Description: Haiti for the Haitians (1884) is Louis Joseph Janvier's landmark critique of European imperialism, predatory finance capitalism, and Haitian politics. Translated here for the first time, this volume offers substantial analysis of this vital nineteenth-century Haitian thinker and his era's international debates about slavery, race, nation, and empire.
Brief description: Brandon R. Byrd is an Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.
Review Quotes: "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
Matthew Smith, University College London