Reposted from The Black Agenda Review. On Wednesday September 25, 1991, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically-elected president of the Republic of Haiti, addressed the forty-sixth session of the United Nations General Assembly. For Aristide, the address offered an opportunity to describe to the international community Haiti’s long historical contribution to the struggle for freedom […]
Author Archives: The Public Archive
For Biden Administration, Black Lives Don’t Matter in Haiti!—A Black Alliance for Peace Statement on Haiti, 12 February, 2021
The people of Haiti have been demanding freedom from the succession of U.S.-imposed dictators for decades. One such dictator, Jovenel Moïse, refused to leave office February 7, which marked the end of his term four years after an illegal election. This move catapulted yet another intense episode in the historic struggle of the Haitian masses […]
Anarchy / Autonomy / Utopia
There is a present-day tendency to retreat into the realms of dystopia, of catastrophe and disaster, of failed states and fascism, of environmental collapse and economic apocalypse. This tendency is neither wrong nor mistaken. Yet it is often suffocating, only adding to the pressurized dread of the era, offering no antidote to the plague of […]
The Black Agenda Review: A Manifesto of First Principles
The 2020 U.S. elections seem to be over and much of the world is preparing for a new Biden-Harris administration. So, what now? What changes should global Black communities expect? Our sense is that expectations need to be tempered by the lessons of past experience. Long ago we learned that representation is not a sign […]
Black Struggle and the New Society: An interview with C.L.R. James
Across three Saturdays in June, 1977, the New York Amsterdam News ran an extended interview with CLR James. At the time, James was seventy-six years old and teaching at the University of the District of Columbia. The interview, conducted by Amsterdam News feature writer Dawad Wayne Phillip, covered the question of Caribbean Federation, the importance […]
Caribbean Workers and Capitalist Geography: An interview with Marion Werner
Geographer Marion Werner’s Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean is among the most important, and easily the most innovative, work of political economy to emerge on the Caribbean region over the past decades. Issued by the excellent Antipode Book Series, the imprint of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Global Displacements […]
Revolutions and Revisions: An Interview with Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg
In Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto) Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg have produced what is arguably the most important biography of Louverture since CLR James’ magisterial Black Jacobins was first published in 1938. Kicking against the contemporary anti-Black and anti-radical revisionism that downplays the historical importance of the revolution while […]
Archive of Audio Recordings of Haitian Poets & Writers at the Library of Congress
Dating back to 1943, The Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape at the Library of Congress contains nearly seven-hundred recordings of poets and prose writers participating in sessions at the Library’s Recording Laboratory and at other locations around Spain and Latin America. It also contains seven recordings of Haitian writers. We provide links to those […]