Books

Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader. Duke University Press. (Co-edited with Yarimar Bonilla and Mayanthi Fernando.)

Throughout his career, the internationally re Throughout his career, the internationally renowned Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot unsettled key concepts in anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Black studies, Caribbean studies, and beyond. From his early critique of the West to the ongoing challenges he leveled at disciplinary and intellectual boundaries and formations, Trouillot centered the Caribbean as a site both foundational to the development of Western thought and critical to its undoing. Trouillot Remixed offers a representative cross section of his work that includes his most famous writings and lesser-known and harder-to-find texts essential to his oeuvre. Encouraging readers to engage with Trouillot’s scholarship in new ways, this collection demonstrates the breadth of his writing, his enduring influence on Caribbean studies, and his relevance to politically engaged scholarship more broadly.

There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. University of California Press.

Now out in paperback!

This is not just another book about crisis in Haiti. This book is about how it feels like to live and sometimes die with a crisis that never seems to end. It is about the experience of living amid the ruins of ecological devastation, economic collapse, political upheaval, violence, and humanitarian disaster. It is about how catastrophic events and larger political and economic forces shape the most intimate aspects of everyday life. In his gripping debut, anthropologist Greg Beckett offers a stunning ethnographic portrait of ordinary people struggling to survive in Port-au-Prince in the twenty-first century. Drawing on over a decade of research, There Is No More Haiti builds on stories of death and rebirth to powerfully reframe the narrative about a country in crisis. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Haiti today.

REVIEWS 

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (review by Jana Evans Braziel).

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review (review by Vincent Joos).

LSE Review of Books (review by Lachlan Summers).

H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences (review by Claire Payton).

“Deeply researched and lived, Greg Beckett’s portrait of Port-au-Prince is full of insights about an often misunderstood city at one of its least understood times.”

—Jonathan M. Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

“A knowledgeable and moving tour d’horizon of the crises that Haitians have lived through since the fall of the Duvalier dynasty: coups, countercoups, occupations, hurricanes, and the devastating 2010 earthquake. Greg Beckett navigates this scene alongside insightful and witty Haitians from all walks of life. It’s an intriguing look at the way people manage to survive intense and ongoing political and natural trauma.”

—Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti

“Exceptionally written, Greg Beckett’s book is a poignant, very human tale that highlights how people in Haiti endure and respond to ‘crisis.’ It offers rich ethnographic detail, revealing diverse local perspectives on multiple events from the catastrophic to the ‘everyday.’ There Is No More Haiti is an important and needed text, centering human faces, experiences, understandings, and voices behind the statistics and honoring their dignity.”

—Mark Schuller, author of Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti

“Simply put, this is a breathtaking work: overwhelmingly smart, overwhelmingly careful and deliberate in its attentions, and, above all, overwhelmingly filled with love for the places and people whose lives (and deaths) it seeks to understand.”

—Patrick Anderson, author of Autobiography of a Disease

“Greg Beckett is among a new generation of young scholars who offers a non-Eurocentric path for understanding ‘the other.’ With solid theoretical credentials, he brings an urgently needed and sincere humanistic empathy to his subjects—the only way to make sense of our collective present.”

—Raoul Peck, filmmaker and director of I Am Not Your Negro