Travel Chronicles a Diaspora in Haiti

Travel Chronicles a Diaspora in Haiti
Author: Aldy Castor
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-03-31
Genre:
ISBN: 9781638482918

In Haiti, the impact of the Diaspora is significant and crucial. Over time, millions of Haitian nationals have come to financially depend on family, friends, and support organizations abroad for what is euphemistically called "remittances," at times more than two billion dollars a year.The pervasive and profoundly chronic utilitarian and financial need from the in-country receivers, the intense psychological feeling, strong unfulfilled self-validation, and deep remembrances from the givers abroad create between them a solid and long-term relational attachment that ultimately contributes to forging the identity of the Diaspora. This exchange and reciprocity are, in a way, the expression of a gift and a counter-gift.This relationship has profound consequences over the emergence of Haitians' capacities to engage in endogenous development. The Diaspora is attuned to this charity-versus-development problem, i.e., development-without-charity? or development-plus-charity? or how to make the transition from charity to development? In so many words, by what steps and conditions could eleven million Haitian nationals come out of their "caves?" By what phases could the Diaspora focus and coordinate for development rather than for survival?This anthology of disaster dispatches, guides, and allegories demonstrates the fine points of Diaspora strategy-making. The reality herein constantly disconcerts the author and his colleagues who, despite their broad knowledge of the land and the people of Haiti, discover and come to grips with more and more of the country's worst-kept secrets. The reader will encounter this in a stroll through "Bolivia 1" or the sight of someone desperately eating a spaghetti sandwich, or the paralyzing fear, superstition, and corrupt social control that shuts doors to the twenty-first century. As always, overcoming paralysis - whether personal or national - requires courage, new thinking, and lots of humility.

forum for inter-american research Vol 6

forum for inter-american research Vol 6
Author: Wilfried Raussert
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2023-07-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3946507824

Volume 6 of 6 of the complete premium print version of journal forum for inter-american research (fiar), which is the official electronic journal of the International Association of Inter-American Studies (IAS). fiar was established by the American Studies Program at Bielefeld University in 2008. We foster a dialogic and interdisciplinary approach to the study of the Americas. fiar is a peer-reviewed online journal. Articles in this journal undergo a double-blind review process and are published in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

Let's Speak Haitian Food

Let's Speak Haitian Food
Author: Cindy Similien-Johnson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2017-03-24
Genre:
ISBN: 9780692860793

I am not Haitian because I was born in Haiti, I am Haitian because Haiti was born in me. -Anonymous After Haitian-American Author and Community Advocate Cindy Similien-Johnson met her102-year-old Haitian grandmother for the first time in 20 years, she embarked on a cultural journey to rediscover her Haitian heritage. It was through food that she felt a deeper connection to her roots. She reached out to her Haitian brothers and sisters from around the world and talked about their memories of cuisine, community, and culture. This volume is a culmination of half a decade worth of collecting, editing, and compiling heartfelt stories from more than 100 members of the Haitian Diaspora. Also included are the recipes of her top favorite Haitian foods from her childhood. It is with great hope that the stories contained in this book will be shared for generations to come, and cultivate the importance of passing down traditions, stories, and memories.

Refugee Diaspora

Refugee Diaspora
Author: Sam George
Publisher: William Carey Publishing
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0878080872

God is at work among refugees everywhere. Will you join? Refugee Diaspora is a contemporary account of the global refugee situation and how the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ is shining brightly in the darkest corners of the greatest crisis on our planet. These hope-filled pages of refugees encountering Jesus Christ presents models of Christian ministry from the front lines of the refugee crisis and the real challenges of ministering to today’s refugees. It includes biblical, theological, and practical reflections on mission in diverse diaspora contexts from leading scholars as well as practitioners in all major regions of the world.

Breath, Eyes, Memory

Breath, Eyes, Memory
Author: Edwidge Danticat
Publisher: Soho Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2015-02-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1616955023

The 20th anniversary edition of Edwidge Danticat's groundbreaking debut, now an established classic--revised and with a new introduction by the author, and including extensive bonus materials At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village 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 her stunning literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti—and the enduring strength of Haiti’s women—with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people’s suffering and courage.

Dividing Hispaniola

Dividing Hispaniola
Author: Edward Paulino
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-02-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822981033

The island of Hispaniola is split by a border that divides the Dominican Republic and Haiti. This border has been historically contested and largely porous. Dividing Hispaniola is a study of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo's scheme, during the mid-twentieth century, to create and reinforce a buffer zone on this border through the establishment of state institutions and an ideological campaign against what was considered an encroaching black, inferior, and bellicose Haitian state. The success of this program relied on convincing Dominicans that regardless of their actual color, whiteness was synonymous with Dominican cultural identity. Paulino examines the campaign against Haiti as the construct of a fractured urban intellectual minority, bolstered by international politics and U.S. imperialism. This minority included a diverse set of individuals and institutions that employed anti-Haitian rhetoric for their own benefit (i.e., sugar manufacturers and border officials.) Yet, in reality, these same actors had no interest in establishing an impermeable border. Paulino further demonstrates that Dominican attitudes of admiration and solidarity toward Haitians as well as extensive intermixture around the border region were commonplace. In sum his study argues against the notion that anti-Haitianism was part of a persistent and innate Dominican ethos.

A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou

A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou
Author: Benjamin Hebblethwaite
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 149683562X

Connecting four centuries of political, social, and religious history with fieldwork and language documentation, A Transatlantic History of Haitian Vodou analyzes Haitian Vodou’s African origins, transmission to Saint-Domingue, and promulgation through song in contemporary Haiti. Split into two sections, the African chapters focus on history, economics, and culture in Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda while scrutinizing the role of Europeans in fomenting tensions. The political, military, and slave trading histories of the kingdoms in the Bight of Benin reveal the circumstances of enslavement, including the geographies, ethnicities, languages, and cultures of enslavers and enslaved. The study of the spirits, rituals, structure, and music of the region’s religions sheds light on important sources for Haitian Vodou. Having royal, public, and private expressions, Vodun spirit-based traditions served as cultural systems that supported or contested power and enslavement. At once suppliers and victims of the European slave trade, the people of Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda deeply shaped the emergence of Haiti’s creolized culture. The Haitian chapters focus on Vodou’s Rada Rite (from Allada) and Gede Rite (from Abomey) through the songs of Rasin Figuier’s Vodou Lakay and Rasin Bwa Kayiman’s Guede, legendary rasin compact discs released on Jean Altidor’s Miami label, Mass Konpa Records. All the Vodou songs on the discs are analyzed with a method dubbed “Vodou hermeneutics” that harnesses history, religious studies, linguistics, literary criticism, and ethnomusicology in order to advance a scholarly approach to Vodou songs.

Germany and the Black Diaspora

Germany and the Black Diaspora
Author: Mischa Honeck
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2013-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857459546

The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.

Haiti Fights Back

Haiti Fights Back
Author: Yveline Alexis
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2021-06-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1978815409

Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte is the first US study of the politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who fought against the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. Alexis locates rare multilingual sources from both nations and documents Péralte's political movement and citizens' protests. The interdisciplinary work offers a new approach to studies of the US invasion period by documenting how Caribbean people fought back.

Searching for Zion

Searching for Zion
Author: Emily Raboteau
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2013-01-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 080219379X

From Jerusalem to Ghana to Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, a woman reclaims her history in a “beautifully written and thought-provoking” memoir (Dave Eggers, author of A Hologram for the King and Zeitoun). A biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, Emily Raboteau never felt at home in America. As the daughter of an African American religious historian, she understood the Promised Land as the spiritual realm black people yearned for. But while visiting Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. More surprising was the story of how they got there. Inspired by their exodus, her question for them is the same one she keeps asking herself: have you found the home you’re looking for? In this American Book Award–winning inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement, Raboteau embarked on a ten-year journey around the globe and back in time to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of black Zionists. She talked to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews—all in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit. Uniting memoir with cultural investigation, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place, patriotism, dispossession, citizenship, and country in “an exceptionally beautiful . . . book about a search for the kind of home for which there is no straight route, the kind of home in which the journey itself is as revelatory as the destination” (Edwidge Danticat, author of The Farming of Bones).