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Bêtes Noire – Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands
Bêtes Noire
Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands
LAUREN DERBY
In Bêtes Noires, Lauren Derby explores storytelling traditions among the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shapeshifting spirit demons called baka/bacá. Drawing on interviews and life stories of residents in a central Haitian-Dominican frontier town, Derby contends that bacás—hot spirits from the sorcery side of Vodou/Vodú that present as animals and generate wealth for their owners—are a manifestation of what Dominicans call fukú, the curse of Columbus. The dogs, pigs, cattle, and horses that Columbus brought with him are the only types of animals that bacás become. As instruments of Indigenous dispossession, these animals and their spirit demons convey a history of trauma and racialization in Dominican popular culture. In the context of slavery and beyond, bacás keep alive the promise of freedom, since shapeshifting has long enabled fugitivity. As Derby demonstrates, bacás represent a complex history of race, religion, repression, and resistance.
“An interdisciplinary triumph of what has been termed ‘the Multispecies Humanities,’ Lauren Derby’s Bêtes Noires is an extensively researched, brilliantly theorized tour de force. Demonstrating the prevalence of demonic animals in myth, rumor, and performance throughout the Caribbean, it documents the profound human and environmental impacts of coloniality. Derby takes us into the belly of that beast to show how indigenous dispossession, enslavement, dictatorship, and imperialism continue to haunt and hex everyday people, even today.” — Elizabeth Pérez, author of Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions
dukeupress.edu/betes-noires
November 2025 | 356 pages, 37 illustrations
978-1-4780-3278-6 | $29.95 paperback $20.97 with discount
Special offer: Use coupon code E25DERBY to save 30% when you order from dukeupress.edu.
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