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Jean Casimir

Professor of Humanities at the Université d’État d’Haïti and former Ambassador of Haiti to the United States

Sweet light from sugar: The counter-plantation and the trap of imperial discourse

Sugar, in the form of refined, added sugar, came into our collective lives through Europe’s invention of the plantation. The plantation is a modern economic and social institution central to the West’s project of industrialization, globalization, and racialization. It is a product of colonialism, and sugar cane is its preeminent crop. Through the wholesale abuse and forced labor of captive humans, tropical sugarcane was turned into a global commodity to be consumed by the West even as it consumed the bodies of indigenous people and captives kidnapped from Africa. 

If Europe invented the racist, enslaving, destructive plantation that used forced labor to produce empty, addictive calories for export, what would its opposite look like? Prof. Jean Casimir says we can look to Haiti for an answer: the Haitian people have invented a counter-plantation. If we have ears to listen, Haiti can teach us a lot.

An author, teacher, researcher, and diplomat, Dr. Jean Casimir is Professor of Humanities at the Université d’État d’Haïti and a renowned scholar of decolonization and historical sociology. He has served as Ambassador of Haiti to the United States, Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States, and as an international civil servant with the United Nations, and he has taught internationally at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Stanford University; Duke University; University of Utrecht, and University of the West Indies, Mona.

His numerous books, beginning with La cultura oprimida in 1981, seek to understand how a sovereign nation forms out of the hell that was the slave plantation. Published in Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, and English, his scholarship, while historical, becomes more relevant with each passing year, by offering an analytical perspective to examine contemporary (ongoing?) issues of racial injustice, the legacies of slavery, decolonization, and political sovereignty.

His awards include the 2013 Jean-Price Mars Award of the Faculty of Ethnology at the University of Haiti and the 2016 Haitian Studies Association Award for Excellence. His most recent book, The Haitians: A Decolonial History (2020, English translation), received the Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. 

His talk: Thought on Haiti is currently framed by ideas and values from the Modern Age not shared by its inhabitants. The emerging concept of statehood in the colonial “Pearl of the Antilles” institutionalized enslavement as a massive, if slow, execution of the workers. After centuries of stubborn resistance, the enslaved workers attempted, in 1791, to put an end to the slaughter. A counter-plantation system emerged, opposed to the avowed aims of modern public life. While the latter creates hierarchies of White, mixed-race, and Black people, Haitian Kreyòl spurns distinctions in skin color, differentiating only between foreigners, or Blan, and locals, or Nèg.

Though linked by power relations, French and Haitian Kreyòl speakers have been living two different realities. The incompatibility of these two realities and their unbearable hierarchy became increasingly apparent as Kreyòl speakers kept invading the public space. The resulting crisis remains insoluble within the framework of modern values. Life flourished out of a laborious search for dignity and sovereignty that the modern State cannot grant the descendants of the enslaved without destroying itself. Since they must solve their problems by themselves, Haitians will not enjoy the sweetness of sugar soon.