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2024 Isis Duarte Book Prize, Haiti/ Dominican Republic Section, Latin American Studies Association
2024 Longlist, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Bocas Lit Fest

This collection ponders the personal and political implications for Haitians at home and abroad resulting from the devastating 2010 earthquake.

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 was a debilitating event that followed decades of political, social, and financial issues. Leaving over 250,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, and 1.5 million people homeless, the earthquake has had lasting repercussions on a struggling nation. As the post-earthquake political situation unfolded, Myriam Chancy worked to illuminate on-the-ground concerns, from the vulnerable position of Haitian women to the failures of international aid. Originally presented at invited campus talks, published as columns for a newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago, and circulated in other ways, her essays and creative responses preserve the reactions and urgencies of the years following the disaster.

In Harvesting Haiti, Chancy examines the structures that have resulted in Haiti's post-earthquake conditions and reflects at key points after the earthquake on its effects on vulnerable communities. Her essays make clear the importance of sustaining and supporting the dignity of Haitian lives and of creating a better, contextualized understanding of the issues that mark Haitians’ historical and present realities, from gender parity to the vexed relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Vision limited, sounds muffled. Tiny water droplets reflect light back to its source and make it difficult to locate the origin of sounds: this is fog. In Chakad Ojani’s ethnography, this atmospheric phenomenon plays a pivotal role.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on engagements with fog in Lima and coastal Peru, Harvesting the Clouds examines how local NGO workers and fog oasis conservationists sought to utilize coastal fog as a water source. NGO workers installed fog catchers in informal or recently formalized neighborhoods where state infrastructure was absent, while conservationists harnessed ground-touching clouds in order to prevent informal urbanization. As they set out to capture ground-touching clouds to pursue their distinct goals, these collectives became entrapped by activities, demands, and expectations that they had not foreseen. The book frames these relationships as ecologies of capture: emergent webs of relationships held together by conflicting aims and expectations, the possibilities and limitations of fog capture, and the material qualities of fog itself. 

Harvesting the Clouds argues that capture is always only partially successful, but by virtue of this partiality, it becomes productive of social relations—an understanding that the author extends to anthropological inquiry itself as an exercise in the productive impossibility of ethnographic entrapment.

Although fascism is typically associated with Europe, the threat of fascism in the United States haunted the imaginations of activists, writers, and artists, spurring them to create a rich, elaborate body of cultural and political work. Traversing the Popular Front of the 1930s, the struggle against McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Black Power movement of the 1960s, and the AIDS activism of the 1980s, Haunted by Hitler highlights the value of “antifascist” cultural politics, showing how it helped to frame the national discourse. 

Christopher Vials examines the ways in which anxieties about fascism in the United States have been expressed in the public sphere, through American television shows, Off-Broadway theater, party newspapers, bestselling works of history, journalism, popular sociology, political theory, and other media. He argues that twentieth-century liberals and leftists were more deeply unsettled by the problem of fascism than those at the center or the right and that they tirelessly and often successfully worked to counter America's fascist equivalents.

Winner, William M. LeoGrande Prize, Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, 2022

For half a century, cultural production in Colombia has labored under the weight of magical realism—above all, the works of Gabriel García Márquez—where ghosts told stories about the country’s violent past and warned against a similarly gruesome future.

Decades later, the story of violence in Colombia is no less horrific, but the critical resources of magical realism are depleted. In their wake comes "spectral realism." Juliana Martínez argues that recent Colombian novelists, filmmakers, and artists—from Evelio Rosero and William Vega to Beatriz González and Erika Diettes—share a formal and thematic concern with the spectral but shift the focus from what the ghost is toward what the specter does. These works do not speak of ghosts. Instead, they use the specter to destabilize reality by challenging the authority of human vision and historical chronology.

By introducing the spectral into their work, these artists decommodify well-worn modes of representing violence and create a critical space from which to seek justice for the dead and disappeared. A Colombia-based study, Haunting without Ghosts brings powerful insight to the politics and ethics of spectral aesthetics, relevant for a variety of sociohistorical contexts.

A depiction of moral imagination that resonates today, Have You Got Good Religion? reveals how Black Churchwomen’s understanding of God became action and transformed a nation.

In this intimate ethnography, Raquel Romberg seeks to illuminate the performative significance of healing rituals and magic works, their embodied nature, and their effectiveness in transforming the states of participants by focusing on the visible, albeit mostly obscure, ways in which healing and magic rituals proceed. The questions posed by Romberg emerge directly from the particular pragmatics of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing), shaped by the eclecticism of its rituals, the heterogeneous character of its participants, and the heterodoxy of its moral economy.

What, if any, is the role of belief in magic and healing rituals? How do past discourses on possession enter into the performative experience of ritual in the here and now? Where does belief stop, and where do memories of the flesh begin? While these are questions that philosophers and anthropologists of religion ponder, they acquire a different meaning when asked from an ethnographic perspective.

Written in an evocative, empathetic style, with theoretical ruminations about performance, the senses, and imagination woven into stories that highlight the drama and humanity of consultations, this book is an important contribution to the cross-cultural understanding of our capacity to experience the transcendental in corporeal ways.

The role of American hospital expansions in health disparities and medical apartheid

Health Colonialism considers how U.S. urban development policies contribute to the uneven and unjust distribution of health care in this country. Here, Shiloh Krupar investigates the racially inequitable effects of elite U.S. hospitals on their surrounding neighborhoods and their role in consolidating frontiers of land primed for redevelopment.

Naming this frontier “medical brownfields,” Krupar shows how hospitals leverage their domestic real estate empires to underwrite international prospecting for patients and overseas services and specialty clinics. Her pointed analysis reveals that decolonizing health care efforts must scrutinize the land practices of nonprofit medical institutions and the liberal foundations of medical apartheid perpetuated by globalizing American health care.