Crystal N Eddins | University of Pittsburgh (original) (raw)

Books by Crystal N Eddins

The Haitian Revolution was perhaps the most successful slave rebellion in modern history; it crea... more The Haitian Revolution was perhaps the most successful slave rebellion in modern history; it created the first and only free and independent Black nation in the Americas. This book tells the story of how enslaved Africans forcibly brought to colonial Haiti through the trans-Atlantic slave trade used their cultural and religious heritages, social networks, and labor and militaristic skills to survive horrific conditions. They built webs of networks between African and 'creole' runaways, slaves, and a small number of free people of color through rituals and marronnage - key aspects to building the racial solidarity that helped make the revolution successful. Analyzing underexplored archival sources and advertisements for fugitives from slavery, Crystal Eddins finds indications of collective consciousness and solidarity, unearthing patterns of resistance. Considering the importance of the Haitian Revolution and the growing scholarly interest in exploring it, Eddins fills an important gap in the existing literature.

Articles and Chapters by Crystal N Eddins

ENGAGING CHILDREN IN VAST EARLY AMERICA, 2024

In a deadly slave society like colonial Haiti where children were few, it is difficult to define ... more In a deadly slave society like colonial Haiti where children were few, it is difficult to define what it meant to be a child. Birth rates were notably low and nearly half of infants who were born in the colony died within a short time span. To enslavers, children represented the embodied future of slavery and forecasted economic gains from forced labor. Therefore, when enslaved children did survive infancy and grow to adolescence, they were not spared the harsh realities of the exploitative labor and sexual violence that characterized the plantation economy. Boys labored in the fields as young as seven or eight years old, and some girls became pregnant as young as eleven. For both boys and girls, the burden of domestic labor began in childhood. Among the enslaved population, however, children were important not because of their labor potential but because they represented the continuation of humanity in the wake of death as well as future possibilities of freedom. Not only did enslaved women and men flee with their children during marronnage, but children and adolescents ran away from plantations without adults and were reported as maroons—although less frequently than adults—suggesting that some children were consciously part of the broader fabric of resistance in colonial Haiti. This chapter draws on archival insights from plantation inventories and fugitive advertisements published in the newspaper Les affiches américaines to shed light on the experience of childhood and resistance during slavery in colonial Haiti.

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2023

Subversion encompasses the tactics deployed to realize this freedom that included not only grand ... more Subversion encompasses the tactics deployed to realize this freedom that included not only grand counter-slavery offensives manifested in outright rebellion, but also the everyday acts of resistance and survival that sustained enslaved people and threatened the world of Atlantic slavery. The enslaved consistently found ways to reject plantation domination, and through that rejection they embodied liberatory consciousness and politics. From this perspective, we consider subversion to include a range of acts that, however individualized or illegible to traditional conceptualizations of resistance and rebellion, undermined the operation of slavery and colonial power. In this sense, subversion consists of individual acts of escape and theft to collective actions and uprisings to sociopolitical revolutions. Subversion includes enslaved people’s everyday practices to protect themselves from the violence of plantation and colonial authority. Enslaved people’s self-defense, including their sense of honor and dignity, was also expressed through the philosophies of freedom and anti-slavery in narratives, songs, prayers, dance, dress, kinship and practices of intimacy. Enslavers brutally surveilled and repressed these activities because of their possible connections to future Black freedoms. For this reason, subversion is at the heart of Atlantic world history, situated in the multitude of challenges to racial slavery and colonial occupation.

Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation , 2023

The Marronnage in Colonial Haiti, 1766-1791 dataset aims to make publicly available information a... more The Marronnage in Colonial Haiti, 1766-1791 dataset aims to make publicly available information about enslaved people’s resistance strategies and tactics in the years prior to the Haitian Revolution. This dataset enumerates 12,857 enslaved individuals who were described as runaway maroons in colonial Haiti’s newspaper advertisements from 1766 to 1791. Enslaved people across the Americas routinely escaped plantations, hiding on plantation outskirts, establishing self-liberated communities in geographically inaccessible areas, blending into free Black communities in urban towns and cities, or crossing geo-political boundaries.

Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, 2022

This chapter offers insight on how existing paradigms within Black Studies, specifically the idea... more This chapter offers insight on how existing paradigms within Black Studies, specifically the ideas of racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition, can advance sociological scholarship toward greater understanding of the macro-level factors that shape Black mobilizations. In this chapter, I assess mainstream sociological research on the Civil Rights Movement and theoretical paradigms that emerged from its study, using racial capitalism as a lens to explain dynamics such as the political process of movement emergence, state-sponsored repression, and demobilization. The chapter then focuses on the reparatory justice movement as an example of how racial capitalism perpetuates wide disparities between Black and white people historically and contemporarily, and how reparations activists actively deploy the idea of racial capitalism to address inequities and transform society.

JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH , 2022

Marronnage, or escape from slavery, was a longue-durée form of resistance to slavery in Haiti and... more Marronnage, or escape from slavery, was a longue-durée form of resistance to slavery in Haiti and was also, as Sylvia Wynter argues, a "dialectical response to the capitalist plantation system"-a system that aimed to deny humanity, sever social and cultural ties, and commodified people and their labor power. This article, as well as works by others such as Cedric Robinson (1983), Sylvia Wynter (n.d.), and Jean Casimir (2020), argues that marronnage was a fundamentally anti-capitalist mode of resistance, socio-political critique, and grassroots mobilizing. In the immediate moments when enslaved people fled plantations, they reclaimed possession of themselves and other tangible and intangible resources, such as their time, social relationships, forms of knowledge, and labor skills that enslavers stole from them. When maroons re-appropriated resources and mobilized themselves, they challenged and subverted colonial plantation structures, contributing to the downfall of both Spanish and French imperial slaveries in Haiti. During and after the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, Africa-born rebels and maroons were central to the mobilizing structures that successfully fought to abolish slavery and overturn colonialism-representing an astounding rupture to the prevailing Atlantic world-system that was dependent upon enslaved labor. Even after the post-independence Haitian government replicated aspects of the colonial administration, as Casimir (2020) points out, the formerly enslaved masses of Haiti organized themselves into communal social arrangements that prioritized subsistence labor and extended kin networks, and continued to rely on marronnage to protest exploitative economic practices. This article explores the trajectory of marronnage in Haiti as a continuous struggle, emphasizing the ways that it exposed the violence, exploitation, and oppression inherently embedded in the Atlantic world-system, and exposed the limits of the governing Haitian states.

Gender & History, 2020

This paper explores the possible existence of organic reproductive justice actions among enslaved... more This paper explores the possible existence of organic reproductive justice actions among enslaved moth- ers and pregnant women in colonial Haiti (Saint Domingue) with specific focus on how marronnage – escape from slavery – provided them opportunities to exert power over their lives, bodies and biological reproduction. Reproductive justice is defined as the complete well-being of women and girls, based on their human right to decide when and how to have – or not have – children, and to parent existing children in safe and sustainable communities. The conditions of enslavement in Haiti were particularly detrimental to women’s control over their fertility and overall reproductive health as birth rates remained so low that the enslaved population could not reproduce itself; however, findings from an underutilized archival roster containing demographic information on the only formally recognized community of maroons from colo- nial Haiti, the Maniel, indicate that the child-woman ratio among fugitive women was over twice as high as their counterparts who remained enslaved on plantations. Subversive reading of runaway slave adver- tisements also suggests that choosing to abscond was a rare but effective mechanism for women to achieve reproductive justice by exercising agency over their lives and protecting their childbearing capabilities. By highlighting motherhood during a state of fugitivity in one of the most economically prosperous slave so- cieties in modern history, this paper can help establish historical precedent for contemporary reproductive justice claims. Moreover, maroon mothers’ organic acts of reproductive justice have important implica- tions for the study of how black women resist structures of racial capitalism that negatively impact their reproductive health and other areas of their lives.

The Journal of Haitian Studies, 2019

The Haitian Revolution was the modern era’s most successful slave rebellion. Grand marronnage, lo... more The Haitian Revolution was the modern era’s most successful slave rebellion. Grand marronnage, long-term or permanent escape from enslavement, was part of the pre-revolution repertoire of contention. This paper uses content analysis of digitally archived runaway advertisements to examine relationships between birth origin and interactional patterns that facilitated long-term escape and reflected shared responses to repression and other environmental factors over time. Marronnage by a group of two or more people was a significant portion of the sample, demonstrating the importance of small-scale group interactions while escaping rather than attempting the dangerous act of fleeing alone. Africa-born and creole African-descendant runaways responded to repression using group escape and other types of social network ties in distinctive ways. There was a closely associated relationship between the use of social network ties and durations of escape that were relatively successful, which I define as lasting for six months or more. Moreover, rates of successful marronnage gradually increased in the years before the Haitian Revolution, which perhaps helped to facilitate the diffusion of a growing shared consciousness. These findings indicate a need for further research on micro-level activity prior to world-historical events such as the Haitian Revolution.

Haitian History Journal, 2019

It might be argued that the 1739 treaty between the Jamaican Maroons and the British prevented th... more It might be argued that the 1739 treaty between the Jamaican Maroons and the British prevented the colony from being overtaken by the maroons and their enslaved collaborators, thereby precluding it from becoming the first free black nation in the Americas – a distinction that Haiti (Saint Domingue) famously holds. Conversely, despite its singularity as the only rebellion that resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence from colonialism, the Haitian Revolution lacks preceding large-scale revolts or maroon wars that were more common in Jamaica. This paper analyzes early eighteenth-century colonial repression of marronnage by co-opting intermediary groups whose freedom for even themselves was precarious – the Jamaican maroons and the freemen of color-dominated maréchaussée of Saint Domingue. The emergence of these two groups in the early eighteenth century had lasting implications for future rebellions in both colonies, and shape national and racial identity discourses in the post-emancipation era.

Book Reviews by Crystal N Eddins

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2024

Review Symposium of Hajar Yazdiha's The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms t... more Review Symposium of Hajar Yazdiha's The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023.

Journal of African American History , 2022

Book Review of Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power and Violence in Brazilian History by Lamonte Aidoo (201... more Book Review of Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power and Violence in Brazilian History by Lamonte Aidoo (2018). Journal of African American History 107 (4): 608-609.

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2022

Public Books, 2021

Book Review Essay of Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1... more Book Review Essay of Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690 by Juan José Ponce Vázquez (2020) and Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804-1954 by Chelsea Stieber (2020).

Journal of West African History, 2018

Book review essay of Sekou M. Franklin's After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movement Activi... more Book review essay of Sekou M. Franklin's After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movement Activisim, and the Post-Civil Rights Generation (2014) and Shannon King's Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism during the New Negro Era (2015)

Public Academic Writing by Crystal N Eddins

Age of Revolutions: An Open-Access, Peer-Reviewed Academic Journal, 2020

One of the questions that has plagued scholars of the Haitian Revolution was: what role did maroo... more One of the questions that has plagued scholars of the Haitian Revolution was: what role did maroons play in the rebellionʼs unfolding? Haitian scholars have long argued marronnage was the core tradition of resistance that anticipated and shaped the 1791 Revolution, and indeed that continues to impact Haitian collective consciousness and action. Historian Jean Fouchard stated, "Marooning is the dominant feature of all Haitian history … it is undoubtedly the phenomenon which gave its orientation to the history of our nation." [1] Spanish archives provide better clarity on the etymology of the word cimarron, tracing it beyond its Spanish usage of "wild beast or animal" to the Taíno word simara for "arrow" that signifies the ongoing action or flight of an arrow let loose. Gabriel Rocha analogizes the Taíno meaning of simara to "the intentionality of … enslaved or colonized people extricating themselves from conditions of oppression." [2] The black ladinos and African bozales who labored alongside the Taíno in Spanish mines and on sugar plantations and collaborated with them in marronnage and rebellions, likely would have adopted this understanding of the term cimarron, engendering a tradition of resistance. Anthropologist Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique has argued-supported by oral histories and archaeological findings-that Haitiʼs legacy of resistance, language, and religion must be understood within the context of sixteenth and seventeenth century patterns of interactions between Africans, Taínos, and freebooters. [3] Indeed, the Haitian revolutionaries in 1804 readopted the islandʼs original Taíno name Ayiti, further symbolically exemplifying the legacy of overlapping African and Taíno liberation struggles.

Black Perspectives: Blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, 2020

This piece follows up on the January 2019 post “Haitian and French Petrol Protests in the Age of ... more This piece follows up on the January 2019 post “Haitian and French Petrol Protests in the Age of Climate Change.” Since that time, the PetrolCaribe Corruption protest actions have expanded into a full-fledged movement to challenge the legitimacy of the Haitian president, and to call for the end of government corruption and the United States’ political influence in the first free Black country of the Caribbean. The protests and road blockades essentially gridlocked the country, leading government officials including the President Jovenel Moïse to warn of an impending humanitarian crisis. Today’s piece is interested in power struggles within and over Haiti, the legacy of US imperialism to be specific, through the lens of Black scholars, W.E.B. Du Bois in particular. I use Du Bois’ relationship to Haiti to explore not just the trajectory of his intellectual interests, but also to raise the question of the role of intellectuals in addressing the demands of the communities we study, especially those who have contributed so much to the world.

Black Perspectives: Blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, 2019

For the past several months, major unrest has occurred almost simultaneously in both Haiti and Fr... more For the past several months, major unrest has occurred almost simultaneously in both Haiti and France over rising gas prices, accusations of government corruption, and inflated costs of living. However, national and international media attention has focused more on recent events in France while ignoring the protests in Haiti, which has resulted in the death of several protestors at the hands of police and other state officials. The two nationʼs histories are inextricably linked: the Caribbean country Haiti, known in the nineteenth century as Saint Domingue, was once the wealthiest colony of the French empire. After the formerly enslaved Africans of Saint Domingue wrested freedom from their owners and declared themselves independent from colonialism in 1804, the French army later imposed an indemnity for 150 million francs on Haiti to compensate for their lost "jewel" of sugar and coffee production. To avoid future French incursions, this money was paid with interest-to the tune of 22 billion in todayʼs dollars and is often cited as a critical cause of Haitiʼs underdevelopment, along with the Westʼs economic and political isolation of Haiti throughout the nineteenth century. Despite ongoing calls for France to repay the indemnity, since it had stolen enough in human life and labor value, no such conversation has been breached by Franceʼs current President Emmanuel Macron. Now it seems that both are facing crises and a growing protest movement around a different resource: petrol.