Haiti, long noted for poverty and repression, has a powerful and too-often-overlooked history of resistance. Women in Haiti have played a large role in changing the balance of political and social power, even as they have endured rampant and devastating state-sponsored violence, including torture, rape, abuse, illegal arrest, disappearance, and assassination. In Walking on Fire, Beverly Bell, an activist and an expert on Haitian social movements, brings together thirty-eight oral histories from a diverse group of Haitian women. The interviewees include, for example, a former prime minister, an illiterate poet, a leading feminist theologian, and a vodou dancer. Defying victim status despite gender- and state-based repression, they tell how Haiti's poor and dispossessed women have fought for their personal and collective survival. The women's powerfully moving accounts of horror and heroism can best be characterized by the Creole word istwa, which means both "story" and "history." They combine theory with case studies concerning resistance, gender, and alternative models of power. Photographs of the women who have lived through Haiti's recent past accompany their words to further personalize the interviews in Walking on Fire.

Democratic Insecurities focuses on the ethics of military and humanitarian intervention in Haiti during and after Haiti's 1991 coup. In this remarkable ethnography of violence, Erica Caple James explores the traumas of Haitian victims whose experiences were denied by U.S. officials and recognized only selectively by other humanitarian providers. Using vivid first-person accounts from women survivors, James raises important new questions about humanitarian aid, structural violence, and political insecurity. She discusses the politics of postconflict assistance to Haiti and the challenges of promoting democracy, human rights, and justice in societies that experience chronic insecurity. Similarly, she finds that efforts to promote political development and psychosocial rehabilitation may fail because of competition, strife, and corruption among the individuals and institutions that implement such initiatives.

"Haiti's catastrophic earthquake follows a decade of crisis in governance and in everyday social life. Erica James's powerful ethnographic study shows how insecurity has been created, victimhood shaped, and trauma mediated under long-term conditions of grinding poverty punctuated by periodic disaster and interventions both external and domestic. The international and unintended consequences have commodified suffering, institutionalized insecurity, and fashioned a troubling and troubled 'democracy.' This book is a major achievement!"--Arthur Kleinman, author of What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger "This is a remarkable piece of scholarship. Erica James has raised the bar as far as solid ethnographic inquiry in Haiti goes and draws on a diverse set of theoretical traditions in anthropology and in social theory. Her research will, I predict, open new doors."--Paul Farmer, Harvard University, founding director of Partners in Health "Erica James' book is a vivid descent into the ordinary of violence and insecurity, of suffering and trauma, in a country that seems to have never completely recovered from past French exploitation and American imperialism. Based on an ethnography of neighborhoods as well as of aid agencies, the inquiry courageously questions our categories of thought and models of action to confront Haitian endless tragedies, from victimization to humanitarianism, bringing together, in an unprecedented analysis, what she calls the economies of terror and the economies of compassion."--Didier Fassin, author of When Bodies Remember "Democratic Insecurities is a work of extraordinary depth that sets new standards on the themes of violence and social suffering. The power of the book lies in the great attention to historical and ethnographic detail of Haitian society and politics through which the doing and undoing of violence is rendered knowable as well as its command over social theory."--Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University "James draws us in via an astonishingly vivid and unsettling account of her first weeks in Haiti. This book is a highly sophisticated, compelling, and instructive read and an outstanding example of ethnography by one of the leading anthropologists in the field of trauma."--Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Harvard University

Jacques Stephen Alexis, Jacques Roumain, René Depestre, Marie Chauvet, Frankétienne, J. J. Dominique, Jean Métellus, Dany Laferrière, Yanick Lahens, Lyonel Trouillot et Edwidge Danticat sont quelques-uns des écrivains haïtiens dont l'écriture est marquée par le contexte politique d'Haïti. Les régimes dictatoriaux ont, en effet, affecté l'espace créatif, imposant un certain nombre de contraintes auxquelles ces écrivains, chacun à leur manière, ont ingénieusement riposté et réagi. Ce recueil d'essais critiques et d'entretiens tente d'illustrer et d'analyser comment les oeuvres romanesques, poétiques et théâtrales s'accommodent du « pays assiégé » et déploient des stratégies linguistiques et formelles permettant de transcender les forces d'oppression. Jacques Stephen Alexis, Jacques Roumain, René Depestre, Marie Chauvet, Frankétienne, J. J. Dominique, Jean Métellus, Dany Laferrière, Yanick Lahens, Lyonel Trouillot and Edwidge Danticat are some of the Haitian writers whose writing is marked by Haiti's political history. Successive dictatorships have indeed shaped Haiti's creative space, imposing constraints that the authors ingeniously counteract and against which they all react. This collection of essays and interviews illustrates and analyzes the various ways in which the fictional, poetic and theatrical texts transcend the forces of oppression through linguistic and formal strategies.

Latin American states took dramatic steps toward greater inclusion during the late twentieth and early twenty-first Centuries. Bringing together an accomplished group of scholars, this volume examines this shift by introducing three dimensions of inclusion: official recognition of historically excluded groups, access to policymaking, and resource redistribution. Tracing the movement along these dimensions since the 1990s, the editors argue that the endurance of democratic politics, combined with longstanding social inequalities, create the impetus for inclusionary reforms. Diverse chapters explore how factors such as the role of partisanship and electoral clientelism, constitutional design, state capacity, social protest, populism, commodity rents, international diffusion, and historical legacies encouraged or inhibited inclusionary reform during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Featuring original empirical evidence and a strong theoretical framework, the book considers cross-national variation, delves into the surprising paradoxes of inclusion, and identifies the obstacles hindering further fundamental change.

Despite Haiti's proximity to the United States, and its considerable importance to our own history, Haiti barely registered in the historic consciousness of most Americans until recently. Those who struggled to understand Haiti's suffering in the earthquake of 2010 often spoke of it as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, but could not explain how it came to be so. In recent years, the amount of scholarship about the island has increased dramatically. Whereas once this scholarship was focused on Haiti's political or military leaders, now the historiography of Haiti features lively debates and different schools of thought. Even as this body of knowledge has developed, it has been hard for students to grasp its various strands. Haitian History presents the best of the recent articles on Haitian history, by both Haitian and foreign scholars, moving from colonial Saint Domingue to the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. It will be the go-to one-volume introduction to the field of Haitian history, helping to explain how the promise of the Haitian Revolution dissipated, and presenting the major debates and questions in the field today.