Javier’s Murder: Politics, Sorcery and the Cattle Trade in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands (Yale Agrarian Studies)

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Lauren (Robin) Derby is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at University of California in Los Angeles. Robin’s work has focused on everyday life under regimes of state terror, the long durée social history of the Haitian and Dominican borderlands, and how notions of race, national identity and witchcraft have been articulated in popular media such as rumor, food, and animals. From explicating the cultural rationale of popular rumors, explaining Haitians and Dominicans who have a history of enmity to each other, illuminating the logics of rural borderlands cultures hidden to urban elites, and elucidating post-independence Latin American historical processes as they have played out within the peripheries of empire, her research and teaching has long been occupied with translating incommensurable worlds