Marvin Chochotte winner of the 2020 Andres Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize

The Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2020 Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize in recognition of excellence in the field of Caribbean history. The prize committee awarded this year's prize to Marvin Chochotte (Dartmouth College) for "The Twilight of Popular Revolutions: The Suppression of Peasant Armed Struggles and Freedom in Rural Haiti during the US Occupation, 1915-1934," which was published in The Journal of African American History 103, no. 3 (2018): 277-308. The prize will be awarded at the 52nd Conference of the ACH in Le Gosier, Guadeloupe, June 6-11, 2021. 

The prize committee, chaired by Sasha Turner (Johns Hopkins University), notes that Chochotte brilliantly links nineteenth century peasant revolts to Haiti's longer revolutionary history and popular politics. He makes an important contribution to the ongoing challenge to America's persistent portrayal of Haiti as intrinsically unstable, undemocratic, and violent. 

"The Twilight of Popular Revolutions," takes seriously Haitian peasants claim that US occupation was 'slavery,' tracing how, through anti-black racism, incarceration, and forced labor, US officials simultaneously exported Jim Crow and systematically reimposed slavery era laws and conditions. Chochotte's creative combination of oral history and Haitian archival records with US military reports and congressional testimonies provides rich, bottom-up insight into Haitian subjectivity, defining twentieth century US occupation as upending the rough egalitarianism Haitians secured through nineteenth century popular revolts.  Chochotte connects Haiti's experience under U.S. occupation with the history of slavery in important ways, rethinking U.S. occupation as "a post-emancipation crisis reinvigorated by U.S. imperialism."