The Radical History Review invites submissions for a forthcoming issue about the history of Haiti and its position in and relationship to the world.
Following the January 2010 earthquake that leveled Haiti’s capital city and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the Caribbean republic re-entered mass public consciousness. While plate tectonics were blamed for the earthquake itself, commentators across the political spectrum attributed the vast scale of this “unnatural disaster” in the “poorest country in the West” to a variety of human factors, most notably foreign interference, administrative misappropriation, and Haitians’ general incapacity for self-rule. Academics participated in the collective hand-wringing by revisiting Haiti’s stunning absence from the teaching of history just about everywhere except in Haiti itself. Some even remembered that the Haitian Revolution—the only successful slave revolution in modern history—was a world-historical event. In the Revolution's aftermath Haiti has fuelled economic and antiblack policies and inspired cultural production and Pan-Africanist mobilizations. It has played a central role in organizing historical knowledge about the Caribbean region, the so-called First and Third worlds, and the West. And it is among the most widely touted sites of anticolonial activism in the Americas region even as Haitian postcolonialism has been more presumed than studied. This issue of Radical History Review strives to open and extend the discussion of Haitian history rekindled by the earthquake, and to highlight research that helps us understand Haiti and Haitians as inextricable from world history.
The issue editors will consider submissions that examine Haiti’s history, from its indigenous past to its colonial and post-colonial history, that draw together its past and present, and, especially, that show its larger hemispheric, regional, trans-oceanic, and global implications:
- The Haitian Revolution (e.g how it is remembered and forgotten within Haiti and around the world; its enduring importance; revisionist or critical examinations of C. L. R. James’s classic narrative; its connections to political upheaval, independence wars, and/or slave uprisings; the communities that free and enslaved refugees of the Revolution established abroad)
- Public history essays on the commemoration of Haitian independence, at home and abroad
- Teaching notes about how to reframe a course on French or European history that accounts for Haiti and/or the Revolution
- Haiti, Pan Africanism, blackness (understood as Black resistance and fear of Black power)
- Histories of Haitian Creole and its relationship to global Francophonie
- Haiti and the historical process of inventing the “West”
- Haiti, Africa, and international Black politics, art, culture, and religion
- Haiti and twentieth-century imperialism, resistance, and national liberation struggles
- Haiti's twentieth-century intellectual life and Latin American indigenismo
- Haiti’s place in the growth of the study of the “Atlantic World” in the United States
- Haiti and contemporary slavery, human trafficking, and child labor
- Haitian Diasporas composed of exiles, immigrants, and intellectuals and writers abroad
- Haiti-U.S. policies/relations (i.e. Haitian migration and the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base)
- Historical analyses of Haitian NGOs
- Representations of Haiti and the rise of the world AIDS epidemic
- Haiti and the politics of an “unnatural disaster”
- Cité Soleil and other urban shanty towns as part of a hemispheric, or global phenomenon of the growth of urban slums
- Writing histories of violence: Haiti as a special challenge
- Research notes on archival sources or oral history depositories on Haiti
Radical History Review publishes material in a wide variety of forms. The editors will consider scholarly research articles as well as photo essays, film and book review essays, interviews, brief interventions, essays on museum and other public history forums, “conversations” between scholars and/or activists, teaching notes and annotated course syllabi, and research notes.
Preliminary inquiries may be sent to issue editors Amy Chazkel (amy.chazkel@qc.cuny.edu) and Melina Pappademos (melina.pappademos@uconn.edu). Abstract Deadline: June 1, 2011
Procedures for submission of article abstracts:
By June 1, 2011 please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the article you wish to include in this issue as an attachment to contactrhr@gmail.com with “Issue 115 abstract submission” in the subject line. By July 15, 2011, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review. The due date for completed drafts of articles is November 1, 2011. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 115 of Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Winter 2013.
The issue editors strongly encourage the submission of images or artwork to illustrate textual pieces, as well as photo or other visual essays. Please send any images as low-resolution digital files. If chosen for publication, authors will need to send high-resolution images files (jpg or tif files at a minimum of 300 dpi), along with written permission to reprint all images.