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 the 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.

Lauren (Robin) Derby’s research has treated dictatorship and everyday life, the long durée social history of the Haitian and Dominican border, and how notions of race, national identity and witchcraft have been articulated in popular media such as rumor, food and animals. Her publications include the prize-winning The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo, the co-authored Terreur de frontière: le massacre des Haïtiens en République dominicaine en 1937 (Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2021), and the co-edited Dominican Republic Reader. Her current project is based on oral testimony of demonic animal phantasms in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and considers werewolf encounters in light of the animal turn. It is called Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands and will soon be published with Duke University Press. She is professor of history at UCLA where she teaches courses on modern Latin America and Caribbean history, cultural history, and food studies.