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In my photography I focus on issues such as Nature, West African Cultures, Travels and People. In this collection, let me introduce you to the Everyday people of West Africa. I captured 150 pages of God's perfect art through my camera eye.THIS PROJECT IS TO HELP RAISE MONEY FOR OUR 'NO MEANS NO FOUNDATION' AND OUR 'COEUR DES ENFANTS' [Children's heart] MISSION. 100% OF OUR PROFIT WILL GO TOWARDS THESE OBJECTIVES. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

Best reader on the Haitian Revolution
A great reader on the Haitian Revolution. It is cheap, short, and has a great summary of the revolution at the beginning, so it is perfect as a supplementary reading in classes on slavery, Atlantic History, Haitian history, etc.
The documents are well chosen and representative. John Garrigus is a thorough researcher, and it shows: the documents are taken straight from the French archives.

College Coursework
I purchased this book for college coursework in a core history class. We were assigned a paper on the book. Other people in my class did some outside research, but there was enough information between the text and all the source documents that I didn't find outside sources necessary.

Fascinating
I could not be helped but be moved by the documents in this book.The author did an incredible job of helping the reader understand the importance of San Domingue and the other French colonies by including letters, articles and transcripts. This was so important to my research about the nation that would eventually become Haiti and other colonies that found themselves in similar circumstances.These accounts tell the real truth about life in the French colonies and the resolve of the inhabitants. ... Read more

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Encountering Revolution looks afresh at the profound impact of the Haitian Revolution on the early United States. The first book on the subject in more than two decades, it redefines our understanding of the relationship between republicanism and slavery at a foundational moment in American history.

For postrevolutionary Americans, the Haitian uprising laid bare the contradiction between democratic principles and the practice of slavery. For thirteen years, between 1791 and 1804, slaves and free people of color in Saint-Domingue battled for equal rights in the manner of the French Revolution. As white and mixed-race refugees escaped to the safety of U.S. cities, Americans were forced to confront the paradox of being a slaveholding republic, recognizing their own possible destiny in the predicament of the Haitian slaveholders.

Historian Ashli White examines the ways Americans -- black and white, northern and southern, Federalist and Democratic Republican, pro- and antislavery -- pondered the implications of the Haitian Revolution.

Encountering Revolution convincingly situates the formation of the United States in a broader Atlantic context. It shows how the very presence of Saint-Dominguan refugees stirred in Americans as many questions about themselves as about the future of slaveholding, stimulating some of the earliest debates about nationalism in the early republic.

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This books focuses on the relationship between Vodou and theatre, a subject on which very limited research has been done. The objective is to demonstrate that Vodou, like some other rituals, encompasses theatrical and dramatic elements, which give it the character of a sacred theatre. Theatrical and dramatic elements are analyzed basically according to Aristotelian criteria. The research reveals that Vodou contains eight major theatrical elements: impersonation, mise-en-scene, audience, chorus, music, dance, scenery, costume, and four dramatic elements: plot, character, thought, diction. These theatrical and dramatic elements make Vodou a potential model for a secular indigenous theatre in Haiti.

The book provides a solid framework to fit Vodou as starting from Africa progressing to the island setup in Saint-Domingue where an economy based on slavery was intertwined with a maroon based social setting. ... Read more

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Historically and contemporarily, politically and literary, Haiti has long been relegated to the margins of the so-called 'New World.' Marked by exceptionalism, the voices of some of its most important writers have consequently been muted by the geopolitical realities of the nation's fraught history. In "Haiti Unbound", Kaiama L. Glover offers a close look at the works of three such writers: the Haitian Spiralists Franketienne, Jean-Claude Fignole, and Rene Philoctete. While Spiralism has been acknowledged by scholars and regional writer-intellectuals alike as a crucial contribution to the French-speaking Caribbean literary tradition, the Spiralist ethic-aesthetic not yet been given the sustained attention of a full-length study. Glover's book represents the first effort in any language to consider the works of the three Spiralist authors both individually and collectively, and so fills an astonishingly empty place in the assessment of postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics. Touching on the role and destiny of Haiti in the Americas, "Haiti Unbound" engages with long-standing issues of imperialism and resistance culture in the transatlantic world.Glover's timely project emphatically articulates Haiti's regional and global centrality, combining vital 'big picture' reflections on the field of postcolonial studies with elegant close-reading-based analyses of the philosophical perspective and creative practice of a distinctively Haitian literary phenomenon. Most importantly perhaps, the book advocates for the inclusion of three largely unrecognized voices in the disturbingly fixed roster of writer-intellectuals that have thus far interested theorists of postcolonial (Francophone) literature. Providing insightful and sophisticated blueprints for the reading and teaching of the Spiralists' prose fiction, "Haiti Unbound" will serve as a point of reference for the works of these authors and for the singular socio-political space out of and within which they write. ... Read more

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As a young anthropologist, Sidney Mintz undertook fieldwork in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Fifty years later, the eminent scholar of the Caribbean returns to those experiences to meditate on the societies and on the island people who befriended him. These reflections illuminate continuities and differences between these cultures, but even more they exemplify the power of people to reveal their own history.

Mintz seeks to conjoin his knowledge of the history of Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico—a dynamic past born of a confluence of peoples of a sort that has happened only a few times in human history—with the ways that he heard people speak about themselves and their lives. Mintz argues that in Jamaica and Haiti, creolization represented a tremendous creative act by enslaved peoples: that creolization was not a passive mixing of cultures, but an effort to create new hybrid institutions and cultural meanings to replace those that had been demolished by enslavement. Globalization is not the new phenomenon we take it to be.

This book is both a summation of Mintz's groundbreaking work in the region and a reminder of how anthropology allows people to explore the deep truths that history may leave unexamined.

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Understanding the Caribbean
Sidney Mintz, who headed the anthropology department at Yale and helped found its counterpart at Johns Hopkins, is perhaps best known for his recent studies of food, notably Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History(Viking, 1985). His interest in sugar arose from field work in the Caribbean, which he began in Puerto Rico in the late 1940s while still working on his Ph.D. at Columbia. He soon widened his experience to include Jamaica, Haiti, and other regions.

The astonishing wealth to which the Caribbean colonies gave rise, Mintz writes, resulted from "the acquisitive energy of European masters and the cumulative forced labor of millions of workers, nearly all of them African," producing what he aptly calls "the first commercially marketed soft drugs ... tobacco, coffee, chocolate, and the sugar and molasses needed to sweeten them." Those drugs became instruments of power, used to remodel the class structure of Europe -- not least by supplying sweetened stimulants like sugared tea to fuel workers' punishing hours in mines, mills, and factories.

What interests Mintz far more than the fruits of Caribbean labor is the extraordinary creativity with which the mostly West African slaves and their offspring, torn from their homes and cultures, the sources of their identity, assembled new societies and new identities in the New World. The destruction of their histories gave rise to new histories, each markedly different, intimate, and profound. Mintz is an impatient pragmatist when it comes to questions of how history and anthropology relate. He insists that what anthropologists learn from their informants about their culture cannot be understood without appreciating the history that brought these individuals to where they are; nor can history be understood without seeing how it shapes individual lives.

The first of the ancient colonies Mintz discusses is Jamaica, where domination by particularly brutal and implacable British plantation owners at first gave rise to an almost clandestine peasant economy, and after freedom finally came, to rural villages established by Christian missionaries with programs of their own. The modern consequences of this history are, as Mintz learned at first hand in the 1950s, the racial stratification of status and wealth and a sharp division between the roles of men and women. The Jamaican peasantry live "in the shadow of the national history."

The history of Haiti, "the single most profitable colony in the history of the New World," was markedly different. Following the American and French revolutions, Haiti declared independence in 1804. The French did not accede until 1825, at an exorbitant price. The first revolution in history to end slavery, says Mintz, Haiti's was consequently the most terrifying: the United States did not recognize Haiti's independence until 1862. What followed was the collapse of the plantation system and the rise of a peasantry on whose backs "petty bureaucrats, coffee exporters, lawyers, military officers and merchants -- intermediaries of all sorts -- soon contrived to rest their collective weight." Much of what the elite skimmed was from a market economy run largely by women; nevertheless, as the first nation populated by emancipated slaves, power was largely undefined by race.

Mintz's third and most ancient colony was the first he visited in person, Puerto Rico. Unlike Jamaica and Haiti, Puerto Rico did not have an important plantation economy until the U.S. introduced mechanized agriculture in the 20th century, when the southern coast became "an ocean of sugarcane" - and then only for a period measured in decades, not centuries, largely because in the beginning Spain's attention had been concentrated on its colonies in mainland Latin America. Thus, Mintz estimates, "the rise in the number of physically mixed people on the island must have been continuous." Historical differences gave rise to differences in gender relations, race relations, and issues of self and violence, a "pattern of fierce chaperonage, elopement, feigned rage, and rapid reconciliation" typical of marriages that "fitted neatly with a strikingly different pattern, one of homicide ... brought on either by insults real or fictive to masculine identity or by sexual jealousy."

In his final and most fascinating chapter, "Creolization, Culture, and Social Institutions," Mintz shows how the enslaved responded to terrible constraints by creating new social institutions within slavery, built from assorted memories of the different cultures from which they came. Creolization is not mere mixture, like paint in a pot, but a synthesis arising from what might seem incommensurates. But while Jamaica and Haiti gave rise to creolized cultures and creole languages, Mintz shows, Puerto Rico, although slavery existed there, never experienced a massive influx of slaves and was never creolized.

Mintz persuasively demonstrates how human history intimately affects human response in cultural terms. Borrowing anthropologist Alfred Kroeber's argument that how culture comes to be is more distinctive of culture than what it is, Mintz says, "the process by which slaves dealt with the immediate postenslavement trauma they faced ... comes as close to understanding how culture comes to be than anything else in the human record I know of."

Three Ancient Colonies is adapted from a series of lectures honoring W. E. B. Du Bois that Mintz delivered at Harvard in 2003, and begins with a deft biographical sketch of Du Bois and the role his acquaintance with the Caribbean played in his own view of the history of African Americans. He honors the memory of Du Bois and the men and women he came to know well in the rural communities of the Caribbean in this passionate, humorous, persuasively argued book.
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On January 12, 2010 a major earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the greater part of the capital was demolished. Dr. Paul Farmer, U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, had worked in the country for nearly thirty years, treating infectious diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS. No one understood better than he how painful it was that Haiti, the site of so much suffering, would have to endure another disaster. It was, in his words, a “cruel cosmic joke.”

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Casualties of the 2010 Haiti earthquake include bothcivilian and government officials, locals andforeigners – however the overwhelming majority ofthose killed and wounded in the quake were Haitiancivilians. A number of public figures perished inthe earthquake, including government officials,clergy members, musicians, together with foreigncivilian and military personnel working with theUnited Nations. As of January 24, CommunicationsMinister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said thedeath toll was over 150,000 in the Port-au-Princemetropolitan area alone. Haitian President RenePreval reported on 27 January that "nearly 170,000"bodies had been counted. In February Prime MinisterJean-Max Bellerive estimated that 300,000 had beeninjured. ... Read more

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The Haitian Revolution, despite what Michel-Rolph Trouillot described as its unthinkable nature, has generated a vital corpus of response in areas ranging from philosophy to historiography to 20th century literary and artistic representations. But what about the work generated at the time, by Haitians? This book is the first to present an account of a specifically Haitian literary tradition in the Haitian Revolutionary era. "Beyond the Slave Narrative" shows the emergence of two separate strands of textual innovations, both evolving from the new consciousness and new dialogues prompted by the revolution: the political texts produced by Haitian revolutionary leaders, and transcriptions of popular Creole poetry from the libertine culture in Saint-Domingue. Wildly divergent in their nature, these two kinds of texts nevertheless document growing cultural autonomy and influence of literary voice among non-white populations in the increasingly destabilized colony. Generals and courtesans alike presented paradigms of legitimate independence.These Haitian revolutionary texts have been neglected as a crucial foundation of Afro-diasporic literature in the Atlantic world for 2 reasons: they do not fit the generic criteria of the slave narrative, with its structural assumptions of a defining autobiographical experience of enslavement, and they are mediated texts, in which the speech acts of partly or wholly unschooled thinkers were relayed to the print cultural Atlantic domain by either secretaries or refugee colonists. As such, this corpus of work requires a more flexible consideration of the constitutive links between authorial voice, writing, print culture, and cultural autonomy among the formerly enslaved. At the same time, the texts produced by Jean-Jacques Dessalines and others require reassessment of numerous points of our historical understanding of the Haitian Independence and its relationship to an international world of contemporary readers. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Radio Caraibes FM broadcast live from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, it was created 60 years ago by the Brown family. It is currently run by Patrick Moussignac. CaraibesFM hosts the most popular talk show on the island called Ranmasse. It is been rebroadcast to the Haitian diaspora from a hand full of radio station from Miami to Montreal and Paris. A talk show (American and Australian English) or chat show (British) is a television or radio program where one person (or group of people) will discuss various topics put forth by a talk show host. Sometimes, talk shows feature a panel of guests, usually consisting of a group of people who are learned or who have great experience in relation to whatever issue is being discussed on the show for that episode. Other times, a single guest discusses their work or area of expertise with a host or co-hosts. A call-in show takes live phonecalls from callers listening at home, in their cars, etc. Sometimes, guests are already seated but are often introduced and enter from backstage ... Read more

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The Game of Slipknot, Contrast and Critisizm
Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture : The Game of Slipknot (New Americanists) by Keith L. Walker

This book, was not only interesting but also puts you into a better perspecive to look at modern culture. How the world's beliefs and feelings have changes drastically. The main point of this story is about a heavy metal band Slipknot, and angered heavy metal band highly popular by rock/heavy metal fans, as they are considered as Maggots. As a huge fan of them I believe, I may have a different opinion than someone oblivious of the band. Overall I think this book is worth its money. So, if you are ready to take on a farely challenging book and enjoy criticing the modern art of music and culture this is the book for you. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 844 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.The Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the regions of the American continents in which two of the world's first civilizations developed: Mesoamerica (the name for the lands in which ancient civilizations arose in Central America and Mexico) and the Andes Mountains region of South America (in present-day Peru and parts of Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Ecuador). In both regions, the history of civilization goes back thousands of years. ... Read more