Haiti’s 200-Year Ménage-à-Trois: Globalization, The State, and Civil Society

In this article, I explore the limits of dominant historiographies of Haiti to examine and challenge binary frameworks within discourses of globalization and civil society. I employ a comparative, longue durée world-systems approach, discussing Haiti’s history and contemporary situation through long-term fieldwork, oral history, and published materials on Haiti’s history. Conversations with different groups of Haitian people helped me identify, analyze, and categorize two dominant historiographies.

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Expansion Now!: Haiti, “Santo Domingo,” and Frederick Douglass at the Intersection of U.S. and Caribbean Pan-Americanism

This article seeks to analyze Frederick Douglass’ responses to U.S. empire formation in Santo Domingo, between 1870-1872, and in Haiti, between 1889-1891. As U.S. Minister to Haiti and as Assistant Secretary of U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant’s commission to annex the Dominican Republic, Douglass fully supported the virtues of U.S. expansion and U.S. Pan-Americanism as long as it promoted effective and egalitarian development in Caribbean and Latin American nations. However, Douglass opposed U.S. empire if it perpetuated U.S. notions of racial domination.

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