Betes Noires

Sorcery As History in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands

By: Lauren Derby

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Paperback | 18 November 2025

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344 Pages

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22.86 x 15.24

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In Betes Noires, Lauren Derby explores storytelling traditions between the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, focusing on shapeshifting spirit demons called baka/baca. Drawing on interviews and life stories of residents in a central Haitian-Dominican frontier town, Derby contends that bacas - hot spirits from the sorcery side of Vodou/Vodu that present as animals and generate wealth for their owners - are a manifestation of what Dominicans call fuku, the curse of Columbus. The dogs, pigs, cattle, and horses that Columbus brought with him are the only types of animals that bacas 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, bacas keep alive the promise of freedom, since shapeshifting has long enabled fugitivity. As Derby demonstrates, bacas represent a complex history of race, religion, repression, and resistance.

Industry Reviews

"An interdisciplinary triumph of what has been termed 'the Multispecies Humanities,' Lauren Derby's Betes Noires is an extensively researched, brilliantly theorized tour de force. Demonstrating the prevalence of demonic animals in myth, rumor, and performance throughout the Caribbean, it documents the profound human and environmental impacts of coloniality. Derby takes us into the belly of that beast to show how indigenous dispossession, enslavement, dictatorship, and imperialism continue to haunt and hex everyday people, even today." - Elizabeth Perez, author of Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions "With excellent attention to both historical and contemporary contexts, Betes Noires reads the shape-shifting baca as a rich archive of social memory and more-than-human life in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands. It represents one of the most thorough integrations of in-depth ethnography and historiography that I have encountered." - J. Brent Crosson, author of Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad

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