Haiti for the Haitians - by Brandon R Byrd & Chelsea Stieber (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.

The world-historical significance of the Haitian Revolution is now firmly established in mainstream history. Yet Haiti's nineteenth-century has yet to receive its due, this despite independent Haiti's vital importance as the first nation to permanently ban slavery and its ongoing struggle for sovereignty in the Atlantic World.

Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855-1911) is one of the foremost Haitian intellectuals and diplomats of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His prolific oeuvre offered enduring challenges to racist slanders of Haiti and critiques of the global inequalities that arose from European colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Through his writings, Janvier influenced the international debates about slavery, race, nation, and empire that shaped his era and, in many ways, remain unresolved today.

Arguably his most powerful work, Haiti for the Haitians (1884) provides a searing critique of European and U.S. imperialism, predatory finance capitalism, and Haiti's domestic politics. It offers his vision of Haiti's future expressed through a remarkable phrase: Haiti for the Haitians.

Haiti for the Haitians is the first major English translation of Janvier. Accompanied by an introduction, annotations, and an interdisciplinary collection of critical essays, this volume offers unprecedented access to this vital Haitian thinker and an important contribution to the scholarship on Haiti's nineteenth century.

Review Quotes

"In his lifetime Janvier's work was certainly celebrated by his Francophone community in which they circulated. Non-French readers and critics knew very little of them though the man was highly respected for his achievements and diplomatic engagements in Europe. The editors have succeeded in correcting this and done so with a most sophisticated and respectful treatment."
Matthew Smith, University College London

"This is a welcome addition to the field of nineteenth-century Haitian intellectual history. Equally important, it makes a significant contribution to the wider study of Caribbean and Black Atlantic literary figures and their views on coloniality and post-coloniality, as well as the distortionary power of Eurocentric epistemology and the production of knowledge with regard to colonial societies, and not least, to issues of how the West has constructed the very concept of race and used it to undergird racialized imperialist policies."
Carolyn Fick, Concordia University