Nèg Mawon Podcast

Who was the Baron de Vastey, secretary to King Henry Christophe, and why did his pen make so many enemies? Dr. Marlene Daut explains the "paper war" between Haiti's North and South. She shows how early Haitian writers answered the pseudoscience of race with their own idea of regeneration, and why reading Vastey changes how we understand the Black Atlantic. We start with a question for her: are we living in a golden age of Haitian studies?

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/neg-mawon/2027-03-27/transcript

Historian Matthew J. Smith talks about his book Red and Black in Haiti. He explains the title's meanings, from the colors of Vodou to an old dice game to the rivalry between communists (red) and noiristes (black). He then takes us through Haiti after the U.S. occupation: the Good Neighbor policy, Daniel Fignolé's labor movement, the music of Jazz des Jeunes, and the SHADA rubber project that displaced thousands of peasants. He ends with the crisis of the 1950s that opened the way for François Duvalier.

(Like episode #1, this is an orphaned episode we restored from season 2.)

Guerline T. Emmanuel and her husband Hogarth founded Belle Vue Tours, which has been taking groups to Haiti for more than a decade. She tells Patrick how they spent three years researching on the ground before their first tour, and why they chose to partner with companies already working in Haiti. She also explains why she believes Haiti needs hundreds of tour companies: tourism feeds farming, transport and jobs. They talk about her family and childhood, the gap between the diaspora's good intentions and Haiti's realities, her clothing line BVstylez, and her new work on civic responsibility toward Haiti.

This is the very first episode on the podcast we were able to restore.

Marie-Louise Coidavid was born free in Cap-Français in 1778, married Henry Christophe in a city on fire, and was crowned Queen of Haiti in 1811. Drawing on the research of Dr. Marlene Daut, this Deep Dive follows her from the free Black families of colonial Saint-Domingue to the court at Sans-Souci, through the night of October 8, 1820, and the killing of her son Prince Victor, to her long exile in England and Pisa. Along the way we look at what the women's archive of the Revolution can and cannot tell us, and the question Daut leaves open: what does it mean that a queen swore a sovereign's oath?

Read the full transcript on Jou: https://jou.rasanblaj.ht/podcast/deep-dive/2026-10-20/transcript

As a small business owner, Guerline, the owner of bvtours.com has a built-in bias towards action. She wants to get stuff done more than she wants to talk about getting stuff done. When you have to deal with payroll and all the day-to-day stuff life throws at you, you really don't have time for BS.  

This is why this interview with Guerline Emmanuel resonated so much with me. She doesn't suffer fools gladly when it comes to running her businesses, especially when it comes to loose talk about how to solve the myriad challenges facing Haiti. She just calls balls and strikes. I found this discussion with Guerline Emmanuel refreshing and I hope you do as well.

Yes. Haitians were in the nation-building business! This episode covers a little-known chapter in Haitian history. Dr. Regine Jackson offers a fascinating, multi-sited, and interdisciplinary study of the United Nations Organization in the Congo (ONUC), a civilian operation established after the Democratic Republic of Congo achieved independence from Belgium.  

Through narrative interviews in New York City, Port-au-Prince, Montreal and Paris and analysis of archives in Haiti, Kinshasa, and at UN headquarters in New York and Paris, Dr. Jackson helps us understand better the lived experiences of the Haitian educators, engineers, and doctors in the ONUC during the Congo crisis. her previous research suggests that many of these Haitian professionals saw postcolonial Africa as a space of possibility (see Jackson 2014).  

This episode seeks to answer crucial questions about our best and brightest: about their pre-migration experiences in Haiti under Duvalier, the role of international organizations such as the UN and WHO, relations between Haitians and the Congolese, as well the circumstances of their departure from the Congo under Mobutu Sese Seko.

Visit her guest page

https://neg.fm/dr-regine-ostine-jackson/

• Dr. Steiber turns to the written record to re-examine the building blocks of Haitian history.
• Picking up where most historians conclude, listen as Dr. Chelsea Stieber explores the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of swords and of pens, waged in newspapers and periodicals, in literature, broadsheets, and fliers. In her analysis of Haitian writing that followed independence, Dr. Stieber composes a new literary history of Haiti, one I'm certain challenges our interpretations of both freedom struggles and the postcolonial.
• She also examines internal dissent during the revolution, Stieber reveals that the very concept of freedom was itself hotly contested in the public sphere, and it was this inherent tension that became the central battleground for the guerre de plume―the paper war―that vied to shape public sentiment and the very idea of Haiti.
• Stieber’s reading of post-independence Haitian writing reveals key insights into the nature of literature, its relation to freedom and politics, and how fraught and politically loaded the concepts of “literature” and “civilization” really are. The competing ideas of liberté, writing, and civilization at work within postcolonial Haiti have consequences for the way we think about Haiti’s role―as an idea and a discursive interlocutor―in the elaboration of black radicalism and black Atlantic, anticolonial, and decolonial thought. In so doing, Stieber reorders our previously homogeneous view of Haiti, teasing out warring conceptions of the new nation that continued to play out deep into the twentieth century.

Enjoy!