Reclaiming the Narrative on HAITI with Dr. Jemima Pierre

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 06:37:01 +0100

Dr. Jemima Pierre, born in Gros Morne, Haiti and raised in Miami, Florida, speaks to The Other Narrative about why Haiti is paying a price - 220 years after it yanked Independence from the jaws of colonizers. Dr. Pierre speaks about the resilience of Haitians and their struggle against imperialism - in all of its iterations - and the fact that Haiti's emancipation is part and parcel of the global African/Black emancipation.

Dr. Pierre also speaks about the importance of Haiti to US imperialism; the way the West manufactures narratives; racism in international structures; regional neocolonial countries in service of imperialism; and so much more.

Dr. Jemima Pierre is Professor of Global Race in the Institute of Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ) at the University of British Columbia and a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg.

Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist in the African Diaspora Program at the University of Texas, Austin, her research and teaching engages with Africa and the African diaspora across three broad areas of inquiry: 1) the relationship of political economy to race, as articulated through capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism; 2) migration, transnationalism, and diaspora; and 3) the ethics and politics of western knowledge production and disciplinary formation.

Dr. Pierre has published widely; her essays and articles have examined the racial history of the discipline of anthropology, race and colonialism, theories of the African diaspora, the cultural politics of racial formation in Africa, Western resource extraction in Africa, and the history and politics of U.S. imperialism in Haiti and the Caribbean.

She is also the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race. The Predicament of Blackness was winner of the 2014 Elliot Skinner Book Award in Africanist Anthropology and long listed for the 2013 OCM – BOCAS Literary Prize.

Her next book, titled Of Natives, Ethnics, and True Negroes: A Counter-History of Anthropology, will be published in 2024.

Source: https://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/profile/jemima-pierre/