Duke Haiti Lab Kreyòl (Creole) Blog

Click here to watch a great discussion of Haiti’s history and current debates about reconstruction by Deborah Jenson, broadcast from Duke last Friday in relation to the “Haiti’s History” conference April 22-23.

Julia Gaffield, a Duke graduate student who has studied Creole with Gaspard Louis and Deborah Jenson, brought the extraordinary nature of Haitian history to the attention of the wider world this past week with the news of her discovery of the only known government-issued copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence in the British National Archives.

Gaffield is an expert sleuth of historical manuscripts, following her thesis advisor, Laurent Dubois, and thesis committee member Jenson, who also cherish the ghosts of history preserved in the stained and fragile pages of the archives. Gaffield has made the allure of archives palpable to fellow students everywhere.

Haiti as a nation has produced not only remarkable documents, but remarkable historians for over two centuries now. From the memoirs of Boisrond-Tonnerre and Toussaint Louverture, to the multi-tome historiography by Madiou and Ardouin, to the early 20th century work of Pauleus Sannon and Nemours, anti-colonial Haiti rivals the great colonial metropoles in its historical monuments and historiographical expertise.

Please read the Declaration and share your comments on its fierce brilliance!

Chapò ba, Jilia! Akolad!

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2010/04/06/ac.penn.relocating.people.haiti.cnn?hpt=C2

Duke and affiliated university students can now register for Haitian Creole for the Recovery (French 199) or Creole/Kreyòl Studies II (French 193) with Haitian Creole linguist Jacques Pierre in the fall of 2010! Byenveni, Jak!

Prof. Pierre will teach the course sequence first developed by French professor Deborah Jenson and co-taught with great aplomb by Gaspard Louis, Reginald Patterson, Laura Wagner (and Jenson).  Prof. Pierre has MA degrees in Teaching English as a Second Language and in Translation with a specialization in French and Haitian Creole; he has studied lexicography with Creole Linguist Albert Valdman and assisted in the Haitian Creole-English Bilingual Dictionary (Indiana UP 2007) that has set the scholarly standard in the field. He has also published, with Creole linguist Ben Hebblethwaite, translations of French literature into Creole.