Bêtes Noires

“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

“With excellent attention to both historical and contemporary contexts, Bêtes Noires reads the shape-shifting bacá as a rich archive of social memory and more-than-human life in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands. It represents one of the most thorough integrations of in-depth ethnography and historiography that I have encountered.” - J. Brent Crosson, author of Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad