Contrary to popular notions, Haiti-U.S. relations have not only been about Haitian resistance to U.S. domination. In Haiti and the Uses of America, Chantalle F. Verna makes evident that there have been key moments of cooperation that contributed to nation-building in both countries.
 
In the years following the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), Haitian politicians and professionals with a cosmopolitan outlook shaped a new era in Haiti-U.S. diplomacy. Their efforts, Verna shows, helped favorable ideas about the United States, once held by a small segment of Haitian society, circulate more widely. In this way, Haitians contributed to and capitalized upon the spread of internationalism in the Americas and the larger world.
 

Well-researched analysis of the impact that Spain and Spanish America had on antebellum literature in the United States.
 
In Hispanicism and Early US Literature, author John C. Havard posits that representations of Spain, Spanish America, Spanishness, and Spanish Americanness are integral elements in the evolution of early national and antebellum US literature. He argues that Spanish-speaking countries have long held a broad fascination for Americans and that stock narratives regarding these peoples were central to the period’s US literature.
 
Beginning with the work of eighteenth-century literary nationalists such as Joel Barlow, US literature has been drawn to reflect on Spain and Spanish America. Such reflection was often inspired by geopolitical conflicts such as US expansion into Spanish Louisiana and the US-Mexican War. Havard terms the discourse emerging from these reflections “Hispanicism.” This discourse was used to portray the dominant viewpoint of classical liberalism that propounded an American exceptionalism premised on the idea that Hispanophone peoples were comparatively lacking the capacity for self-determination, hence rationalizing imperialism. On the conservative side were warnings against progress through conquest.
 
Havard delves into selected works of early national and antebellum literature on Spain and Spanish America to illuminate US national identity. Poetry and novels by Joel Barlow, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville are mined to further his arguments regarding identity, liberalism, and conservatism. Understudied authors Mary Peabody Mann and José Antonio Saco are held up to contrast American and Cuban views on Hispanicism and Cuban annexation as well as to develop the focus on nationality and ideology via differences in views on liberalism.
 
More than just a work of literary criticism, there is a substantial amount of cultural and political history discussed. Havard’s use of archival sources such as political articles and personal correspondence elucidates not just literary genres and movements such as early national epic poetry, abolitionist fiction, and the American Renaissance, but also US culture writ large.

In 1492 the island of Hispaniola was inhabited by the Taino, an Indian group whose ancestors had moved into the Caribbean archipelago from lowland South America more than 1,500 years before. They were organized politically into large cacicazgos, or chiefdoms, comprising 70 or more villages under the authority of a paramount cacique, or chief. From the first voyage on, Columbus made Hispaniola his primary base for operations in the New World. Over the subsequent decades, disease, warfare, famine, and enslavement brought about the destruction of the Taino chiefdoms and almost completely annihilated the aboriginal population of the island.
 

This book examines the early years of the contact period in the Caribbean and in narrative form reconstructs the social and political organization of the Taino. Wilson describes in detail the interactions between the Taino and the Spaniards, with special attention paid to the structure and functioning of the Taino chiefdoms. By providing additional information from archaeology and recent ethnography, he builds a rich context within which to understand the Taino and their responses to the Europeans.

The Taino are especially important in a New World context because they represent a society undergoing rapid sociopolitical change and becoming more complex through time. The early contact period on Hispaniola gives us a rich ethnohistorical glimpse of the political processes of a complex New World society before and during its destruction brought about by the arrival of the Europeans.


 

Winner of the 2016 Anthropology in Media Award from the American Anthropological Association 

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was one of the deadliest disasters in modern history, sparking an international aid response—with pledges and donations of $16 billion—that was exceedingly generous. But now, five years later, that generous aid has clearly failed. In Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, anthropologist Mark Schuller captures the voices of those involved in the earthquake aid response, and they paint a sharp, unflattering view of the humanitarian enterprise.  
 
Schuller led an independent study of eight displaced-persons camps in Haiti, compiling more than 150 interviews ranging from Haitian front-line workers and camp directors to foreign humanitarians and many displaced Haitian people. The result is an insightful account of why the multi-billion-dollar aid response not only did little to help but also did much harm, triggering a range of unintended consequences, rupturing Haitian social and cultural institutions, and actually increasing violence, especially against women. The book shows how Haitian people were removed from any real decision-making, replaced by a top-down, NGO-dominated system of humanitarian aid, led by an army of often young, inexperienced foreign workers. Ignorant of Haitian culture, these aid workers unwittingly enacted policies that triggered a range of negative results. Haitian interviewees also note that the NGOs “planted the flag,” and often tended to “just do something,” always with an eye to the “photo op” (in no small part due to the competition over funding). Worse yet, they blindly supported the eviction of displaced people from the camps, forcing earthquake victims to relocate in vast shantytowns that were hotbeds of violence.
 
Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti concludes with suggestions to help improve humanitarian aid in the future, perhaps most notably, that aid workers listen to—and respect the culture of—the victims of catastrophe.