The twentieth century saw a wide range of struggles for women’s empowerment and equality in Haiti. In this excerpt, Carolle Charles focuses on the politicization and the consequent victimization of Haitian women under Duvalier. Exploring the phenomena of indiscriminate violence and repression as generative of political being, Charles unpacks the means by which the Duvalierist state ironically transformed women into more politicized, albeit more vulnerable, citizens.

This chapter discusses the complex anthropology and history of Haiti and how its inter-connectedness to the rest of the world factors into its unique past and present. Inspired by and in dialogue with Benjamin and Marx, it questions and rethinks the categories of analysis that have defined much of anthropological and historical theory over the past two centuries. Dubois reflects on the problem of understanding Haiti through anthrohistory by returning to a series of early, and often overlooked, works on Haiti by the anthropologist Sidney Mintz.