Haiti: Pawn in their Game

After the devastation of the recent earthquake in Haiti, readers might like to know that Chris Harman's concise introduction to Haitian history (from about 1786-1986) is online here. For more on the Haitian Revolution itself, readers should consult C.L.R. James's classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins - which even Christopher Hitchens still has the audacity to describe as 'essential' reading while simulaneously praising US efforts to recolonise Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake - despite of course James's own stress in The Black Jacobins that there is more 'decency, gratitude, justice and humanity in a cage of starving tigers than in the councils of imperialism'. For the period after the Duvaliers and on Aristide, see Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment.

Edited to add: Five upcoming academic conferences on Haiti/the Caribbean

(1)Haiti and the Politics of the Universal, The Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland)
Friday and Saturday, March 12-13, 2010

(2) INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
FROM DUVALIER TO PRÉVAL:
HAITI YESTERDAY, TODAY & TOMORROW
INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF THE AMERICAS
Senate House, London, WC1E 7HU
21ST – 22ND JUNE 2010

(3) Caribbean Enlightenment conference,
An Interdisciplinary Caribbean Studies Conference
8th to 10th April 2010, University of Glasgow

(4) Afromodernisms 1: Re-encounters with the French and Anglo-Atlantic Worlds, 1907–61.
Symposium: University of Liverpool, UK. Thursday 15th April - Saturday 17th April.

(5) Caribbean Globalizations: Histories, Cultures and Genres, 1493 to the Present Day
University of Oxford, 27-29 September 2010