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The author reflects on the centering of the Haitian/Caribbean/African diasporic community from the margins in her novel "What Storm, What Thunder." She discusses the tradition of polyvocality inherent in African and Caribbean literature, as well as the coexistence of the dead with the living as an act of commemoration and form of memorialization, gender, the class and age of the narrators of the novel, and the depiction of a classist, heteronormative, hierarchical and patriarchal society.

Background: In this article, I utilize the concept of the Plantationocene as an analytical framework to generate a holistic and historical understanding of the present-day struggles of a mostly Haitian migrant workforce on sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic. Methods: Inspired by Paul Farmer's methodology, I combine political economy, history, and ethnography approaches to interpret the experiences of sugarcane cutters across historical and contemporary iterations of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial practices over the course of five centuries. Results: My findings elucidate the enduring power of capitalism, implicating corporate and state elites, as the structural scaffolding for acts of racialized violence that condition the life-and-death circumstances of Black laborers on Caribbean plantations to this day. Although today's sugarcane cutters may suffer differently than their enslaved or wage labor ancestors on the plantation, I argue that an unfettered racialized pattern of lethal exploitation is sustained through the structural violence of neoliberalism that links present conditions with the colonial past. Conclusions: Ultimately, this paper contributes understandings of the plantationocene's enduring effects in the global south by demonstrating how imperialist arrangements of capitalism are not a distant memory from the colonial past but instead are present yet hidden and obscured while relocated and reanimated overseas to countries like the Dominican Republic, where American capitalists still exploit Black bodies for profit and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at Haitian narratives of disaster that induce an apocalyptic turn in the millennium, an apocalyptic moment without the promise of a new or better beginning, and illuminate the workings of Haitian exceptionalism. It mentions that the Haitian perception of finality post–2004 coup evokes a subjective experience tied to cultural specificities, a way of describing what feels like the loss of an independent Haiti, of a dream of democracy.

There is a pervasive stigma attached to being Haitian in the Bahamas. This article examines reflections on the experiences of the stigma of being Haitian at primary and secondary school among second-generation Haitians in the Bahamas. Based on this research, I argue that primary school functions as the first major institution where children of Haitian descent experience stigma as it relates to their ethnic heritage and, in turn, are exposed to the idea of being the 'other' in Bahamian society through bullying and anti-Haitian sentiments from students and teachers. Stigma, prejudice, exclusion, and discrimination characterize primary and secondary education for Haitians living in the Bahamas and are manifest in the form of cruel teasing, bullying, and discrimination primarily from students and teachers. The goal is not to argue that children of Haitian descent are completely unaware of anti-Haitian sentiment in the Bahamas until they attend school but, rather, that school functions as one of the first institutions children of Haitian descent learn there is stigma in being Haitian in the Bahamas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ariel and Caliban, two characters from Shakespeare ’s Tempest, served as emblematic metaphors for several interpretations of decolonization, particularly in the Caribbean context (Ruben Dario, Jose Enrique Rodo, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon). Initially, the dichotomy was used along the North/South American axis (white/black, master/slave, civilized/ barbaric, reason/instinct, and materialism/spirituality) and the argumentation of the authors in question was mainly ideological, focusing on the various civilizational factors. Since the Nineteen Seventies, these meanings have shifted to express the negotiation of cultural differences, or were used as an aesthetic counterpoint. Developments of this kind have had a positive impact on Quebec literature, particularly in the works of authors of the Haitian diaspora, such as Emile Ollivier, Dany Laferriere and Gerard Etienne. Wherever there is a thematic divide between the topographies of Montreal and those of Haiti the stylistic registers reflect the contrasts between intellectual distance and lyrical or epic emotion, between individualism and community, rationality and supernatural collective beliefs. Being positioned between the host land and the land of origin the characters look for emotional and noetical answers to their exiled existence.

Anti-Black racism has been widely criticized in scholarly and cultural representations of the Dominican Republic. Yet, this narrative of "Black denial" obscures growing activist and popular culture movements that are breaking the silence around race and visibilizing blackness. This paper examines one emergent thread of Black popular culture, the natural hair movement. This growing trend and commercial space promoting the acceptance of afro-textured hair challenges anti-blackness and exclusionary national ideologies of mestizaje. Given the ways that blackness and Haitianness are co-articulated in Dominican culture, this paper evaluates the potential of the cultural politics of hair to challenge Haitian exclusion. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Dominicans of Haitian descent, this essay situates the natural hair movements alongside contemporary policies aimed at the exclusion of the Haitian diaspora. In particular, these activists identify the commercialization of the movement as a threat to its political efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The search for professional work opportunities which allow the subjects better living conditions is directly related to international migration. Professional work seems to be a resource which enhances psychic health by promoting the experience of recognition of the migrant's skills, with effects on their subjectivity. Through the method of psychoanalytic research, this article examines the role of professional work in relation to the impasses of migratory experience. The risks to the social pathologization of migration tendencies are discussed and the relationship between migration and the creative potential of labor practice is approached. A Haitian migrant was interviewed and the book entitled "Sonhos que mobilizam o imigrante haitiano: biografia de Renel Simon" (Dreams that mobilize the Haitian immigrant: A biography of Renel Simon) was also selected as a research material. In a statement constituted from the analysis of these narratives, the individual way of how each one of these subjects has faced challenges along the migration process has been explained. The article concludes that professional work responds to the identity dimension, assessing value of one-self, as it allows the subject in its social insertion and intersubjective experiences of recognition for the activities performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thin sympathetic engagement is a basic, cognitive understanding of the needs of the other. It played an important role in how elites from the Montreal Haitian diaspora were able to influence an NGO in their adopted country, Canada, the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, to work with the diaspora to secure a truth commission in Haiti. That commission ultimately became the Commission Nationale de Vérité et de Justice. The aims of the diaspora were advanced by its engagement with neutral outsider groups in their adopted country and their ability to persuade these groups toward a thin sympathetic response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a lens to consider how the ceremonial space of Vodou functions as a queer site, allowing for experiences of spiritual possession by Vodou spirits, as well as unconventional expressions of gender and sexuality for participants, especially Black women. I draw from theorists of religion, gender, and diaspora studies in order to frame this argument. Historian of religion Mircea Eliade develops the notion of "sacred space" to elucidate the participants' transformation through direct contact with the divine. Religion scholar Tracey E. Hucks explains how Black women's worship of and devotion to African-derived goddesses empowers them, grounding them with a strong sense of self-worth and history. Additionally, gender studies scholar Gayatri Gopinath expands definitions of queer diaspora, describing how "queer desires, bodies and subjectivities become dense sites of memory in the production and reproduction of culture and communal belonging." Lastly, drawing from the work of Gina Athena Ulysse, Audre Lorde, and Zora Neale Hurston, I use an auto-ethnographic approach to analyze my own experiences within a Haitian Vodou community in Montreal as a participant observer in order to explore these complex notions of Black womanhood, motherhood, and sexuality. I also rely on ethnographic and historical research and interviews with practitioners on Haitian Vodou. It is my hope that this and other such studies will demonstrate the value of pursuing critical research on gender and sexuality in Haitian Vodou. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This intimate diaristic article illuminates how lauded modern/contemporary dancer Roxane D'Orléans Juste resourcefully tapped into what she terms "movement intelligence" to embody a priestess who channeled the divine in the 2014 choreography She Who Carries the Sky. Inspired in part by Edwidge Danticat's book Breath, Eyes, Memory , D'Orléans Juste became the spiritual realm's conduit through what she calls "knowing and sensing with the body, allowing environments and people to be mutually affective, and drawing from this knowledge to thread movements that animate the message the body projects." Born in Québec to a French Canadian mother and a Haitian father, the performer underwent rigorous training in dance and academic studies in Haiti, Canada, the United States, and Europe, becoming a staple of the United States' prestigious Limón Dance Company from 1983 to 2016. D'Orléans Juste was the company's associate artistic director when she devised the piece with McIntyre. Limón's then artistic director Carla Maxwell commissioned the choreography for D'Orléans Juste to commemorate her thirty-year tenure with the company. In recreating D'Orléans Juste's method for initiating a choreographed, embodied movement practice for the stage that sources and routes Haitian cultural memory on a personal level, this article also tends to the primary concerns of her work. It mobilizes the artist's emic term "movement intelligence" in describing her process of researching, rehearsing, and performing She Who Carries the Sky as a representation of the physical and intellectual ingenuity sourced by Haitian diasporic arts practitioners as they lead culturally engaged and multidirectional lives. Accordingly, the article is deeply attentive to the dance's references and allusions for readers and viewers of the choreography's future iterations; it follows D'Orléans Juste's insistence that a Haitian woman's creative and spiritual methods for moving through spaces, times, and sociocultural knowledge constitute acts of self-determination, alchemized with finesse and careful and sustained labor. To articulate the artist's efforts to create new memories and broaden perceptions of Haitianness for her audiences, I use Haitian and Vodou epistemologies as interpretive lenses that explicate how D'Orléans Juste's contemporary dancing body challenges the investment some readers and viewers––of Haitian descent and otherwise––might have in a specific traditional construct of dance in Haiti and its diasporic spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Haitian art composers of the diaspora have sought to show Haitian music's uniqueness as well as universality across cultures in order to create an internationally recognized, distinctly Haitian musical voice. As composers of the diaspora have established their individual musical voices, their collective choices have reflected a particular musical narrative staging the nation. Common themes reflected by Haitian composers of the diaspora from the 1960s to the present include nostalgia, fragmentation, cultural tensions, Vodou rhythms, political expression, the mixing of musical styles, and cosmopolitanism. This article examines works by composers Carmen Brouard and Julio Racine for their musical priorities in narrating the Haitian diaspora and staging the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ariel and Caliban, two characters from Shakespeare's Tempest, served as emblematic metaphors for several interpretations of decolonization, particularly in the Caribbean context (Rubén Dário, José Enrique Rodó, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon). Initially, the dichotomy was used along the North/South American axis (white/black, master/slave, civilized/ barbaric, reason/instinct, and materialism/spirituality) and the argumentation of the authors in question was mainly ideological, focusing on the various civilizational factors. Since the Nineteen Seventies, these meanings have shifted to express the negotiation of cultural differences, or were used as an aesthetic counterpoint. Developments of this kind have had a positive impact on Quebec literature, particularly in the works of authors of the Haitian diaspora, such as Émile Ollivier, Dany Laferrière and Gérard Étienne. Wherever there is a thematic divide between the topographies of Montreal and those of Haiti the stylistic registers reflect the contrasts between intellectual distance and lyrical or epic emotion, between individualism and community, rationality and supernatural collective beliefs. Being positioned between the host land and the land of origin the characters look for emotional and noetical answers to their exiled existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The 7.0 magnitude earthquake on January 12, 2010 in Haiti reawakened in the diaspora a strong sense of purpose to focus efforts beyond family remittances towards regional and national development. Yet Haitian hometown associations (HHTAs) in the US struggled to establish a strong, organizational structure to respond systematically and effectively to the country's increased post‐earthquake needs. Based on historical analysis, participatory observations, interviews, and comparisons with other diaspora groups’ models for homeland development, we explore how trust within the transnational Haitian nation has been impacted in the post‐earthquake era by cultural conditionings of the past which constrain the scalability, durability, and viability of HHTAs’ developmental potential to systematically intervene in a coordinated manner regionally and nationally. We examine the ways in which trust – and resistances to it – operates as a mediating lens remobilized by the earthquake for the interpretation of the Haitian past, present, and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze how the “mobility turn” and, more precisely, the use of media and information and telecommunication technologies (ICTs), are reshaping the territoriality of migration. Through the concepts of relational space and multiple attachments, it is a matter of examining the relational modes between distant places enabled by ICTs and how they are reshaping the sense of belonging for people of Haitian origin. Through the diachronic study of media practices within the Haitian community in Montreal, from anti-Duvalier exiles to a transnational community, it will query how media sustain the creation of connected belongings and attachments.

Using a creative interdisciplinary method of enquiry, this article seeks to exorcise the spectres of revolutionary creolisation embedded in George Washington Cable’s 1880 novelThe Grandissimes. It probes, in particular, the secreted traces of the Creole diaspora triggered by the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, and attempts to peel back the manifold layers of ideological occlusion embedded in the (ostensibly white, Anglo-American) narrative frame of Cable’s omniscient narrator and his protagonist Joseph Frowenfeld, which suppress the connections between inter-American identities across diverse, revolutionary, creolistic worlds in Louisiana and the Gulf South. Unlike other studies examining traces of the Haitian Revolution inThe Grandissimes, which tend to focus on the parallels between fictional and historical figures in Cable’s southern romance, this article dissects the subtle allusions to the revolution and the attendant diaspora found in the plantation infrastructures and the urban landscape of Cable’s Louisiana. In so doing, it demonstrates how Saint-Domingan migrants affirmed and reinvigorated the cultural landscape of the ‘Creole’ South and ‘circumvented’ the ideological spread of ‘Americanness’ at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, and during successive moments thereafter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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A number of catastrophic disasters in the last decade have raised questions about their transnational impacts and about the role of the diaspora. The 2010 Haiti earthquake, the focus of our study, provided a lens to further our understanding of evolving conceptualizations about transnationalism, transmigrants, and social capital. We hypothesize that sustained ‘intensive transnationalism’ by diaspora and linking forms of social capital between diaspora, other civil society organizations and advocacy groups, and government institutions are critical during post-disaster recovery in affected nation states and in countries to which survivors turn for refuge. We conducted 103 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a wide range of civil society actors in South Florida, Boston, New York, Atlanta, and Washington DC between June 2010 and June 2015. We found that linking forms of social capital were more important after the earthquake than in previous disasters. Overall, the longevity and variety of Haitian diaspora advocacy work, particularly in immigration, have resulted in broader social networks and alliances, work groups, task forces, interfaith coalitions, and support groups to address complex social and policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My essay, “Lenelle Moïse: Postscript, Swimming in the Waters of Endezo,” examines the work of Haitian American poet and performance artist, Lenelle Moïse, who artfully blends Haitian Kreyòl and English in her poems and solo performances. She challenges conventional understandings of gender and sexual difference through interrogating language and positionality in ways that explore the interrelatedness between words, images, and movement. My essay is an exploratory analysis of the solo performance,Madivinez and To Erzulie, the experimental video produced and directed by videographer Mara Alper in which Moïse performs her poem “the number.” Both works, in different ways, illustrate her resistance against a sexualized alterity through the interrogation of cultural memory and spirituality. As a black woman who accepts and identifies with the term “lesbian,” is politically moved by the word “queer,” and theoretically and artistically inspired by the term “pomosexual,” Moïse's work interweaves complex stories and histories that reveal language as a performative and political practice engaged in the creation of black subjects. Her performances illustrate, visually and linguistically, the tensions and slippages of negotiating a diasporic identity. Furthermore, she explores the differences that are created by and embedded in language and ethnicity to produce poems and performances that are infused with explorations of belonging, gendered identities, and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes the recent immigration of Haitians in Brazil since the socio-communicative interactions that constitute subjectivities, trajectories and ensembles of these immigrants in the context of their diasporic experiences in transnational migration networks. From the bibliographic and documentary research, conducting in-depth interviews with Haitians and observing events on migration, we examine how these interactions make evident the global geopolitical ties between Brazil and Haiti, as well as this process forge transnational imaginaries about Brazil as an immigration country and a media environment of affirmation and public dispute over this new immigration as otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We recruited eleven participants during April 2012 from the Haitian American Empowerment Program that was launched at the Diaspora Community Service (DCS) agency to meet the needs of the Haitian community in Brooklyn after the earthquake. Data were collected using open-ended questions in in-depth interviews. The key themes that emerged related to dealing with repeating memories of the earthquake; emotional and physical distress; and financial, housing, and material needs. Participants mentioned that their needs were addressed through assistance in applying for Temporary Protected Status and Medicaid, receiving medical care, and learning English. The implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outside regular school and family structures, the youth are exposed to other environments that allow them to learn from adults. This is referred to as “tiers-lieu éducatif” or "third-place education". Churches in Haitian communities in Martinique emerge, in our opinion, from this experience. In fact, the Haitian Diaspora is concentrated in areas that contain small ecclesiastical strongholds, enterprises led by self-acclaimed pastors who originate from the exiled community, assuming responsibility for their progeny, and thus helping them to integrate in the society. This article highlights the function of Education in these areas highly populated by Haitians. Following the example of the native Evangelical Communities, we have formulated the explanatory hypothesis that we have verified: A function that does not fulfil, on the other hand, the few voodoo temples on the island, led by the sons of Toussaint Louverture.

So far religious encounters in migratory settings have been largely examined in relation to the pluralizing of religious cultures, the emerging of syncretisms as well as religious conversions. However, many migrants choose to live more than one religion at the same time and integrate themselves into several religious communities with different and sometimes opposing religious agendas. This article concentrates on the Haitian migrant community in Montreal, Canada. On the basis of" the parallelisms between Vodou and Catholicism it first examines the parallels between different religious concepts and performances and second, the significance of particular Vodou spirits which act as mediators between different cultures. The article questions the idea of exclusive belongings and highlights the meaning of space as a differentiating factor in the diversification of religious meanings and messages in multicultural settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of economic and political conditions in Haiti during the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, many Haitians sought refuge or work in nearby countries. While some entered these countries legally, most entered or sought to enter by non-traditional means. Both the danger they risked in attempting to reach a "better land", and their receptions upon arrival have been the concern of the international community. This paper is an assessment of the international response to Haitians in the United States, Dominican Republic and Bahamas Islands, who have been the victims, or alleged victims of discrimination because of race or nationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Haitian diaspora and the effect of Internet-based communication on Haitian identity and collective action. The Internet-linked communities of Haitians or "diasporic public spheres" are discussed. Three types of Internet-mediated public spheres that create identity, community, and agency are: representational such as the online journal "Tanbou" which is at www.tanbou.com; network where group opinion and agendas are formed in interactive forums; and vertical where opinions are directed to institutions and public officials by such organizations as the Haitian Creolists' Internet Network. Subaltern public spheres and the Corbett List of electronic mail message subscribers are mentioned.