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The Haiti Reader: History, Culture, Politics LAURENT DUBOIS, KAIAMA L. GLOVER, NADEVE MENARD, MILLERY POLYNE, AND CHANTALLE F. VERNA, EDS. Duke University Press, 2020 544 pp.
The Haiti Reader, edited by three historians on Haiti's national history, Laurent Dubois, Millery Polyné, and Chantalle F. Verna, and two literary scholars on Haitian literature, Kaiama L. Glover and Nadeve Ménard, is part of Duke University Press's Latin American Readers series. Like other volumes in the series, The Haiti Reader focuses on three broad areas: history, culture, and politics. The content of this volume follows a historical chronology and is structured around eight major themes or chapters in Haitian history: "Foundations," "The Second Generation," "The Birth of Modern-Day Haiti," "Occupied Haiti (1915-34)," "Second Independence," "The Duvalier Years," "Overthrow and Aftermath of Duvalier," and "Haiti in the New Millennium." The book begins with documents connected to the founding of the nation of Haiti on January 1, 1804, and it closes with texts linked to the transformative event of January 12, 2010: the magnitude 8.0 earthquake in Haiti. Excerpts and documents in this volume include Haiti's scholarly, literary, religious, visual, musical, and political culture.
Each individual section of the anthology includes excerpts from three kinds of documents associated with Haiti's visual culture or materials (e.g., historical photographs of individuals, places, political moments, and social events); contemporary texts (e.g., literary texts, poems, essays, fiction and nonfiction, political and legal documents); and scholarly works (e.g., scholarship on Haitian history and culture). In the book's introduction, the editors justify the need to write this anthology by lamenting that the Anglophone world, especially North America, has a limited knowledge about Haiti's rich culture and literary and intellectual tradition. They propose two reasons for this lack of information: (1) the linguistic barrier because Haiti's two official languages are Creole and French while the maternal language of most of the Haitian population is Haitian Creole; and (2) the mischaracterization of Haiti through false images, negative narratives, and pseudo-historical discourses.
As a result, the objective of The Haiti Reader is threefold: (1) "to introduce a broad audience of anglophone readers to Haiti via the cultural productions of Haitian themselves"; (2) "to offer a kind of counternarrative, highlighting some lesser-known aspects of Haitian life and culture"; and (3)...