Repatriating the Alan Lomax Haitian Recordings in Post-Quake Haiti

Abstract

Alan Lomax’s Haitian recordings, 1936–1937, rediscovered in the Library of Congress Archives of Folk Culture in 1999, were edited to produce a boxed set in 2009, with the intention of repatriating the set and eventually the entire corpus of 1,500 recordings and six films to Haiti. This chapter charts the process and the problematics of curating the box set as well as repatriating the archives in the face of the massive 2010 earthquake in Haiti. It discusses the challenges inherent in the large repatriation team assembled by the project’s funders. It also looks at the impact of such recordings on the personal, familial, and religious levels, as the “voices of ancestors” return to their homeland.