Lauren Derby's "Bêtes Noires"

Lauren Derby is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo and coeditor of The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics.

Derby applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, and reported the following:

Page 99 showcases one of the central questions of Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands – why animals figure so prominently in the popular culture and religion of Hispaniola which I explain through the prominence of hunting and extensive cattle ranching in the island’s history. Contraband sales of cattle peaked in the late eighteenth century as Dominican cattle and oxen were sold to the neighboring colony of Saint Domingue when it became the largest sugar producer of the French Atlantic since the sugar mills were driven by oxen. Due to the vast expanse of feral herds formed over centuries of pigs and cattle originally brought by Columbus as seed animals, the Dominican Republic developed a vibrant hunting culture. Hunting has not been explored much for Caribbean history but it was an important feature of Dominican everyday life and one that enabled these peasants the luxury of remaining outside of slavery and sugar plantation labor while it continued into the late nineteenth century in neighboring Cuba and Puerto Rico. Dominican hunting skills also shaped the army since troops were not provisioned as they were in Cuba, a detail also noted on that page. Hunting and extensive ranching has left its mark on popular culture from animal nicknaming practices to horned carnival costumes and most importantly storytelling about spirit demons in animal form. The fact that the animals from the Columbian exchange have become spirit demons I argue is a material manifestation of what Dominicans call the fukú de Colón – the curse of Columbus – and represent trauma since these animals were used to dispossess the indigenous population and were terrifying since the largest animal on the island had been a hutia – a large rodent - before the massive horses and cows and the violent boars and slave catching canines arrived.

Learn more about Bêtes Noires at the Duke University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue