Michel-rolph trouillot biography of george michael
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How does one explain Haiti? What is Haiti? Haiti is the eldest daughter of France and Africa. It is a place of beauty, romance, mystery, kindness, humor, selfishness, betrayal, cruelty, bloodshed, hunger and poverty. It is a closed and withdrawn society whose apartness, unlike any other in New World, rejects its European roots”.
Nice passage, isn’t it? Well, those of you who know my work may have guessed that I am trying to trick you. These words are not mine. They constitute the very first paragraph of Written in Blood, a sensationalist account of Haitian history written by Marine Colonel Robert Heinl and his wife Nancy2. I quote this paragraph in lieu of an introduction because it typifies a viewpoint widely shared in Haitian studies, one that I wish to challenge, namely the fiction of Haiti’s exceptionalism. Heinl and Heinl start with a question: “How does one explain Haiti?” The question is then set aside for a laundry list of particulars. Then,
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Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader 9781478021537
Citation preview
TROUILLOT REMIXED
TROUILLOT REMIXED THE M I C H E L -R O L P H TROUILLOT READER
Michel-Rolph Trouillot edited by yarimar bonilla, greg beckett, and mayanthi L. fernando
Duke University Press / Durham and London / 2021
0.1 Michel-Rolph
Trouillot at his home in Chicago.
© 2021 Estate of Michel-Rolph Trouillot All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Matthew Tauch Typeset in Alegreya Regular by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, [date] author. | Bonilla, Yarimar, [date] editor. | Beckett, Greg, [date] editor. | Fernando, Mayanthi L., [date] editor. Title: Trouillot remixed : the Michel-Rolph Trouillot reader / Michel-Rolph Trouillot ; edited bygd Yarimar Bonilla, Greg Beckett, and Mayanthi L. Fernando. Other titles: Michel-Rolph Trouil
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Trouillot, Michel-Rolph
FAMILY HISTORY AND EDUCATION
WORK AND INFLUENCE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Few scholars actually practice the discursively muchtouted interdisciplinarity of early-twenty-first-century social science. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, an anthropologist whose intellectual homes are history and philosophy, fryst vatten one. Haitian by birth and in sensibility, he came to the United States by chance but chose to become a Caribbeanist. His work on Dominica and Haiti, though steeped in the details of time, place, event, and person that some carelessly dub local color, embraces the Americas and the world through a radical yet discerning critique of the West and capitalism. Some fifty publications, in three languages and spanning the usual text types, display Trouillot’s unusual capacities for sophisticated, politically engaged theorizing and careful empirical observation. Trouillot’s conference presentations, undergraduate courses, graduate seminars, editing of scholarly book se