Identity and Ideology in the Haitian U.S. Diaspora

Book excerpt: This work puts forth the argument that, in the Haitian diaspora in the USA, a new Haitian identity has emerged among the youth, which is tied to the practical consciousness of the black American underclass. Black Americans in the postindustrial capitalist world-system of America are no longer Africans. Instead, their practical consciousnesses are the product of two identities: the black bourgeoisie, or African Americans, on the one hand, under the leadership of educated professionals and preachers, and the black underclass, on the other hand, under the leadership of street and prison personalities, athletes, and entertainers vying for ideological and linguistic domination of black America. These two social class language games were, and still are, historically constituted by structural differentiation and different ideological apparatuses, the church and education on the one hand and the streets, prisons, and the athletic and entertainment industries on the other, of the global capitalist racial-class structure of inequality under American hegemony, which replaced the African ideological apparatuses of Vodou, peristyles, lakous, and agricultural production as found in Haiti, for example. Among Haitian youth in the US after 1986, following the topple of Jean-Claude “baby doc” Duvalier, the latter social class language game, the black American underclass, came to serve as the bearer of ideological and linguistic domination against Haitian bourgeois purposive-rationality, and agents of the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism.