after a mural in port-au-prince by alexandre was from the pic of le cap where the citadel sits the arawaks wait the fleshes of their headdress are stairs up the montagne the rings of the palm trees are bells up the montagne toussaint is a zemi he stares from the flesh of stone the white […]
Tag Archives: Caribbean
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 […]
Posted in Haiti
Also tagged anarchism, archive, autonomy, freedom, liberation, libraries, literature, pan-africanism, reading, Trinidad
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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 […]
Posted in Haiti
Also tagged 1937, anti-Blackness, anti-Haitianism, Aristide, borders, Caribbean Studies, coloniality, Dominican Republic, economy, factory, geography, Haiti, labor, neoliberalism, plantation, political-economy
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“The lass days of KB and CowPastor Vandal”
[The following letter of protest from the late Kamau Brathwaite was circulating in 2005. It is at once a heartfelt plea for his own plot of land in Barbados and a tragically visionary comment on the future of the Caribbean’s ecology]. Pl circulate this ATTACH (ihope it will open!) aswidely as possible as a contribution […]
We Are Not All Haitians
Reading and re-reading The Public Archive’s 2012 interview with the late J. Michael Dash I was struck by Dash’s refusal to talk about himself. In the interview Dash described many of the moments and encounters that shaped him as an intellectual. But he offered little in the way of personal motivation. There is nothing of the […]
Posted in Haiti
Also tagged archives, Haiti, literature, representation, solidarity, sovereignty
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Dark Specters and Black Kingdoms: An interview with historian Ada Ferrer
THE PUBLIC ARCHIVE: Ada Ferrer is Professor of History and Latin American Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on the themes of race and slavery, and nationalism and revolution, in the nineteenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic World. Her first book, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, a critical, path-breaking study of the multiracial […]
Migrations and Microhistories: An interview with historian Matthew J. Smith
MATTHEW J. SMITH is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His first book, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 is a brilliant, pioneering account of the remarkable political history of Haiti from the end of the US Occupation to the rise of Francois […]
Andrew Salkey, “For Haiti” (1983)
In Memory of Jacques Stephen Alexis and Jacques Roumain 1 We’re either cut down, weighted and dumped into the sea By the savagery of those licensed uncles of woven straw Or else we’re driven into the ground by their lurking threats; From both extremes, the headlamps of blue light terrorize us: tontons-macoutes parading their acumen, […]