An inventive and astute dissection of Haiti’s evolving notions of sexual identity.
A debut nonfiction book explores the effects of imperialism on Haiti’s sexual landscape.
A rash of homophobic violence erupted following the debilitating 2010 earthquake in Haiti. This tragic aftereffect was a result of accusations from some of the country’s evangelicals that God was punishing Haiti for the behavior of its queer community. After the earthquake, evangelical churches in the United States poured millions of dollars of aid into the nation while a much smaller stream of support arrived from American LGBTQ+ organizations. These latter resources helped transform Haiti’s sexual identity politics, creating an aspirational LGBTQ+ social movement in the country, complete with advocacy organizations, artists, and activists. Since then, both evangelical and LGBTQ+ communities have gained greater influence in the country, leading some Haitian commentators to variously assert that either gay sexuality or homophobia are foreign imports. With this work, Durban analyzes the extent to which the “homosexual/heterosexual” framing is indeed an import from Europe and the United States as well as the imperialist discourses regarding Haiti that make the country ripe for foreign intervention. The author is a deliberative and incisive writer, adeptly weaving history and politics together with the many layered traditions of Vodou and the concept of the zonbi (a spirit of the recently dead). Durban writes of a queer Haitian artist, the founder of a theater troupe, who performed a zonbi-inspired piece at the 2009 Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince: “He, like others who had grown up in evangelical Christian households, was particularly zealous when it came to the subject of Vodou, which he considered to be a radical space of belonging that was distinctly Haitian. Vodou, moreover, informed his queer, anti-imperialist politics.” While too academic for a general audience, the book is more than a primer on the status of LGBTQ+ issues in Haiti. It’s a captivating work of cultural history, offering a window into how the nation is perceived by foreign powers as well as how it perceives itself.
An inventive and astute dissection of Haiti’s evolving notions of sexual identity.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780252044755
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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