By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications
The honor marks the second time the UCLA historian has received the rigorous Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award for her work.
UCLA International Institute, June 15, 2026 — Robin Derby’s latest book, “Bêtes Noires: Sorcery as History in the Haitian Dominican Borderlands” (Duke, 2025), has won the first-place Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award of the Caribbean Studies Association, or CAS.
The organization held its annual meeting in Kingston, Jamaica earlier this month. The UCLA historian’s first monograph, “The Dictator′s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo” (Duke, 2009) was co-winner of the same award in 2010.
“Bêtes Noires” argues that errant spirits known as the bacá, and the drinking tales about them, are an expression of Dominicans’ experience of authoritarianism and modern capitalist exploitation, as well as of the unspoken trauma of Hispaniola’s colonial history.
“I was shocked at the news of the award. I thought the books' audience was the small group of folks who study the Dominican Republic and Haiti, so I was very pleased although very surprised to see that it reverberated among the wider Caribbeanist community,” said Derby, who has been busy for months doing book talks across the United States in both university and public settings.
“The Caribbean Studies Association has a strong presence of literary scholars, and monsters such as the bacá often appear in Caribbean literature, which may help explain the book’s appeal,” she added
In its highly laudatory announcement of the book prize, CAS said of the book:
“Bêtes Noires ranks first as the most theoretically rigorous, intellectually ambitious, and epistemologically disruptive of the 40 books reviewed by the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award Committee. Across 356 pages, the book dismantles colonial discourses that demonize Haitian and Dominican cosmologies as merely ‘superstitious.’ Instead, it approaches indigenous memory, the animal world, spirits, and colonial histories as legitimate archives of knowledge, rather than supernatural tropes invented by outsiders.
Centered on the Haitian/Dominican borderlands, the text utilizes orality — specifically storytelling centered on shape-shifting animals — as an epistemological framework to understand the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, their trauma at the hands of European colonizers, and the subsequent racialization of Haitian and Dominican material and popular culture.
Derby convincingly demonstrates how ‘sorcery’ serves as a vital archive through which the brutal consequences of colonialism — land dispossession, exploitation, and wealth extraction — were subversively critiqued by the dispossessed themselves… The book’s conceptualization of the Bakas as a ‘commodity familiar’ is a major theoretical intervention in History and Caribbean Studies… Overall, Bêtes Noires’ historical scope, theoretical originality, and imaginative depth cements its place as a groundbreaking contribution to global historiography.”
See earlier International Institute article on the book here.
Published: Monday, June 15, 2026
