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.

Presenting incisive original readings of French writing about the Caribbean from the inception of colonization in the 1640s until the onset of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s, Doris Garraway sheds new light on a significant chapter in French colonial history. At the same time, she makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of the cultural contact, creolization, and social transformation that resulted in one of the most profitable yet brutal slave societies in history.

This chapter reflects on the ways in which foreign volunteers, humanitarian workers, and even academic researchers are implicated in gender-based inequality, racialized and sexualized power relations in Haiti. The author considers this a crucial aspect of transnational solidarity work that is often ignored by foreign participants who keep such aspects hidden, while they publicly present themselves as moral do-gooders helping Haiti.

Along with the other authors in this volume, I aim to better understand the intersection of diaspora, race, and gender as defining forces in the lives of Black Pentecostal women. My focus is on how Haiti fares conceptually in one rather extreme yet influential strand of Pentecostal thought: Third Wave evangelicalism.