Haiti and the Outer Periphery of the World-System

• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Alex Dupuy
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20933283
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Pierre-Louis Jr. / BOOK REVIEW 165

From C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Alejandro Carpentier, and Edouard Glissant to

Dennis Walcott, respected Caribbean writers cannot forget the impact of the revolution

on the region and the world, but the way they depict it depends on their own under-

standings of the relationship that should be established between the independent

republic and the metropole. Although one may not agree with their depiction of the

revolution, by recounting it they not only keep it alive but also affirm that the Haitian

people will not go away. Figueroa’s attempt to cover the work of a number of Caribbean

and Latino writers in a single volume does not do justice to the ideological and cultural

differences that many of them express.

One lesson of these three books is that, while the Haitian Revolution is celebrated in

Latin America and the Caribbean, there is no consensus among these writers on its

centrality in shaping modern Caribbean and Latin American society. It is nonetheless

refreshing and uplifting to read three books on Haiti by non-Haitian writers in which

Haiti’s religion, culture, and history are celebrated for creating conditions that change

the narrative on slavery and colonialism.

Haiti and the Outer Periphery of the World-System

by

Alex Dupuy

Robert Fatton Jr. Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery. Boulder, CO, and London:

Lynne Rienner, 2014.

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20933283

In Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery, his third book devoted to Haiti, Robert Fatton

once again advances the frontiers of theory to explain the country’s seeming inability

to promote some level of economic development to overcome its grotesque class

inequalities, the acute poverty of the majority of its population, and its intractable social

polarization. To that end, he deploys the concept of the “outer periphery,” which he

derives from Immanuel Wallerstein’s tripartite theory of the capitalist world-system,

made up of core, semiperipheral, and peripheral zones. It may be useful, then, to situate

Fatton’s concept of the outer periphery in the context of that theory, which he argues

does not fully explain countries like Haiti.

Since it emerged in the sixteenth century, the world-system has constituted a single

international division of labor with different zones characterized by different class

structures and modes of labor control—wage labor and advanced skilled production in

the core areas, unskilled agricultural and minimum- and nonwage-labor production in

the periphery, and a combination of corelike and periphery-like production relations

and infrastructures of production in the semiperiphery. The unequal relations among

the different zones have led to the development of strong states in the core areas and

relatively weaker states in the peripheral zones. This has had two consequences: First,

the capitalists in each zone, including the foreign firms operating there, have appropri-

ated the surplus-value produced by their workers. Second, in the trade relations

between the more developed core, the less developed semiperiphery, and the even

more underdeveloped periphery, the core countries have appropriated the surplus

Alex Dupuy is John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology emeritus at Wesleyan University.