Chronic carriers

Abstract

This chapter examines the political ontology of Haiti’s postplantation agrarian worlds. A case study of the eradication and repopulation of the creole pig between 1978 and 1988 reveals rural Haiti as one site of contestation around the reproduction of colonial logics of biopolitical control in neoliberalizing markets. In this chapter, analysis of the scientific, economic, and material practices that shaped peasants’ experience of the end of Haiti’s 29-year Duvalier dictatorship allows the theorization of a new horizon of possibility for imagining decolonial futures. It thus demands attention not only to epistemology – how the colonial project has shaped ways of knowing, but also to ontology – the ways of being that coloniality makes possible or forecloses. Ultimately, it argues, peasants’ contested claims to agrarian ways of being and knowing enact a more-than-human project of agrarian transformation in landscapes still profoundly shaped by the material histories of racial slavery.