, in some ways "the great Haitian intellectuals of the nineteenth century ... were both pro-Black and Africanophobic" and "dreamed of regenerating the black race by using the very principles and tools the West used to degrade them" (p.19)

Annexation · Appropriation · Citizenship · Historiography · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Philosophy