Dissertation Defense: Sony Prosper

The School of Information is pleased to announce the oral defense of Sony Prosper.

Title: Toward a Community Politics of Repatriation: The Radio Haiti Archive

Date: Monday, August 31, 2026

Time: 12:45-2:30pm

Location: Online via Zoom

https://umich.zoom.us/j/93192013736

Kentaro Toyama, serving as committee chair, will preside over the oral defense. 

All are welcome to attend!

Abstract:

This dissertation examines how archivists, information professionals, cultural workers, and members of the Haitian diaspora conceptualize repatriating and returning the Radio Haiti Archive and what the case contributes to contemporary understandings of archival repatriation and return. To answer these questions, this study uses a case study approach that brings together an analysis of documents and archival records and semi-structured interviews. This study argues that a full understanding of archival repatriation and return is incomplete without examining how archivists, information professionals, cultural workers, and members of diasporic communities conceptualize these processes, including the relationships among custody, stewardship, expertise, authority, access, and use.

More specifically, this study argues that returning and repatriating the Radio Haiti Archive requires movement toward a community politics of repatriation instead of reproducing dominant archival logics that privilege institutional custody, authority, and professional expertise. A community politics does not reject institutional expertise or professional archival practice. Instead, it calls for reorganizing the relationships between institutional expertise and community authority. In other words, this work calls for an approach that creatively and experimentally centers community stewardship and caretaking, recognizes the source community as a critical locus of authority, expertise, activation, and use, and understands return as reciprocal and relational rather than extractive or final.

Additionally, this study argues that placing the problem space within the intersecting frameworks of diaspora archives, critical archival studies, and anti-colonial archival praxis is essential for tracing questions extending beyond legal custody to encompass care, stewardship, expertise, authority, access, activation, and the broader historical and structural conditions that led to the archive’s placement at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University in the first place.