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Books on the Caribbean
Hubert Cole. Christophe: King of Haiti. New
York: The Viking Press, 1967.
C.L.R. James.
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(1938)
Edourad Gissant.
Caribbean Doscourse (2004)
/ Barbara Harlow.
Resistance Literature (1987)
Josaphat B. Kubayanda.
The Poet's Africa: Africanness in the Poetry of Nicolas Guillen and Aime
Cesaire
(1990)
Paul Laraque and Jack Hirschman.
Open
Gate An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry
(2001)
David P. Geggus, ed.
The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World.
University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
Jean-Bertand Aristide.
Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a
Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization
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HAITI ACTION ALERT
Aristide
Under Lock & Key
U.S. Delegation Says
Dear friends,
We would like to encourage you help circulate the following press
release on breaking news regarding the status of Haitian President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who is being held virtually incommunicado
on the instructions of U.S. authorities. We have established an
easy-to-use system that will allow you to send the press release
to the local and national media of your choice. This system also
will allow you to send a brief customized message, if you would
like, to the media outlet(s) you choose. By working together
around the country, we can encourage and/or pressure the media to
pursue
this story.
Thousands of people in Haiti have risked life and limb in recent
days to demonstrate in Port-au-Prince in support of the return of
the democratically elected president of Haiti and in opposition to
the U.S. coup d'etat and occupation. Take a few moments to help
circulate this press release to show solidarity with the Haitian
people.
Below is the press release, entitled "Aristide Under Lock
& Key, U.S. Delegation Says." Below the press
release is the link for the easy-to-use system that allows you to
send out this press release to the media outlets of your choice.
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ARISTIDE UNDER LOCK & KEY, U.S. DELEGATION SAYS
Contact: International Action Center
New York: (212)
633-6646
Greg Dunkel or Deidre
Sinnott
March 7, 2004
A delegation from the United States has arrived in the Central
African Republic to meet with overthrown Haitian President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. President Aristide was taken involuntarily
to the Central African Republic following a U.S. coup d'etat on
February 28. The group was granted visas on Thursday and Friday
and departed the United States on Friday evening.
The delegation includes Kim Ives from the Haiti Support Network,
and Johnnie Stevens and Sara Flounders from the International
Action Center. Ives, Flounders and Stevens are representing former
U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Also on the delegation are
Brian Concannon, acting in the capacity of President Aristide's
lawyer; and Katherine Kean, a friend of President Aristide.
Kim Ives, a personal friend of Jean-Bertrand and Mildred Aristide,
said "This morning, the delegation went to the Palace of the
Renaissance [Bangui, capitol city], the presidential compound
where President Aristide is being held." Mr. Ives had spoken
to the Foreign Minister on Thursday to inform him that the
delegation was coming to the Central African Republic to meet with
President Aristide.
"We were stopped at the gates by a guard who contacted a
Central African Republic official inside the building. A
representative of the Central African Republic came out to speak
with us," Ives reported. "We asked to go in to visit
President Aristide and were told we could not. We asked if he
could come out to see us, and we were told no. We asked if we
could send in a note or our phone number, and we were told no. The
official then told us that he had spoken with the Minister of
Defense and that Aristide was not allowed to receive
visitors."
Mr. Ives also reported that he placed a call to the cell phone
that the Aristides have been using to place calls to their
friends, attorneys and the media. "Mildred Aristide answered
the phone. I said, 'Hello Mildred, this is Kim Ives, we are here.'
At that point, the phone line went dead. We have tried to call
many times since then but there has been no answer."
Brian Concannon is also a member of the delegation, acting in the
capacity of President Aristide's attorney. Standing outside the
gates of the compound where President Aristide is being held, Mr.
Concannon requested to meet with President Aristide alone for a
consultation. This was also denied.
"The world has been told that President Aristide is free to
come and go, and that he has simply chosen not to leave,"
said Sara Flounders of the International Action Center. "The
fact that our delegation has been denied all forms of contact with
President Aristide confirms, in fact, that he is being kept under
lock and key, at this point not even able to communicate by
phone."
"The U.S. and French governments chose to take Aristide to
the Central African Republic, a formerly colonized and
impoverished country," said Johnnie Stevens of the
International Action Center. "The Central African Republic,
similar to many formerly colonized countries in Africa and around
the world, has been isolated and underdeveloped because of the
past policies of France, the U.S. and other colonial and
neo-colonial powers. The U.S. and France should be paying
reparations to the Central African Republic."
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The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
Reviewed by Mimi Sheller
The slave revolution
that two hundred years ago created the state of Haiti
alarmed and excited public opinion on both sides of the
Atlantic. Its repercussions ranged from the world commodity
markets to the imagination of poets, from the council
chambers of the great powers to slave quarters in Virginia
and Brazil and most points in between. Sharing attention
with such tumultuous events as the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic War, Haiti's fifteen-year struggle for racial
equality, slave emancipation, and colonial independence
challenged notions about racial hierarchy that were gaining
legitimacy in an Atlantic world dominated by Europeans and
the slave trade. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the
Atlantic World explores the multifarious influence—from
economic to ideological to psychological—that a revolt on a
small Caribbean island had on the continents surrounding it.
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Fifteen international scholars,
including eminent historians David Brion Davis, Seymour Drescher, and
Robin Blackburn, explicate such diverse ramifications as the spawning of
slave resistance and the stimulation of slavery's expansion, the opening
of economic frontiers, and the formation of black and white diasporas.
Seeking to disentangle the effects of the Haitian Revolutionfrom those
of the French Revolution, they demonstrate that its impact was
ambiguous, complex, and contradictory.—Publisher,
University of South Carolina
Press
David P. Geggus is a
professor of history at the University of Florida in Gainesville and a
former Guggenheim and National Humanities Center fellow. He has
published extensively on the history of slavery and the Caribbean, with
a particular focus on the Haitian Revolution. He is the author of
Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue,
1793–1798 and an editor of
A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean.
Geggus lives in Gainesville.
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Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804
A Brief History with Documents
By Laurent
Dubois and John D. Garrigus
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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update 6 May 2010
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