Class and Black-Nationalist Sociality

François Duvalier appropriated the figure of the negro and reconstructed it as a Haitian nègre central to noirisme. The chapter situates Duvalier’s nègre as a pivot of a black-nationalist sociality of the privileged, where it preempts mulatto participation, given mulattoes’ valuation of European bodily ideals. It then shows (black) constituents of this sociality crossing class boundaries at an event in a Port-au-Prince slum, where markers of their class remain operative. The chapter then finds them in a transcendent sociality—at a trendy bistro—where mulattoes and blacks together realize and reproduce their class situations. They are again later at another space of privilege, where this time the black-nationalist sociality reproduces itself in contradistinction to the mulatto, who becomes the other Haitian. In an ethnographic moment ending the chapter, the black-nationalist sociality of privilege can neither contain nor deny class tensions that inhere between privileged and nonprivileged blacks of the nation.