Haitians, the People That Will Not Go Away

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20933314
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Author: François Pierre-Louis
• Date: 01 November 2020
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

162 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Christ. As Kunzle notes, “it is often said that Jesus’ death was more important than his

life; that he began really to live only when he died. The same have been said of Che

Guevara” (326).

Ultimately, this book provides a comprehensive investigation of the numerous paral-

lels in the lives and myths of Christ and Che as explored through word and image. It is

an ambitious undertaking and not without controversy. In his introduction Kunzle

acknowledges that to some it is “blasphemous” to compare the atheist Che, “perhaps

the most famous armed revolutionary of the 20th century,” with Christ, “the founder of

the defining religion of the Western world” (18). Thus this book speaks to a specific

niche audience and will not do much to change minds.

REFERENCES

Carmichael, Joel

1989 Birth of Christianity: Reality and Myth. New York: Hippocrene Books.

Kunzle, David

2008 “Chesucristo: fusions, myths, realities.” Latin American Perspectives 35 (2): 97–115.

Haitians, the People That Will Not Go Away

by

François Pierre-Louis Jr.

Matthew J. Smith Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation. Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Toni Pressley-Sanon Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural

Imagination. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017.

Victor Figueroa Prophetic Visions of the Past: Pan-Caribbean Representations of the Haitian

Revolution. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015.

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20933314

Matthew J. Smith’s thesis in Liberty, Fraternity, Exile—that “the creation of Caribbean

identity is found not only in the comparative lives of nations of the region but also in

the shared experiences of those who cross the straits and borders that separate the

‘exiled pieces of land,’ carriers of histories seldom acknowledged” (330)—is the perfect

introduction to my review of three recent books on Haiti. What we learn from him is

that the Caribbean sea could not separate Haitians and Jamaicans in the nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries even though they did not share a language or history. Given

the economic, social, and political mayhem taking place in Haiti today, it is hard to

believe that at one time Jamaica not only looked up to Haiti as a model but fostered

family and political ties with the newly independent country through commercial

exchanges, migration, and kinship.

François Pierre-Louis Jr. is a professor of political science at Queens College, City University of

New York. He served in the private cabinet of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and on the

senior staff of Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis in 2007–2008. He is the author of Haitians

in New York City: Transnationalism and Hometown Association (2006) and coeditor (with Tarry Hum,

Ron Hayduk, and Michael Alan Krasner) of Immigrant Crossroads: Globalization, Incorporation, and

Placemaking in Queens, New York (forthcoming 2021).