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In Bêtes Noires, Lauren Derby explores storytelling traditions among the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shape-shifting spirit demons called baka/bacá. Drawing on interviews with 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 de Colón, 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 shape-shifting has long enabled fugitivity. As Derby demonstrates, bacás represent a complex history of race, religion, repression, and resistance.
Price: $29.95
Pages: 356
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Publication Date:
18 November 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781478032786
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
“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
“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
Lauren Derby is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo and coeditor of The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics, both also published by Duke University Press.
Acknowledgments ix
Preface. From the Mouth of the Goat xiii
Introduction. Spirits, History, and Power 1
1. Preternaturalia: Of Talking Cows 17
2. The Mysterious Murder of Javier 43
3. The Inscrutable Jailbreak of Clément Barbot 68
4. Creole Pigs as Memento Mori 87
5. Specters of Columbus 112
6. Big Men and Tall Tails 128
7. Becoming Animal: Food, Sex, and the Animal Grotesque 161
Notes 187
Bibliography 265
Index
Preface. From the Mouth of the Goat xiii
Introduction. Spirits, History, and Power 1
1. Preternaturalia: Of Talking Cows 17
2. The Mysterious Murder of Javier 43
3. The Inscrutable Jailbreak of Clément Barbot 68
4. Creole Pigs as Memento Mori 87
5. Specters of Columbus 112
6. Big Men and Tall Tails 128
7. Becoming Animal: Food, Sex, and the Animal Grotesque 161
Notes 187
Bibliography 265
Index