The Weekly Read is Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands by Lauren (Robin) Derby.

In Bêtes Noires, Lauren Derby draws on interviews with and life stories of residents in a central Haitian-Dominican frontier town to explore storytelling traditions among the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shape-shifting spirit demons called baka/bacá. Bacás are hot spirits from the sorcery side of vodou/vodú that present as animals and generate wealth for their owners. Derby demonstrates how bacás both convey convey a history of trauma and racialization and keep alive the promise of freedom. As Derby demonstrates, bacás represent a complex history of race, religion, repression, and resistance. Elizabeth Pérez, author of Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions writes, “An interdisciplinary triumph of what has been termed the ‘multispecies humanities,’ Lauren Derby’s Bêtes Noires is an extensively researched, brilliantly theorized tour de force. Demonstrating the prevalence of demonic animals in myth, rumor, and performance throughout the Caribbean, it documents the profound human and environmental impacts of coloniality. Derby takes us into the belly of that beast to show how indigenous dispossession, enslavement, dictatorship, and imperialism continue to haunt and hex everyday people, even today.”

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and the UCLA Library.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.