A greater Guinea

This article traces the transformation of ‘Guinea’, a European colonial geographic designation, into Ginen, the central signifier of African ancestry, spiritual return, and cultural authenticity in (Creole) Haitian thought and practice. Beginning with the term’s etymology and its racializing function within the vocabulary of the Atlantic slave trade, the article argues that Ginen’s evolution constitutes a singular case of linguistic reclamation forged under conditions of extreme violence and displacement. Unlike other African ethnonyms preserved in the diaspora (‘Congo’, ‘Nago’, ‘Arada’), which kept ties to specific regional or political formations, Ginen became the overarching name for African origin itself, a universalizing function made possible by the term’s very colonial imprecision. Drawing on Haitian revolutionary historiography, Vodou cosmology, liturgical analysis of Lapriyè Ginen, and close readings of songs from Mizik Rasin, Konpa, and Vodou ceremonial music, the article maps Ginen’s polyvalent afterlives across sacred, political, and popular registers. It demonstrates that Ginen operates simultaneously as ancestral plane, ritual lineage, class marker, and utopian horizon, an Afrotopian formation that does not seek to recover a fixed origin but generates a living history, in the present. The article engages with scholarship by David Geggus, Deborah Jenson, Elizabeth McAlister, and Benjamin Hebblethwaite, situating Ginen within broader debates on diasporic identity and Afro-Caribbean cultural production.

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence through the support of the Winthrop-King Institute: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .