While Haiti established the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere and was the first black country to gain independence from European colonizers, its history is not well known in the Anglophone world. The Haiti Reader introduces readers to Haiti’s dynamic history and culture from the viewpoint of Haitians from all walks of life. Its dozens of selections—most of which appear here in English for the first time—are representative of Haiti’s scholarly, literary, religious, visual, musical, and political cultures, and range from poems, novels, and political tracts to essays, legislation, songs, and folk tales. Spanning the centuries between precontact indigenous Haiti and the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, the Reader covers widely known episodes in Haiti’s history, such as the U.S. military occupation and the Duvalier dictatorship, as well as overlooked periods such as the decades immediately following Haiti’s “second independence” in 1934. Whether examining issues of political upheaval, the environment, or modernization, The Haiti Reader provides an unparalleled look at Haiti’s history, culture, and politics.

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About the presenting Editors:

Laurent Dubois is Professor of Romance Studies and History, founder and Faculty Director of the Forum for Scholars & Publics at Duke University. From 2010 to 2013, he was the co-director of the Haiti Laboratory of the Franklin Humanities Institute. Laurent is the author of prize-winning research. He has written about the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean, with Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (2004). In 2012, he published the New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. And, he is the author of Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (2010), The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer (2018), The Banjo: America’s African Instrument (2016), and most recently Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), with Richard Turits. Laurent’s writings on music, history and sport have appeared widely in the scholarly and popular press. He tweets as @Soccerpolitics.

Kaiama L. Glover is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies and Faculty Director of Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College, Columbia University. An award-winning scholar, Kaiama is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP, 2010) and translated several works of fiction and non-fiction from French to English, notably Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (2014), Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano (2016), René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (2017), and Françoise Vergès’s The Wombs of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, Feminism (2019). Her forthcoming monograph is “The Regarded Self: On Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being,” (Duke UP, 2020). Her current book project is on “René Depestre: For the Love of Revolution.” She is founding co-editor of archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and founding co-director of the digital humanities project “In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography.”

CHANTALLE F. VERNA is Associate Professor of history and international relations at Florida International University. She is the author of Haiti and the Uses of America: Post-U.S. Occupation Promises (Rutgers University Press, 2017). Her current projects include: research on Haitian professionals hired by international organizations and heads of state to work across Africa during the waves of decolonization that followed the Second World War, and a collaborative scholarly edition and translation of St. Victor Jean-Baptiste’s Fondateur Devant l’Histoire (1954). To learn more, visit: nam2nam.com.