When Philippe-Richard Marius arrived in Port-au-Prince to begin fieldwork for this monograph, to him and to legions of people worldwide, Haiti was axiomatically the first Black Republic. Descendants of Africans did in fact create the Haitian nation-state on January 1, 1804, as the outcome of a slave uprising that defeated white supremacy in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Haiti’s Founding Founders, as colonial natives, were nonetheless to varying degrees Latinized subjects of the Atlantic. They envisioned freedom differently than the African-born former slaves, who sought to replicate African nonstate societies. Haiti’s Founders indeed first defeated native Africans’ armies before they defeated the French. Not surprisingly, problematic vestiges of colonialism carried over to the independent nation. Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the reproduction of privilege and inequality in contemporary Haiti. Through his ethnography, class emerges as the principal site of social organization among Haitians, notwithstanding the country’s global prominence as a “Black Republic.” It is class, and not color or race, that primarily produces distinctive Haitian socioeconomic formations. Marius interrogates Haitian Black nationalism without diminishing the colossal achievement of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue in destroying slavery in the colony, then the Napoleonic army sent to restore it. Providing clarity on the uses of race, color, and nation in sociopolitical and economic organization in Haiti and other postcolonial bourgeois societies, Marius produces a provocative characterization of the Haitian nation-state that rejects the Black Republic paradigm.

When Philippe-Richard Marius arrived in Port-au-Prince to begin fieldwork for this monograph, to him and to legions of people worldwide, Haiti was axiomatically the first Black Republic. Descendants of Africans did in fact create the Haitian nation-state on January 1, 1804, as the outcome of a slave uprising that defeated white supremacy in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Haiti’s Founding Founders, as colonial natives, were nonetheless to varying degrees Latinized subjects of the Atlantic. They envisioned freedom differently than the African-born former slaves, who sought to replicate African nonstate societies. Haiti’s Founders indeed first defeated native Africans’ armies before they defeated the French. Not surprisingly, problematic vestiges of colonialism carried over to the independent nation. Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the reproduction of privilege and inequality in contemporary Haiti. Through his ethnography, class emerges as the principal site of social organization among Haitians, notwithstanding the country’s global prominence as a “Black Republic.” It is class, and not color or race, that primarily produces distinctive Haitian socioeconomic formations. Marius interrogates Haitian Black nationalism without diminishing the colossal achievement of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue in destroying slavery in the colony, then the Napoleonic army sent to restore it. Providing clarity on the uses of race, color, and nation in sociopolitical and economic organization in Haiti and other postcolonial bourgeois societies, Marius produces a provocative characterization of the Haitian nation-state that rejects the Black Republic paradigm.

Exploring the subject through many different theoretical frameworks and epistemological traditions, this book confronts the history of Haiti's three major practicing religious faiths: Vodou, Roman Catholicism, and Protestant Evangelicalism. Scholars, researchers, and faith practitioners have often depicted relations between these traditions as antagonistic, conflicting, unproductive, and lacking in mutual understanding. With the aim of exploring the possibility of nation building in Haiti and the benefits of interreligious collaboration, contributors to this book consider topics such as the obstacles to interfaith dialogue, religious conflict, interreligious dialogue in schools, race and identity, and religious pluralism. This book will be beneficial to scholars, practitioners, historians, and sociologists of religion, as well as the religious communities themselves in Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora.

In the summer and fall of 1964, a massacre took place in the small town of Jérémie, Haiti. After an ill-fated uprising, the brutal regime of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier ordered reprisals against the town that some of the insurgents were allegedly from. Entire families—all from the town’s upper class—were slaughtered. Through a rich historical ethnography of the massacre, Jean-Philippe Belleau offers a new account of the workings of the Duvalier regime and an innovative analysis of anti-elite violence. Killing the Elites meticulously reconstructs the various phases of the massacre, identifying the victims and perpetrators, tracing the social ties that linked them, and examining the varying degrees of culpability from the state to bystanders. Although Duvalier and the military were responsible, the killings were attributed to popular social grievances. Examining how the Haitian state has brutalized the upper classes, Belleau develops a new theory of anti-elite violence. He challenges views that ideology or social difference can readily drive people to kill their neighbors and that the upper classes fall victim to popular rough justice, showing that social bonds within the town prevented organized violence from spreading. The state, Belleau underscores, is the primary perpetrator of violence against elites. Drawing on interviews with eyewitnesses and former regime members as well as a wide range of unexplored primary sources, this book provides a new lens on Haiti under Duvalier and reveals why the victimization of the elite is essential to mass violence.

In this book, author Martin Munro offers a new path into Caribbean studies based on sound. He argues that to understand and begin to transform the past, present, and future of Caribbean studies, historians must do so at the node of both sound and vision. It is a transnational, multidisciplinary study that will interest anyone who knows or wishes to learn about the Caribbean.

Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Society in v. 1-11, 1925-34. After 1934 they appear in Its Bulletin.

This surprising study of online political mobilization shows that money and organizational sophistication influence politics online as much as off, and casts doubt on the democratizing power of digital activism. The internet has been hailed as a leveling force that is reshaping activism. From the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, digital activism seemed cheap, fast, and open to all. Now this celebratory narrative finds itself competing with an increasingly sinister story as platforms like Facebook and Twitter—once the darlings of digital democracy—are on the defensive for their role in promoting fake news. While hashtag activism captures headlines, conservative digital activism is proving more effective on the ground. In this sharp-eyed and counterintuitive study, Jen Schradie shows how the web has become another weapon in the arsenal of the powerful. She zeroes in on workers’ rights advocacy in North Carolina and finds a case study with broad implications. North Carolina’s hard-right turn in the early 2010s should have alerted political analysts to the web’s antidemocratic potential: amid booming online organizing, one of the country’s most closely contested states elected the most conservative government in North Carolina’s history. The Revolution That Wasn’t identifies the reasons behind this previously undiagnosed digital-activism gap. Large hierarchical political organizations with professional staff can amplify their digital impact, while horizontally organized volunteer groups tend to be less effective at translating online goodwill into meaningful action. Not only does technology fail to level the playing field, it tilts it further, so that only the most sophisticated and well-funded players can compete.