Sorcery and the Legacies of Colonialism in the Dominican Republic

Assistant Director of the LCHP Rose Campbell welcomes UCLA historian Robin Lauren Derby to discuss her new book Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands. Robin explores how beliefs surrounding the bacá, spirits that appear as animals, preserve cultural memories of colonialism, slavery, authoritarianism, and capitalist exploitation in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Drawing on archival research, ethnographic studies, and oral interviews, Robin explains how stories of shape-shifting, zombies, and sorcery reveal enduring Indigenous, African, and colonial influences while challenging dominant nationalist narratives about Haitian-Dominican relations. She argues that these spiritual traditions are not simply folklore but valuable historical sources that illuminate the lasting legacies of violence, resistance, race, and political repression in the region, while continuing to evolve and take on new meanings in the present day.Robin Lauren Derby is Professor and Dr. E. Bradford Burns Chair in Latin American Studies at UCLA. Robin’s work has focused on everyday life under regimes of state terror, the long durée social history of the Haitian and Dominican borderlands, and how notions of race, national identity, and witchcraft have been articulated in popular media such as rumor, food, and animals. Her first book, The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (Duke, 2009; published in Spanish by the Academy of History of the Dominican Republic, 2016), considered public culture and daily life during the regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (1930-61). She has also authored and co-edited many volumes and articles on Haiti and the Dominican Republic. She is currently Senior Editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review, which is housed at UCLA.