Haiti-DR Section Prizes Announcement
Section Awards – Haiti-Dominican Republic Section 2023
1. Isis Duarte Book Prize
Winner:
Lorgia García Peña, Tufts University (Princeton University, beginning Fall 2023)
Book title:
Translating Blackness. Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke UP, 2022)
Co-Honorable Mention:
Marisel Moreno, University of Notre Dame
Book title:
Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art (U of Texas P, 2022)
Co-Honorable Mention:
Charlton Yingling, University of Louisville
Book Title:
Siblings of Soil: Dominicans and Haitians in the Age of Revolution (U of Texas P, 2022)
Committee:
Sharina Maillo-Pozo, Mariana Past, Christina Davidson
The committee reviewed six books that were submitted for consideration for the prize, ranked choices, and met together to determine the prizewinner and honorable mentions.
2. Haiti-Dominican Republic Section Article Prize
Co-Winner:
Pauline Kulstad-González, independent scholar
Article title:
“El negro detrás de la dovela: La interacción indo-afro-hispana en La Española del Siglo XVI a partir de la resignificación del material arqueológico de La Vega Vieja (1494-1564)” (Ciencia y Sociedad 47, no. 3, 2022, pp. 133-149)
Co-Winner:
Marianne Tøraasen, Chr. Michelsen Institute & University of Bergen
Article title:
“Women’s Judicial Representation in Haiti: Unintended Gains of State-Building Efforts" (Politics & Gender, 2022, pp. 1-32)
Honorable Mention:
Médar Serrata, Grand Valley State University
Article title:
“The True and Only Bones of Columbus”: Relics, Archives, and Reversed Scenarios of Discovery" (PMLA 137, no. 3, 2022, pp. 472-488)
Committee:
Lissette Acosta-Corniel, Kathryn de Luna, Reena Goldthree
The committee received 13 submissions of articles published during 2022, ranked choices, and met together to determine the prizewinners and honorable mention.
3. Haiti-Dominican Republic Section Translation Prize, translation of a book during 2021 or 2022
Winner:
Lauren (Robin) Derby (UCLA) and Richard Turits (William and Mary College)
Book title:
Terreurs de frontière : Le massacre des Haïtiens en République dominicaine en 1937 (Centre Challenges, 2021), edited by Watson Denis of the Université d’État d’Haïti
Honorable Mention:
Ginetta Candelario, Smith College
Book title:
El negro detrás de la oreja: Identidad racial dominicana, desde los museos hasta el salón de belleza (Editorial Universitaria Bonó, 2021) (translation of Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops, Duke UP, 2007)
Committee:
Aaron Coy Moulton, Molly Hamm-Rodríguez, Victor Miguel Castillo de Macedo
This new prize received 2 submissions, which the committee reviewed, ranked choices, and met together to determine the prizewinners and honorable mention.
Section Awards – Haiti-Dominican Republic Section 2021
1. Isis Duarte Book Prize
Winner:
Rachel Quinn, University of Houston
Book title:
Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo (U of Illinois Press, 2021)
Honorable Mention:
Mariana Past (Dickinson College) & Benjamin Hebblethwaite (University of Florida), translators
Book title:
Stirring the Pot of Haitian History (Liverpool University Press, 2021; translation of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti, 1977)
Committee:
April Mayes, Ana Liberato, Chelsey Kivland
The committee reviewed seven books that were submitted for consideration for the prize, ranked choices, and met together to determine the prizewinner and honorable mention.
2. Haiti-Dominican Republic Section Article Prize
Winner:
Lissette Acosta-Corniel, Borough of Manhattan Community College
Article title:
“Elena: Running to Dance and Other Defects in Colonial Santo Domingo (1771-73)” (Women, Gender, and Families of Color 9.2, Fall 2021)
Honorable Mention:
Kathryn de Luna, Georgetown University
Article title:
“Sounding the African Atlantic” (William & Mary Quarterly, 78.4, October 2021)
Committee:
Megan Myers, Kyrstin Mallon Andrews, Hugo Harvey
The committee received 13 submissions of articles published during 2021, ranked choices, and met together to determine the prizewinner and honorable mention.
3. Guy Alexandre Paper Prize, paper presented at LASA 2020 or LASA 2021
Winner:
Emmanuel Lachaud, City College of New York
Article title:
“Between La Vierge and the Lwas: Popular Spiritualism, Religious Nationalism, and Legitimacy in Haiti’s Second Empire, 1847-1859”
(paper presented at LASA 2020)
Committee:
Christina Davidson, Nancy Kang, Raj Chetty
Last year there was only one submission for this prize, so last year’s committee decided to have this year’s prize include presentations from 2020 and 2021. The committee received 3 submissions of articles (including the one submitted for consideration last year) presented at LASA during those two conferences, ranked choices, and met together to determine the prizewinner.
2019
Isis Duarte Book Prize
Winnner:
Jeffrey S. Kahn, Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019).
Islands of Sovereignty by Jeffrey S. Kahn reveals how the U.S. government’s policing of migration from Haiti expanded the U.S. border, remade the Caribbean, and transformed the nation-state itself. Employing an impressive combination of ethnographic and historical research methods, Kahn locates the origin of the now widely-used practice of extraterritorial migration control in the U.S. interdiction of Haitian migrants and shows how the legal struggles around this policy tested competing tendencies at the very core of liberal constitutionalism. The result, Kahn reveals, was a new border, new geographies, and a spatially-reconfigured nation-state, the impact of which has been felt in Haiti, the Caribbean, the United States, and throughout the world. Kahn’s findings represent a major contribution to an interdisciplinary conversation at the intersection of anthropology, legal theory, geography, political philosophy, and history.
Honorable Mention:
Brandon R. Byrd, The Black Republic; African Americans and the Fate of Haiti (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
The Isis Duarte book prize committee commends the work of Brandon R. Byrd in the 2019 publication The Black Republic. Beautifully written, the book serves as a reminder of the critical place of Haiti in so many of the important conversations circulating in the Black Atlantic across the 20th century. A narrative that unfolds clearly and yet with crucial nuance, this work of intellectual history serves as a key reminder of the deep roots of Black anti-imperialism and the many, even conflicted, ways Haiti has served as a symbol of freedom and liberation in the modern era.
Section Article Prize
Winner
Anne Eller, Raining Blood: Spiritual Power, Gendered Violence, and Anticolonial Lives in the Nineteenth-Century Dominican Borderlands (Hispanic American Historical Review)
The award winning article is an exciting demonstration of transnational perspective and scholarship on the island. It brings forward an astounding array of sources that reveal the center-island borderlands in the late 19th century to be a remarkable space of fugitive activity, and challenges the geographic and epistemological boundaries of the two nation states. Eller's focus on the spiritually grounded defense of autonomy, moreover, offers new ways of thinking about political authority in Latin American and the Caribbean that privileges the voices and perspectives of peasants and rebel leaders. We commend this article for both its breathtaking archival scope and analysis and theoretical innovation.
Honorable Mention
Maria Cecilia Ulrickson, honorable mention for Cultivators, Domestics, and Slaves: Slavery in Santo Domingo Under Louverture and Napolean, 1801-1803 (The Americas)
An honorable mention is awarded to Ulrickson's "Cultivators, Domestics and Slaves." Using notarial and ecclesiastical archives, Ulrickson charts how slaveholding and slave trading transformed under the influence of Louverture and Napoleon, and argues that slave owners created hidden slave markets and invented new ways of masking old forms of bondage. Thus, emancipation did not come suddenly to enslaved people on Hispaniola, but instead developed as a series of negotiations, contestations, and shifts that played out over time. In challenging how emancipation is conceptualized, this article will undoubtedly impact the scholarship on slavery and emancipation beyond Haitian and Dominican Studies.
Guy Alexandre Paper Prize (for a paper presented at the 2019 LASA conference in Boston)
Winner
Nancy Kang for “Ciguapismo: Rhina Espaillat’s Feminist Hermeneutics of Loss.”
The point of departure for Nancy Kang’s innovative paper is Espaillat’s characterization of her work of translation, not just between languages but also between home and diaspora, as “writing in reverse.” Kang interprets the poet’s statement in light of the image of la ciguapa, the mythic female figure whose backwards feet enable her to travel across borders of time and space. Especially when writing about Dominican women, Kang argues, Espaillat engages in an epistemology of ciguapismo, which Kang defines as“an interpretive faculty, an imaginative resource, and a humane impulse to excavate the mythic and world-building capacities of Dominican and Dominican diaspora women, aquí y allá.” Kang’s persuasive analysis is bolstered by her careful reading of the great poet’s oeuvre and interviews with the wise humanitarian, who is 88 years young now), and comparative scholarship on the metaphor of la ciguapa, not the least of which is found in the journal publication that won the section article prize two years ago by Ginetta Candelario.
Honorable Mention
Julie Sellers “From Radio Guarachita to El Tieto eShow: Bachata’s Imagined Communities.”
In this richly documented paper, Julie Sellers applies Benedict Anderson’s theory and scholarship on new, digital media to extend her unique scholarship on Dominican popular music, including her most recent (2017) book, The Modern Bachateros. Sellers elucidates the context and characteristics of the humble, melancholic bachata genre and the working class radio program that promoted it on the periphery of the centers of musical authority in the Dominican Republic. These slantwise assets were an ideal foundation for the successful reinvention of the radio program by means of creative appropriation of new media, into an online, diasporic show.
2018
The Haiti-DR Section Article Prize
This prize will be presented for the best article on a Haitian or Dominican topic published in any peer-reviewed journal during 2018.
To qualify, authors must:
1. Be a paid member of both LASA and the Haiti/DR Section for the coming year’s conference (2019). Visit http://lasa.international.pitt.edu to (re)register for both by January 7, 2019.
2. Publish an original piece of scholarship in English, French, Kreyòl, Portuguese, or Spanish on a Haitian or Dominican topic in a peer-reviewed journal during 2018.
3. Submit the article electronically no later than January 7, 2019 to: emanley1@xula.edu.
The Guy Alexandre Paper Prize
This prize, for a paper presented on Haitian or Dominican studies at the annual LASA conference 2018, honors former Haitian Ambassador to the DR, scholar, and wonderful and brilliant diplomat who passed in 2014.
To qualify, authors must:
1. Be a paid member of both LASA and the Haiti/DR Section for the coming year’s conference (2019). Visit http://lasa.international.pitt.edu to (re)register for both by January 7, 2019.
2. Have made an original presentation in English, French, Kreyòl, Portuguese, or Spanish on a Haitian or Dominican topic at LASA 2018. If you presented but were not a member of the section you may join by January 7, 2019 and become eligible.
3. Submit the paper presentation to the committee no later than January 7, 2019. Papers may be edited from the original presentation form. We especially encourage emerging scholars and graduate students to submit their work. Please send the paper electronically to: emanley1@xula.edu
The Isis Duarte Prize
This prize, for a book published in 2018 on a Haitian or Dominican topic, honors Isis Duarte, a prominent sociologist, UASD professor, and pioneering scholar whose work on Dominican and Haitian migration, and Dominican women and household economies made significant contributions to Dominican Social Services.
To qualify, authors must:
1. Be a paid member of both LASA and the Haiti/DR Section for the coming year’s conference (2019). Visit http://lasa.international.pitt.edu to (re)register for both by January 7, 2019.
2. Publish an original academic-length monograph in English, French, Kreyòl, Portuguese, or Spanish on a Haitian or Dominican topic between January 1, 2018 and December 31, 2018. Translations of previously published works and edited volumes will be accepted if a strong case can be made (in the cover letter) for a broad and substantial on the field.
3. Submit an electronic copy and one physical copy of the monograph no later than January 7, 2019, accompanied by a cover letter (including a statement justifying the nomination for this prize) and CV (with complete contact information) to: emanley@xula.edu and 1 Drexel Drive Box 147 Department of History Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA 70125.
*All award decisions will be announced in the Spring of 2019. Award recipients will be celebrated at the Section Meeting/Reception at LASA 2019 in Boston, Massachusetts. Award committees will be convened in the fall of 2018. The section may cancel a given competition if it receives an insufficient number of entries.