Specters of Marx, Hegel, and Columbus Too: Haunting and Historicity in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands

This essay surveys work on rumor as a historical source in Europe and India (Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Revel, Ranajit Guha) as well as Africa and Latin America (Sidney Mintz, Miguel Barnet, Luise White, Eric Van Young and Mary Weismantel) to make the case for studying oral speech genres as a means of accessing implicit social knowledge in the Caribbean, a region that like no other was forged in the shadow of state power.  A case is made for rumor as a means of microhistorical research, as well as one which enables access to subaltern modes of knowledge and resistance that are otherwise occluded from view on the shop floor and plantation, and are more easily discovered in the rum shop or colmado, the kitchen and the street.  In addition to content and genre, the piece makes the case for exploring style, virtuosity and poetics in speech forms as well, and thus argues for recouping the insights of Pete Wilson, Frank Manning, Roger Abrahams as well as Jorgé Manach, Antonio Lauria and Fernando Picó in the exploration of everyday verbal arts in the Caribbean.