Marvin Chochotte

Marvin Chochotte is a historian of the Caribbean, Latin America, and, generally, the political confluences of the Americas under US influence. His scholarly work focuses on the historical themes of slavery, freedom, peasants, agrarian democracy, foreign intervention, and authoritarianism in Haiti. His forthcoming book explores these themes in Haitian history and how they shaped the historical context for the the rise and fall of the François and Jean-Claude Duvalier dictatorship, which remains one of the most brutally repressive regimes in Caribbean history. The book examines how peasant insurgent enthusiasm for democracy in nineteenth-century Haiti transformed into staunch popular support for the brutal Duvalier dictatorship in the twentieth century. This forthcoming book is titled, Black Agrarian Democracy: Peasants, US Empire, and the Origins of the Duvalier Dictatorship in Haitian History, 1804-1986, which is under contract with Yale University Press. 

Chochotte has also published peer-reviewed articles in academic journals, some of which received awards and recognition. He published "The Twilight of Popular Revolutions: The Suppression of Peasant Armed Struggles and Freedom in Rural Haiti during the US Occupation, 1915-1934," in The Journal of African and African American History, which was awarded the Andrés Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Article Prize by The Association of Caribbean Historians. He also published "Making Peasants Chèf: The Tonton Makout Militia and the Moral Politics of Terror in the Haitian Countryside during the Dictatorship of François Duvalier, 1957–1971," in Comparative Studies in Society and History (CSSH), which was awarded honorable mention for the 2020 Jack Goody Award by CSSH.  Chochotte has a forthcoming article on land tenure and customary law in nineteenth-century Haiti that will appear in the volume series titled The Cambridge History of the Caribbean, Vol II: The Long Emancipation (Cambridge University Press). Chochotte has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Dartmouth College, and a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University.