Walking on Fire: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780801487484)

Haiti, long noted for poverty and repression, has a powerful and too-often-overlooked history of resistance. Women in Haiti have played a large role in changing the balance of political and social power, even as they have endured rampant and devastating state-sponsored violence, including torture, rape, abuse, illegal arrest, disappearance, and assassination.In Walking on Fire, Beverly Bell, an activist and an expert on Haitian social movements, brings together thirty-eight oral histories from a diverse group of Haitian women. The interviewees include, for example, a former prime minister, an illiterate poet, a leading feminist theologian, and a vodou dancer. Defying victim status despite gender- and state-based repression, they tell how Haiti's poor and dispossessed women have fought for their personal and collective survival.The women's powerfully moving accounts of horror and heroism can best be characterized by the Creole word istwa, which means both "story" and "history." They combine theory with case studies concerning resistance, gender, and alternative models of power. Photographs of the women who have lived through Haiti's recent past accompany their words to further personalize the interviews in Walking on Fire.

Author: Beverly Bell
ISBN-10: 080148748X
ISBN-13: 9780801487484
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/15/2002
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.96w x 0.69d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 12/03/2001 pg. 52
Library Journal 01/01/2002 pg. 132
Qbr the Black Book Review 07/01/2002 pg. 28
Multicultural Review 09/01/2002 pg. 95
Choice 07/01/2002 pg. 2020