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Ryan Cecil Jobson will discuss the new edition of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's book "Peasants and Capital: Dominica and the World Economy." He will be joined in conversation by Mark Hauser and William Balan-Gaubert. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. At the Co-op.
About the book: Over thirty-five years ago, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s debut ethnography, "Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy," dared to regard peasants not as vestiges of premodern economies but as instrumental to, and integrated in, a capitalist world system. Combining historical ethnography with an intimate portrait of a banana-producing eastern Caribbean village, this multi-sited study demonstrates how multinational capital thrives on the surplus production of peasant cultivators. At the same time, it investigates how peasantries generate independent conceptions of value and subsistence in the process of building a new postcolonial state in Dominica. This new edition of "Peasants and Capital" invites anthropologists to revisit the methodological innovations of this multi-scalar study and readers to meditate on the continued vitality of peasant livelihoods in the Caribbean today.
Ryan Cecil Jobson’s new introduction situates this edition in the context of Trouillot’s remarkable life and career. Jobson reminds us of the book’s enduring theoretical and ethnographic significance and asks us to consider how the entanglement of peasants from Dominica in national and world affairs has been impacted by more recent histories, such as the end of preferential markets for Caribbean bananas, the migration of “banana children” to regional and metropolitan urban centers, and the devastation of Dominica by Hurricane Maria.
About the author: Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012) was a Haitian anthropologist and professor of anthropology at The University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including "Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History" and "Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World."
About the editor: Ryan Cecil Jobson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The University of Chicago. His book, "The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago" is published with The University of Chicago Press.
About the interlocutors: Mark Hauser is Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. As an historical archaeologist, he specializes in materiality, slavery and inequality. His first book "An Archaeology of Black Markets" (Florida 2008), maps the informal economies of enslaved people in Jamaica through the utilitarian pottery they made and with which they furnished their houses to trace the cultural and political registers of their everyday lives. His most recent book, "Mapping water in Dominica" (Washington 2021) examines the archaeological record of water, its management, and everyday uses during the island’s short lived ‘sugar revolution,’ to map the ecological legacies of colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean.
A native of Haiti, William Balan-Gaubert is a Haitian History & Society Scholar in Residence and Lecturer at the University of Chicago. With extensive studies in Haiti, France, and the United States, he focuses on and explores Haitian Vodun as both cultural memory and ethical life. Through numerous lectures and writings, Balan-Gaubert has significantly contributed to the understanding and appreciation of Haitian Vodun and its profound impact on societal and cultural dynamics.
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