S2 Episode 5: Jean Casimir & Michel DeGraff : Onè ak jistis: Avenues for reparations in Haiti

In this episode of Future Perfect | Futur Antérieur, we have the honor of welcoming two eminent scholars of Haiti, Professors Jean Casimir and Michel DeGraff, who speak with us about the legacies of colonialism in Haiti and the ongoing fight for justice and repair for the island. Prof. Casimir discusses the place and role of the Haitian state in demands for reparations from France, as well as what solidarity with other movements for historical justice across Africa and its diasporas might look like. Analyzing educational policies and practices in Haiti, Prof. DeGraff explains how colonial violence continues to play out in Haiti today in the enduring denigration of kreyòl, one of the country’s two official languages and the only one that is spoken by the entire population, in favor of French, the other official language (spoken by the formally educated and the elite). The needed reparations and restitution for colonial crimes, our guests show, are monetary but also, importantly, cultural. 

Michel DeGraff is Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), co-founder and co-director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, founding member of Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen, fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. DeGraff is also an African Futures Lab Fellow. His research contributes to an egalitarian approach to Creole, Indigenous and other non-colonial languages and their speakers, as in his native Haiti.  Anchored in a broader agenda for human rights and social justice, his writings also engage intellectual history and critical race theory, especially the links between power-knowledge hierarchies and the hegemonic (mis)representations of non-colonial languages and their speakers in the Global South and beyond. Platfòm MIT-Ayiti, one of DeGraff's initiatives, sets up a model for other oppressed communities to constructively enlist their native languages as tools for quality education and for inclusion in all other spheres where knowledge and power are created and transmitted. More details at: https://mit-ayiti.net/, http://facebook.com/mithaiti, http://twitter.com/mithaiti, http://instagram.com/mithaiti, https://www.tiktok.com/@mithaiti.

Jean Casimir is a sociologist and Professor of Humanities at the Université d’État d’Haïti (UEH). He has taught at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico, at Stanford University and Duke University in the United States, as well as at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica. He served as a UN officer for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean between 1975 and 1988 and as Ambassador of Haiti to the United States and the Organization of American States between 1991 and 1997. Prof. Casimir is the author of several books, including La Culture Opprimée (1981), Haïti et ses élites, l’interminable dialogue de sourds (2009), and La Caraïbe, une et divisible (1991). His most recent book is The Haitians: A Decolonial History (2020), winner of the Caribbean Philosophical Association's 2

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