Rereading the literate Andean past. Then, Manigot on Haiti:
Library shelves sag under the weight of books on Haiti, old and new. Many were written by Haitians in the nineteenth century. They are exceptional studies challenging racism, but they also probe and dissect with honesty and candor the causes of Haiti’s repeated failures at sustained development and good governance. Few areas were left unstudied: French colonial slavery and the demand for reparations, European and American racism, domestic failures to plumb the island’s “culture of poverty,” ecological devastation, and endemic corruption. Haitian elites, of whatever color and class, never seem to stop searching for solutions. Foreigners have also contributed well-documented tomes on the island’s labyrinthine economy and politics.
There is really interesting commentary on C. L. R. James and Laurent Dubois in that piece. (I am clearing shelves, and I had kept the paper issue of a journal for these few pages.)
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 