Haitian Epistemology
Mocombe names and defends what he calls Haitian/Vilokan Idealism, a transcendental idealist and realist epistemology he traces to the gradual demystification and rationalisation of an African religious worldview on the island. Readings of the Haitian Revolution through Hegel's master and slave, and the rival vocabularies of créolité, négritude and hybridity, are dismissed together as accounts written from the standpoint of the mulatto and petit bourgeois Affranchis, which leave the practical consciousness of the African majority unexamined. Two systems of integration are said to have organised the country after independence: a Catholic and Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism among the merchant and professional elite, and among the rural majority a Vodou ethic and spirit of communism carried by the lakou compound, subsistence farming, Kreyòl, herbal medicine, secret societies and the authority of oungan, manbo and elders. From this metaphysics he derives an ethic of reciprocal justice and a method he calls phenomenological structuralism.
Mocombe, P. C. (2019). Haitian Epistemology. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.