Being Poloné in Haiti: Origins, Survivals, Development, and Narrative Production of the Polish Presence in Haiti
Some four to five hundred Polish legionnaires sent to crush the Haitian revolution stayed on after 1804, and Rypson went to find what is left of them. His fieldwork, carried out in the mountain village of Cazale in 2003, asks what the Polish presence now consists of and treats the answer as three kinds of evidence: objects and images, ceremonies and music, and the stories people tell about descent. He argues that Polishness in Haiti is best defined by who counts as Polish locally rather than by any ancestral inventory, and he traces how journalistic, scholarly and village accounts of the legionnaires have fed on one another for two centuries. Colour terms carry much of the weight: Cazaliens are called moun wouj by their neighbours and blan among themselves, a usage Rypson uses to correct an earlier reading by Pachoński and Wilson.
Rypson, S. (2008). Being Poloné in Haiti: Origins, Survivals, Development, and Narrative Production of the Polish Presence in Haiti. Oficyna Wydawnicza ASPRA-JR.