publication

This essay explores the goals, methods, challenges, and meanings of the Radio Haiti archive project, currently underway at Duke University. From the early 1970s until 2003, Radio Haïti-Inter was the voice of the Haitian people, especially those who had been historically and systematically excluded from public discourse and power: rural farmers, grassroots organizers, Vodou adherents, and the urban poor. The director of Radio Haiti, agronomist-turned-journalist Jean Dominique, was a public intellectual committed to social change. Under his leadership, Radio Haiti developed unparalleled democratic appeal and influence. Radio Haiti’s journalists covered stories that no other media would or could cover, traveling to the far reaches of the country and urban no-go zones to report on human rights abuses, repression, and popular resistance. Today, Radio Haiti’s archive is an irreplaceable tool in the fight against forgetting, erasure, and impunity; creating this archive and bringing it home to Haiti is devoir de mémoire (memory work). This essay examines what it means for Radio Haiti to go digital.