Lauren Derby’s BÊTES NOIRES with Anne Eller, René Cordero, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

With a performance from Orchestre Moto

To celebrate Independent Bookstore Day, Word Up welcomes author Lauren Derby to celebrate her new book Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands. Joining Derby will be Anne Eller (long durée Hispaniola history), René Cordero (post-Trujillo corruption and drug trafficking), and Lizabeth (Lisa) Paravisini-Gebert (vodou/vodú), each presenting on their research topics.  

After the reading, there will be a performance from Orchestre Moto. Orchestre Moto is a New York and Los Angeles-based band with a constellation of roots, from Kinshasa to Brazzaville, Lubumbashi to Pointe-Noire, dedicated to showcasing the Congolese sound. Moto means “fire” in Lingala: a name that reflects the explosive, high-energy African dance music they bring to the stage. The ensemble performs genres such as rumba, sebene, mutuashi, and ndombolo—styles born in post-independence Africa that blend traditional rhythms with electric guitar and Afro-Cuban influences.

“With excellent attention to both historical and contemporary contexts, Bêtes Noires reads the shape-shifting bacá as a rich archive of social memory and more-than-human life in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands. It represents one of the most thorough integrations of in-depth ethnography and historiography that I have encountered.” – J. Brent Crosson, author of Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad

This event is a $5 suggested donation ticket. Please register in advance.

In compliance with Word Up Community Safety guidelines, all attendees are encouraged to stay masked at all time.

Recirculation, a project of Word Up Community Bookshop, is located at 876 Riverside Drive (near 160th St.) in Washington Heights, NYC. You can take the 1 train to 157th St., A/C train to 163rd St., and the M4 and M5 to Broadway and 159/160th.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In Bêtes Noires, Lauren Derby explores storytelling traditions among the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shape-shifting spirit demons called baka/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 of vodou/vodú that present as animals and generate wealth for their owners—are a manifestation of what Dominicans call fukú 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lauren Derby is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo and coeditor of The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics, both also published by Duke University Press.

ABOUT THE INTERLOCUTORS

Anne Eller is an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at Yale University.  She received her degree in the history of the African Diaspora and Latin America from NYU; her dissertation received the Dean’s prize for outstanding dissertation in the humanities, 2011-2012. She is a former Fulbright-Hays scholar and her work has been supported by multiple research and writing fellowships. She is the author of We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom.

René Cordero is a professor in the Department of Latin American and Latinx Studies. He earned a PhD at Brown University and is now completing his book manuscript about the history of university politics in the Dominican Republic during the twentieth century. René’s research interest and teaching spans modern Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino/a/x history, with a more specific focus on race, politics, and state governance in the Caribbean and Latinx contexts.

Lisa Paravisini-Gebert works in the fields of literature and cultural studies, specializing in the multidisciplinary, comparative study of the Caribbean. Growing up in her native Puerto Rico, she became fascinated by the many cultural connections between Caribbean peoples despite our different histories and languages and has made that the subject of her research and teaching.

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ACCESSIBILITY: Recirculation is a wheelchair-accessible space with one ramp from the street level down to the store. Most of the shelves are on wheels and can be moved to provide additional access. The bathrooms are not yet ADA compliant and do not yet have a changing table but are gender neutral. The events are mic’d for sound and videos are captioned when possible. Free ASL interpretation is available for most programs upon request. Please email events@wordupbooks.com to request interpretation as early as possible. If you have specific questions about the space or how an event can be made more accessible to you, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@wordupbooks.com.