Btes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands [Paperback]

InBêtes Noires, Lauren Derby explores storytelling traditions among the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shape-shifting spirit demons calledbaka/bacá. Drawing on interviews with and life stories of residents in a central Haitian-Dominican frontier town, Derby contends that bacás—hot spirits from the sorcery side ofvodou/vodúthat present as animals and generate wealth for their owners—are a manifestation of what Dominicans callfukú de Colón, the curse of Columbus. The dogs, pigs, cattle, and horses that Columbus brought with him are the only types of animals that bacás become. As instruments of Indigenous dispossession, these animals and their spirit demons convey a history of trauma and racialization in Dominican popular culture. In the context of slavery and beyond, bacás keep alive the promise of freedom, since shape-shifting has long enabled fugitivity. As Derby demonstrates, bacás represent a complex history of race, religion, repression, and resistance.USLauren Derby explores storytelling traditions between the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shapeshifting spirit demons called baka/bacá as a way to reckon with a shared history of enslavement, colonialism, and exploitation.Lauren Derby is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author ofThe Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujilloand coeditor ofThe Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics, both also published by Duke University Press.“An interdisciplinary triumph of what has been termed the 'multispecies humanities,’ Lauren Derby'sBêtes Noiresis an extensively researched, brilliantly theorized tour de force. Demonstrating the prevalence of demonic animals in myth, rumor, and performance throughout the Caribbean, it docum