Since my stepfather disappeared in 1982, disappearance has been my obsession. In writing Disequilibria, I read everything I could on missing persons. By now, I might be the chief authority on Missingness! – that is, on disappearance as a theoretical construct. I’m especially interested in how, across different sensibilities (in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, but also law, social science, journalism, philosophy, history, and media studies), we can compose a shared language and create shared understanding. My larger goal is to discover creative and redemptive ways of responding to loss, grief, and trauma; to find how disappearance in all its forms creates a framework for understanding what it means to be human.
Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat’s linked short-story collections brilliantly balance a focus on detail, gesture, and situation with a cumulative vision of place and fateful circumstance.
In Claire of the Sea Light, the disappearance of a young girl frames a sequence of tales about several members of the small seaside community where the girl lives with her father.
After Claire’s sudden disappearance in the opening narrative, we follow the adults’ betrayals, sacrifices, and missteps to the final story, when the missing girl’s own perceptions provide a moral and imaginative frame for the family and community she must now choose to rejoin or escape permanently.
From the national bestselling author of Brother, I’m Dying and The Dew Breaker: a “fiercely beautiful” novel (Los Angeles Times) that brings us deep into the intertwined lives of a small seaside town where a little girl, the daughter of a fisherman, has gone missing.
Just as her father makes the wrenching decision to send her away for a chance at a better life, Claire Limyè Lanmè—Claire of the Sea Light—suddenly disappears. As the people of the Haitian seaside community of Ville Rose search for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are unearthed. In this stunning novel about…
I’m a Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University who studies the history of France and the French empire. My research stretches from the age of Louis XIV through the French Revolution, exploring questions of political economy, capitalism, empire, the Enlightenment, and popular culture. At a moment when historical research is becoming increasingly specialized, my work builds bridges between political, economic, and cultural history.
Covo investigates long-neglected economic aspects of the Haitian Revolution. Beginning in the pre-revolutionary period, when the French called the colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) the “Pearl of the Caribbean,” this deeply researched book spotlights the role Haiti played as a commodities hub during the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. I find this book particularly important because it shows how imperial trade and racial capitalism defined the age of commercial republicanism.
The Age of Revolutions has been celebrated for the momentous transition from absolute monarchies to representative governments and the creation of nation-states in the Atlantic world. Much less recognized than the spread of democratic ideals was the period's growing traffic of goods, capital, and people across imperial borders and reforming states' attempts to control this mobility.
Analyzing the American, French, and Haitian revolutions in an interconnected narrative, Manuel Covo centers imperial trade as a driving force, arguing that commercial factors preceded and conditioned political change across the revolutionary Atlantic. At the heart of these transformations was the "entrepot," the island…
A love of literature and a summer with relatives in Belgium—a country divided by language and culture—inspired me to travel to Santo Domingo in 1988 to learn Spanish and study the fraught dynamics of two countries speaking different languages but sharing an island. My time in the Dominican Republic and Haiti inspired a lifelong exploration of complex issues. Today I write about risk, drawing on psychology, culture, policy, and economics, as in Why the Cocks Fight. My third book, The Gray Rhino, calls for a fresh look at obvious, looming threats. The sequel, You Are What You Risk, explores risk perceptions and attitudes through a comparative, socio-cultural lens.
It’s impossible to understand contemporary Haiti without recognizing the impact of the 2010 earthquake that devastated the country, taking an estimated 300,000 lives and destroying many of the iconic historical sites in the capital city, Port-au-Prince. Chancy’s powerful novel of tragedy and resilience depicts the lead-up to and aftermath of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake via the interlinked stories of ten characters from different walks of life. These stories drive home both how different the experience of Haiti can be depending on socioeconomic class and race; yet also how connected so many Haitian stories are to each other.
A NPR, Boston Globe, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, and Library Journal Best Book of the Year
“Stunning.” —Margaret Atwood
At the end of a long, sweltering day, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster—Richard, an expat and wealthy water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, Anne, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker, Leopold, who pines for…
I am a historian of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, specializing in the American and French Revolutions. The relationship between ideas and politics has fascinated me since I worked in media relations in Washington, DC. Because I think history can help us better understand our current political controversies and challenges, I write about the origins of representative democracy in the eighteenth century. I’m also an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame where I teach classes on colonial and revolutionary America, the Constitution, and history of the media.
The Haitian Revolution was long left out of the history of Atlantic revolutions, dismissed as a violent uprising of enslaved people without an ideological dimension.
Dubois’s book walks readers through the twists and turns of this decade-long revolution, highlighting the intellectual agency of enslaved and freed people and the ideological consequences of this transformative event.
The Haitian Revolution is a notoriously complicated event, but I found that this book provided coherence and a compelling analysis of the effects of this crucial moment in the history of democracy and movement for human rights. And it was a gripping read at that.
The first and only successful slave revolution in the Americas began in 1791 when thousands of brutally exploited slaves rose up against their masters on Saint-Domingue, the most profitable colony in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Within a few years, the slave insurgents forced the French administrators of the colony to emancipate them, a decision ratified by revolutionary Paris in 1794. This victory was a stunning challenge to the order of master/slave relations throughout the Americas, including the southern United States, reinforcing the most fervent hopes of slaves and the worst fears of masters.
By Jada Benn Torres and Gabriel A. Torres Colón
Author
Why are we passionate about this?
We met as “baby anthropologists” in graduate school and have stuck together ever since. With Jada’s training in genetic anthropology and Gabriel’s training in cultural anthropology, we’ve accompanied each other to our various field sites throughout the Caribbean, Spain, and the US Midwest. Aside from our book, each of us has authored many peer-reviewed publications, including an award-winning article in the journal Human Biology. Though we both have our own independent research agendas, our interests overlap on several topics including genetic ancestry. Our different anthropological training and our mutual love for our discipline always makes for interesting perspectives on a variety of topics.
This recommendation is a work of fiction. Overall, Allende is an incredible storyteller whose characters seem so real that by the end of the book, you feel like you know them in the same way you know family or an old friend. Island Beneath the Sea, set in 18th - 19th century Haiti then in New Orleans, is a story that illustrates the beautiful messes we create in our lives through those that we love and those that we hate. Drawing on the chaos of American slavery and the Haitian Revolution, Allende’s book draws on themes related to slavery, politics, history, and family drama all of which illustrate what can happen when cultural values (i.e. social constructions of race) are attached to specific bodies (i.e. Black and White women).
From the sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue to the lavish parlors of New Orleans at the turn of the 19th century, Isabel Allende's latest novel tells the story of a mulatta woman, a slave and concubine, determined to take control of her own destiny in a society where that would seem impossible.
Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue - now known as Haiti -Tete is the product of violent union between an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage.
When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it's…
From the time I heard of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed over 200,000 people, my heart was drawn to that country. From 2012 to 2017 I lead five mission trips to Cap Haitian, where we toured mission work, helped Haitians build an elementary school, and met so many of these beautiful people. I ate the great cooking of “Mama Jo” who, along with her husband, hosted us. I gave “horsey” rides to children at a Port-au-Prince orphanage; and shared in prayer and singing with churches near Cap Haitian. In short, I fell in love with these people. How could I notwrite a novel of hope about them?
This is the definitive biography on Toussaint. First published in 1863, it clearly showed me why Toussaint L’Ouverture was one of the most admired world leaders of his time. They called him “the Black Napoleon!” Reading this book brought back to mind that I did a report on Haiti and Toussaint back when I was in junior high (“a long time ago in a universe far, far away!") Even at the time I was impressed by how much the Haitian Revolution influenced our own Civil War.
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I've been interested in U.S.-Latin American relations ever since my junior year in college when I studied abroad in Chile, a country that had only two years prior been run by dictator Augusto Pinochet. Often referred to as America’s “backyard,” Latin America has often been on the receiving end of U.S. machinations and expansions. In terms of the history of American foreign policy, it's never a dull moment in U.S. involvement in its own hemisphere. I have now had the privilege to work inside the executive branch of the U.S. government on Latin America policy, stints which have forced me to reconsider some of what I had assumed about U.S. abilities and outcomes.
Professor McPherson’s stellar history paints an incredibly rich portrait of protracted U.S. interventions—the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, most critically—during the so-called Banana Wars in the first decades of the 20th century. This painstaking researched and lucidly penned tome demands that we take the Latin American side of the story when we study the searing history of Uncle Sam interventionism.
In 1912 the United States sent troops into a Nicaraguan civil war, solidifying a decades-long era of military occupations in Latin America driven by the desire to rewrite the political rules of the hemisphere. In this definitive account of the resistance to the three longest occupations-in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic-Alan McPherson analyzes these events from the perspective of the invaded themselves, showing why people resisted and why the troops eventually left.
Confronting the assumption that nationalism primarily drove resistance, McPherson finds more concrete-yet also more passionate-motivations: hatred for the brutality of the marines, fear of losing land, outrage…
I was drawn to Haiti for two reasons; the Haitian Revolution is the only one of the three 18th century upheavals to fulfill the declared ideology of the French and American Revolutions by extending basic human rights to all people, not just white people. Secondly, or maybe I should put it first, the practice of Vodou makes Haiti one of the few places where one can meet divinity in the flesh, an experience I coveted, although (as it is written) it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God.
Lyonel Trouillot is one of the most powerful novelists of our time, extremely well known in the Francophone world, though less so in the US, in part because of the difficulty of translating his intensely lyrical prose. He has a rare ability to make artistically sound texts based on very immediate reportage on the various Haitian crises. This particular novel is especially valuable in the way it relates the desperation of Haitian life today to the country’s heroic past.
Deux enfants courent, fuyant la misère du bidonville, le destin, le corps d'un père alcoolique et violent qu'ils viennent de tuer. Tableau d'une population désorientée et meurtrie, privée d'échappatoire, ce récit est un bouleversant cri d'alarme au coeur de l'indifférence.
I’ve written five poetry books and I am presently working on my sixth. My poems are also confessional and narrative styles. I have also written two novels and enjoy writing fiction and poetry. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have. They have saved my life on many occasions.
I love this book because it’s an epic poetry book. The first of its kind. Three-hundred and ninety-six-page poetry book. Ariana Reines is one of my favorite top three modern poets as well. Poetry lovers should have this book in their collection. If not, what are you waiting for? It’s a masterpiece. I can see her soul in this book, I can see her heart. I can see her mind. It’s as if sand is literally under your feet as you read these poems divided into sections. This book is meant to be read slowly, like a fine glass of wine. It took me months to read it. It taught me that a poet is an artist and is a traveler of time and space. It taught me to break rules and to do whatever you want as a poet. It taught me to not limit myself as a writer…
Deadpan, epic, and searingly charismatic, A Sand Book is at once relatable and out-of-this-world. In poems tracking climate change, bystanderism, state murder, sexual trauma, shopping, ghosting, love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, A Sand Book chronicles new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times.
What does the destruction of our soil have to do with the weather in the human soul? From sand in the gizzards of birds to the iridescence on the surface of spilt oil, from sand storms on Mars to our internet-addicted present, from the desertifying mountains of Haiti to natural disasters and state…
Reading and writing about family dynamics, particularly Black families, has always appealed to me. Particularly when it comes to the generation gap between parents and their children that causes them to see the same world through different lenses. Who we choose to see as our true family, the ones who define the place we call home, may or may not be defined by blood. I am fortunate not to have personally experienced most of the drama and trauma found in novels that I am drawn to, and in stories I have felt compelled to write. Otherwise, I would have turned to memoir writing rather than fiction.
As a teenager, Sophie leaves behind all that she knows in Haiti to be reunited with her mother. In New York, she falls for a man closer in age to her mother than herself. Her mother rages against him, or any man deemed unsuitable. Desire to guard Sophie's purity drives a wedge between them. The patriarchy of Haiti has lingering effects, resulting in maternal protection that resembles cruelty. Sophie tries to make a marriage work out in different ways and for different reasons than the women (mother, aunt, grandmother) who raised her and formed her ideas of womanhood. Stories of family often center on the differing priorities and expectations of different generations. This aspect of the gracefully written Breath, Eyes, Memory is what drew me in and kept me hooked.
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.
