Inheriting Illegality: Race, Statelessness, and Dominico-Haitian Activism in the Dominican Republic

In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s highest court ruled to revoke birthright citizenship for over 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent. Ruling TC 168-13 prompted dialogue about race and racism in the country, breaking the racial silence that accompanies mestizaje (racial mixture). Scholars viewed this ruling through the lens of “Black denial” whereby Dominicans’ failure to adopt Black identities, despite being largely afrodescendant, fuels the racialization of Haitians as Black.

Continue ReadingInheriting Illegality: Race, Statelessness, and Dominico-Haitian Activism in the Dominican Republic

“The Problem with the Haitians is their Language”: Language as Color-Blind Racism

This project explores the mechanisms of exclusion and oppression of a Haitian population in a rural community in South West Florida. The analytical approach taken is an analysis of the social field and habitus as dispositions and embodied culture. Language has been identified as a tool to marginalize the population in the general social order.

Continue Reading“The Problem with the Haitians is their Language”: Language as Color-Blind Racism

Agrarian Change and Peasant Prospects in Haiti

This dissertation explores contemporary struggles facing Haitian peasants in the belief that while they face extremely adverse circumstances, their continuing decline is far from inevitable. On the contrary, this dissertation is premised on the conviction that improving the livelihoods of peasant farmers is fundamental to reducing poverty and food insecurity in Haiti.

Continue ReadingAgrarian Change and Peasant Prospects in Haiti

Privilege in Haiti: Travails in Color of the First Bourgeois Nation-State in the Americas

Who are the elites in the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere? Do Haiti’s elites constitute themselves in a Blackness vs. Whiteness/Mulattoness opposition? In investigating these questions, this ethnography encompasses in the object of study the nation’s middle classes educated in Western ways, and it arrives at an analysis of social relations among privileged national subjects within and across boundaries of color.

Continue ReadingPrivilege in Haiti: Travails in Color of the First Bourgeois Nation-State in the Americas

Imagining Haiti: Representations of Haiti in the American Press during the U.S. Occupation, 1915-1934

Throughout the United States occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, the U.S. government and its supporters were forced to defend the legitimacy of American action. In order to justify it to the American public, officials and journalists created a dichotomy of capacity between an inferior Haiti and a superior U.S., and they presented the occupation as a charitable civilizing mission.

Continue ReadingImagining Haiti: Representations of Haiti in the American Press during the U.S. Occupation, 1915-1934

From Sight to Site to Website: Travel-Writing, Tourism and the American Experience in Haiti, 1900-2008.

This paper presents an anthropological examination of touristic representations of Haiti throughout the 20th century. I dentify three main themes - Racism and "The Negro Question," Haitian Revolutionary Intrigue, and Voodoo Mystique - that illustrate a dominant discourse, but later transform these touristic sights into bona fide tourist sites.

Continue ReadingFrom Sight to Site to Website: Travel-Writing, Tourism and the American Experience in Haiti, 1900-2008.