We’ve curated a list of our books about Haiti’s deep history and rich cultural heritage. Soundly researched and well written, these books provide an opportunity for readers everywhere to learn about the Caribbean nation that over 11 million people call home.
Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives
Edited by Cécile Accilien and Valérie K. Orlando
“Critical, informative, and forward-looking. An important and compelling volume that adds to the scholarship on Haiti while also providing valuable tools to responsibly engage Haiti in the classroom through sound pedagogical interventions.”—Claudine Michel, coeditor of Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, and Reality
This volume is the first to focus on teaching about Haiti’s complex history and culture from a multidisciplinary perspective. Making broad connections between Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean, contributors provide pedagogical guidance on how to approach the country from different lenses in course curricula. They offer practical suggestions, theories on a wide variety of texts, examples of syllabi, and classroom experiences.
Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies
Edited by April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram
“Highly original and richly researched, this volume challenges many of the bedrock assumptions in Dominican and Haitian nationalist and statist thought, filling important gaps in the literature on the island in English.”—Lauren Derby, coeditor of Activating the Past: History and Memory in the Black Atlantic World
Rejecting dominant narratives that reinforce opposition between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, contributors to this volume highlight the connections and commonalities that extend across the border, mapping new directions in Haitianist and Dominicanist scholarship.
Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System
Carl Lindskoog
“Shows how systems, policies, and even detention centers that were designed for Haitian refugees grew insidiously over the decades into a more and more encompassing immigrant detention system.”—Aviva Chomsky, author of Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal
“Forcefully demonstrates how the case of Haitian refugee detention became the basis for America’s inhumane response to refugees arriving directly on its shores.”—Alex Stepick, author of Pride against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States
Who Owns Haiti?: People, Power, and Sovereignty
Edited by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman
“A timely collection of articles by some of the leading and emerging scholars and specialists on Haiti, offering a wide range of critical perspectives on the question and meaning of sovereignty in Haiti.”—Alex Dupuy, coauthor of The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti
“Powerful essays by experts in their fields addressing what matters most to smaller nations—the meaning of sovereignty, and the horrid trajectory from colonialism, to neocolonialism into neoliberalism.”—Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, author of Haiti: The Breached Citadel
Contrary Destinies: A Century of America’s Occupation, Deoccupation, and Reoccupation of Haiti
Leon D. Pamphile
“A significant work, partly because of its ambition and partly because of its refreshing perspective. This is Haitian history through the eyes of a Haitian scholar. . . . It will serve future scholars—both Haitian and American—who seek to understand more fully this profoundly consequential relationship.”—American Historical Review
“Unpacks the cultural, political, and economic impact of U.S. occupation, and by extension, American imperialism in Haiti.”—Quito Swan, author of Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization
Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination
Toni Pressley-Sanon
“Untwines the aesthetic, sociohistorical, and spiritual ties that bind and unbind the first black republic to the African continent.”—Gina Athena Ulysse, author of Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle
“Reveals an impressively rich cultural landscape inhabited by women and men whose legendary resilience in the face of adversity clothes a ferocious dedication to their identity as free people.”—LeGrace Benson, author of Arts and Religions of Haiti: How the Sun Illuminates Under Cover of Darkness
Duvalier’s Ghosts: Race, Diaspora, and U.S. Imperialism in Haitian Literatures
Jana Evans Braziel
“A study which foregrounds the experiences of refugees (particularly those refused asylum and detained in camps), the political mobilisation of the diaspora in the United States, the ramifications of the policies and adjustment programmes imposed on Haiti by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and USAID.”—Bulletin of Latin American Research
“Urgently pursues those nameless ghosts of Haitians lost in the liminal space of the Black Atlantic.”—New West Indian Guide
From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870–1964
Millery Polyné
“Most works on Haiti tend to focus either on the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) or the more recent era of Jean Bertrand Aristide (1991-2004), and specifically the US-supported coup in 2004. In excluding these two seismic eras, Polyné (NYU) tells a more important story of the forging and gradual weakening of ties between US African Americans and Haitians. Impressive temporally and thematically, well researched, and destined to be an important work.”—Choice
“Widens our understanding of the Americas for the discipline of American Studies and paves the way for new and stimulating discussions in the fields of history and African American and Haitian studies. [Polyné] has ignited a welcome and relevant debate about the concept and practice of black Pan-Americanism, which should be applied to all parts of the Americas. The book is a strong addition to hemispheric American Studies.”—The Americas
Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora in the Wider Caribbean
Edited by Philippe Zacaïr
“This groundbreaking book aims at describing and understanding the opposition that Haitians have met with as they settle in the United States and other parts of the Caribbean. This collection of essays is the first comparative attempt to discuss anti-Haitian feelings across the Caribbean and the United States. Its interdisciplinary approaches make it a seminal book for students ready to consider migration and other transnational processes not just from the common understanding of hybridity and cultural creation but from the reality of stigmatization and discrimination that many foreign nationals are subjected to.”—New West Indian Guide
“Casts considerable light on and enhances our understanding of the experiences of Haitian migrants in their adopted homes.”—Louisiana History
The Florida Bookshelf 
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