The Haiti Exception : Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative [1 ed.] 9781781384527, 9781781382998

Citation preview

The Haiti Exception Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative

F R ANCOPHONE PO STCOL ONIA L ST U DIE S The annual publication of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies New Series, Vol. 7

Francophone Postcolonial Studies The annual publication of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies The Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies (SFPS) is an international association which exists in order to promote, facilitate and otherwise support the work of all scholars and researchers working on colonial/postcolonial studies in the French-speaking world. SFPS was created in 2002 with the aim of continuing and developing the pioneering work of its predecessor organization, the Association for the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French (ASCALF). SFPS does not seek to impose a monolithic understanding of the ‘postcolonial’ and it consciously aims to appeal to as diverse a range of members as possible, in order to engage in wide-ranging debate on the nature and legacy of colonialism in and beyond the French-speaking world. SFPS encourages work of a transcultural, transhistorical, comparative and interdisciplinary nature. It implicitly seeks to decolonize the term ‘Francophone’, emphasizing that it should refer to all cultures where French is spoken (including, of course, France itself), and it encourages a critical reflection on the nature of the cognate disciplines of French studies, on the one hand, and anglophone postcolonial studies, on the other. Our vision for this new publication with Liverpool University Press is that each volume will constitute a sort of état present on a significant topic, embracing various expressions of Francophone postcolonial cultures (e.g. literature, film, music, history), in relation to pertinent geographical areas (e.g. France/Belgium, the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Asia, Polynesia) and different periods (slavery, colonialism, the postcolonial era, etc.): above all, we are looking to publish research that will help to set new research agendas across our field. The editorial board of Francophone Postcolonial Studies invites proposals for edited volumes touching on any of the areas listed above; proposals should be sent to Dr Charlotte Baker (c.baker@lancaster. ac.uk). For further details, visit www.sfps.ac.uk. General Editor: Dr Charlotte Baker (Lancaster University, UK) Editorial Board Chris Bongie (Queen’s University, Canada) Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool, UK) Pierre-Philippe Fraiture (University of Warwick, UK) Alec Hargreaves (Florida State University, USA) Jane Hiddleston (Exeter College, Oxford, UK) Nicki Hitchcott (University of Nottingham, UK) Lydie Moudileno (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Jean-Marc Moura (Université Paris Ouest, France) David Murphy (University of Stirling, UK) Ieme van der Poel (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) Srilata Ravi (University of Alberta, Canada) Andy Stafford (University of Leeds, UK) Dominic Thomas (UCLA, USA)

The Haiti Exception Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative

Edited by Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Kaiama L. Glover, Mark Schuller and Jhon Picard Byron The Haiti Exception

Liverpool Universit y Press

First published 2016 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2016 Liverpool University Press and the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies The right of Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Kaiama L. Glover, Mark Schuller and Jhon Picard Byron to be identified as the editors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78138-299-8 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78138-452-7

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

Contents Contents

Editors’ Introduction Kaiama L. Glover and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

1

I. Tracing Intellectual Histories The Anthropological Uses of Haiti: A Longue Durée Approach Mark Schuller

15

Transforming Ethnology: Understanding the Stakes and Challenges of Price-Mars in the Development of Anthropology in Haiti Jhon Picard Byron

33

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ … Herskovits, Métraux, Race and Human Rights Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

52

Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory: A Mintzian Journey Laurent Dubois

74

II. Interrogating the Enquiring Self ‘Written with Love’: Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham’s Island Possessed 93 Kaiama L. Glover v

vi

The Haiti Exception

Dance, Haiti and Lariam Dreams Barbara Browning

110

‘Haitian Art’ and Primitivism: Effects, Uses and Beyond Carlo A. Célius

120

III. On Nation-Building: Histories, Theories, Praxes Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions Deborah A. Thomas

137

Haitian Culture in the Informational Economies of Humanitarian Aid 156 Valerie Kaussen Urban Poetics Michèle Duvivier Pierre-Louis

177

Epilogue Kalfou Danje: Situating Haitian Studies and My Own Journey within It 193 Claudine Michel Notes on Contributors 209 Index 215

Editors’ Introduction Kaiama L. Glover and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

Introduction

In the large periodic table of human societies, Haiti could therefore not miss appearing as a social molecule whose small dimensions retained remarkable properties, a molecule formed, it would seem, of atoms capable of releasing exceptional quantities of energy. This fact alone should justify the impassioned attention devoted increasingly by ­sociologists and ethnographers to Haitian society. – Claude Lévi-Strauss Let me admit at the outset that I am obsessed by Haiti. – Colin (Joan) Dayan It is a deeply peculiar phenomenon, Haiti’s ‘popularity’. Marked by qualitative extremes – first successful slave revolt, first black republic, most African Caribbean culture, most dangerous tourist destination, among others – the country occupies a unique place in the collective consciousness of the modern American hemisphere. And it is fair to say that many have been ‘obsessed by Haiti’ over the course of the so-called ‘American Century’, and since. Yet, at the same time, the nation has factored little and only indirectly (that is, without substantive, recognizable agency) in shaping the politics and the policies of a contemporary global order largely crafted by ‘former’ and current North Atlantic imperial powers. In the past decade, many scholars 1

2

The Haiti Exception

of Haiti have lamented the ways in which the island nation, its history and contemporary realities, have been constructed and circulated outside of the country – by the international media, by political pundits, by development and humanitarian aid workers, by missionaries and even by academics working more or less directly within the deeply interdisciplinary field that is Haitian Studies. Appearing in many forms and emerging from multiple sources, the narrative of Haiti’s exceptional nature has been persistent and constraining. At once postcolonially international and colonially French, Haiti has occupied a fraught geopolitical position that, over the course of its more than 500-year history, has determined the singular parameters of its development – and underdevelopment – from colony to modern nation-state. It has also yielded an extremely particular narrative, one that has persistently muted the extent to which Haiti has historically undone the presumptuous demands of empire. Arguably the most significant source and pervasive vehicle of this narrative is the discipline of anthropology; and so it is that anthropology, specifically cultural anthropology, as it has developed as an academic field and professional practice in the United States, serves as the point of departure for this volume. We as editors, along with our contributors, call attention throughout to the ways in which anthropological methodologies have emerged in tandem with the development of Haiti – the fact that, as several of the essays in this collection note, Haiti and anthropology have been, historically, and are, even in the present moment, very much mutually constitutive. Given this, we do not take anthropology as a fixed discipline with respect to the Haitian context, but rather open it up to critical interrogation, recognizing that embedded within it are questionable narrative constructions of both subjects and objects of enquiry and aid, and evoking those who have more or less successfully negotiated its traps. In focusing on anthropology, we are attentive to the potential danger inherent in the discipline’s often troubling deployment of race and class as social categories of sameness and difference. Consequently, the conversations broached in this volume are marked by an awareness of the extent to which anthropology has been responsible for positioning Haiti as intellectual and practical Petri dish, in many ways an object for consumption – and this despite the persistent call of poststructural anthropologists to remain vigilant to the power dynamics implicit in their practice. Considering this phenomenon in its long-historical and transnational dimensions, we necessarily interrogate the inextricable links between the social sciences, politics and narrative. And we premise this interrogation on the principle that to think about Haiti – be it in the context of ethnography, literature, history, religion or else – has long been to think anthropologically, that is, to call humanness and humanity into question.

Introduction

3

More specifically, we are concerned here with the fact, the terms and the processes of Haiti’s construction as exceptional. As the title of our volume intimates, we have been preoccupied fundamentally with the extent to which Haiti has been perceived in multiple arenas as definitively unique with respect not only to the countries of the North Atlantic, but also to the rest of the Americas. Painted as at once repulsive and attractive, abject and resilient, singular and exemplary, Haiti has long been framed discursively by an extraordinary epistemological ambivalence. That is, for all its exceptionalism, the nation has also served in large measure as a cautionary tale, a model for humanitarian aid and development projects, and a point of origin for general theorizing of the so-called Third World. How are we to make sense of this ostensible contradiction – this dialectic of exemplarity and alterity? How do we pull apart this multivalent narrative to identify and examine its constituent parts? We recognize that we are by no means the first to interrogate the long-standing reciprocal relationship between Haiti and the discipline of anthropology. Such work has been done perhaps most notably by Haitian anthropologist and critical theorist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, whose work and thought undergirds the whole of this volume. Trouillot has thoroughly and eloquently laid out the processes by which narratives born in the academy too often nurture global inequality. For Trouillot, anthropology is a messy affair with markedly high stakes. To cast whole communities of human beings as objects of study is effectively to ‘other’ them in ways that hierarchize, primarily and perniciously, via the tropes of gender, class and, especially, race. Author of ‘The Odd and the Ordinary’, the critical ur-text for those attentive to the implicit and explicit racism of the ‘exceptional Haiti’ narrative, Trouillot is one of the principal ancestors of The Haiti Exception. He has insightfully and incisively identified the power that inheres in the ‘simple’ act of narration – a process-space that elides the distinction ‘between what happened and what was said to have happened’ (Trouillot, 1995: 5). It is in this evocation of storytelling and its potential to obscure, and so to do violence, that Trouillot has influenced our grounding in this space. While Trouillot looms especially large in our volume, he is by no means our sole interlocutor. Less explicitly evoked but similarly influential, Haitian writer-intellectual René Depestre is also present in the project. Where Trouillot has issued a broad call to rethink our collective reifications of the ‘Savage slot’, to interrogate critically and redefine the terms of our engagements as scholars and as ethical beings with the so-called Other, Depestre looks pointedly at the ‘founding fictions’ that are the fantasies of the North Atlantic with respect to non-white peoples in Haiti and beyond. Depestre has also been willing to acknowledge the construction of Haiti as singular

4

The Haiti Exception

object of study – fixed in the position of absolute cultural counterpoint – by Haitian intellectuals both in Haiti and outside the island, both to better and worse effect. From the contributions he has made directly within the field of anthropology1 to his studied integration of Haitian spiritual practices into his poetry and prose fiction, Depestre’s engagements with anthropology have been both provocative and sustained. Also crucial to our conceptualization and articulation of this project has been Gina Athena Ulysse’s resounding exhortation to produce new narratives of/for/from/about/in Haiti.2 Indeed, this project was born of a panel discussion at the 2012 annual meeting of the Haitian Studies Association, on which Ulysse served as a discussant. Thanks largely to her insights in that forum, we have since been mindful of – and attempted to position our intervention with respect to – the ‘conundrum’ she describes: that is, the fact that ‘a deconstructive exercise alone cannot fill the lacuna of stories from Haitian perspectives with counter-narratives’ (Ulysse, 2010: 41, 40). We have wanted to take up the challenges issued by these antecedents – to frankly consider our own role as researchers with regard to the ‘status of the native voice in anthropological discourse’ (Trouillot, 2003: 129) as we struggle to establish our respective positions along the continuum from academia to activism. From the very origins of the project, it has been our aim to tease out the motivations and the stakes – both personal and intellectual – of our common individual grapplings with Haiti in our professional lives. We have worked to articulate these preoccupations through the various lenses of our diverse cultural, national, disciplinary and institutional backgrounds. Indeed, of this volume’s four editors, two are anthropologists and two are literary scholars; two are based in the United States, one in Haiti and one in both spaces.3 See Depestre (2005). See Ulysse (2015), Dubois and Glover (2013), Schuller and Morales (2012). 3 Literary scholar Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken is assistant professor at the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the City University of New York, the first free public institution of higher education in the United States, where major constituencies of the student body claim one or more Caribbean identities. Kaiama L. Glover is a professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, a small, private liberal arts college embedded within Columbia University. Haitian researcher Jhon Picard Byron is department chair of Anthropology/ Sociology at the Faculté d’Ethnologie at the University of Haiti, an institution within which US-American scholar and activist Mark Schuller maintains a long-standing appointment as invited faculty. Schuller is also a faculty member in the Anthropology Department and the Center for NGO and Leadership Development at Northern Illinois University, a public research university that has few curricular engagements with Caribbean Studies. 1 2

Introduction

5

The interdisciplinarity of our editorial collective has marked profoundly the premises of this enterprise and resonates deliberately with that of the many other voices that haunt this work. We are, for example, very conscious of the important work of James Clifford, one of the most incisive scholars in the field. His 1988 monograph The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art and 1986 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, the latter co-edited with George Marcus, have become canonical texts for anthropologists. Similarly, our anchoring of the volume in reflections by Trouillot (an anthropologist, yes, but also a historian and astute reader of poetry), Depestre (a poet, essayist and political activist) and Ulysse (a trained anthropologist, essayist, activist and renowned performance artist) speaks to our intent to think through the connections that exist between anthropology and other scholarly and/or creative modalities. As Charles Forsdick’s article ‘After the Earthquake: Some Reflections on Recent Scholarship about Haiti’ (2013) cogently argues, catastrophe has given way to an enormous production of Haiti-focused scholarship. Martin Munro’s Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010 (2014); Millery Polyné’s The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis and Development (2013) and Carla Calargé, Raphael Dalleo, Luis Duno-Gottberg and Clevis Headley’s Haiti and the Americas (2013) are some of the most impressive examples of scholarly counterpoints to the distancing tendencies that generally inform externally generated post-earthquake narratives of Haiti in the public sphere. Our volume also enters into dialogue with and moves beyond the 2005 special issue of Gradhiva, ‘Haïti et l’anthropologie’, edited by one of our contributors, Carlo A. Célius. Where ‘Haïti et l’anthropologie’ concentrates on the early and mid-twentieth-century work of US-American, French and Haitian anthropologists on and in Haiti, however, The Haiti Exception includes more recent anthropological work being done on humanitarianism, international aid networks and Haitian public life. It is in light of this vast and dynamic body of recent critical writings on Haiti that we have been adamant as editors in asking our colleagues – and ourselves – to think pointedly about the ‘why’ of this interest in Haiti. We have solicited deep reflections on the nature of Haiti’s positioning as an ultimate space of Agambenian ‘bare life’4 – ontologically impoverished and subject to disaster, and somehow, as Forsdick argues, in an anomalous relationship to history – both since 12 January 2010 and, indeed, well before. How, we ask, has Haiti proven particularly compelling – that is, exceptionally useful – to our scholarship of the hemispheric Atlantic?

See Fischer (2007).

4

6

The Haiti Exception

How, moreover, is such scholarship implicated in global, anthropological constructions of the human? Thus, rather than denounce the phenomenon of Haiti’s exceptionalization, as many have done already with both passion and enormous insight, 5 we have endeavoured in this volume to reflect usefully on our positionings of Haiti in our own work as well as to interrogate specific moments of knowledge production in and on Haiti. We not only critique international policymaking, but also, perhaps more importantly, consider our own role with respect thereto, as scholars and social actors largely supported by the very institutions of the ‘global north’ that have participated in Haiti’s degradation. We have sought to question our own individual and collective interest in Haiti, acknowledging the ways in which, despite our best efforts, we risk reavowing what has been disavowed, even as we work to dispel marginalizing myths that seem to reproduce themselves endlessly. How and why, we ask, do our scholarly efforts at once contend with and reflect a discourse of Haiti’s immutable difference? To what extent, as producers of narrative, are we – can we or should we be – attuned to the specific means and modes of Haitian exceptionalism as foundation for engaged (self-) critical enquiry? Are there alternative models of scholarship that manage to avoid narratives and practices of exceptionalization? of exoticization? Do we ourselves, or those who have led us to Haiti, manage to craft honest and responsible relationships to the place? As the essays in this volume show, we mean for such questions to serve as a meta-critical platform on which to base a discussion of alternative narratives about the island nation, while also acknowledging how we might be bound unintentionally to narratives of Haiti’s exceptionality, even as we seek to resist them. We have attempted to embrace, that is, a practice of reflexivity. The ‘reflexive turn’ in the field of anthropology emerged largely in answer to postcolonial critiques of anthropology’s imbrication in the United States’ imperialist ideology and colonialist practices. It also responded to the call of feminist researchers to acknowledge the anthropologist’s Self as greatly determinant of the way in which s/he interprets and writes the Other. Reflexivity thus refers to a practice of self-critique that strives to resist the colonialist sedimenting of supposed cultural difference and the concomitant penchant, despite best intentions, to reify communities of others into fixed categories of being. To practice reflexivity is to call attention to the dialogic aspect of any human-to-human interaction – a phenomenon similarly implicit in the relationship between reader and text. It is, then, this practice that we mean to evoke through the ‘predicament of narrative’ of our subtitle See, for example, Dash (1988), Clitandre (2011), Bonilla (2013), Scott (2014).

5

Introduction

7

– an explicit invocation of Clifford, yes, but also a no less purposeful gesture toward Marcus, Paul Rabinow and, especially, Ruth Behar, all of whom well understand (anthropological) knowledge as unavoidably situated – ‘interpretative and hermeneutic rather than positive, tentative rather than conclusive, relative to time, place and author rather than universal’ (Carrithers, 1990: 263). Also placing our methodological concerns somewhat nearer, as it were, to the object of our interrogation, we have taken on this task in full awareness of the ways in which Haitian Studies in particular has deployed reflexivity. The extent to which Haitianist scholars (the vast majority of them women) have been motivated to embrace self-interrogation, especially in considering the nation’s spiritual practices, has not escaped us. Indeed, if Haiti has long been perceived and represented as the explosive ‘social molecule’ of Lévi-Strauss’s formulation in the epigraph, Vodou has been ‘seen as crucial to this “release” […] the thing that made Haiti appear to be an excessive and singular place: something extraordinary, a surplus’ (Gelder, 2000: 91). We would argue that while Vodou has been exoticized by more and less sympathetic extrainsular perspectives, it has also served for both Haitians and scholars of Haiti as a remarkable exemplar of reflexivity insofar as it marks a ‘turn into the deeper self’ that both facilitates and demands a ‘blurring [of] the lines between the true and the imaginary’ (Nazaruk, 2011: 73) as it dynamically adapts its sacred methods to its lived contexts. From Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938), Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953) and Katherine Dunham’s Island Possessed (1969) to Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (1991) and Leslie G. Desmangles The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (1992), researchers have contended with the transformative effect of Haitian spiritual practices on themselves as social and ethical beings. The Haiti Exception proposes to extend such reflections beyond anthropology (into literary studies, performance studies, media studies, art history, human rights, development and humanitarian studies, among others), broadening the community of those willing to take the risk of writing themselves into their work.6 Individuals working outside the specific discipline of anthropology have increasingly done this kind of work in recent years. Some examples include scholar and cultural critic Colin (Joan) Dayan’s Haiti, History and the Gods (1995); writer and scholar Myriam Chancy’s Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997); Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010); activist Beverly Bell’s Fault Lines: Views Across Haiti’s Divide (2013); and journalist Amy Wilentz’s Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti (2013). 6

8

The Haiti Exception

The truly intrepid souls whose work appears in this volume have accepted, to varying degrees, our call to foreground themselves as scholars while acknowledging Haiti’s significance to the knowledge they produce and the narratives they create. They have opened up important aspects of their writing, travelling and researching lives to scrutiny, outlining the very personal motivations for their investment, however great, in Haitian Studies. We have structured The Haiti Exception into three separate but inevitably overlapping and interconnected sections. In the first, ‘Tracing Intellectual Histories’, Mark Schuller, Jhon Picard Byron, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and Laurent Dubois consider the relations and correlations between the personal, the professional and the political as the most pressing concern for anthropologists since the first decades of the twentieth century. Schuller offers an interrogation of the link between anthropology and the public sphere, reflecting deeply on the multiple genealogical strands of the discipline. Taking a broad historical view as a contextual frame for understanding more recent developments in the field, he lays out the various, often conflicting or troubling transatlantic paradigms that have been applied to Haiti in the last century. As much scholar as committed activist, Schuller accounts for his own participation and push-back with respect to these institutional phenomena and ‘concludes’ with a series of unsparing questions for those working in the arenas of both anthropology and humanitarianism. Byron similarly interrogates the institutional parameters that have determined the development of Haitian ethnography as a discipline within the particular context of the Haitian nation. He does so in order to make plain the challenges of shaping the field’s evolution for a new generation of scholars – challenges that include engaging critically with the ancestors. Foregrounding his own incentive, as a ‘child of 1986’, to recuperate missed opportunities for transatlantic connection in the chaos of that political crisis, Byron calls for a return to Jean Price-Mars and suggests that a critical reshaping and revitalization of the practice of ethnography in Haiti might be generated through meaningful encounters with US-American theories of critical anthropology. Benedicty-Kokken’s essay focuses on a comparative analysis of the work and biographies of seminal early mid-century anthropologists Melville Herskovits and Alfred Métraux. She examines the relative success – and failure – of their efforts to responsibly politicize their scholarly practice and considers the ways in which their efforts to ‘de-exceptionalize’ Haiti were, at varying points in their respective careers, thwarted by global perspectives on race and poverty. This is the springboard from which she thinks more broadly about the ways in which the question of human rights can be most dynamically integrated into the ethics of scholarship, especially for scholars of Jewish heritage in a constantly post-war world in which ‘race’ functions

Introduction

9

ultimately as charged sociopolitical praxis. Trained ‘anthrohistorian’ Dubois closes the section, situating Haitian Studies in a multivalent and dialogic, albeit in many ways assailed, border space – a space unflaggingly defended by his intellectual forebears. Wending his way through a meditative conversation with Fernando Coronil, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and, especially, Sidney Mintz, whose work on peasant culture he revisits from a new perspective, Dubois places Haiti at the root of his personal intellectual genealogy. In so doing, he looks at the particular ways in which women’s work – practical and intellectual – has (and has not) figured in his own scholarly trajectory. In the volume’s second section, ‘Interrogating the Enquiring Self’, Kaiama L. Glover, Barbara Browning and Carlo A. Célius offer revealing interdisciplinary reflections on the extent to which they have been enriched, frustrated and humbled to different degrees by their long-standing academic connections to Haiti and Haitian Studies. All three contributors engage anthropology and the arts (spiritual, visual, performance) in the context of the ‘modern’, as these have factored in Haiti’s perception in the wider world. Each scholar articulates her or his motivations and sense of ethical responsibility as potential shepherd of that public image in the academy. Glover endeavours to discern and bring together the traces and stakes of her own scholarly path, and to spotlight Haiti’s role therein, via an oblique conversation with Katherine Dunham. Reading Dunham’s 1969 memoir-ethnography Island Possessed closely, Glover reflects on the various points of intersection and relay – emotional and professional – and negotiations of race and gender that often underpin the work done by women of colour in the academy. She considers carefully Dunham’s choices as an African-American performer and ethnologist, teasing out the strategies and the risks underlying her pioneering practice of dance anthropology. Scholar, dancer, novelist and cultural critic Browning also evokes Dunham, situating her within the context of several radically experimental figures of the Afro- and US-American dance world who have made Haiti the poto mitan of their professional praxis. Whereas Glover’s concern is the love at the heart of Dunham’s engagement with Haiti, Browning examines the ‘obscenity’ and even ‘pathology’ that can infect the relationship of the US-American Self to the Haitian Other. Browning’s essay assembles a vibrant cast of transatlantic characters whose exchanges and collaborations were the foundations of the mid-century postmodern avant-garde. Placing Dunham alongside such figures as Ralph Lemon, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maya Deren, André Breton and, to a degree, herself in a hemispheric dialogue that is simultaneously broad and intimate, Browning reveals the persistent and very similar ways in which Haiti has haunted the performing black body. In the final essay of this section, Haitian art historian Célius argues that European and North Atlantic academic and art institutions

10

The Haiti Exception

have relegated Haitian plastic arts, like those of non-white peoples across the globe, to the Hegelian space of the anti-modern. He describes a very personal experience of vulnerability to double-consciousness prompted by the silencing prejudgements of the Euro-North American anthropological gaze. Célius paints a troubling picture of the (neo-)primitivist paradigm and its stubbornly confining reliance on cultivated ignorance, unchanging stereotypes and exoticist understandings of Afro-ontology. The third and final section of the volume, ‘On Nation-Building: Histories, Theories, Praxes’, features contributions from Deborah Thomas, Valerie Kaussen and Michèle Duvivier Pierre-Louis, whose interventions all outline the obstacles presented by the state and its avatars – be they globalizing corporate structures, NGOs, foreign governments, neoliberal economic programmes or local political machines – vis-à-vis the expression and recognition of the nation’s needs and interests. Thomas’s essay is itself exceptional within the frame of this volume, in that it moves our consideration of Haiti beyond the country’s relationship with the US and Europe to propose a regional, Caribbeanist perspective. As a scholar concerned with issues of structural state violence within the Jamaican national context, Thomas rejects a priori the notion of Haiti’s singular political failure and positions Haiti and Jamaica within the same generative analytical frame. She identifies her professional roots in the work of anthropologists like Trouillot, Sidney Mintz, Melville Herskovitz and Jean Price-Mars, whose work on Haiti enabled her to better understand the relationship between nationalist discourse and peasant cultural appropriation. Kaussen reflects on her experience as a foreign academic and would-be aid worker in Haiti’s capital city during the year following the January 2010 earthquake, offering a meticulous analysis of the activist landscape in post-disaster Haiti. Positing the conflict between the perceptions she brought with her to Haiti from the United States and the realities of Haitian social life, Kaussen frames a discussion of the deep and troubling disconnects between humanitarian organizations and the constituencies they mean to serve. Focused specifically on the phenomenon of communications initiatives in the aid world, Kaussen charts in ‘real-time’ the emergence of development models that rely on Haiti as a guinea pig. In the final essay of the section, former Haitian Prime Minister Pierre-Louis moves beyond the empty sloganeering and wrongheaded, if not downright cynical, agendas of the international development world to issue a decidedly local call to ‘build Haiti back better’.7 Her focus is the ‘Republic of Port-au-Prince’ – that beleaguered and now physically devastated real and We cite here the condescending phrase that animates the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. 7

Introduction

11

ideal site of nationhood – and, more specifically, the symbolically resonant neighbourhood of Martissant. Her essay tells the history of the city from the moment of national independence up to the present day, and outlines possibilities for its renewal. Identifying a ‘we’ that is competent, vocal, informed and primarily Haitian, Pierre-Louis writes of and to a dynamized community of non-state actors capable of imagining and crafting the nation’s future. The essays that make up The Haiti Exception mean to propose a measure of transparency in expressing our collective investment in Haiti’s possible futures, both practical and discursive. The interventions here are so many efforts to tell individual truths and so to offer new narratives of Haiti and of ourselves. They are necessarily eclectic in both form and content – more or less focused on the science of anthropology, more or less revealing of their author’s personal implication, more or less analytical, more or less meditative. In their ensemble, they reflect our firm belief that if the way we relate to and promote Haitian Studies is to be ethical and refreshed, it must be plural, capacious and forthright. As Claudine Michel so rightly contends in her epilogue to this volume – an unprecedented presentation of the evolution of Haitian Studies in the United States and in Haiti – we stand as scholars, as humanists and as humans at an exciting and potentially dangerous crossroads. With the January 2010 earthquake likely to be an enduring signpost in the trajectory of perceptions of Haiti both in the North Atlantic and in the Global South, we must be ever mindful of the impact and the limitations of our necessarily elite interventions. The contributions to this volume represent our humble efforts to read over our own and one another’s shoulders – rather than, we sincerely hope, on an ‘exceptional’ Haiti’s back.

Works Cited Bonilla, Yarimar. 2013. ‘Ordinary Sovereignty’. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17.3: 151–65. Carrithers, Michael. 1990. ‘Is Anthropology Art or Science?’ Current Anthropology 21: 263–82. Clitandre, Nadège. 2011. ‘Haitian Exceptionalism in the Caribbean and the Project of Rebuilding Haiti’. The Journal of Haitian Studies 17.2: 146–53. Dash, J. Michael. 1988. Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination. London: Macmillan. Dayan, Colin (Joan). 1995. Haiti, History and the Gods. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Depestre, René. 2005. ‘La France et Haïti: le mythe et la réalité’. Gradhiva 1. Available at http://gradhiva.revues.org/249.

12

The Haiti Exception

Dubois, Laurent, and Kaiama L. Glover (eds). 2013. ‘New Narratives of Haiti’. Transition 111: 1–2. Fischer, Sibylle. 2007. ‘Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life’. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 23: 1–15. Forsdick, Charles. 2013. ‘After the Earthquake: Some Reflections on Recent Scholarship about Haiti’. Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies 4.2: 2–8. Gelder, Ken. 2000. ‘Postcolonial Voodoo’. Postcolonial Studies 3.1: 89–98. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1950. Foreword to Katherine Dunham, Les Danses d’Haïti. Paris: Pasquelle Editeurs. —. 1983. Dances of Haiti. Trans. by Stovall, Jeanelle. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Nazaruk, Maja. 2011. ‘Reflexivity in Anthropological Discourse Analysis’. Anthropological Notebooks 17.1: 73–83. Schuller, Mark, and Pablo Morales (eds). 2012. Tectonic Shifts: Haiti since the Earthquake. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press. Scott, David. 2014. ‘The Theory of Haiti: The Black Jacobins and the Poetics of Universal History’. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 18.3: 35–51. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. —. 2003. Global Transformations Anthropology and the Modern. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2010. ‘Why Representations of Haiti Matter Now More than Ever’. NACLA Report on the Americas 43.5: 37–41. —. 2015. Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Earthquake Chronicle. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Tracing Intellectual Histories

The Anthropological Uses of Haiti: A Longue Durée Approach Mark Schuller

The Anthropological Uses of Haiti

In 2010, Haitian-American anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse sounded a clarion call for textual production about Haiti. Analysing the continuities of narratives that have denigrated the Haitian people since the revolution, which Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot declared ‘unthinkable’ (Trouillot, 1995), Ulysse pointed to their excesses during the disaster porn that followed the earthquake of 12 January 2010. The challenge quickly spread throughout Haitian Studies, eloquent in its clarity and apparent simplicity: Haiti needs new narratives (Ulysse, 2012 and 2015b). However, actually producing these new narratives requires continual interrogation, unflattering reflection and profound self-critique. Anthropologists have been engaging in a self-critique since at least 1986; the text Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) is often marked as central to this. And yet, have our basic premises and praxes changed? The title of this book, The Haiti Exception, calls into question the ways in which the island nation has been exceptionalized, singled out, by writers, especially those of us who are foreign. Indeed, Haiti’s singularity – born of the first and only slave revolt to result in nationhood, its fall from the phenomena of ‘pearl of the Antilles’ to the ‘poorest country in the hemisphere’, and the white supremacy, imperialism and later ‘development’ – was one of its primary attractions for many scholars, including myself. However, focusing on this singularity obscures the ways in which Haiti has also served as a testing ground, a laboratory, for general anthropological theories, not to mention for international aid, as the two are often linked. In addition to the textual production, it behooves us to interrogate the political economy 15

16

The Haiti Exception

of knowledge production: to wit, what and whose interests are being served by anthropological knowledge on Haiti? In addition to the texts (i.e., the product), other elements of the research (i.e., the process) deserve attention. Gérarde Magloire and Kevin A. Yelvington (2005) offer a powerful reminder of Haiti’s construction within and by anthropology. Trouillot calls into question the difference between location, locale and locality (Trouillot, 2003: 122–25). How, as practitioners of this craft, are we complicit in the political and economic inequalities that render Haiti open to the gaze of foreigners in the first place? Are there alternatives to this knowledge production? Because anthropology includes relationships that are always embedded in the research, usually offering greater benefit to researchers than to the communities being studied, I have adapted the title of Paul Farmer’s early manifesto The Uses of Haiti (Farmer, 2003 [1994]). I argue that to analyse these trends, a glance at the longue durée is necessary. Like the following text, this narrative is by necessity partial (Crapanzano, 1986). Building on other efforts at interrogation (e.g., Célius, 2005; Ramsey, 2005; Byron, 2012), this short chapter does not attempt an in-depth analysis of any particulars, and cannot possibly cite all relevant works. A reading of the shifts in the production of foreign anthropological knowledge reveals the uneven contours and sensibilities of the anthropological enterprise itself. Complementing Byron’s chapter on ethnography in Haiti, this chapter seeks to explore the role that Haiti has played within general theorizing among US-based anthropologists. Though often relegated to what Trouillot has called the ‘Savage slot’ (Trouillot, 2003), Haiti has been the site of theoretical experimentation with core concepts such as culture, creolism and structural violence. It has also been the discipline par excellence, as Trouillot points out in Global Transformations, the first to ‘collaborate’ with the official ‘development’ regime following the Second World War (Trouillot, 2003). Tracing US anthropological production through the twentieth century reveals disjunctures that run parallel to a consistent attachment to exotophilia. This chapter interrogates a particular set of political, economic and geopolitical interests embedded in the institutional foundation of anthropological knowledge production, including my own. Read in this longue durée approach, it becomes apparent that, since the 1980s, anthropological textual production on Haiti has not been particularly influenced or modified by the postmodern turn, feminism, or the various strands of anthropological self-critique. This exploration ends with a series of questions grounded in my own experiences – notably failures – to inspire a critical self-examination and dialogue.

The Anthropological Uses of Haiti

17

Haiti and the place of ‘race’ in anthropology Carlo A. Célius (2005) argued that the concept of ‘race’ was one of the focal points in nineteenth-century anthropology [see also his chapter in this volume]. As historian of anthropology George Stocking (1971) has argued, the name ‘anthropology’ itself reveals its racializing heritage. Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin used anthropology to disprove racist ideologies, publishing a book, De l’égalité des races humaines (anthropologie positive) (1885), that directly challenged Arthur de Gobineau’s inequality of the races. As Carolyn Fleuhr-Lobban (2000) has written, Firmin’s book influenced the founder of US anthropology, Franz Boas, who waged a struggle against racialism his entire career. In other words, since its foundation, anthropology has had a debt to Haiti that has gone – and still largely goes – unacknowledged, unlike Hugo Chávez, who after the earthquake honoured the support Haiti had given Simón Bolívar. Fleuhr-Lobban (2000), Yelvington (2006) and others, notably Lee D. Baker (2005) and Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison (2000), engaged in a corrective, explicitly acknowledging contributions of black anthropologists. This said, however, as a symbol or field of intervention, foreign anthropology did not have much use for Haiti until ethnography was formalized with Boas. As the history is so often told in introductory texts, ‘Papa Franz’ formalized a ‘four-field’ discipline: physical or biological anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology and sociocultural anthropology. For Boas, all four were necessary to deconstruct contemporary racist ideology. But we need to admit that in our praxis, the ‘four field’ model of anthropology hasn’t worked out the way Boas envisioned. Many departments have splintered in recent years, including where I received my PhD, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. (It must first be admitted that my alma mater did not even have all four fields.) Other high-profile splits occurred at Stanford and Duke, among others. I’m currently a part of a committee thinking through the creation of a new PhD in anthropology. Our first question is, during this economic crisis, do we need to have another PhD program? How is our PhD program different from other offerings at other institutions? How will we assure that our graduates find employment? Two responses to these questions are, first, we need to intentionally weave in action and, second, we really need to put these four fields to work in the service of current world problems.

18

The Haiti Exception

My own anthropological imagination I call this process the ‘anthropological imagination’. Distinct from Magloire and Yelvington, who were discussing what might be called the imaginaire (imaginary), I adapt C. Wright Mills’s concept within sociology: thinking like an anthropologist. It is difficult to move from the species level to individual lived experience, for example; yet such moving back and forth is critical if we are to understand climate change, its impacts on humanity and our response. I use the World Social Forum slogan, ‘another world is possible’, to answer the question, Why anthropology? Another example of research that for the moment is largely absent from Haitian Studies is work in physical anthropology or archaeology; perhaps scholars will respond to this lacuna, thanks to the purported discovery of the shipwreck of Christopher Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria. But, in general, the biggest impact from international scholarship on Haiti is first sociocultural and then linguistic ­anthropology. Haiti has served me as an important grounding to this anthropological imagination. For example, the documentary Poto Mitan is an early example of my attempts to ground an analysis of global political economy in individual lived experience. I need to go further. Seeing the world through what one of my advisors, Katherine Maternowska (2006), called ‘Haiti eyes’ reveals harsh truths about the urgency of climate change and its impact on tropical storms, crop failure and scarcity of water. I often call Haiti ‘the real world’, where realities of inequality, food production, pollution, and human and industrial waste are all too visible: this is what capitalism looks like. By contrast, the flight home to the US always feels like being plugged back into the Matrix. In general, Haiti has been very good to me. The documentary has taken me to over forty college campuses; working on Haiti post-earthquake has also brought me to Washington, DC, to Congressional briefings. And Ulysse recommended to the editors of Huffington Post that I have a column. My ‘Uses of Haiti’ have been employed in the service of activism, defined in collaboration with specific people including the individual women and grassroots groups profiled in Poto Mitan (Bergan and Schuller, 2014). But, especially because of this engagement, I feel an extra sense of responsibility and accountability for the results of my actions. True enough, legislation that I played a role in helping to push was passed in 2014: ‘Assessing Progress in Haiti Act.’1 And as I draft this chapter, I am working with Haitian and foreign partners to implement this new law. But most of the ‘results’ of my work are scholarly: I am and should be accountable to how I represent Haiti and Haitian people. I have struggled in my writing not to https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s1104

1

The Anthropological Uses of Haiti

19

exceptionalize Haiti. I often portray Haiti as a ‘canary in the coal mine.’ My first monograph also takes a cue from people in Haiti to explore how I am connected with the people in the film. It ends with a quote from a timachann, a street vendor, saying that the best way to help Haiti is to bring democracy back to Washington (Schuller, 2012). I have also deliberately steered clear of a culturalist analysis and ‘exotic’ topics such as Vodou, in part because of its disproportionate share of anthropological analyses, as Kate Ramsey (2011) and others point out. After the earthquake, New York Times columnist David Brooks deployed familiar culturalist stereotypes, explaining why Haiti is ‘backward’. That said, my work is not entirely devoid of such tendencies. For example, in my ‘public’ writing for Huff Po, I have sometimes confined Haitian people to a ‘Savage slot’ in romanticizing people’s abilities to collectivize and survive. And as I write my second monograph (Schuller, 2016), it is a struggle to walk the line of the specificity of the earthquake – indeed, many Haitian people shared a critique of applying outside models – and identifying what it represents to a greater understanding of the humanitarian enterprise.

Shifts within anthropology Zooming out to a broader historical view allows us to see that there is not a constant interest in Haiti within foreign anthropology. It is punctuated, uneven. Not surprisingly, anthropologists are more involved during periods of intense foreign intervention. Clearly, the first stage of a US/Boasian anthropology in Haiti took hold after the 1915–34 US occupation. Ramsey (2005) interrogates the relationship between the occupation and US anthropological research. To begin, the occupation facilitated access to the field for several US anthropologists. With foreign soldiers’ boots on the ground, anthropologists’ boots can take ‘the field’ as well – using the same language in both situations. That said, the occupation was the occasion for a kind of exchange between two peoples, two cultures, two systems of thinking, two societies. By writing this I am again falling into the trap of normalizing and fixing national identities, essentializing and setting aside the diversity within these two complex societies. Indeed, Millery Polyné (2010) discussed the complex relationships created by and among African-American leaders facing Reconstruction and Jim Crow, including engaging in advocacy and direct service and in some cases lending legitimacy to the occupation. People in power often considered the occupation to be a ‘civilizing’ mission because we foreigners have what we call ‘development’ (Renda, 2001). The cultural differences inspired many blan (foreigners) to exaggerate, take out of context, and denigrate – to put it another way, ‘to exotify’ – Haitian cultural phenomena. Practices, folklore, symbols and reactions to Vodou were most

20

The Haiti Exception

visible. Hollywood took the concept of the zonbi from Haiti and made a lot of money off of a Haitian cultural concept, and continues to do so to this day, as the current ‘zombie craze’ attests (McGee, 2012). Worse were the ways in which this exoticism demonized, minimized and infantilized Haitian people. In general, the first generation of anthropologists after Papa Franz – that is Boas – invaded the four corners of the earth to document (and in some cases exploit) the practices, thought processes and cultural structures of a series of populations within a rubric of ‘salvage anthropology’. Unfortunately, imbedded in this salvage project is an attachment to what we used to call ‘savages’, peoples who haven’t yet gone through the mill of colonization, imperialism or ‘development’, a process of Othering critiqued by Trouillot (2003), Edward Said (1979) and a host of others. Anthropological discourse fixed these differences, presenting cultures as unchanging. The ‘Other’ is not the same as myself. In general, the ‘Other’ is black or brown, poor, colonized, etc. Today we have come to realize that culture cannot be erased by colonization, and that peoples and societies have the creativity to adapt when faced with self-named ‘Western’ culture. But, under this mandate to salvage savage cultures, Haiti had a precocious decolonization. In a 1992 article, Trouillot recounted that the Caribbean region was too ‘hybrid’ for the ideology of salvage anthropology (Trouillot, 1992). In other words, anthropologists trafficking in exoticism were not all that interested in the region. This is the context for the first experience of US anthropology on Haiti. Actually, most of the first US anthropologists were students of none other than Papa Franz. One example that clearly shows the problematic of exoticism during the context of the 1915–34 US occupation is Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1990 [1938]). Her experience in anthropology was complex, and Boas attempted to use her because of her race to gain access to local African-Americans. But this text, true to the predominant sensibilities of the day, highlighted the exotic, and even quoted a person in Haiti who applauded the US military presence (Hurston, 71). Melville Herskovits is one of the best-known US anthropologists. A student of Boas, he founded African Studies within anthropology. In the PBS documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, Baker underscored the power that Herskovits wielded to define the field and make or break people’s careers. In addition, Herskovits played an important role in the elaboration of the ‘culture concept’. In the spirit of Boas, Herskovits tried to disprove contemporary racist ideologies. In this period, some social scientists, particularly sociologists, held that African-Americans had a deficient culture because of the system of slavery, a point that was to be brought to the mainstream with sociologist Nathan Glazer and anthropologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Put another way, African-Americans lost

The Anthropological Uses of Haiti

21

their culture during the process of slavery and assimilation into majority society. Herskovits led a struggle to show how Africans kept cultural aspects even after this most violent, most humiliating, most inhumane system. Herskovits used a positivist methodology: his works are very long, detailed, not necessarily theoretical (the theory within the texts is hidden … and this theory guided the exposition, despite positivist ideology). What he looked for, he found: he compared aspects of kinship, religion, ritual and folklore in Haiti with those of Dahomey (now Benin) in Africa. And he used this experience to develop a theory of cultural conservation. A little later, Swiss-French anthropologist Alfred Métraux worked in the Marbial Valley as a tool of the United Nations [see Alessandra BenedictyKokken’s chapter in this volume]. Chantalle F. Verna (2005) wrote about this period: the United Nations had just been created, and was still looking for legitimating roles. The word ‘development’ appeared as a political tool. The UN created a mission to conduct a serious study, of all areas, to represent the basis for a range of interventions. Haiti was one of the first places where the UN experimented in creating a plan for what it called development. The UN used Métraux, an anthropologist, to mine the country for sociocultural facts. This model – anthropologists as Empire’s shock troops – took hold after the first UNESCO project in Kochon Gra, in the Marbial Valley near Jacmel. It can be said that this was the most profitable period for anthropology, when more people in official structures used it (González, 2004; Low and Merry 2010): good patriots Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict used their research in the service of the Second World War. At this time, anthropologists were developing ‘grand theory’ that followed the meta-discourse of evolution, very closely linked with ‘development’ (e.g., Rostow, 1960). The dominant mode of the era was positivism. It is not by chance that ‘science’ became the most powerful ideology; anthropologists worked on ‘development’ and the US Department of Defense financed international Area Studies networks.

Subaltern humanism Not everyone accepted the dominant positivist model, notably a current of Marxist anthropologists and a host of people who were marginalized along a series of axes: anthropologists who were black, women, artists, or sexual minorities, among others (and obviously people had multiple identity categories). Perhaps because of its historical role, perhaps because of its close proximity to the US, Haiti welcomed many people like this. (There is also a range of important French anthropological currents such as Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, for which Milo Rigaud, a Haitian intellectual,

22

The Haiti Exception

is a forefather. However, as a result of my political commitments and/or chauvinism in focusing on dismantling US empire, this chapter concentrates more on the USA.) A series of scholars have used a humanist approach, even experimental or artistic, in their research on Vodou. Notably, the dancers Katherine Dunham and Maya Deren created several works that called into question the representation of the country [see Barbara Browning’s and Kaiama L. Glover’s chapters in this volume]. With a creative approach, more empathetic, Deren understood various facets of the lwa, drawing out the complexity of specific lwa, such as Ezili, rather than focusing, as previous foreign ethnography had, on how the lwa might be classified according to ‘pantheons’ or ‘nations’. Dunham explained a system of thought that at times could be disconnected from people’s daily lives. Her personal approach – which didn’t pretend to discover larger social rules – showed how people lived with their contradictions [see Glover’s chapter in this volume]. A number of feminist, poststructural scholars (who include Colin Dayan and the late Karen McCarthy Brown) follow this current. This remains a challenge: despite a different, more humanistic approach, they have all concentrated on cultural questions. To be more precise, there is still a foreign preoccupation with Vodou. In other words, even if they have another political orientation, their works risk contributing to the exotification of the country. When we consider the political context in which these studies were conducted, we can propose a hypothesis: could foreign anthropologists work freely during the Duvalier dictatorship (1957–86)? Anselme Rémy (2013) recounts how anthropology (more widely known as ‘ethnology’ on Haiti), particularly the Institut (which was to become the Faculté, the campus within the State University of Haiti) and the Bureau National d’Ethnologie, was instrumentalized by the Duvalier regime [see also Byron’s chapter in this volume]. Did foreign anthropologists have access to analyse Haiti’s sociopolitical structure? Particularly Harold Courlander, writing from the veranda of the famed Hotel Oloffson, did not. Even those who penetrated secret societies might have had a difficult time navigating the tonton makout, Duvalier’s secret police. Glover, in her chapter in this volume, discusses the strategies Dunham employed.

Mintz’s dual legacies Marxists critiqued a cultural anthropology that does not address the global context, class inequality, etc. (e.g., Roseberry, 1989). For example, Eric Wolf criticized the ways in which military and paramilitary agencies used (and continue to use) anthropology. Wolf opposed Mead regarding the US war in Vietnam, where anthropologists were employed in counter-insurgency

The Anthropological Uses of Haiti

23

efforts. Wolf was sanctioned by the American Anthropological Association. Wolf’s colleague, Sidney Mintz, began to conduct a comparative study of the Caribbean region. Mintz used Herskovits’s ‘scientific’ approach to criticize the latter, his ancestor. Mintz questioned the continuity of cultural traits. He considered the context of the plantation within slavery as the womb that birthed an entirely new culture, what anthropologists call ‘creole’ culture. This mixing, and slaves’ garden plots outside the plantation, were the sources of a new culture, what anthropologists call ‘ethnogenesis’. Mintz critiqued the way that Herskovits ignored the question of history and historicity [see Dubois’s chapter in this volume]. In all his work, Mintz mixed history with anthropology (see Mintz, 2010; and Thomas, 2014). He focused much of his career elaborating the concept of culture, particularly ‘acculturation’ (the ways people learn their own culture). Outside of Haiti, Mintz conducted research in Puerto Rico and Jamaica, representations of the Spanish and English colonial systems, respectively (Mintz, 2010). His work concentrated on the political economy. Mintz played a large role in the institutionalization of Caribbean Studies, which over time has turned towards Cultural Studies as pioneered by Stuart Hall. Current scholars critique and fill in gaps in Mintz’s work. Two currents found their inspiration in Mintz. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, one of Mintz’s students, focused on the historical aspects, while for his part, Farmer began to trace a line focusing on the materialist dimensions, inequality and justice. Both have elaborated a global analysis in all of their works. There is no question that Farmer is one of the best-known and most influential living anthropologists. As a public figure, he entered the book clubs and one-campus-one-book programs via Tracy Kidder’s Mountains beyond Mountains (2004), whose title comes from an English translation of a common Haitian Creole proverb. Farmer’s public speaking regularly includes college commencements, and he was a guest on the last week of The Colbert Report. Bill Clinton tapped him as his Assistant United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti. Farmer’s influence is visible in the ‘Lessons Learned’ about foreign aid. He has often spoken about how he gained his moral and political compass through his ethnographic engagement in Haiti (Farmer, 2003; and Kidder, 2004). As an anthropologist, his first book employed the ideas of French anthropologist Gérald Barthélémy (1990) regarding how Vodou as a worldview prevented inequality in a community. Farmer said he became politicized because of the way ‘development’ flooded the village where he intervened to ensure that the elites in Port-au-Prince could have electricity. In his book AIDS and Accusation (1992), Farmer engaged in an analysis of the layers of the international system, where his focus remained in his following books (e.g., Farmer, 2001, 2003 and 2004b). Published the following year, the Uses of Haiti (Farmer 1994, rev. in 2003) was a manifesto

24

The Haiti Exception

against the international system, and has been reprinted in several editions. One thing that has been said of the books is that Farmer has a tendency to leave Cange (where he studied and where the first Partners in Health hospital was built) and go directly to Washington, without analysing intermediaries, certainly at the level of the state. Besides his significant real-world contributions, Farmer’s enduring intellectual legacy is his popularization of the concept of ‘structural violence’ (Farmer, 2004a) first proposed by Johan Galtung (1980). In 2008, after the hurricane season that devastated Haiti, Farmer announced a right turn in an article published in The Nation to defend USAID macroeconomic policies and also made a call for a ‘Marshall Plan for Haiti’ (see also Chancy, 2013). Farmer was on the short list to head USAID when Obama became president. One of his colleagues in Partners in Health, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, became the president of the World Bank in 2012. But Farmer’s anthropological work inspired a generation of anthropologists, myself included, to conduct our research in the service of a vision of justice. His Uses of Haiti was published as I was working with the campus Amnesty International chapter on a campaign relating to Haiti during the 1991–94 coup d’état and also with a movement to fight racism while seemingly being taught about all the other major world revolutions but Haiti’s. A host of anthropologists are working in and on Haiti in the line of enquiry Farmer first traced. I know several other professors and students who are continuing their engagement and carrying the struggle forward. Haiti has also figured large in an ascendant ‘public’ anthropology. With great fanfare, some of the leading anthropologists, many of them at the embattled University of California, Berkeley, announced the term and a book series, from University of California Press, at the 2001 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Joining Berkeley faculty such as Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Laura Nader was Paul Farmer, at Harvard. The charge of public anthropology was to ‘bring anthropology off the shelf’, an implicit acknowledgement of anthropology’s retreat from public discussion. From the days of Margaret Mead, the archetype of what George Marcus (one of the editors of Writing Culture) and Michael Fischer termed ‘anthropology as cultural critique’, anthropology had been reduced to irrelevance, at least perceived (Marcus and Fischer, 1986; see also Gonzalez, 2004; Low and Merry, 2010). The California Series in Public Anthropology counts no less than five books about Haiti (of around thirty in total), a testament to the (too-often unacknowledged) importance of Haiti to the discipline. Following his death in 2012, the 2013 Haitian Studies Association annual conference held three large panels, including a plenary, on Trouillot, who isn’t easy to summarize due to the diversity of his work. Before his death, the American Anthropological Association held a festschrift in his honour.

The Anthropological Uses of Haiti

25

Scholarly collections are beginning to be published as of the time of this writing, a recognition long deserved. Because of this belated attention I will only make a couple of observations in this short and admittedly ambitious chapter. The first is that because of the premium attached to the ‘Other’ within anthropology, in trafficking in the exotic, Trouillot reportedly felt it necessary to work in another country to prove his worth as an anthropologist before he could begin his great œuvre on his own country. Another is that Trouillot’s impact on Haitian Studies is unquestioned. His work in Haitian Kreyòl, Ti Dife Boule sou Istoua Ayiti [Burning Questions on Haiti’s History], published in 1977 was rediscovered belatedly and Mariana Past and Benjamin Hebblethwaite are working on publishing an English translation. Outside of Haiti, Trouillot is most known for his 1995 book, Silencing the Past, which has become a reference text for historians around the globe. His last book, Global Transformations (2003), proposed making the same high-level critical intervention within anthropology, but the impact remains marginal. It is as though Trouillot is more recognized as a historian. Why is this? Is it because anthropologists are not yet ready to hear his critiques? Because our imaginary is too limited? Because the anthropological enterprise is still addicted to the ‘Savage slot’? Is it because he is black? From Haiti? Trouillot’s criticism remains alive today. At least one other anthropologist, Haitian-American Ulysse is following in Trouillot’s critical trajectory. Like Trouillot, Ulysse began her work in another society, notably Jamaica (Ulysse, 2008) before working on Haiti. Ulysse continued a critical analysis about representation of Haiti (Ulysse, 2010) and her work highlighting the necessity of new narratives became a flashpoint for scholars and even activists. Like Dunham and Deren before her, Ulysse blends her theoretical work and performance, and her powerful performance pieces have received widespread attention. Ulysse has provided language and theoretical tools to deconstruct narratives about Haiti from media, humanitarian agencies and scholars, including anthropologists. Connecting feminism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism and critical race theory, Ulysse’s work, some of which has been compiled in a 2015 volume, exposes relationships of power, inequality and racism. Ulysse has set about creating new narratives: in addition to her blogs and performances, Ulysse was invited to give a TED talk; was invited by the Congressional Black Caucus to testify; has edited a pathbreaking 2011 issue of Meridians, ‘Pawòl Fanm sou Douz Janvye’, a collection of articles, prose and poetry on women’s experiences of the earthquake; and a boundarypushing online, interdisciplinary, mixed media double issue of e-misférica published in 2015 titled Caribbean. Trouillot’s and Ulysse’s critiques have a root in the ‘crisis’ within anthropology in the 1980s. In Orientalism (1979), Said published a radical critique

26

The Haiti Exception

of the ways anthropologists (with political scientists and historians) fixed and exaggerated cultural differences. A law professor and a member of the Lakota nation, Vine Deloria Jr. excoriated anthropologists in his book, Custer Died for Your Sins (1988). But the book that received the most attention was Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986). This critique was received by an ascendant poststructural current, inspired by the work of Michel Foucault and others. Yet this self-critique did not go far enough for some anthropologists. Since Ruth Behar (Ulysse’s professor), we have found a place for reflexivity, individual anthropologists analysing ourselves. Feminists themselves critiqued Writing Culture’s silencing of women and minimizing of gender (e.g., Abu-Lughod, 1991; Behar and Gordon, 1997). Harrison, who has also written about structural violence, the impact of neoliberal policies such as structural adjustment and the free trade zone (Harrison, 1997) – but whom Farmer did not cite – wrote of ‘decolonizing anthropology’ not only in the writing but in the practice of anthropology (Harrison, 2010 [1991]). Harrison continues to write about racial inequality and the intersectionality of social injustice.

Interrogations Both strands of activist projects notwithstanding, several challenges remain visible in Haiti, not only in textual production but in the ways anthropology has been instrumentalized to serve dominant interests. In other words, Haiti should be a lesson, a warning, for all bad practices that developed as anthropology grew up under colonialism. But this critical interrogation, self-critique, interrogation or intersectionality, is relatively rare in ­anthropological texts on Haiti. And this is not even to consider practice; for all their power, texts are final products of research. As Trouillot noted, ‘the exercise in reflexivity must go all the way and examine fully the enlarged reproduction of anthropological discourse’ (2003: 26). Anthropological research is notoriously slow going, not to mention expensive. Who fits the bill? And why? Anthropology got its biggest boost in terms of faculty positions and funding during the Cold War, during the genesis and height of Area Studies, in an effort to gather knowledge about our (potential) adversaries. As Trouillot (1992), Karla Slocum and Deborah Thomas (2003) [see Thomas’s chapter in this volume] and others have argued, Area Studies waned with new goals for global capitalism: Global Studies became the project, eclipsing even Development Studies (McMichael, 1996). As Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (2015) has noted, foundations funded research that justified racism, racialism and white supremacy. In Haiti, white men like Herskovits had the final say on who would be allowed to go to Haiti,

The Anthropological Uses of Haiti

27

who would be endowed with fellowships; his relationship with black women like Hurston and Dunham highlighted attempts at shaping, disciplining and even silencing other voices on Haiti. I cannot write a chapter on this subject without acknowledging my own complicity in what could be called the research-foundation-industrial complex. A Haitian colleague recently asked me how I was doing during my visit to Haiti that spanned the five-year anniversary of the earthquake. I told her that my career was doing well, despite or even because of the difficulties still faced by many in the country. Indeed, studying, writing about and denouncing the wrongdoings, shortcomings and (un)intended consequences of foreign aid agencies has become something of a cottage industry and a crowded field. The irony has not escaped me that the harder I work as an ‘activist’, the more I succeed in my scholarly career, and the more like the agencies I become. Indeed, I have more in common – language, foreign passport, frequent flyer status and white privilege – with the foreign aid workers whom I have made my career criticizing than the beneficiaries, social movement activists and even university colleagues whose stories and critical analyses I retell. My current National Science Foundation (NSF) proposal, a five-year ‘Career’ award, explicitly uses Haiti as an ideal case for analysing general theory, in this case interrogating the alleged power that NGOs have over the long term, for ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The previous year’s unfunded draft framed the discussion about understanding Haiti after the earthquake. Reeling from my previous institution blocking the release of $5,000 to the Faculté d’Ethnologie while it took over four times that amount in ‘indirect costs’ of the previous grant, in the current proposal, funds going to the US and Haitian institutions are almost equal, with almost $200,000 set to go to the Faculté. The NSF has a ‘broader impacts’ criterion, which in my case (attempting to address a ‘real-world’ problem and aiming at institutional reinforcement and development in Haiti) might have helped an otherwise lacklustre proposal rise to the ‘funded’ category. In effect, not only am I using Haiti but I am becoming an NGO in the process. Moreover, as I draft this following the five-year anniversary of the earthquake, I am still in limbo, waiting for word on an official recommendation for funding, to say nothing about approval. As a public agency, the NSF was not spared the political tsunami that saw the Republican takeover of both houses of Congress, one of whose first acts was to pass a bill denying any human responsibility for climate change. The NSF is one of the largest institutions funding climate change research. The fifth anniversary came and went, and I remained silent on the blogs. While at the time I understood the silence as an accurate reflection of how it was experienced by the majority of people in Haiti – and also as resistance to the pseudo-event created by foreign press agencies, hijacked by the

28

The Haiti Exception

political ‘crisis’ that, to most of my colleagues in Haiti, had foreign, especially US, support – I now wonder whether I was silencing myself.

Concluding reflections As my own ‘use’ of Haiti demonstrates, the earthquake, like the US occupation before it, inspired a new invasion of anthropologists (and, we must be honest, a host of other people) writing an explosion of texts. I have corresponded with over a dozen US anthropology graduate students since the earthquake. We all wonder how to understand the current situation? Has there been a continuity or a break within discourses on Haiti? To return to Trouillot, we must understand Haiti as a locale (that Magloire and Yelvington remind us exists in anthropologists’ imagination) that has served the discipline well. As such, analysing how anthropologists used Haiti renders visible the shifts in the development of the discipline. Sometimes, Haiti has become an ‘exceptional’ case in the interest of dehumanizing the Haitian people, or helping to point fingers about the management failures of the post-quake humanitarian aid. Yet again, Haiti serves as a laboratory, like Kochon Gra, the Cadre de Cooperation Interimaire following the 2004 coup and the UN ‘cluster’ system and ‘Transformative Agenda’. All of these are shaped by specific contexts, structures and interests. This chapter highlights that anthropological work arises from a particular political and economic context. At times, the discourse veers towards exeptionalism; at others, Haiti appears as laboratory. Looking at a longue durée approach, one can conclude that when the dominant mode of capital needs differentiation, or US foreign policy demands ideological support, the narrative bends towards the exotic and demonization. Such was obviously the case during the 1915–34 US occupation. When the dominant mode of capital needs expansion and replication, such as the inauguration of the ‘development’ era, Haiti serves as a laboratory. While some anthropologists have been writing against the grain, creating alternative narratives, much of this textual production is on the margins, blended with other media, or both. I use myself as a cautionary tale to point out that even when we are consciously working against dominant political ideologies, as Audre Lorde so powerfully warned, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde, 110). I would like to end by posing questions for other anthropologists (and, by extension, aid workers, whom James Ferguson (2005) called the anthropologist’s ‘evil twin’):

· In what interests are we working? In whose interests?

The Anthropological Uses of Haiti

29

· How can we found our research in the field while keeping in mind the ·

global context?

When we produce our texts, who reads them? How do these institutions or people use our texts?

· How can we keep the Haitian population aware of our work? Not only · ·

sharing ideas but also creating an exchange during the elaboration of our research projects. How can we create a community to whom we anthropologists must be accountable? When we engage a group of people who can politicize our research, what are our responsibilities? Do we not have an obligation to collaborate with social movements? Five years after the earthquake, many foreign governments and people are beginning to forget about Haiti. Similarly to other gaps in history, like the 1915 occupation, the invasion of images of Haiti had an impact, even if ghostly (Gordon, 1995), after we foreigners left. Today, after we foreigners leave, what phantom images will remain? What are our responsibilities, as anthropologists, in this?

Works Cited Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1991. ‘Writing against Culture’. In Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press: 137–62. Baker, Lee D. 2005. ‘Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge’. American Anthropologist. 107.3: 524–25. Barthélémy, Gérard. 1990. L’Univers rural haïtien: le pays en dehors. Paris: L’Harmattan. Behar, Ruth, and Deborah Gordon. 1995. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Byron, Jhon Picard. 2012. L’engagement ethnologique de Jean Price-Mars et son engagement politique. PhD thesis, Département Histoire, Faculté des Lettres, Université Laval, Québec. Célius, Carlo Avierl. 2005. ‘Cheminement anthropologique en Haïti’. Gradhiva 1. Available at http://gradhiva.revues.org/263 (consulted on 23 September 2013). Chancy, Myriam. 2013. ‘A Marshall Plan for a Haiti at Peace: To Continue or End the Legacy of the Revolution’. In Carla Calargé, Raphael Dalleo, Luis Duno-Gottberg and Clevis Headley (eds), Haiti and the Americas. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi: 199–218.

30

The Haiti Exception

Clifford, James, and George Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crapanzano, Vincent. 1986. ‘Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description’. In James Clifford and George Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 51–76. Deloria, Vine. 1988. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Farmer, Paul. 1992. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame, Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —. 2001. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —. 2003 [1994]. The Uses of Haiti. 2nd ed. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. —. 2004a. ‘An Anthropology of Structural Violence’. Current Anthropology 45.3: 305–25. —. 2004b. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor. Edited by Robert Borofsky, California Series in Public Anthropology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ferguson, James. 2005. ‘Anthropology and its Evil Twin: “Development” in the Constitution of a Discipline’. In Marc Edelman and Angelique Haugerud (eds), The Anthropology of Development and Globalization: From Classical Political Economy to Contemporary Neoliberalism. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing: 140–53. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 2000. ‘Anténor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology’. American Anthropologist 102.3: 449–66. Galtung, Johan. 1980. ‘“A Structural Theory of Imperialism” – Ten Years Later’. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 9.3: 181–96. González, Roberto. 2004. Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Gordon, Avery. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harrison, Faye Venetia. 1997. ‘The Gendered Politics and Violence of Structural Adjustment: A View from Jamaica’. In Louise Lamphere, Helen Ragone and Patricia Zavella (eds), Situated Lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge: 451–68. —. 2010 [1991]. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation. 3rd ed. Arlington, VA: Association of Black Anthropologists; American Anthropological Association. Harrison, Ira E., and Faye V. Harrison (eds). 2000. African American Pioneers in Anthropology. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

The Anthropological Uses of Haiti

31

Hurston, Zora Neale. 1990 [1938]. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Perennial Library. New York: Harper and Row. Kidder, Tracy. 2004. Mountains Beyond Mountains: the Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. New York: Random House. Lorde, Audre. 1984. ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’. In Audre Lorde Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Berkeley: The Crossing Press: 110–113. Low, Setha, and Sally Engle Merry. 2010. ‘Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas, An Introduction to Supplement 2’. Current Anthropology 51 (Supplement 2): S203–26. Magloire, Gérarde, and Kevin A.  Yelvington. 2005. ‘Haiti and the Anthropological Imagination’. Gradhiva 1. Available at http://gradhiva.revues.org/335. Marcus, George and Michael M.J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique. Chicago: University Press of Chicago. Maternowska, Catherine. 2006. ‘Haiti Eyes’. New York Times Magazine. McGee, Adam M. ‘Haitian Vodou and Voodoo: Imagined Religion and Popular Culture’. Studies in Religion/ Sciences religieuses 41.2: 231–56. McMichael, Philip. 1996. ‘Globalization: Myths and Realities’. Rural Sociology 61.1: 25–55. Mintz, Sidney. 2010. Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Polyné, Millery. 2010. From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Africanism, 1870–1964. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Ramsey, Kate. 2005. ‘Prohibition, Persecution, Performance: Anthropology and the Penalization of Vodou in mid-20th-Century’. Gradhiva 1. Available at http://gradhiva.revues.org/352 (consulted on 23 September 2013). —. 2011. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rémy, Anselme. 2013. ‘Les débuts de la Faculté d’Ethnologie: Espoirs et déceptions’. In Journées d’Etude, Ethnologie haïtienne et ethnologie d’Haïti: histoire et mémoires d’ne discipline. Port-au-Prince: Faculté d’Ethnologie, Université d’Etat d’Haïti. Renda, Mary. 2001. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Roseberry, William. 1989. ‘Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology’. In Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History, and Political Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press: 17–29. Rostow, W. W. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth, a Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

32

The Haiti Exception

Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Schuller, Mark. 2014. ‘Being an Insider Without: Activist Anthropological Engagement in Haiti after the Earthquake’. American Anthropologist 116.2: 409–12. —. 2015. Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Slocum, Karla, and Deborah Thomas. 2003. ‘Rethinking Global and Area Studies: Insights from Caribbeanist Anthropology’. American Anthropologist 105.3: 553–65. Stocking, George W. 1971. ‘What’s In a Name? Origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1837–71)’. Man 6.3: 371–90. Thomas, Jonathan T. 2014. ‘And the Rest Is History: A Conversation with Sidney Mintz’. American Anthropologist 116.3: 497–510. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1992. ‘The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory’. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 19–42. —. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. —. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2008. Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. —. 2010. ‘Why Representations of Haiti Matter Now More than Ever’. NACLA Report on the Americas 43.5: 37–41. —. 2015a. Guest Editor. Special issue titled Caribbean.e-misférica [Peer-reviewed, online, trilingual scholarly journal published biannually by the Hemispheric Institute, housed at NYU]. (11.2). http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/ emisferica-121-caribbean-rasanblaj (Launched online May 29, 2015). —. 2015b. Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, with a preface from Robin Kelley. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Verna, Chantalle Francesca. 2005. Haiti’s ‘Second Independence’ and the Promise of Pan-American Cooperation, 1934–1956. PhD thesis, Michigan State University, East Lansing. Willoughby-Herard, Tiffany. 2015. Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Yelvington, Kevin (ed). 2006. Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Transforming Ethnology: Understanding the Stakes and Challenges of Price-Mars in the Development of Anthropology in Haiti1 Jhon Picard Byron2

Transforming Ethnology

Beyond the question being deliberated in Africa concerning the existence of local ‘institutional and intellectual traditions’ of ethnology (of the social and cultural anthropological order) (Copans, 2007),3 the challenge to be dealt with today in Haiti consists especially in reviving a relatively ‘old’ national tradition, which dates back to the nineteenth century, before the establishment of the Institut d’ethnologie de Port-au-Prince in the 1940s, and Translated by Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken. If the title of a work in French has been published in the English translation, the translator offers both the original French and the English translation. If the translation does not yet exist, she only uses the French title. 2 This chapter has as its origin a talk that I gave during the Journées d’étude sur l’ethnologie on/in Haiti, as well a conference paper that I gave at CELAT, at the Université Laval, Québec, and a talk that I gave during a conference titled From Dictatorship to Democracy? Transition, Memory and Judgement (2–4 June 2014), organized by the Ecole Normale Supérieure of the Université d’Etat d’Haïti, Universités Paris 8 and Paris 7 in partnership with the Foundation for Knowledge and Freedom (Fondasyon Konesans ak Libète, FOKAL). If we consider the ‘birth’ of modern anthropology and its formalization as a discipline in the West’s institutions of higher education, we are dealing with a rather short history, dating back only to the end of the nineteenth century. 3 Translator’s note: The author intentionally does not define the differences among: ‘ethnology’, ‘ethnography’, and ‘anthropology’. 1

33

34

The Haiti Exception

which did not survive the most sombre moments of the Duvalier dictatorship (particularly the 1960s) and its fall in 1986. In fact, after years of lethargic existence, it is only in the past two years that the discipline of ethnology and its institutional framework, the Faculty of Ethnology, are undergoing a sort of resurgence.4 Certain circumstances, such as the integration of young teachers who are well connected to international research networks and the hosting of well-respected foreign researchers, have contributed to the rapid renewal of the discipline and will undoubtedly lead to a certain, if not vigorous, revitalization of the Haitian ethnological tradition. That said, the current resurgence of scholarship around ethnological practice in Haiti will only sustain itself if we understand its complex history. And so, in this essay, I propose a historical contextualization of the practice of ethnology in Haiti. If a guiding thematic of this volume is to consider how one’s own scholarship is linked to the evolution of one’s discipline, then my own professional journey – from philosophy to ethnology, as related to the social movements in Haiti since 1986 – is illustrative not only of the evolution of the discipline, but also of the why and how of the very recent resurgence of ethnographic practice in Haiti. Let us begin with a coincidence of circumstance, which I argue has shaped the intellectual history of anthropology in Haiti, and made a strong impression on me. The year 1986 saw the publication of Writing Culture, one of the most influential texts in the history of anthropology, a sort of advent announcing a new age, that of critical anthropology, often referred to as postmodern anthropology.5 The same year was marked by another event, in the full sense of the word ‘event’: I was a witness to the political upheaval of the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship. It is precisely this calendric coincidence that revealed to me the important encounter that must occur between ‘Haitian ethnology’ and ‘critical anthropology’, and which up until now has constituted a missed opportunity for the social sciences in Haiti. Moreover, the excitement in the United States that surrounded the Santa Fe The Faculty of Ethnology has a less-than-stellar reputation among Haitian intellectuals. Since the 1960s until very recently, no major publication has appeared under the rubric of ‘ethnology’. That said, exemplary Haitian anthropologists abroad, such as Guérin Montilus (Wayne State University), Laënnec Hurbon (CNRS) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (University of Chicago), employed by foreign institutions have greatly influenced ethnology. To better understand the status of the Faculty of Ethnology before 2012, consult Marianne Palisse (2008, 2014). 5 Here, I allow myself to assimilate ‘critical anthropology’ with the ‘postmodern’ currents of thought, understanding that critical anthropology does not generally look favourably upon the term ‘postmodern’. 4

Transforming Ethnology

35

Seminar, and which lead to the publication of Writing Culture in 1986, had few resonances outside of the Anglo-Saxon sphere, even if Writing Culture itself was largely inspired ‘by paradigms elaborated by French philosophers’ (Mahieddin, 2011). The names of anthropologists such as Georges Marcus or Johannes Fabian are not well known by the majority of Haitians trained in anthropology. Those of Arjun Appadurai and Paul Rabinow circulate more widely among students of philosophy in Haiti than they do among anthropologists. That said, as is often noted, early Haitian works, most notably those of Anténor Firmin, anticipated many of the ideas that would much later become the preponderant lines of thought among postmodern anthropologists (Fluehr-Lobban, 2000: 449–66). I am a child of 1986. Caught up by the events of this notorious year, the adolescent that I was, or rather the young man who had just come out of adolescence, allowed himself to be seduced by the political movements and intellectual debates of the moment. I was profoundly affected by the events of the end of 1985 and early 1986. I might even say that I was born into politics, profoundly affected by the tumultuous transformation that took place in those few months. It is for this reason that in the pages that follow, I try to understand this calendric coincidence, first, by means of my personal trajectory: the intersection of what constitutes the last days of the Duvalierist dictatorship, ignored by most, even academics, in the United States, and the publication of Writing Culture, overlooked by most Haitian ethnographers. A matter of coincidence, of another time it would seem, and yet, today, portentous of new directions. In fact, it is at the heart of the turmoil that followed the fall of Duvalier’s dictatorship that I achieved civic, intellectual and academic maturity. I entered the Université d’Etat d’Haïti (UEH) at Port-au-Prince at the moment of protests by the Department of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure of Port-au-Prince, when the popular uprisings and particularly the student movements were starting to wind down. It was at this time, between 1987 and 1990, that the figurative flames of dissent, led by the Fédération Nationale des Étudiants Haïtiens (FENEH), whose leaders I had known in secondary school, were dying out. In the wake of the student movements, with a few other colleagues, I organized a modest radical group, the Komite Inisyativ Lit Etidyan [Initiatory Committee for Student Struggles] (KILE): we aspired to promote the working class, and here one must understand that by ‘working class’ I mean that we wanted to put into practice a Marxist orthodoxy; we strongly believed in a working-class movement, but understood that it would have trouble developing itself in a country like Haiti, which came into being prior to Marxian notions of capitalism. In Haiti in the late 1980s and early 1990s, protest movements punctuated

36

The Haiti Exception

the university years of my generation. I attended university from 1992 to 1996, but the university was shut down in 1992–93. Due to our involvement in these movements, many of our professional futures were greatly compromised. I speak specifically of my small network, which includes colleagues of two Catholic activist groups, the Don Bosco Club and the Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne (ou Catholique); alumni from Collège Saint Martial and Lycée Pétion; friends from Bel-Air and Portail Saint Joseph, where I lived until the end of my university years. We have each, in one way or another, been set back by our activist engagements: prolonged and/or belated university studies and, as a consequence, later than usual entry into the workplace. The appetite not to know – that is, the refusal to understand all that would come to contradict our former Marxist vision of the world – excited us just as much as our appetite to know (our university curricula). And it goes without saying that the two were often at odds. Our Professor Cénatus, known more familiarly by his first name Bérard, quietly wanted to reorient our rudimentary knowledge of ‘Marxism’, encouraging us to read the classics, but also more contemporary texts by Jacques Rancière (La nuit des prolétaires, 1981), Louis Dumont (Essai sur l’individualisme, 1983), Jack Goody (The Domestication of the Savage Mind, 1977) and Jean-Pierre Vernant (Les origines de la pensée grecque, 1962). I was able to measure the importance of these texts many years later, when finishing my Master’s thesis in philosophy on Cornelius Castoriadis (also known as Pierre Chaulieu or Paul Cardan) in Nancy (Lorraine, France). In fact, it was these edifying readings that led me to work on Castoriadis, a rather ‘unorthodox’ figure of Marxist thought. This literature – particularly La nuit des prolétaires by Rancière, who was himself inspired by E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) – offered an alternative to the more common tradition of Haitian Marxism. As such, I was able to integrate a ‘Haitian Culturalist Tradition’. In my thesis in ethnology on Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969), which presents a certain analogy to my Master’s thesis in philosophy, I attempted to understand how a theoretical and scientific discourse might be transposed onto a more politicized terrain, that is: Castoriadis’s project of autonomy and Price-Mars’s construction of the Haitian nation. Juxtaposing the two, one might argue that the ‘pensée price-marsienne’ is itself political in nature. With a nascent epistemological framework in mind (one that I will develop further in the pages that follow), I finally was able to make a break with the notion that the import of Price-Mars could only lend itself to a Duvalierist political apparatus. Certain early works by René Depestre (1968, 1980) associate Price-Mars with Duvalier. That said, both Haitian Marxists and Duvalierists paid great attention to Price-Mars, albeit from very different

Transforming Ethnology

37

points of view. Depestre, who represents a major figure of Haitian Marxism, framed Price-Mars as one of the first noiristes (Saint-Eloi, 2009), while at the other end of the spectrum, René Piquion, one of the discreet, yet extremely influential powers behind the Duvalierist regime, claimed Price-Mars as the founder of noirisme.6 If I have suggested that Price-Mars serves as a sort of commonplace between a Communist disdain for the Duvalierist regime, and the Duvalierist’s own ‘ideologizing’ of Price-Mars, it is because whether Communist or noiriste, Price-Mars-as-commonplace presumes a simplification of the complexity of his thought. In other words, scholars have largely reduced his work to its most basic political potentiality in order to serve a highly censored and/or politicized Haitian intellectual sphere, notably: noirisme, négritude and indigénisme.7 It is as if the Marxists had given over Price-Mars’s entire intellectual project to the Duvalierists. There is obviously much more to Price-Mars than the shambles that a tragic history of dictatorship has produced. My work on Price-Mars led me to make Haitian ethnology the principal focus of my research, with a methodology that combines intellectual history with the social sciences and the humanities. My research project, in which some of my colleagues are also implicated, is doubly motivated. It has as its objective the reweaving of what I call the ‘Haitian Culturalist Tradition’ into a more inclusive fabric of our intellectual history, while all the while bringing to the fore the first expressions (as they have manifested themselves in Haiti) of what Edward Said calls ‘writing back’; in other words, to identify in Haitian ethnological thought the precursors of postcolonial theory. This task is particularly difficult if one takes into consideration how the early work of Depestre, as well as that of J. Michael Dash (1981) and Max Dominique (1989) have undermined that of Price-Mars. That said, in more recent years, Depestre and Dash have relativized the political uses of Price-Mars’s work (Dash, 2008; Depestre, 2005). The critical reception of Price-Mars is all the more pronounced when one notes how other ‘Third World’ figures, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, have entered the pantheon of Postcolonial Studies, while Price-Mars, the founding father of Haitian ethnological thought, remains largely uncelebrated both at home and abroad. I must admit that my own ethnological engagement, especially as regards Price-Mars’s work, is itself René Piquion takes Price-Mars to task for not having been pugnacious enough on ‘la question noire’, which for him was the issue to deal with (Piquion, 1966). 7 A comparative reading of Depestre and Piquion is necessary to better understand how they affected the public discourse of the time. 6

38

The Haiti Exception

at odds with a certain number of academic initiatives at UEH, initiatives that are representative of circumstances favourable to the development of the discipline of anthropology in Haiti.

II Among the initiatives of UEH, I would mention in particular the establishment in 2006 of the Maîtrise in ‘Histoire, mémoire et patrimoine’ [Master of Arts in History, Memory and Patrimony], a graduate degree programme created in partnership with the Université Laval8 to open up opportunities and fulfil the demand for professionals in a very specific career path dedicated to the exploration and analysis of material and immaterial cultural heritage. A professional competence in cultural heritage has become a requirement for those pursuing a career in diplomacy, particularly as part of the Ministry of Culture, and as such has played an edifying role in reinforcing both anthropology and cultural studies at the Faculty of Ethnology at UEH. In fact, this first Master’s programme has benefited the Faculty of Ethnography, since we have seen the number of ethnographers in our department multiply since its creation, which in turn, against all expectations, has inspired a renewal of the study of ethnology in Haiti. One of the main achievements, a testimony of sorts to this renewal, has been the organization in February 2012 of the international colloquium on ‘Ethnology and the construction of the political nation, the people and the citizen in Haiti’, which brought together more than fifty Haitian and foreign researchers from North America, Europe and Africa. The reputation of the department has shifted from an abandoned and neglected section of UEH to a reputed centre of learning in Haiti. In addition to the new Master’s degree in anthropology (since 2013), steps are being taken in collaboration with the deanship and the doctoral school at UEH to offer a doctorate in anthropology. Such renewal is due in large part to the Department of Anthropology/ Sociology’s desire to foster a substantial dialogue between Haitian ethnological thought and the varied approaches to the discipline of ‘anthropology’ worldwide. As a result, we are actively bringing together scholars from the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’, not only in regard to the places in which we conduct fieldwork, but also the methodologies and theoretical lenses with and through which we do our work. As such, we heed the call The Master’s was founded in collaboration with Professor Emeritus Bogumil Jewsiewicki, anthropologist and historian. As regards the Haitian context, ‘patrimony’ has become the most important of the three terms that figure in the degree’s title. 8

Transforming Ethnology

39

and follow in the footsteps of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the first contemporary Haitian anthropologist to reflexively interrogate traditional North/South relations as defined by the more prominent ways of practicing anthropology (whereby the ‘North’ studies the ‘South’, and rarely the other way around) (Trouillot, 1992, 2003).9 Despite the way in which anthropology has challenged itself to adapt its methodologies and change its ways,10 the discipline is still considered a means by which the northern countries (in Europe and North America) study mostly communities in the ‘Global South’, or ‘peoples’, those who are most marginalized within their own countries (for example, the Inuits in Canada). For a long time to come, this discipline will remain greatly marked by the major anthropological schools of thought (US-American, British and French), It is nonetheless somewhat difficult for us to claim Trouillot as a representative of the Haitian school of ethnology, even if he always made sure to identify himself as Haitian. Drawing on Jean Copans in an article on the non-existence of a scientific tradition of social anthropology in Africa, Haitian ethnology has not been very decisive in ‘la configuration sociale de [sa] personnalité professionnelle’ [the social configuration of [its] professional personality] (Copans, 2007). Trouillot, who always maintained contact with the Haitian university milieu, might have thought to transpose into the Haitian context debates in which he was implicated as an ‘American university’ anthropologist, even though the internal preoccupations (in Haiti) were far from the discussions being had in the US-American context, perhaps because they were of an orthodox Marxist bent doubled by a ‘scientism’ that were both falling out of fashion in the United States (Copans, 2007). It is worth noting that Michel-Rolph Trouillot is primarily known in Haiti as a historian. I would even dare to suggest that during this time, from the second half of the 1980s until 2003, the year in which Trouillot published Global Transformations, he was not inclined to address himself to Haitian ethnologists or anthropologists in Haiti. That said, he did meet with historians: we can cite, for example, his participation in the colloquium La Révolution française et Haïti. Filiations, ruptures, nouvelles dimensions, organized in Port-au-Prince by the Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie on 5–8 December 1989. To clarify, facing the decline of the discipline of ethnology in Haiti in the 1980s and 1990s, Trouillot had to find interlocutors elsewhere. It is only now that his work in Haiti as an anthropologist is finally finding its rightful place. 10 Anthropology began to undergo true transformations when, at the end of the 1970s, anthropologists in the North, breaking with an inclination for the ‘exotic’, started to work in the North, for example, the work of Marc Abélès on the political life of France (Jours tranquilles en 89. Ethnologie politique d’un département français, 1989) and Jeanne Favret-Saada on witchcraft in Normandy (Les Mots, la Mort, les Sorts, 1977). 9

40

The Haiti Exception

which for their part have defined geographic ‘areas’ of specialization (for example, large expanses such as ‘Africa’, ‘Asia’, ‘South America’). That said, a certain equilibrium has been re-established in North–South relationships through globalization and a certain provincializing of the West. For, as noted above, some intellectual paradigms coming from Global Southern thinkers have allowed for a certain renewal of the epistemologies of the social sciences. Contemporary debates in anthropology, initiated particularly by ‘the Postmoderns’, insist on the historical moment at which anthropology emerged as part of the colonial enterprise. In the early years of anthropology it was absolutely out of the question to imagine that the ‘natives’ might position themselves as anthropologists. From the point of view of such a ‘colonial/ izing science’, the ‘indigenous’ should only recount their daily lives, without the possibility of articulating, much less deducing, any sort of meaning or ‘interpretation’ from their own narrative processes. As is by now widely remarked (and criticized), even anthropologists who are in constant rapport with the communities among whom they conduct their fieldwork are hard pressed (still) to create academic narratives that give their ‘informers’ the voice they merit, as the critical anthropologist Fabian would phrase it, ‘le déni de co-temporalité’ [the denial of co-temporality’] (Fabian, 2006 [1983]). These anthropologists are even capable of ignoring the very existence of pedigreed ‘indigenous’ individuals, who often have been (or remain) their first and most constant interlocutors. And yet, paradoxically, even from the moment of anthropology’s first stammerings, Haitians presented themselves as anthropologists. We find them in learned societies (Fluehr-Lobban, 2005; Sibeud, 2005); they have dared to discuss theories, approaches and methodologies (Firmin, 1885); they have had the courage to produce knowledge about their own experiences, their own practices (Trouillot, 1995). Michel-Rolph Trouillot notes that ‘[u]p to the fourth decade of this century, native scholars from Haiti, Cuba or Puerto Rico were more willing than foreigners to apply the tools of anthropological analysis to the study of their own folk’ (Trouillot, 1992: 21). Had the rapport between northern anthropologists and their ‘informants’ not been reduced to a relationship of condescension, even contempt, Haitian intellectuals might have enjoyed more renown; especially if the attitude of northern intellectuals had been more encouraging, rather than one that denied, even reduced to silence the intentions of the first Haitian anthropologists.11 The case of our compatriot Bénito Sylvain, member since 1893 of the Société d’ethnographie de Paris and leader of its committee of ‘the Orient The works of these Haitian authors were published long before the establishment of anthropology in the United States, where the chair of anthropology founded 11

Transforming Ethnology

41

and Africa’ (l’Orient et l’Afrique), is just an example (Sibeud, 2005) of how Haitians were active in the discipline from very early on.

III Still today, more than three decades since the advent of critical anthropology, despite the transformations of this discipline, the importance of Haitian intellectuals who work in anthropology, who became its practitioners, is little known, especially abroad. James Clifford, historian of anthropology and one of the champions of ‘writing back’, who served as one of the editors of the collected volume which may be considered the manifesto of critical anthropology, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), completely missed (that is, ignored any mention of) the important contribution of Haitian anthropologists, notably of Anténor Firmin and Jean Price-Mars. To look for the precursors of Said’s ‘writing back’ in Orientalism, Clifford only went back to 1939, the year of publication of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land] (Clifford, 1996). Why didn’t he reach further back, for example to 1928, the year of the publication of Price-Mars’s Ainsi parla l’oncle [So Spoke the Uncle]; or to 1885, the year of the publication of both Firmin’s De l’égalité des races humaines [The Equality of the Human Races, 1885] and Duverneau Trouillot’s Le Vaudoun: aperçu historique et évolutions? If we defer to Césaire and to Senghor, they encourage us to recognize, to paraphrase Achille Mbembe, ‘Les écritures africaines de soi’ [African writings of the self], the adventure of the ‘écritures [nègres] de soi’ [the black writings of the self] (Mbembe, 2000). I modify Mbembe’s expression from ‘African’ to ‘black’ not only to include Haiti, but also to underscore the tumultuous entry of our country’s thinkers into the discipline of anthropology. In a short text of a page reprinted in Témoignages sur la vie et l’œuvre du Dr. Jean Price Mars 1876–1956, Senghor clearly expresses how he was indebted to Price-Mars for his work as a forefather of négritude (cited in Fouchard and Paul, 1956: 3). If I had to dig a little in the archives to find a text in which Senghor, one of the recognized fathers of négritude,12 pays homage to Price-Mars’s lifework, other scholars, such as Piquion (1966), have long ago acknowledged the crucial fact that Price-Mars’s masterpiece, Ainsi parla l’oncle, served as a precursor to négritude. Anthropology’s institutionalization in our universities is now over a century old, and as we think through who has been recognized within by Frantz Boas was not created until 1889, and in France, where the Institut d’Ethnologie under Marcel Mauss was not established until 1925. 12 See Wilder (2005).

42

The Haiti Exception

its canons, both colonial and postcolonial,13 and how Haiti from the very beginning has been actively engaged in the discipline, we come to realize the paradox of it all. Might there have been other possible avenues, by which Haiti’s intellectual role in the discipline of anthropology would have been better recognized? It would seem that the scientific tools that were available at the time, these paradigms of the end of the nineteenth century, as well as their twentieth-century progeny, have not left much of a choice for these compatriots but to claim their belonging to humanity, to a world supposedly ‘civilized’, whose members, whose intellectuals denied any ‘droit de cité’ [rightful place] to their Southern homologues. To contextualize the discourse of our first anthropologists, a certain historiography is vital to understanding what was at stake for them. These Haitian thinkers of the end of the nineteenth century certainly contributed to the interrogation of the project and supposed ‘scientific’ apparatus of hierarchizing ‘races’. What they did, though perhaps to their own disservice, was take Western anthropology too seriously. They weren’t able to escape the vicious circle of European universalism. They struggled to understand certain elements of Haitian culture and, most importantly, to fully accept and protect them. Their defence strategy became the ‘black race of Haiti’, ‘the black race of Africa’ – which could only put them in the position of being constantly ‘on the defence’ against its counterpoint, ‘European civilization’. In so doing, they inevitably ended up establishing the variable of ‘European civilization’ as the absolute point of reference. The case in point is that the ‘réhabilitation de l’Afrique’ [the rehabilitation of Africa] would pass through Haiti which, unlike Africa, it seemed, had better access to this supposed ‘European civilization’ (Price, 1900). Our thinkers of the nineteenth century, who appropriated both anthropology as well as a paradigm that assumed European superiority, made much more than a simple mistake. Their very non-recognition of certain elements of Haitian culture was paired with their choice, as members of the Haitian elite, to espouse what Carlo A. Célius refers to as a neocolonial ‘social model’ that excluded the popular classes (Célius, 1998). It has thus been necessary to break with this ‘modèle social haïtien’ [Haitian social model] so that the elite might pay even the slightest attention to Haitian culture. The merit of Price-Mars’s work is that he was able to crack open what had previously been their choice, as the impenetrability of this model.14 His contribution was not See Kaiama L. Glover’s preface on the establishment of an especially francophone, ‘postcolonial canon’ in Haiti Unbound (Glover, 2010). 14 Carlo Célius emphasizes that this ‘social model’ dates back to the 1801 constitution of Toussaint Louverture (Célius, 1998). 13

Transforming Ethnology

43

only scientific, but political. Before taking into account any sort of scholarly consideration of the imaginary of ‘les classes populaires’ [popular classes], he first had to recognize politically that they even existed. This political recognition is at the heart of his first book, published in 1919, La Vocation de l’élite (Byron, 2012a). The scientific contribution of the author of Ainsi parla l’oncle was decisive for the orientation of anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s. In this work, first published in 1928, Price-Mars deals with anthropology very differently from his nineteenth-century Haitian homologues. The spirit of the book is an argument for Haiti, for turning inwards, for latching on to notre différence [our difference] rather than worrying about proving that we are beings worthy to be called Human, or that we belong to Humanity. Instead, Price-Mars is more interested in the elements that make up our heritage. Price-Mars insists on our African heritage for a simple reason: to reject this heritage would be to reject the ‘classes populaires’ [popular classes] and ‘la paysannerie’ [the peasantry]. And, importantly, he is just as interested in another source of our heritage: our Amerindian patrimony.

IV The scientific contribution of Price-Mars, at its most basic, as noted above, has largely been recognized by both critics and proponents of his thought, not to mention those canonical figures who wrote after him. And yet, many critics have completely ignored the greater significance of his work for Haitian Studies. With him, a new paradigm was progressively put into place over the course of a decade15 during which he published a number of articles, of which the most important are rewritten or republished in two of his most notable works. The dissemination of Price-Mars’s work earned him great respect among his contemporaries. Many Haitian intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century associated themselves with his teachings. However, if they appropriated certain of his ideas, they did not really adhere to the more international uses of his work. Few are the specialists, among them David Nicholls, who have seized upon the ideas of Price-Mars and those of his so-called disciples. As noted above, more often than not, he is understood to be an indigéniste, even a noiriste and often an intellectual of Price-Mars actively participated in the public sphere, especially between 1916 and 1930: 1916 marks the year of his return to Haiti after spending a year in France as Plenipotentiary Ambassador; he was then elected senator to the Republic; and 1930 is the year of his failed presidential candidacy, upon which time he withdrew from politics. 15

44

The Haiti Exception

négritude.16 A closer reading of his work, especially as inscribed in its context, allows us to understand his specificity, his vision of the construction of the Haitian nation, from the epistemological point of view, its ‘culturalism’. In La Vocation de l’élite, as in Ainsi parla l’oncle, Price-Mars offers an integral vision of the nation that calls into question rather explicitly what Célius calls the ‘modèle social haïtien’. In none of its variants has Haitian nationalism ever really put into action the social mode envisioned by Price-Mars. The nation that the intellectuals of the end of the nineteenth century defended so valiantly (Firmin and others), the nation envisaged by Price-Mars’s contemporaries, who for the most part were against the American occupation, even the indigénistes’ vision of the nation – even if they are meant to espouse the ‘people’ (the noiristes, in particular) – all maintain the elite’s powerful sphere of influence. Haitian cultural identity, as Price-Mars understands it, participates in a vision of the nation that is truly ready to compromise elite privilege. Price-Mars’s conception is one of integration, and like many of his contemporaries, his work is marked, indeed, by a certain essentialism. Yet for Price-Mars, this essentialism remains strategic, whereas for his colleagues, or what some might name his so-called disciples, this essentialism becomes pathological (Byron 2012a, 2012b, 2014a). In addition to this integrative vision of the nation, we also find in Price-Mars’s work what we might identify as a form of culturalism, one that does not itself refer necessarily to US-American cultural anthropology, even if many of his citations come from this context. I would say that Price-Mars’s life writings, in their spirit, anticipate and prefigure certain orientations that Cultural Studies would establish in the 1960s. Price-Mars’s culturalism represents the epistemological variable of this new paradigm. It is articulated in its ‘recognition of the imaginary of the people’ (Byron, 2014b: 9), which clearly informs the deconstruction of the narration of the nation (which Price-Mars took on in the 1920s), while at the same time beginning to elaborate a new narrative. We can reconstitute this Price-Marsian culturalism by evoking certain categories that the author mobilizes in his major works without necessarily proceeding to their conceptualizations. The majority of these categories came to occupy a central role in the social sciences and humanities in the last decades of the twentieth century. Notably, Price-Mars draws on storytelling and narration. The importance that he gives to beliefs may be compared to the attention that critical theory, especially since the 1970s, has given to the imaginary. Similar attention is given to the social and These common preconceptions about Price-Mars persist to this day, as several of the essays in the edited volume Revisiter l’oncle, which accompanies the re-edition of Ainsi parla l’oncle make apparent (Byron, 2012). 16

Transforming Ethnology

45

political agent (Byron, 2012a). I dare to compare the paradigmatic change operated by Price-Mars in Haiti in the 1930s and 1940s with that of Richard Hoggart, one of the major figures of Cultural Studies (Hoggart 1957, 1970). As already emphasized, the prestige of Price-Mars paradoxically harmed the understanding of his work and how it has been disseminated throughout the intellectual (and not so intellectual) history of the twentieth century, especially during and around the Duvalier dictatorship. The contribution of Price-Mars to both an integrative vision of the nation and also to a form of Cultural Studies avant la lettre, have for all intents and purposes been obfuscated, especially among Haitian intellectuals, who favour instead a much less cosmopolitan interpretation of his work. As such, in the second half of the twentieth century, the culturalist heritage that Price-Mars inaugurated with the institutionalization of a Haitian ethnological intellectual tradition [l’école haïtienne d’ethnologie] was left unrealized. And sadly, tragically, the cultural/ist impact of Price-Mars’s work was reduced to almost nothing by Marxists and noiristes, even though they occupied opposite ends of the political spectrum. And a further irony: from a theoretical point of view, the influence of Price-Mars has served his legacy rather badly; yet, more practically speaking, it was initially extremely useful to him, enabling him to establish the foundations for a further development of anthropology in Haiti. From the first half of the twentieth century, his scientific contribution privileged a new paradigm in scientific thought. Then in 1941, Price-Mars founded the Institute of Ethnology (a private institution recognized as serving a public cause), which played an active part in putting into place the Bureau National d’Ethnologie. It came under the jurisdiction of the education authorities in 1956–57, and his son Louis Mars became its director, while Price-Mars himself served as Ambassador of Haiti.17 As such, with the transformation of the ‘Institut’ into the ‘Faculté’ of Ethnology in 1958, the Bureau National d’Ethnologie stood as the historical precursor to the integration of the discipline of ethnology into UEH. If we take into account the decisive role of Price-Mars, an important figure of the intellectual movements of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and strongly ‘In February 1957 Interim President Joseph Nemours Pierre-Louis sent him back to Paris as Haitian Ambassador to France. […] It goes without saying that the new President [Duvalier, like President Pierre-Louis a former student of Price-Mars at the Lycée Pétion], [elected on 22 September 1957] did not call Price-Mars back from Paris’ (Antoine, 1981: 185). Price-Mars remained Ambassador in Paris through 1960, serving through the early Duvalier years. That said, he took his distance from the new presidency, criticizing it in his 1967 writings. Duvalier was already in his eighties and quite quickly withdrew himself from the public sphere. 17

46

The Haiti Exception

influenced by anthropology (or ethnology),18 we can say confidently that UEH has been almost completely reconstituted around the notion of ethnology (even if its first institution dedicated to ethnology dates back to 1941, long after the foundation of the schools of medicine and law). The circumstances that surround Price-Mars’s appointment to the position of Chancellor of UEH took place under the presidency of Paul Eugène Magloire, confirming the importance of ethnology in the social sciences in Haiti, not to mention in higher learning in Haiti. UEH, which Dantès Bellegarde, Minister of National Education during the first years of the US-American occupation, tried to establish, finally became a reality under President Magloire, who in 1956 named Jean Price-Mars Chancellor of the university. Price-Mars officially assumed the position on 12 January 1956.19 In 1960, Price-Mars retired from his position as Chancellor, at the same time as Duvalier began to play a more important role in the management of the university. The name change of 1958, from ‘Institut’ to ‘Faculté’, is not without importance. With Duvalier’s arrival to power in 1957, the institutionalization of ethnology takes on a new dimension. The discipline espouses the work of the state through that of the university, down through the level of the faculty. The attention to its nomenclature is important: ethnology in Haiti is a faculty, that is, it isn’t an institute, nor is it a department within a larger faculty; it is a faculty in its own right. This has enormous political implications and gives ethnology a significant place in the disciplinary configuration of the University of Haiti. However, Price-Mars’s influence on ethnology did not necessarily adhere to how he would have wanted the orientations of his teachings to manifest themselves. The new apparatuses that would support the discipline of ethnology, as I have underscored throughout this essay, took place in a very particular context. Initially, it would seem, Price-Mars knew how to take In his article ‘Idéologie et mouvements politiques en Haïti, 1915–1946’, David Nicholls establishes a strong relationship between resistance to the American occupation of Haiti and what he refers to as ‘le mouvement ethnologique’ [the ethnological movement] (Nicholls, 1975). 19 See Le Matin XLIX.14591, 13 January 1956, which recounts the inauguration of the new Chancellor on Thursday 12 January 1956, and which points to Price-Mars’s arrival in Haiti for a series of events organized around his eightieth birthday (Fouchard and Paul, 1956). Price-Mars’s trip from Paris to Port-au-Prince, in January 1956, also coincides with the roundtable on ‘folklore and nationalism’ that gave rise to an intense polemic between Hénock Trouillot and Jacques Stéphen Alexis on the subject of ethnology and Vodou, closely followed by the newspapers in Port-au-Prince, notably in Optique (23 June 1956). Hénock Trouillot defended the ethnologists, and notably the important role that Price-Mars had played in the nurturing of the discipline. 18

Transforming Ethnology

47

advantage of the opportunity of the arrival to power of a former student, François Duvalier, who for his part was proud to be one of Price-Mars’s disciples. This opportunity of course had its flipside. If the presidentethnologist was an avid supporter of the faculty’s institutionalization, he would obviously be invested in orienting it in the direction he envisaged for it. The new institutional project for ethnology put into place in 1958 doubly served Duvalier’s interests. It allowed him to consolidate the hegemony of his ‘school of thought’, noirisme. But noirisme did not have to wait for Duvalier to exert its influence, for already in the mid-1940s noirisme controlled the Bureau d’ethnologie to the detriment of the Marxists;20 and from 1960 on, the movement would engage in a process of integrating an ethnological discourse in such a way as to transform itself into a veritable ideology of power. The general understanding is that ethnology flourished in Haiti under Duvalier; in fact, ethnographic practice and its scholarship actually experienced a decline from the moment the regime tried to assure its permanence. This decline must be understood in a context in which the president-ethnologist and his grand dignitaries never missed an opportunity to mobilize the discipline to their own ends. From a so-called intellectual justification through a certain mimicking of an anthropological epistemology, Duvalier would try to imbue noirisme’s racial and racialist ideology with a semblance of scientific rigour. It is no mere coincidence that the only Dean of the Faculty of Ethnology during the Duvalier years was Jean Baptiste Romain, a physical anthropologist; physical anthropology, which constituted a specialization within anthropology and was almost extinct in France and elsewhere after the Second World War, would continue to be part of the curriculum presented to students in Haiti until very recently. I have insisted on Duvalier’s decision to create an active institutional relationship with the discipline of ethnology. I have openly engaged in a topic that is often avoided; that is, an analysis of how ethnology became one of the very sources of a Duvalierist discourse of power. I have had to do so to underscore how his regime’s engagement with ethnology in 1960 represented a paradigm shift by which Duvalier would remould the nascent University of Haiti and, with this change, steer the production of knowledge in a certain direction, under his control. This process coincides – and it is essential to emphasize this fact – with Price-Mars’s withdrawal from both intellectual and political life, after his eightieth birthday. I would also like to The death of Jacques Roumain represents for many the last time, at least during his era, that Marxist scholars would try to integrate ethnology and Marxism. 20

48

The Haiti Exception

draw attention to the genealogy of the Duvalierist discourse and identify its sources in Haitian ethnology. Some of the authors who have been at the heart of Haitian ethnography, and who did not attract the attention of the Haitian Marxists, writers such as Carl Brouard, Justin Dorsainvil or Arthur Holly, were ethnologists contemporary to Price-Mars who dealt with the question of race and, to a greater or lesser extent, noirisme (Nicholls, 1971, 1975). Imagining what seems for many to be an unthinkable exit from a Haitian ethnological practice whose representation has been tarnished by Duvalier and noirisme in order to study the actual historiography of a discipline with a very long history in Haiti, is indispensable to understanding the contribution of other intellectual histories – notably the ambivalence in Haiti between, on the one hand, a Marxism reduced to the work of Jacques Roumain, and on the other, Duvalierism, often associated uniquely with Price-Mars. The refusal to accept ethnology’s complex history in Haiti has had grave consequences not only for the discipline, but more importantly for the very conditions that were supposed to assure our country’s transition to democracy in 1986 (a transition that we are still undergoing today). The popular democratic movements that arose after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship were not accompanied by an intellectual dynamism, which was the case at the time of the resistance against the US-American occupation. The cultural movement Racines [roots], which seems to have remained a form of indigénisme (Trouillot, 1993), did not have the theoretical basis and rigour to address the deficits of an intellectually weakened public sphere, a result of decades of lack of attention to and brain drain of Haiti’s once renowned and highly well-educated (even if mostly elite) intellectuals. Democratic aspirations persist alongside reactionary discourses that lead one to believe, for example, that the dictatorship is forever inscribed in our cultural identity. We won’t find the solution in the aging Marxism that continues to thrive in certain intellectual and academic circles. Yet another grave consequence of this refusal to fully recognize the more multifaceted history of ethnology is signalled by the constant crises that the Faculty of Ethnology has known since the 1990s. It would seem that this institution, which existed without problems for so long under the dictatorship is having trouble finding its role in a more democratic space ‘under construction’. In the 1980s, intellectuals and academics thought it made sense to associate the twentieth-century genealogy of ethnology, both Price-Mars’s writings and his life’s work, with Duvalierist ideology. Such a connection created greater distance between Haiti and the practice of anthropology elsewhere in the world. And it is thus that after the fall of the dictatorship, most intellectuals remained indifferent to the wealth of debates (i.e. Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies) taking place around the discipline

Transforming Ethnology

49

of anthropology in the world’s most esteemed universities (for example, we continue to interrogate the question of cultural identity in terms that are absolutely out of date). In short, this essay has served as a historical reminder, an outline of an intellectual history that illustrates how central, charged and multifaceted the discussion of ethnology and anthropology is in the context of Haitian intellectualism. Moreover, the essay has nuanced understandings of the genealogy of anthropology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, the essay sheds light on the often ignored complexity of Price-Mars’s entire life and work, as well as on present-day deliberations of the futures of anthropology. As Haitians, we must articulate for ourselves, write our own intellectual genealogies, define our own cultural differences. That said, this writing of ourselves for ourselves, of Haitian ethnology, must be marked by a constant appropriation of the theoretical tools, approaches and paradigms that are being circulated and polemicized worldwide, and that are the most appropriate to our work in Haiti. In today’s Haiti, the interrogation of how we integrate ideas from elsewhere in the world is part of the very deliberation of the discipline of ethnology, and its import is nothing short of the political, economic and social order of our country. And as such, everything must be done to ascribe to ethnology its essential role within the humanities and social sciences, in Haitian Studies and in our institutions of higher learning, particularly at the heart of the Université d’Etat d’Haïti.

Works Cited Antoine, Jacques Carmeleau. 1981. Jean Price-Mars and Haiti. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, Inc. Byron, Jhon Picard. 2012a. ‘Séquelles de l’esclavage, identité culturelle et construction de la citoyenneté en Haïti dans l’œuvre de Jean Price-Mars’. In Francine Saillant and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Afrodescendance, cultures et citoyennetés. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval: 23–42. —. 2012b. L’engagement ethnologique de Jean Price-Mars et son engagement politique. PhD thesis, Département de l’Histoire, Faculté des Lettres, Université Laval, Québec. —. 2014a. ‘La pensée de Price-Mars. Entre construction politique de la nation et affirmation de l’identité culturelle haïtienne’. In Jhon Picard Byron (ed.), Production du savoir et construction sociale. L’ethnologie en Haïti. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval; Port-au-Prince: Éditions UEH: 47–79. —. 2014b. ‘Preface’. In Emmanuel C. Paul (ed.), Panorama du folklore haïtien (Présence africaine en Haïti). Port-au-Prince: self-published: iii–ix.

50

The Haiti Exception

Célius, Carlo Avierl. 1998. ‘Le Contrat social haïtien’. Pouvoirs dans la Caraïbe 10: 27–70. Clifford, James. 1996. ‘Sur l’orientalisme’. In Malaise dans la culture. L’ethnographie, la littérature et l’art au XXe siècle. Paris: ENSB-A: 255–76. Copans, Jean. 2007. ‘Les frontières africaines de l’anthropologie. Un demi-siècle d’interpellations’. Journal des anthropologues 110–11: 337–70. Dash, J. Michael. 1981. Literature and Ideology in Haiti 1915–1961. London: Macmillan. —. 2008. ‘Fictions of Displacement: Locating Modern Haitian Narratives’. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12.3: 27–32. Depestre, René. 1968. ‘Jean Price-Mars et le mythe de l’Orphée ou les aventures de la négritude’. L’homme et la société 7.7: 171–81. —. 1980. Bonjour et adieu à la Négritude. Paris: Laffont. —. 2005. ‘Entretien avec René Depestre, par Jean-Luc Bonniol’. Gradhiva: Haïti et l’anthropologie 1: 31–45. Dominique, Max. 1989. L’arme de la critique littéraire. Littérature et idéologie en Haïti. Montréal: CIDHICA. Fabian, Johannes. 2006 [1983]. Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Firmin, Anténor. 2002. De l’égalité des races humaines (Anthropologie positive), translated into English in 2000 by Asselin Charles as The Equality of the Human Races, and retranslated by Asselin Charles and Carolyn FluehrLobban in 2002 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002 [2000, 1885]). Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 2000. ‘Anténor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology’. American Anthropologist 102.3: 449–66. —. 2005. ‘Anténor Firmin and Haiti’s Contribution to Anthropology’. Gradhiva 1: 95–108. Fouchard, Jean, and Emmanuel C. Paul. 1956. Témoignages sur la vie et l’œuvre du Dr. Jean Price Mars 1876–1956. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de l’Etat. Glover, Kaiama L. 2010. Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Mahieddin, Emir. 2011. ‘Vingt-cinq ans après Writing culture. Retour sur un âge d’or de la critique en Anthropologie’. Journal des Anthropologues 126–27: 369–83. Mbembe, Achille. 2000. ‘A propos des écritures africaines de soi’. Politique africaine 77.1: 16–43. Nicholls, David. 1971. ‘Biology and Politics in Haiti’. Race & Class 13.2: 203–14. —. 1975. ‘Idéologie et mouvements politiques en Haïti, 1915–1946’. Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 4: 654–79. Palisse, Marianne. 2008. Rapport sur l’enseignement en sociologie et anthropologie à la Faculté d’Ethnologie. Université d’État d’Haïti.

Transforming Ethnology

51

—. 2014. ‘La Faculté d’Ethnologie de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti. Des projets de Price-Mars et de Roumain à la réalité des années 2000’. In Jhon Picard Byron (ed.), Production du savoir et construction sociale. L’ethnologie en Haïti. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval; Port-au-Prince: Éditions UEH: 83–98. Piquion, René. 1966. Manuel de Négritude. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps. Price, Hannibal. 1900. De la réhabilitation de la race noire par la République d’Haïti. Port-au-Prince: J. Verrollot. Saint-Eloi, Rodney. 2009. ‘Le premier manifeste de la condition noire’. In Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l’oncle, suivi de Revisiter l’oncle. Montréal: Mémoire d’Encrier. Sibeud, Emmanuelle. 2005. ‘Comment peut-on être noir ? Le parcours d’un intellectuel haïtien de l’universalisme au panafricanisme à la fin du XIXe siècle’. Cromohs 10: 1–8. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. ‘Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness’. In Richard G. Fox, Recapturing Anthropology. Working in the Present. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press: 17–44. —. 1992. ‘The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory’. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 19–42. —. 1993. ‘Jeux de mots, jeux de classes: les mouvances de l’indigénisme’. Conjonction 197: 29–45. —. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Wilder, Gary. 2005. The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between Two World Wars. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press.

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ … Herskovits, Métraux, Race and Human Rights Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken1

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

But that was a question for Mr. Sweet, for he grew up in the atmosphere of questions of life and death: the murder of millions of people in a short period of time who lived continents away from each other; on the other hand hovering over Mrs. Sweet, though she had been made to understand it as if it were a style of a skirt, or the style of the shape of a blouse, a collar, a sleeve, was a monstrosity, a distortion of human relationships: The Atlantic Slave Trade. What is the Atlantic? What is the slave trade? So asked Mr. Sweet, and he watched Mrs. Sweet […] – Jamaica Kincaid (2013: 12) The documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness (2009) asks: ‘Who has the authority to define a culture – especially if people from that culture are denied the opportunity to engage in the scholarly discourse of defining themselves? Is there a politics of knowledge?’ (Herskovits, 2009: abstract). The interviews with historian Vincent Brown, who is also the film’s producer and director of research, and anthropologist Johnnetta B. Cole, in particular, Very special thanks to Kaiama L. Glover, Kwame Nimako, Toni Pressley-Sanon, Susanna Rosenbaum and Mark Schuller for reading through the varying iterations of this article. Part I of this chapter was inspired by the sixth chapter in Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (Lexington Books, 2015). 1

52

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

53

question the power structures of academia. Cole asserts: ‘We don’t want to be the basis on which you […] write your books and get your tenure. We want to be full participants’ (Herskovits, 2009, 51 minutes). Throughout the documentary, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Brown and Cole deliberate on their admiration for Melville Herskovits’s devotion to – and in Cole’s words, also his ‘entanglement’ in – the study of African and African-American life (Herskovits, 2009, 17 minutes), and his commitment to decolonization, but also his undercutting of W. E. B. Du Bois’s scholarship (Herskovits, 2009, 31 minutes). To answer the documentary’s overarching question, I consider how Herskovits’s and Alfred Métraux’s relationship both to Haiti and to what I refer to as their ‘Jewishness’ is related to a recent history of human rights that has at once racialized and also un-racialized ‘the Jew’,2 creating a ‘politics of knowledge’ that is fraught with complexity, ambivalence and contradictions. More specifically, I address Brown’s and Cole’s questioning of the legitimacy of a white anthropologist of Jewish heritage, such as Herskovits, ‘studying and positing’ himself as an expert on the experience of persons of African heritage throughout the Americas. As such, I consider contexts that, I argue, informed the intellectual environment in which Herskovits and Métraux worked.3 First, I look at how Haiti fits into Herskovits’s and Métraux’s professional trajectories. I also trace a history of how both Herskovits and Métraux strived to adapt anthropology to what in the 1940s and 1950s became an important moment for human rights institution-building. Informed by Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s reflections on anthropological methodologies and Samuel Moyn’s historicizing of the relationship between human rights and anti-colonialism, this article argues that Herskovits’s and Métraux’s professional trajectories exemplify the dissonances between the anthropological intellectual project and human rights institution-building. I examine how discourses of race, ‘Jewishness’ and ‘blackness’ in North America and Europe have interacted over the past decades. I consider, among other things, the fact that both Herskovits and Métraux conducted fieldwork in Haiti at a specific moment in their career, but for all intents and purposes did not significantly return to Haiti to conduct major research projects. I claim that this ‘turning away’ from Haiti had to do with a racialized politics of knowledge, which in a sense It is not generally ‘known’ that Métraux was Jewish. Métraux’s father was Swiss Protestant and his mother Jewish, born in Tiflis, Georgia. She studied medicine in Lausanne, where she met Alfred Métraux’s father. Also, his first wife, Fernande Schulmann, ‘who accompanied him to Chile, Peru, and Brazil and who planned to work with him in Paraguay’ wrote L’Enfance ailleurs – mémoires juives (1988). 3 This article does not cover the history of Jews in Haiti. See McAlister (1999). 2

54

The Haiti Exception

dictated new directions to their research. In the final part of this essay, I draw on my own experience to deliberate upon Brown’s question about who has the authority to define a culture. I conclude with a consideration of how my own mixed religious heritage might have led me to study the intellectual history of mid-twentieth-century Haiti. I reflect on the relationship that Herskovits’s and Métraux’s Jewish heritage may have had on their commitment to human rights and, moreover, the fact that human rights institution-building involves deliberations about questions of race, especially as concerns the African diaspora. As W. E. B. Du Bois asked in 1944, if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not offer provisions for ending world colonialism or legal segregation in the United States, ‘Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?’ – Alexander G. Weheliye (2014: 76)

Part I: Public anthropology and the Americas Multiple intellectual histories are manifest in the professional trajectories of Melville Herskovits and Alfred Métraux:4 scholarship on the Haitian peasantry; research on the African diaspora; humanitarian aspirations for anthropology and contact with varying milieus of anthropological practices, for example, US-American, French-based, Brazilian, Haitian and Mexican. Taking Herskovits and Métraux as central figures, the one American, the other European, I narrate what might initially seem to be rather unrelated moments in the ethnography of the Afro-Atlantic. In so doing, I focus on the prominent role Haiti has played in both US-American and French cultural anthropology, especially from the 1930s through to the early 1950s.5 I show J. Michael Dash explores how ethnographic practices have affected what he identifies as the ‘myth’ of Haitian exceptionalism (Dash, 2008: 32), commenting on the difference between Herskovits’s and Métraux’s ethnographic practices, and the resonance that these practices have had in Haitian intellectual life, especially as reflected in the work of Jacques Roumain and Dany Laferrière. Dash explains that ‘Métraux’s perspective’ involved a ‘more dynamic creolizing approach’ (Dash, 2008: 37). 5 Kate Ramsey calls this 1930s moment a ‘dramatic turn of U.S. anthropological interest toward Haiti’, and one that ‘warrants further study’ (Ramsey, 2011: 165, 329). Haiti figures as the site of a sort of exchange between France, ‘from where’ Métraux worked, and the United States, where Herskovits built his career. I use ‘from where’ to emphasize the transnational aspect of anthropological work, 4

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

55

how both Herskovits and Métraux strived to adapt anthropology to what in the 1940s and 1950s became an important discourse on human rights. In particular, I consider Du Bois’s early calls to the international community to consider human rights, civil rights and race relations under the same umbrella (Weheliye, 2014: 76). I suggest that the transformation of anthropological work on the African diaspora over the decades is directly related to the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. To contrast Herskovits’s professional biography with Métraux’s shines light on how and where anthropologists conducted their fieldwork in the Americas. It also explains why Haiti was such a ‘popular destination’ for fieldwork on the African diaspora in the Americas in the 1930s and 1940s, but was later replaced by other sites, notably Brazil. Writing in 2008, in his extensive review of Jerry Gershenhorn’s biography of Herskovits, Roy Richard Grinker, professor of social anthropology and human rights at the Elliott School of George Washington University, explains how the profession of anthropologist is always a ‘public’ one, one not only engaged in the analysis of how peoples and their communities organize themselves, but also a profession upon which both the academic and the general professional sector rely. Grinker explains that Gershenhorn’s biography of Herskovits is essential to understanding contemporary anthropological theory (Grinker, 2008: 268). More generally, he explains that anthropology, politics and personal trajectories are inextricably linked: First, young anthropologists today struggle, under the banner of ‘public anthropology’, to make the discipline meaningful to contemporary social issues, often believing that activism in anthropology is a wholly original act. They would do well to learn about people like Leslie White and Melville Herskovits. Anthropology, for them, while different in many ways from the current concept of public anthropology, was nonetheless inseparable from politics. Second, the history of anthropology was shaped as much by personal background and political experience as by intellect. Thus, we should pay careful attention to the way our own work today is informed by who we are as individuals. (Grinker, 2008: 260) In a more provocative way, Michel-Rolph Trouillot corroborates Grinker’s claim that anthropology plays a privileged role outside of academe, most notably as ‘an institutional arm of the state abroad as it was at home’, that rather especially for ethnographers such as Herskovits and Métraux, who frequently conducted fieldwork abroad. That said, their work was funded by institutions based mostly in France or the United States.

56

The Haiti Exception

than being an advisee who revises a government’s agenda, anthropology plays the consultant who more often than not is co-opted by it (Trouillot, 2003: 19). To relate Herskovits’s and Métraux’s professional trajectories to each other is to note that over the middle decades of the twentieth century the anthropological study of the African diaspora moved south along the Atlantic: from the United States and Haiti, to Brazil and, for Métraux, back to South America.6 There are several reasons why the international community, and hence the institutions that funded anthropologists’ work, took an interest in Haiti in the 1930s to 1960s. The first was and continues to be security concerns, especially the fortification of areas geographically proximate to the United States. The second political concern corresponded to a more international humanitarian agenda. Marcos Chor Maio, a historian of the social sciences in Brazil, writes: UNESCO had been established following the catastrophic results of World War II. One of its major goals was to understand the international conflict and its most perverse consequence, the Holocaust. The issue of race was also kept in the forefront of public attention by the persistence of racism, especially in the United States and South Africa, the emergence of the Cold War, and the disruption of colonialism in Africa and Asia. […] To this end, UNESCO encouraged in the early 1950s a cycle of studies about Brazilian race relations. (Chor Maio, 2005: 144) Chor Maio indicates that in the first years of the institutionalization of human rights after the Holocaust, issues of racial discrimination were also explicitly considered by UNESCO. The third factor, which offers a context for Haiti’s changing place in the research agendas of foreign scholars, has to do with the tension between ‘civil rights’ and ‘human rights’, whereby civil rights are ‘those rights that one enjoys by virtue of citizenship in a particular nation or state’ and ‘human rights’ are the ‘most fundamental rights’ (HG Legal Sources, 2015). In a post-Second World War and post-Holocaust context, the United States emerged as a hero, having liberated Europe from the Nazis, and so played an important role in determining the direction taken by human rights discourse and its institutions. Yet, domestically, it became more and more clear that the US had its own problems assuring civil rights for black Americans. As such, Métraux’s work from the late 1920s and throughout his career was dedicated to indigeneity in the Americas. He contributed multiple entries to the Handbook of South American Indians, edited by Julian H. Steward and published by the Smithsonian Institution 1940–47. He also spent much of his early childhood in Argentina, where his parents lived. 6

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

57

at the same time that the United States was actively contributing to drafting the UDHR, it confronted an extremely volatile public discourse on race in the Civil Rights Movement. In other words, while the US served as a major player in defining infringements of human rights at an international level, it was committing its own crimes against humanity at home. Given the aforementioned three variables in terms of ‘the politics’ surrounding research funding, in tracing Herskovits’s and Métraux’s career paths, I suggest that the hypocrisy that underlay the tension between ‘human rights’ and ‘civil rights’ informed how funding was accorded to scholars, scholars’ research agendas and, as a result, where they conducted their fieldwork. Herskovits’s and Métraux’s research, the professional positions they occupied, and their funding sources offer clues to a better understanding of Haiti’s place within the intellectual history of cultural anthropology. To illustrate how and why Haiti figured as such an important site for field research of the African diaspora, and why it later became less prominent for American and French anthropologists, I will note significant moments first in the life of Herskovits and then in that of Métraux. I will follow with some conclusions that relate the two men’s biographies to the aforementioned political issues that informed the most active parts of their respective careers. Herskovits and Métraux: two career paths In 1923, Herskovits received his PhD under Franz Boas’s aegis; just four years later, he established the Anthropology Department at Northwestern University; in 1928, he travelled to Haiti for the first time with his wife Frances (Ramsey, 2011: 165); in the summer of 1934, he and his wife conducted fieldwork in Mirebalais, Haiti; in 1935, Katherine Dunham received funding from the Guggenheim to work with Herskovits and, in that same year, Herskovits began to correspond with Arthur Ramos, a Brazilian psychologist and anthropologist (Guimarães, 2008–09: 53–79). In 1937, Herskovits published Life in a Haitian Valley. Also in 1937, he offered Métraux ‘a salary of $2,700 to take up a six-month course at Northwestern’ (Guimarães, 2008: 65). In 1941, Herskovits published The Myth of the Negro Past, in which he clearly stated his intention to build ‘scientific knowledge of what has happened to this African cultural heritage in the New World’ (Herskovits, 1941: 54). In the same year, Métraux and his wife Rhoda travelled to Haiti for the first time, with a letter of introduction from Herskovits to Jean Price-Mars (Ramsey, 2011: 211). Métraux met Haitian writer and communist activist Jacques Roumain and they developed the idea of establishing the Bureau d’Ethnologie (Ramsey, 2011: 210, 212). At this same time, Herskovits conducted fieldwork in Brazil, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation on, amongst other topics, spirit possession in Candomblé (Guimarães, 2011: 55).

58

The Haiti Exception

His collaborations with Ramos in Brazil contributed to the creation of the Inter-American Society for Black Studies. Sociologist Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães explains the context: They [Herskovits and Ramos] both took part in this project [i.e. research on studies in race relations, funded by UNESCO] along with Fernando Ortiz, Richard Pattee, Jean Price-Mars, and others, and the project led to the creation of the Inter-American Society for Black Studies, whose headquarters were eventually established in Mexico in 1944. From 1945 their letters dealt with subjects relating to the exchange of books, to the publication of the translation of Herskovits’s book Acculturation: The Study of Culture Contact (1938). (Guimarães, 2011: 55) In 1948, in the United States, Herskovits established the first major program in Africana Studies at Northwestern University with funding from the Carnegie Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Research agendas, especially those in American universities, now turned their attention to better understanding ‘blackness’ in the Americas. At the same time, just after the Second World War, Herskovits’s reputation as an anthropologist was called into question over a series of methodological and political interventions. He became, as J. Cameron Carter describes him, the ‘odd man out’ (Carter, 2008: 131). Already in 1939, with the publication of The Myth of the Negro Past, his work had come under significant criticism from E. Franklin Frazier, ‘the most famous black sociologist of the time, who had already published The Negro Family in the United States’ (Sansone, 2011: 48).7 The social and political implications of Herskovits’s work, as Boas’s before him, was always ‘dwarfed’ by the social project proposed by sociologists such as Frazier or Robert E. Park. His work towards what anthropologist Lee Baker calls the ‘heritage project’ was constantly undermined by the ‘uplift project’ of which Frazier was one of the most influential proponents (Baker, 2010: 27). Baker explains that twentieth-century discussions of race in the United States revolved around a debate – that between the ‘uplift’ and the ‘heritage’ ‘projects’ – which dates to the first half of the century, and which has persisted in both discussions and policymaking concerning race (Baker, 2010: 28). The debate revolved around the implications of asserting the legitimacy and importance of Black American culture. The question was framed around

Frazier ‘rejected most of Herskovits’s evidence for African survivals in the United States’, or at least discredited the ‘scientific’ significance of Herskovits’s research, ‘while conceding that there were African survivals in language and the arts’ (Gershenhorn, 2004: 113).

7

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

59

whether or not Black Americans even had a culture, an avatar of the extreme racism that imbued public intellectual space, and, if they did: was it worth salvaging, protecting or cultivating? The answer to the question was not empirical but political. Whether one labels it the Herskovits/ Frazier debate or the Boas/Park division, two different discourses animated competing racial politics of culture, and both are woven into the genealogy and history of race in America. One pivoted on the value of cultural heritage, the other on racial uplift. (Baker, 2010: 24). Boas’s work to show that ‘racial inequality was not based on biological inferiority’ underlay both political projects (Baker, 2010: 24). Boas himself advocated for an appreciation of African-American culture as an ‘amalgamation of African and European culture’ (cited by Baker, 2010: 25), whereas Park argued that a specific African-American culture did not exist and thus the success of the African-American depended on her/his willingness and ability to assimilate to (white) American culture. In other words, the ‘cultural heritage’ project was the thought system that undergirded Boas’s and Herskovits’s work. It translated into social and public policy as such: if the existence of a specific African-American culture could be empirically proven, then it would create an argument upon which African-Americans could claim that the public sphere and legal institutions needed to take responsibility for ‘the history of slavery, racism, disfranchisement, and segregation’ (Baker, 2010: 27). In contrast, the ‘uplift project’, favoured in Frazier’s and Park’s research, argued that all African culture had been lost over the centuries and as such the ‘behaviours’ of African-Americans (i.e. ‘high rates of crime, disease, and poverty’) ‘became indelible signs of deviant behaviour or a pathological culture’ (Baker, 2010: 27). Science, race relations and human rights: from Haiti to Brazil Given a context in which the very methodologies of Herskovits’s research were called into question, when Herskovits tried to inform the discussion around the drafting of the UDHR, as the below will illustrate, the decisionmakers largely ignored his concerns. Herskovits’s biggest perceived misstep came in the form of the ‘Statement on Human Rights’, which he drafted for the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and submitted (on behalf of the AAA) to the Commission on Human Rights on 26 June 1947 (Gershenhorn, 2004: 296), and which ‘aroused tremendous controversy among anthropologists’ (Gershenhorn, 2004: 21). In his biography of Herskovits, Gershenhorn cites Herskovits’s ‘Statement’: the UDHR must guarantee ‘the right of men to live in terms of their own traditions’ (Gershenhorn, 2004: 21). The debate revolved around the

60

The Haiti Exception

moral implications of ‘cultural relativism’,8 which Herskovits advocated, insisting that when one society holds or has historically held more political and economic power than another, it should not impose its own societal behaviours onto that other society. Yet, just coming out of the Second World War, to apply ‘cultural relativism’ to a discourse of human rights was in a sense to morally condone questionable behaviour.9 Mark Goodale’s introduction to a 2006 edited volume of American Anthropologist dedicated to the history of human rights and anthropology explains that after Herskovits’s ‘Statement on Human Rights’, anthropology itself has looked more critically at how it might influence human rights discourse and institution-building since the 1980s. He explains that at the time Herskovits wrote the Statement, the American Anthropological Association endorsed it, though he definitely ‘disappoint[ed]’ UNESCO, which ‘had assumed that Herskovits would legitimate the proposed declaration of human rights by pronouncing it a necessary and proper expression of certain basic and universal moral facts’ (Goodale, 2006: 1).10 That said, even anthropologists had reservations about the Statement because, as a social science, anthropology’s duty is to ‘describe’ not to ‘contribute to a project that required normative judgments to be made about particular cultural practices as they stood in relation to the set of universal rights’ of the UDHR (Goodale, 2006: 1). It wasn’t until the 1980s, with the ‘blurring of boundaries between research, representation, and political action on behalf of subaltern populations’ that the AAA would assert itself ‘as a human rights nongovernmental organization’ (Goodale, 2006: 4). At the time, Du Bois openly identified another problem related to the drafting of the UDHR: that of race. Not one of the drafters of the UDHR was ‘African’ or ‘African-American’ (United Nations, 2015).11 A few years later, in a separate document, UNESCO turned explicitly to the question Cultural relativism considers a given societal behaviour as a function of that particular society. In other words, what makes sense for one society might not make sense for another; while societies might be unequal in power relations, they are all equal ‘culturally’. 9 As international relations theorist Jack Donnelly has argued, the ‘international consensus represented by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Human Rights Covenants, in the conditions of the modern world, support a weak cultural relativist approach to human rights; that is, an approach that views human rights as prima facie universal, but recognizes culture as a limited source of exceptions and principles of interpretation’ (Donnelly, 1984: 402). 10 As yet, I have not found any evidence to show that Métraux was the person to ‘invite’ Herskovits to ‘endorse’ the UDHR. 11 The nine drafters were: Charles Malik (Lebanon), Alexandre Bogomolov (USSR), Peng-chun Chang (China), René Cassin (France), Eleanor Roosevelt 8

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

61

of race, commissioning a statement – ‘The Race Question’, which, due to controversy, appeared in different versions published in 1950, 1951, 1964 and 1967 (UNESCO, 1969).12 It was in these years and in response to the polemics surrounding each draft of ‘The Race Question’ that institutional funding from UNESCO was earmarked for research on ‘Black Studies’ in the Americas, and later ‘race relations’ (Chor Maio, 2001). Moreover, it was Métraux who coordinated the international team of scholars that produced the definitive UN ‘Statement on Race’ (1951)’ (Prins, 2005). Harald E. L. Prins writes, ‘[a]s a direct offshoot of the 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” it [the ‘Statement on Race’] sought to dismantle any scientific justification or basis for racism and proclaimed that race was not a biological fact of nature but a dangerous social myth’ (Prins, 2005).13 For Moyn, despite the concerted efforts of the international community after the Second World War to harmonize a discourse of human rights and create initiatives to promote them, it was not until the latter part of the twentieth century that these initiatives had any significant import; it was not in fact until the 1970s that the language of ‘human rights’ actually made sense as a political discourse for any of the world’s nations and/or communities (Moyn, 2010: 47). Following Moyn’s claims, regardless of anthropologists’ criticism of Herskovits and the AAA’s ‘Statement on Human Rights’, the discussion around them, especially in the United States, died out very quickly after the Second World War (Moyn, 2010: 47). It thus becomes clearer why Herskovits became the ‘odd man out’ (Carter, 2008: 131) because, amongst other reasons, he was working in a post-war US-American space that was resistant to making real changes in racial relations, and whose policymaking was incapable of integrating ‘social freedom in the state’ (Carter, 2008: 131). As Baker’s research on the tension between the ‘heritage’ and ‘uplift’ projects shows, it was more convenient for the US-American public sphere to deny African-Americans ‘a complicated cultural identity’ (Baker, 2010: 26): the reasoning was that without a proper or legitimate culture, there was less of .

(USA), Charles Dukes (UK), William Hodgson (Australia), Hernan Santa Cruz (Chile) and John P. Humphrey (Canada). 12 The four Statements are named ‘Statement on Race’ (Paris, 1950), ‘Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences’ (Paris, 1951), ‘Proposals on the Biological Aspects of Race’ (Moscow, 1964) and ‘Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice’ (Paris, 1967). 13 The 2001 World Conference against Racism, known as Durban I, held in South Africa was meant to address the lacunae related to racism and human rights institution-building. For references surrounding the debates, see Faye Harrison (2008) and Leith Mullings (2008).

62

The Haiti Exception

an argument upon which to justify that African-Americans could claim they were victims of human rights abuses. In blunter terms, the ‘uplift project’ believed that were African-Americans to assimilate to Euro-North American culture, they would no longer suffer from social ills. While Herskovits aspired to a more prominent role in the post-war international community, Métraux already occupied a position as a public anthropologist well before his publication of Voodoo in Haiti (1959 [1958]). As previously mentioned, his 1948–50 work in Haiti was funded by UNESCO, and in 1950 Métraux became a permanent member of UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences, director of research for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and headed UNESCO’s ‘Race Division’ in Paris (Prins, 2005). It is thus in large part thanks to Métraux that UNESCO even paid attention to the question of race.14 In 1951, Métraux joined forces with Herskovits and Roger Bastide, a French sociologist, anthropologist and researcher of Brazilian Candomblé, to support African-American anthropologist Katherine Dunham when she was ‘denied admittance to a hotel because she was Black’ in São Paulo. ‘This episode of racial discrimination opened a series of congressional discussions about an antidiscrimination law, approved in 1951, the so-called Alfonso Arinos law’ (Chor Maio, 2005: 166, 168). In that same year, Métraux conducted research in Brazil. In 1947, Herskovits had created controversy over the ‘Statement on Human Rights’, but by 1950 Métraux had secured himself a permanent position at UNESCO, and had actively dedicated himself to integrating racial discrimination into human rights discourse. In other words, Métraux – as the scholar who worked ‘internationally’, outside of the fraught sociopolitical US-American context of domestic race relations – was given a significant position in the public sphere to pursue his commitment to human rights, while Herskovits’s influence on public discourse began to diminish.15 Whereas many of the research projects led by US-American scholars were funded during the US-American occupation of Haiti from 1915–34, in the years following the occupation, US-Americans paid less attention to Haiti. French intellectuals who were exiled from the Vichy government in France spent time in Haiti during and immediately after the Second World War, It is also significant that Métraux left UNESCO’s offices in New York for Paris in 1950, inviting speculation that the United States was not capable of deliberating the ‘race question’ at home (Prins, 2005). 15 In Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, Brown explains that Herskovits was considered by the Kennedy administration to head the Bureau of African Affairs, but was rejected because his ‘advocacy for social justice’ and his commitment to decolonization compromised the US policy agenda (Herskovits, 2009, 45 minutes). 14

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

63

notably André Breton, Pierre Verger and Pierre Mabille, who served as the cultural attaché for ‘la France libre’ in Haiti (Berthet, 2008: 99). Later, in the interests of US-American foreign policy, Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime made Haiti stable, insofar as his ascendancy to power assured the United States that Haiti would not become a breeding ground for communism. As such, funding academic research in Haiti became less of a necessity for US policymakers. In addition, the volatility of the Civil Rights Movement shifted attention from research on the African diaspora to research on race relations. For a research agenda interested in learning more about ‘blackness’, one that equated skin colour with ‘cultural’ influences, Haiti, as stereotypically one of the most ‘African’ places in the Americas,16 provided the most obvious avatar of the preservation of ‘African’ cultural behaviours in the Western hemisphere (whereas, exigencies of a research agenda interested in improving race relations found more resonance in Brazil, where different ‘races’ supposedly cohabited within the same population).17 I suggest, then, that, generally speaking, research funding from the United States ‘moved south’, and as such, scholars’ research trajectories moved from Haiti to Mexico, and then to Brazil. Blackness is not just, or even about, African ancestry. It’s about ­racialization and the ascription of blackness. – Stephen Small (2009: xxv–xxvi)

Part II: Haitian Intellectualism: An Epistemology for Accountability I worked on this essay over the course of 2014 and 2015, a year in which throughout the world, as Gina Athena Ulysse reminds us, ‘Being Black, these days, means living in constant state of siege’ (Ulysse, 2015: 18 June). In the midst of writing, I knew that this ‘denial about the targeting of In The Myth of the Negro Past, Herskovits provides a ‘scale’, ‘a kind of chart indicating the extent to which the descendants of Africans brought to the New World have retained Africanisms in their cultural behavior’. According to Herskovits, the first place/persons on the scale ‘after Africa itself’ are ‘the Bush Negroes of Suriname’, then ‘their Negro neighbors on the coastal plains of the Guianas’ and, thirdly, ‘[n]ext on our scale we should undoubtedly place the peasants of Haiti’ (Herskovits, 1941: 25). 17 Luso-tropicalism, a term introduced by sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900–87), proposes, among other questionable claims, that persons of different races in Brazil coexist democratically and hence harmoniously. 16

64

The Haiti Exception

black bodies and the state of racism in this hemisphere, and in the world’ (Ulysse, 2015: 3 July) had everything to do with the questions brought up in Brown’s documentary about Herskovits’s right as a person of Jewish heritage to establish himself as an expert of the black experience in the Americas. It was not until I compared Métraux’s and Herskovits’s paths that I began to understand – and to seriously deal with – the fact that a ‘politics of knowledge’, especially where a human rights agenda is concerned, has privileged the Jewish experience over that of Afro-descended persons. I wondered then how Herskovits’s and Métraux’s Jewishness – that is, being of Jewish heritage in the mid-1900s – might have informed their dedication of important moments in their careers to advocating that human rights institution-building pay attention to issues of race. In reflecting on my own relationship with my research on Haiti, I suggest that, as persons of Jewish heritage, they were perhaps extremely aware of the often subtle and extremely dangerous mechanisms of racialization and racism. That Jews in Europe and the Americas were more negatively and tragically racialized in the past than they are today might explain Herskovits’s and Métraux’s understanding of the lived experience of racism. It is within this context that, in this second part of the essay, I consider how Haitian intellectualism might have informed the two ethnographers’ advocacy for the inclusion of questions of race in human rights initiatives and scholarship, especially as these initiatives related to communities of the African diaspora. I propose that Haitian intellectualism, especially that informed by Vodou thought, at once ‘remembers’ a time that was not yet so ‘immutably’ racialized (Weitz, 2003: 97),18 and offers a space in which the Eric D. Weitz’s general deliberation about the function of race in the modern nation-state and Laurent Dubois’s more specific historical work about race in revolutionary Saint-Domingue illustrate that the establishment of Haiti as a nation-state took place at a transitional moment in transatlantic thinking about race and nation, at a time when racial thinking had not yet become the dominant organizational mode in the Americas. As such, Vodou thought is inscribed, I argue in my previous work, with a memory of a time before race had become a defining principle of citizenship. Weitz argues that one of the defining factors of the modern nation-state is the imposition of ‘inheritable and sometimes immutable’ variables for citizenship (Weitz, 2003: 97). If Weitz refers to modernity as the key moment in which the concepts of ‘race’ and the ‘nationState’ were developed and took hold, then it is not surprising that in the 1790s and the first decade of the 1800s, Haiti’s constitutions, as Sibylle Fischer’s work shows (Fischer, 2004: 239), struggled against the ‘immutability’ of the category of race. Dubois’s historical work on the revolutionary French Antilles corroborates Weitz’s more general claims about the modern nation-state. Dubois traces ‘both 18

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

65

relationship between power and race may be deliberated more frankly than in the current atmosphere of academic thought. I use my own scholarly experience to surmise how Haiti might have figured into Herskovits’s and Métraux’s intellectual landscapes. Besides designating a place where Herskovits and Métraux spent significant time at a certain moment of their lives doing field research, which for each resulted in a book, there is little in their work, of which I am aware, which I can cite, and which explicitly suggests that Haiti informed their commitment to asserting that the Africana experience be included within human rights discourse. In deliberating on my own experience studying Haitian literature, I reflect on the politics of knowledge that has altered the racial standing of ‘Jewishness’ over the past decades as related to my investment in Haitian Studies. Jewishness and blackness In what follows, I suggest that the status of ‘Jews’ has transformed from a racialized group whose culture was deemed threatening or inferior to a white order into a group that has, in certain sectors of the public sphere achieved a status of ‘whiteness’. As such, I deliberate upon how my own interest in ‘studying Haiti’ might be related to what Matthew Frye Jacobson refers to in the context of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US as ‘the instability of race’ (Jacobson, 1998: 139).19 Karen Brodkin traces the inclusion of Jews by institutions in the public sphere to specific ‘federal programs’ which created ‘the conditions whereby the abilities of Jews and other European immigrants could be recognized and rewarded rather than denigrated and denied’ (Brodkin, 2014: 50). She writes, ‘I want to suggest that Jewish success how the meaning of race changed through emancipation and how forms of racial identification and hierarchy were maintained in the midst of a regime in principle based on racial equality’ (Dubois, 2003: 95–96). In describing the revolutionary French Antilles, Dubois historicizes the impossibility, despite best intentions, of eradicating racializing techniques. In other words, while the rights afforded to specific racial groups might have been provisional, the fact of ‘race’ as a principle of social organization was inevitable. 19 Kwame Anthony Appiah explains in Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness that in the late nineteenth century, ‘the Jews begin to be thought of not primarily as a community of people of a distinct faith, but increasingly as a people of distinct bodily type, a racial group’ (Herskovits, 2009: 12 minutes). Jacobson traces a history of a US-American context in which Jews were mostly not considered ‘black’, but were racialized in the sense that they were not considered as white as other whites. Jacobson explains that there were, among other groups, such as the Irish and Italian immigrants to the US, ‘whites of a different colour’, and that ‘the Jews’ in particular had a ‘look’ (Jacobson, 1998).

66

The Haiti Exception

is a product not only of ability but also of the removal of powerful social barriers to its realization’ (Brodkin, 2014: 40). While she reminds her reader that ‘[r]acism in general, and anti-Semitism in particular, flourished in higher education’, she also notes that between her own generation and that of her parents, ‘Jews [became] just as white as the next white person’ (Brodkin, 2014: 43). Most importantly, Brodkin explains that at the same time that Jews were being increasingly welcomed into the public sphere, African-Americans continued to be actively discriminated against: ‘The record is very clear. Instead of seizing the opportunity to end institutionalized racism, the federal government did its level best to shut and double-seal the postwar window of opportunity in African Americans’ faces’ (Brodkin, 2014: 50). As sociologist and economist Kwame Nimako suggests, the very concept of race is based on a system of relationality whereby the mode of comparison is based on how ‘problematic’ a given ‘race’ is to the white order (Nimako, 2014: 55). Drawing on scholar of African and Islamic Studies Ali Mazrui, Nimako explains that ‘among the most brutalized in modern history were the Jews and Gypsies in the Nazi Holocaust’ (Mazrui as cited by Nimako, 2001: 107). Since within ‘the “race” question’, ‘the Black was framed and labeled as […] the problem people’ (Nimako, 2014: 55), the mode of suffering that prevails for the Black as compared to the Jew is marked by ‘the inferiority complex of the black person arising from the history of humiliation’ (Nimako, 2014: 56). Nimako’s discussion looks at Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, suggesting that humiliation inspires revolt as a means to reclaim dignity. The storyline characterizing Jews is that they have been ‘the most brutalized’, whereas the narrative for Blacks is that they have been the most degraded (Nimako, 2014: 55). Where the contemporary public sphere, for the most part, finally respectfully recognizes the reality of the Nazi Holocaust, it does not accord similar acknowledgment to the brutality of slavery. As long as race is based on a system of relationality, with the analytic of ‘white’ dominating the discourse of power, groups that find themselves occupying different places on the racialized scale of relationality will (be obliged to) compare themselves, and even to compare the modes of each other’s sufferings. And, yes, while the experiences of oppression have been ‘shared’, in the words of the abstract for the documentary on Herskovits, the aftermaths, as Brodkin’s work illustrates, have not. Moreover, the academic and media attention given to European Jews’ experience of the Holocaust is for the most part taken seriously (unlike, for example, claims of reparations for the multiple Holocausts of persons of African heritage in the centuries of colonialism, slave trading and slavery). For Nimako, the divergent histories obviously have to do with how Europe has represented blackness, but it also has to do with ‘the underpinning

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

67

schema of the Black in Africana knowledge formation in Europe’, in an intellectual tradition that ‘does not deviate from the concerns of “race” and humiliation’ (Nimako, 2014: 61). Combining Nimako’s analysis of African diasporic intellectual traditions, Mazrui’s comparison of narrative modes of recounting collective experiences of suffering, and Brodkin’s anthropological work on contemporary Jewishness in the United States, it is clear that the ways Jews have been portrayed within the public sphere has changed over the decades, ‘deviating’, using Nimako’s word, from being perceived as only a ‘race’ and moving away from narratives that are predicated on humiliation. Certain public spheres, such as New York or Paris, have allowed ‘Jews’ to reclaim at once rights and dignity. The same cannot be said for how these same public spheres address the sufferings and claims to rights of black Europeans or persons of African descent in the Americas. Vodou, accountability and the modern human In every draft of this essay, I have found myself at a loss as to how to compose a narrative that is at once non-hypocritical, but also corresponds to the exigencies of academic writing. I was grateful to Hoon Song’s article ‘Seeing Oneself Seeing Oneself: White Nihilism in Ethnography and Theory’, because in it Song identifies the sources of my frustration. Song reflects on how the French intellectual sphere – especially as it has been disseminated in the context of US-American social sciences through the enormous popularity of Michel Foucault’s œuvre – has nurtured a ‘loose assemblage of exaggerated self-loathing aesthetics’, that he names, drawing on Annalee Newitz’s term, ‘white nihilism’ (Song, 2006: 472). The article spoke to me because it corroborated Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s claim that most, if not all cultural anthropology, especially that conducted by white anthropologists studying people and communities in what is framed as the ‘global south’, despite the apparent worthiness of self-reflexivity, nonetheless engages in recasting, redrawing and rewriting the contours of a highly racialized ‘Savage slot’ (Trouillot, 2003). The questions posed by the documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, which interrogates Herskovits’s right to have defined his academic career around studying black life in the Americas, have hovered and still hover in the background of my questioning of my own engagement in Haitian Studies. Do I have the right to study Haitian literature? And to what end? For how long? Should I engage in another research project after my first book, or should I turn my attention to ‘other’ literatures? Brown’s questions, and my own work comparing Herskovits to Métraux, made me realize that, at the very least, any effort on my part to interrogate my whiteness without also interrogating my Jewishness would be in vain. Most importantly, I

68

The Haiti Exception

did not know how to bypass the broken-record whining of what Soon names ‘exaggerated self-loathing aesthetics’ (Song, 2006: 472). The answer to beginning to find a way to articulate my engagement in Haitian Studies has come from my commitment to Haitian intellectualism. In my recent research, particularly in my literary analysis of Jean-Claude Fignolé’s novels Possédés de la pleine lune (1987) and Aube tranquille (1990), I argue that Fignolé’s prose historicizes the transition from a non-racial order to a racialized one, while at the same time putting forth Vodou as a thought system that struggles against race as a contemporary sociopolitical reality (Benedicty, 2015: 292–95). More generally, drawing on Judith Butler, I claim that spirit possession in Vodou, as an ethical and intellectual practice and in its necessary relationship to community, marries the exigency ‘to take account’ of the harsh realities of a situation – whether highly individual or highly communal (i.e. globalization) – with the notion of ‘accountability’ (Benedicty, 2015: 196–97). I suggest that the history of Haitian intellectualism deals directly with the complex relationship between ‘taking account of’ one’s being-in-the-world and ‘being accountable for’ it. If one accepts that Haitian thought is informed at some level by Vodou history and practice, then Vodou or Vodou-informed intellectualism privileges equilibrium as a motivating principle. In other words, one’s physical body (kò kadav), one’s soul or psyche (gwo bon anj), and one’s individual traits or personality (ti bon anj) exist in relation to the larger fabric of animal and mineral life, that is: a collective physical body (which includes nature and the lived environment), a collective psyche and a communal identity (Crosley, 2006). Given the important space Vodou thought ascribes to embodied wisdom as intellectual knowledge, part of the process of ‘taking account’ of oneself is the literal taking account of one’s physical body, the kò kadav. As such, Haitian intellectual tradition demands that an individual and also the society to which that individual belongs take account of race, not only passively, but that they deal with race in an action-based way. In other words, to be aware of the flesh – whether as a kò kadav in Vodou thought, or as habeas viscus in Alexander G. Weheliye’s call for Africana thought to be part of any consideration of the modern human – is part of being an intelligent person (Weheliye, 2014: 32). As such, effortfully deploying a Haitianist perspective as part of my own professional praxis has enabled me to enter into a space of what Colin Dayan identifies as the reciprocity of Vodou ethics (Dayan, 1998 [1995]: 24), where I don’t need to ‘dodge’ the race question or, worse, to find myself entrenched in a theoretical discourse that Trouillot discredits outright: ‘We have gained absolutely nothing conceptually on the race-culture relation […]. It has become a theoretical refuge’ (Trouillot, 2003: 106). Instead, in

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

69

employing a Haitianist and, I would argue, a Haitianist Vodou philosophical perspective, I am provided with a vocabulary and a code of ethics for working through and against what Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel name Vodou’s struggle against ‘the twin scourges of colonialism and racism’ (Bellegarde-Smith and Michel, 2013: 477). Herskovits and Métraux occupied esteemed positions in academe and in the public sphere. At some level, maybe Herskovits was aware that he benefited from privileges resulting from government support provided to Jews to assist their upward social mobility in the United States, or maybe Métraux felt that the new institutions dedicated to human rights were more committed to the human rights of Jews than Blacks. I suggest that, for better or worse, informed by an experience of race that was neither ‘black’ nor ‘white’, as ‘Jews’, Herskovits and Métraux understood that they had a responsibility to assess their racial positionality as regards the politics of knowledge.20 Moreover, they also knew that a true ‘anthropology’, that is, a holistic study of humanness and humanity, could not be undertaken without a consideration of race. Herskovits and Métraux might not have succeeded, their attempts might have been maladroit or even methodically or ethically questionable, but their life trajectories show that they participated actively in the fraught terrain designated by Weheliye, which understands that any understanding of the ‘modern human’ must consider what blackness means not just to black persons, not just to communities, such as Jews, who were once much more racialized than they are today, but to all groups of people, to all ‘humanities’. Whether or not Herskovits and Métraux succeeded in being as ethically responsible as they might have been is debatable, but they did attempt, at some level, to ‘take both account of’ and ‘be accountable for’ how they as individuals, individuals who were Jewish in a pre- and post-Holocaust While suicide might be considered a defeatist position, it might also be read as an ultimate stepping out of a ‘politics of knowledge’ to which Métraux felt he could no longer contribute positively. Of course, the aforementioned is an extreme reading, yet Lorenzo Macagno’s work on Métraux suggests that, in fact, Métraux’s suicide had a direct relationship to his professional life. Macagno explains that upon receiving his position at UNESCO, Métraux expressed his trepidations in a letter to Pierre Verger, with whom he sustained a lifelong epistolary friendship. Macagno recounts that Métraux feared becoming a ‘bureaucrat’, no longer returning to the field (Macagno, 2013: 225), describing Métraux as a sort of permanent ‘expatriate’, who without ‘the field’ always felt ill at ease in the world (Macagno, 2013: 218). Further on in his article, Macagno cites Métraux noting, in a UNESCO courrier, the relationship between his own professional ‘privilege’ in life and a certain urgency towards death (Macagno, 2013: 218), maybe an obligation to pass on because one is possibly too privileged. 20

70

The Haiti Exception

era, interacted with both the white status quo and those who did not and still do not benefit from the respect accorded to Jews by the intellectual and larger general public sphere.21 And I suggest that the fact that they even tried ‘to be accountable’, as I have discussed above, has everything to do with their exposure to Haitian intellectual thought. At the end of her introduction to Guy Endore’s novel Babouk, Jamaica Kincaid writes, ‘I think that every white writer should write a book about black slavery, as I think every writer who is not a Jew should write a book about the Holocaust’ (Kincaid, 1991: viii). The Atlantic Slave Trade and its aftermaths over the centuries reveal multiple Holocausts of black Americans. As Cole and Brown, and Kincaid too in See Now Then, suggest (see the epigraph to this essay), raising awareness among Whites is important, but more important is that the sufferings of the African diaspora in the Americas be acknowledged rightfully and respectfully by the larger public sphere and official institutions such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. And as for myself? As Brodkin’s work and Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness show, the times have changed. I do not belong to the same era as Herskovits and Métraux, and as such I must determine my place in academe differently. Se kouto sèlman ki konnen sa ki nan kè yanm – ‘Only the knife knows what is in the yam’s heart’.

Works Cited Baker, Lee D. 2010. Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick, and Claudine Michel. 2013. ‘Danbala/Ayida as Cosmic Prism: The Lwa as Trope for Understanding Metaphysics in Haitian Vodou and Beyond’. Journal of Africana Religions 1.4: 458–87. Benedicty-Kokken, Alessandra. 2015. Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Berthet, Dominique. 2008. André Breton, l’Eloge de la rencontre: Antilles, Amérique, Océanie. Paris: HC Editions. Brodkin, Karen. 2014. ‘How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says about Race in America’. In Paula S. Rothenberg and Kelly S. Mayhew (eds), Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study, 9th ed. New York: Worth Publishers: 39–53. Were I to write this article over again, I would conduct far more archival research into Métraux’s correspondence and the general communication that Herskovits and Métraux conducted with their peers. 21

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

71

Carter, J. Cameron. 2008. Race: A Theological Account. New York: Oxford University Press. Chor Maio, Marcos. 2001. ‘UNESCO and the Study of Race Relations in Brazil: Regional or National Issue?’ Latin American Research Review 36.2: 118–36. —. 2005. ‘From Bahia to Brazil: The UNESCO Race Relations Project’. In Jessé Souza and Valter Sinder (eds), Imagining Brazil (Plymouth: Lexington Books: 141–74. Crosley, Réginald O. 2006. ‘Shadow-Matter Universes in Haitian and Dagara Ontologies: A Comparative Study’. In Patrick Bellegrade-Smith and Claudine Michel (eds), Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth and Reality. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press: 7–18. Dash, J. Michael. 2008. ‘Fictions of Displacement: Locating Modern Haitian Narratives’. Small Axe 27: 32–41. Dayan, Colin (Joan). 1998 [1995]. Haiti, History and the Gods. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Donnelly, Jack. 1984. ‘Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights’. Human Rights Quarterly 6.6: 400–19. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1997. The Correspondence of W. E. B. Dubois, Volume 3: Selections 1944–1963. Edited by Herbert Apthker. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Dubois, Laurent. 2003. ‘Inscribing Race in the Revolutionary French Antilles’. The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003. 95–107. Fignolé, Jean-Claude. 1987. Les possédés de la pleine lune. Paris: Editions du Seuil. —. 1990. Aube tranquille. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Fischer, Sibylle. 2004. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Gershenhorn, Jerry. 2004. Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge. Lincoln, NE: The University of Nebraska Press. Goodale, Mark. 2006. ‘Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key: Introduction’. American Anthropologist 108.1: 1–8. Grinker, Roy Richard. 2008. ‘The Politics of Knowledge: Julian Steward, Leslie White, Melville Herskovits, and Luca Cavalli-Sforza’. Reviews in Anthropology 37: 259–76. Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio Alfredo. 2008–09. ‘Africanism and Racial Democracy: The Correspondence between Herskovits and Arthur Ramos (1935–1949)’. E. I. A. L. Facultad de Humanidades Lester y Sally Entin Escuela de Historia Instituto de Historia y Cultura de América Latina 19: 53–79. Available at http://www1.tau.ac.il/eial/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23 7&Itemid=164 (consulted on 1 January 2015).

72

The Haiti Exception

Harrison, Faye V. 2008. Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness. 2009. Dir. Llewellyn Smith. Herskovits, Melville J. 1937. Life in a Haitian Valley. Princeton, NJ: Alfred A. Knopf. —. 1941. The Myth of the Negro Past. New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers. Available at http://archive.org/stream/mythofthenegropa033515 mbp/mythofthenegropa033515mbp_djvu.txt (consulted on 31 July 2013). HG Legal Resources. 2015. ‘What is the Difference between a Human Right and a Civil Right?’ HG.org – Legal Resources. Available at http://www.hg.org/article. asp?id=31546 (consulted on 10 July 2015). Jacobson, Matthew Frye. 1998. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kincaid, Jamaica. 1991. ‘Foreword’. In Guy Endore, Babouk. New York: Monthly Review Press: i–viii. —. 2013. See Now Then. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Macagno, Lorenzo. 2013. ‘Alfred Métraux: Antropologia aplicada om lusotropicalismo’. Etnográfica: 217–39. Mazrui, Ali A. 2001. ‘Ideology and African Political Culture.’ In Teodoros Kiros (ed.), Explorations in African Political Thought: Identity, Community, Ethics. New York: Routledge: 97–132. McAlister, Elizabeth A. 1999. ‘“The Jew” in the Haitian Imagination: Pre-Modern Anti-Judaism in the Postmodern Caribbean’. In Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 203–28. Métraux, Alfred. 1959 [1958]. Voodoo in Haiti. Trans. by Hugo Charteris. New York: Oxford University Press. Moyn, Samuel. 2010. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press. Mullings, Leith. 2008. ‘Introduction: New Social Movements in the African Diaspora, II’. Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 10.4: 313–14. Nimako, Kwame. 2014. ‘Location and Social Thought in the Black: A Testimony to Africana Intellectual Tradition’. In Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker (eds), Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag: 53–62. Prins, Harald E. L. 2005. ‘Toward a World without Evil: Alfred Métraux as UNESCO Anthropologist (1946–1962)’. 16–18 November 2005. Available at http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=30431&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC& URL_SECTION=201.html (consulted on 20 August 2015).

On ‘being Jewish’, on ‘studying Haiti’ …

73

Ramsey, Kate. 2011. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sansone, Livio. 2011. ‘Turner, Franklin, and Herskovits in the Gantois House of Candomblé: The Transnational Origin of Afro-Brazilian Studies’. The Black Scholar 41.1: 48–63. Small, Stephen, 2009. ‘Introduction: The Empire Strikes Back.’ In Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press: xxiii–xxxviii. Song, Hoon. 2006. ‘Seeing Oneself Seeing Oneself: White Nihilism in Ethnography and Theory’. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 71.4: 470–88. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2015. ‘Meditation on Haiti (and Charleston) as a Certain Kind of Black’. 18 June. Africa Is a Country. Available at http://africasacountry. com/2015/06/meditation-on-haiti-and-charleston-as-a-certain-kind-of-black/ (consulted on 18 June 2015). —. 2015. ‘A Meditation on that Space I Need for My Rage, or, an Independence Manifesto’. 3 July. Africa Is a Country. Available at http://africasacountry. com/2015/07/a-meditation-on-that-space-i-need-for-my-rage-or-an-independence-manifesto/ (consulted on 3 July 2015). UNESCO. 1969. Four Statements on Race. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0012/001229/122962eo.pdf (consulted on 20 August 2015). United Nations. 2015. ‘Drafters’. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 10 July. Available at http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/drafters.shtml (consulted on 20 August 2015). Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Weitz, Eric D. 2003. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory: A Mintzian Journey Laurent Dubois

Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory

In one of the last essays he wrote before his death in 2011, the anthropologist Fernando Coronil invites us to ‘[i]magine a discussion about truth in a Jorge Luis Borges story written by Italo Calvino and illustrated by M. C. Escher’. Such a story, he imagines, would show us that Haiti is at the centre of the world, a luminous source of historical truth: In a magnificent square called ‘Paris 1945–2000’, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jacques Derrida argue in French about how best to explain human history through forms of reasoning associated with ‘dialectical materialism’, ‘structuralism’ and ‘poststructuralism’. Through a crack in its foundation a passage suddenly opens into a larger square called ‘Europe,’ where Kant, Hegel and Marx animatedly discuss the nature of universal history in German while Heidegger listens. Unbeknownst to them, ‘Europe,’ their assumed center of world history, is located atop a grain of sand, minutely drawn by William Blake’s mind. Trapped in a convent built upon the Aztec ruins located inside this granule, Saint Juana Inés de la Cruz reflects on faith through Christian, Muslim and Buddhist theologies. From one of the convent’s secret doors, a labyrinthine path 100 years long leads us to an elongated islet, ‘Saint-Domingue, 1791–1820’, where rebel Boukman, a slave who had learned from his African ancestors the power of spirits and plants, places his faith in Legba to battle for freedom, and Ti Noel, a freed slave oppressed under Henry Christophe’s 74

Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory

75

kingdom in independent Haiti familiar with Boukman’s rebellion and with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, at the end of his life comes to declare war against all masters. From a telescope 10 (500)n times more powerful than the Palomar Observatory located in a star of another universe, we could retrace all their words and deeds, backward or forward, floating as cosmic dust, long after their authors died. And if we look for certain words with care, we may be able even to find those brought together by Alejo Carpentier in a historical model and read that in a place called The Kingdom of this World, where each individual light came to be valued as a precious universe, historical truth was discovered to be fundamentally practical, a matter of struggling against the forces that limit life, the source and aim of history, an elusive marvel. (Coronil, 2011: 303–04) Coronil was my mentor when I was a doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan in the mid-1990s. I had the luck to be assigned as his TA for the survey in Modern Latin American History. He explained that he had never in his life taught such a survey and then – characteristically – described this as a tremendous opportunity to reinvent the ‘survey’ in order to upend assumptions about what constituted both ‘Latin America’ and ‘History’. The course we taught started and ended with Haiti, presented as being at the centre of Latin America – and therefore, by extension, at the centre of the world – journeying from Boukman to Aristide, with detours through Mexico and the Andes, and with Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World as one of the key early texts. To think Haiti is necessarily to question and rethink most of the categories of analysis that have defined much of anthropological and historical theory over the past two centuries. It is that daunting and enticing fact that Coronil illuminates in his utopian offering. The ‘elongated islet’ of Saint-Domingue, at the end of a ‘labyrinthine path one hundred years long’ is where we might ultimately discover the ‘fundamentally practical’ nature of ‘historical truth’. In and through the telling of Haiti’s history, we understand the point of such work – ‘struggling against the forces that limit life’. There, we encounter ‘the source and aim of history, an elusive marvel’. These reflections come in an essay, inspired by and in dialogue with Benjamin and Marx, that offers ten ‘Pieces’ aiming to define the practice of what the collection of which it is a part dubs Anthrohistory. The essays in that collection reflect in a wide range of forms on the possibilities and dangers of the interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange between these areas, and on the unredeemed hopes that have long driven the work of scholars living along this border zone, this frontier. What is striking about reading this work as a Caribbeanist, and specifically a Haitianist, is the realization that we have

76

The Haiti Exception

always inhabited that uneasy space of working across and between forms and disciplines. Indeed, the foundations of Caribbean history and anthropology are irredeemably transdisciplinary. In other areas, the struggle has been to break down firmly constructed disciplinary edifices. But in Haitian Studies, the struggle is a bit different: that of finding a space within a university, perhaps even a universe, built in some ways at odds with the very story one is trying to tell. Indeed, one can find a fairly good definition of the problem of thinking Haiti by taking another passage from Coronil and replacing the term ‘anthrohistory’ with the term ‘Haiti’: Of this world but not at home in it, Haiti resists being disciplined in existing institutions and contained by definitions. As long as this planet is not home for all, the project of Haiti must roam as an exile, witnessing what has been made of it, and reflecting on the work to make it habitable […] Brushing history against the brain, Haiti’s task is to examine what has been recorded and uncover what has been silenced, bringing to light possible histories (Coronil, 2011: 302–03). In this essay, launching from Coronil’s dream, I dwell on the problem of thinking Haiti through anthrohistory by returning to a series of early, and often overlooked, works on Haiti by one of our field’s foundational thinkers: Sidney Mintz. I journey back to these articles by first dwelling, through the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, on one of the central tensions surrounding anthropological work on Haiti: that of seeing it, on the one hand, as a product and expression of a unique history and, on the other, as fully integrated within a diagnostic of broader global histories and processes. Ultimately, however, the return to Mintz’s work also raises a set of troubling questions about how and why the question of gender has nevertheless found itself pushed to the edge of much theorizing despite being acknowledged as of central importance to any understanding of Haiti. Ultimately, I argue, Mintz’s earliest work – which focused on Haitian market women – connects in important ways to more recent emphases in anthropological work; and, collectively, these point the way forward to the future of Haitian anthrohistory.

*** ‘How does one explain Haiti? What is Haiti? […] It is a place of beauty, romance, mystery, kindness, humor, selfishness, betrayal, cruelty, bloodshed, hunger and poverty. It is a closed and withdrawn society whose apartness, unlike any other in the New World, rejects its European roots’. So Michel-Rolph Trouillot began one of his most significant commentaries on the problem of thinking Haiti, published in the short-lived Caribbeanist journal Cimarrón. These

Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory

77

opening lines were a sleight of hand: it wasn’t actually Trouillot speaking, but Robert Heinl, author of the influential tome of Haitian history, Written in Blood. ‘Nice passage, isn’t it?’ continued Trouillot. ‘Well, those of you who know my work may have guessed that I am trying to trick you. These words are not mine’. Trouillot describes Heinl’s work as ‘a sensationalist account of Haitian history’, and uses it as an example of the dangers of the idea of ‘Haitian exceptionalism’, which he argues ‘permeates both the academic and popular literature on Haiti under different guises and with different degrees of candidness’ (Trouillot, 1990: 3). The move is brilliant in part because Heinl’s words are, in fact, not that far from any number of quick characterizations of Haiti one can find in even some of the best historical and anthropological work on the country. Trouillot pinpoints the problem: we inhabit a space deeply saturated and sedimented with ideas about Haiti, with narratives that can seem emancipatory but in fact lock us up, or else seem dangerously exceptionalist but might offer some kind of intellectual redemption. But Trouillot emphasizes the devastating political consequences of certain brands of exceptionalism: during the Duvalier era, he notes, it ultimately led to the conclusion that ‘we can rule this country in ways that seem to defy the imagination of most foreigners and quite a few Haitians’. Trouillot blasts: The majority of Haitians live quite ordinary lives. They eat what is for them – and for many others – quite ordinary food. They die quite ordinary deaths from quite ordinary accidents, quite ordinary tortures, quite ordinary diseases. Accidents so ordinary they could have been prevented. Tortures so ordinary that the international press does not even mention them. Diseases so ordinary that they are easily treated almost anywhere else. Exceptional, is it? (Trouillot, 1990: 5) With this essay, Trouillot insisted on the need for a robust, complex and rigorous approach to thinking about Haiti historically and anthropologically. But, as Trouillot showed in an essay written two years later, many of the foundational categories and approaches of the fields of anthropology and history were not really prepared to deal with Haiti, or the Caribbean more broadly (Trouillot, 1992). Building on this critique, Trouillot constructed what became his most influential intervention, the book Silencing the Past, which deployed a set of fascinating narratives about Haitian revolutionary history in order to both critique Eurocentric narratives of political history and to offer a set of alternative approaches aimed at constituting a different story. In a sense, Silencing the Past brought Trouillot back to the insights of his very first work, a Creole-language history of the Haitian Revolution, which in form and content represented a radical critique of existing historical

78

The Haiti Exception

narratives of the country as well. With these works, Trouillot thoroughly dispensed with the idea of Haiti being exceptional, while also holding on to the idea that its history was powerfully, indeed uniquely, diagnostic of the ways in which certain political visions and hopes have been made exceptional by modern categories of thought. It was necessary, Trouillot showed, to recognize the particularity of Haiti’s historical experience precisely because this enables us to grasp its universal implications for how we think about pretty much everything in world history. In this way, by writing a text that on the surface was largely a meditation on history and historical narrative, Trouillot made a remarkable anthropological intervention, demanding that we question the very foundations of how we constitute our understanding of culture itself.1 Trouillot’s engagement with Haiti was, of course, a constant of his intellectual life, beginning with the family discussions he heard growing up between his father and his uncle – both important intellectuals – and which he acknowledges at the beginning of Silencing the Past as a foundation for his subsequent work. But Trouillot’s interventions were also built upon the work of his predecessor and mentor, Sidney Mintz, whose engagement with Haiti was, at least on the surface, more punctual and less sustained. Yet, if we return to Mintz’s own trajectory, we can also see how fundamentally his experience doing fieldwork in the country ultimately shaped his own thinking on the meaning of markets, culture and ‘modernity’.

*** Mintz travelled to Haiti for the first time in 1957, having already done fieldwork in Puerto Rico and Jamaica. He then returned for longer periods of fieldwork in 1958 and 1959. As he explained in a 2013 presentation at Duke University, he had travelled to Haiti in the wake of a fieldwork project in Puerto Rico, intent on studying ‘a society that had very few national institutions’. If every country is ‘unique’, Haiti is ‘unique in unique ways’, Mintz explained – in part because it ‘lost its colonial apparatus so early in its history’. Besides the army, he went on, there was very little that tied Haiti together. In the absence of such institutions, he wondered, ‘what is there?’ ‘The answer, I thought – and I still think – was the marketing system’. Mintz described his initial mistake as an ethnographer, which was I explore these questions in more detail in previous work (Dubois, 2012b). For a wide-ranging and sustained discussion of Trouillot’s work, see the excellent essays published together under the title ‘Thinking with Michel Rolph Trouillot’ in Small Axe in November 2013, notably Bonilla (2013) and Beckett (2013). 1

Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory

79

to think that he was going to ‘interview women in the marketplace’. ‘Well that’s really idiotic: they have no time to follow around some idiot trying to speak Creole’. Instead, he spent time with them at home with their families, and from there travelled to the market with them. His experiences were ‘marvelous’ and ultimately ‘humbling’ and ‘liberating’. He recounted proudly that, occasionally, one of the market women would let Mintz sell for her while she went to the bathroom: a gesture of immeasurable trust.2 Based on his time in Haiti, Mintz published a series of essays that constitute a somewhat overlooked treasure trove of both ethnographic detail and somewhat understated theorization. The first, published in the Puerto Rican journal Revista de Ciencias Sociales, offered a ‘typology’ of markets in Haiti based on his fieldwork. Mintz established the central context for his work: perhaps as much as 90% of the Haitian population lived in rural areas and constituted a ‘peasantry’ who ‘produce what they consume and consume what they produce’. The country was tied together by an internal market system, made up of at least 300 established rural and urban markets, along with small sites of exchange – ‘oases of trade in the rural hinterlands’ or else ‘marketplace situations’ created at ‘social gatherings’ and ‘crossroads’. This constituted a ‘system’: the markets were ‘all related to one another […] economically interdependent and the changes which occur in any of them affect the others’. He focuses on various actors in this system, notably the resellers, or révâdez, who constantly engage in complex operations acquiring, transporting and redistributing goods. Though Mintz’s language is precise and subdued, his wonder and admiration seeps through: ‘The investment of wealth, intellect and energy involved in maintaining the ­marketplaces of the Republic is enormous’ (Mintz, 1960: 15–16). Mintz has a fondness for lists, and some of them create moments of vertiginous, swirling detail that one can almost imagine as part of a scene in a Spiralist novel: While walking down the road near Fond-des-Nègres marketplace one market day in February, 1959, the following buyers and sellers were enumerated: a Port-au-Prince révâdez buying up soursop, oranges, congo peas, tomatoes, pumpkins, bananas and native mushrooms and seeking to buy corn-on-the-cob, green plantains, dry coconuts, chickens and ginger; three other non-local révâdez buying up chickens, eggs, baskets, brooms and unhusked millet; yet another out-of-town révâdez buying local squash, A video of the presentation is available at http://youtu.be/2O-oY_psmKk; the discussion of Haiti begins at 2:17. Mintz describes his Haiti fieldwork experience in similar terms (2010: 118–33). 2

80

The Haiti Exception green bananas and malanga; a révâdez seller from the capital vending black peas, Jamaican pimento and two varieties of rice; a Port-au-Prince seller of tin measures, and such greens as carrots, radishes, onions and beets; two sellers of the same items, who were also buying up to carry to Port-au-Prince such things as yams and dry coconuts; and a fourth seller of bottles and measures, who is a local révâdez, and was buying nothing. (Mintz, 1960: 24–25)

Captured within this ethnographic poetry are, of course, webs of stories and relationships, layers of almost bewildering complexity. Mintz unassumingly presents this information as if gleaned through a simple saunter down the street, as if he were some kind of anthropological flâneur happening upon this wondrous profusion of goods. Elsewhere, Mintz offers up the fruit of his counting in more spare phrases, finding in the Fond-des-Nègres market ‘41 sellers of cloth, 59 sellers of shirts, trousers, handkerchiefs, etc.; 68 sitting sellers of tobacco, and perhaps 25 ambulant sellers’ and so forth. But of course his very ability to know what he saw and to understand what was going on was based on the time he spent carefully harvesting knowledge during his fieldwork. And Mintz’s presentation of this material is quite strategic: what in other hands easily could have become a celebration of profusion and chaos, a cacophony of voices and fruit, is instead presented as a carefully structured system, rationally constituted in relation to economic and social conditions. The révâdez resellers constitute the nodes of the system, in which ‘the diagnostic of the thread of connection […] is price’. As Mintz notes, given the profusion and complexity of markets and the difficulty of moving between many of them, one might expect prices to ‘vary widely, perhaps even whimsically, from market to neighboring market’. Instead, by tracing ‘a particular commodity from market to market’, Mintz identified ‘pathways of trade’ within a given region along which ‘produce flows […] in sensitive accord with demand’: ‘price behavior shows clearly that the marketplaces form a kind of web of economic activity, much more integrated than might be supposed without study’ (Mintz, 1960: 31–32). These markets were, of course, just one part of a system of production rooted in the small land-holdings throughout the region. As Mintz explored in a second article based on his fieldwork, these too were carefully structured and regulated spaces. In this concise and understated essay, Mintz offers up a striking portrait of the layers of knowledge at work in the crafting of spaces for social and economic life in the Haitian countryside by focusing on ‘living fences’. Through a focus on which plants are put to what uses, Mintz also highlights the larger economic forces at work shaping the contours of life in these communities. The article first offers a description of what is grown on

Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory

81

the small plots of land within the lakou, from ‘minor’ and ‘semi-decorative’ vegetables to ‘trees which provide fruit, shade, and craft material, such as avocados, guavas, coconut palms and lataniers’. Mintz then turns to the plants used to created boundaries and paths in and around this space. These plants, he notes, ‘serve a soil-retention and conservation purpose’, a fact ‘fully known to the peasantry’, though he laments that they are not used more strategically for this purpose on hillsides in the region. From there, the article presents itself as a list of different plants and their various qualities. The short, spiny pêgwê, for instance, ‘holds the earth well’ and keeps out larger animals, but also ‘harbors snakes, mongooses, rats and other small animals’ and so is not ideal next to houses. The cactus-like kâdélab, meanwhile, grows as high as five feet, in ‘orderly lines’ and with little rain, and creates an ‘impenetrable thicket’. In addition, the peasants told Mintz that ‘its sap can be used as paste for paper’ (Mintz 1962: 101–05). There is a lot that goes unsaid in this article, namely all the intricate reasons why fences are necessary, and the artistry of communities that have created these living boundaries to help negotiate life in a tightly cultivated and environmentally and geographically complex landscape. But what infuses the piece is a sense of deep respect and wonder at the way in which the lakou system has created responses to particular problems, anchoring them in sedimented knowledge of both the natural and social worlds. In this sense, the article represents a kind of seed, in which are identified many of the major themes that would guide the anthropological and historical enquiry of Mintz. What would come to define his theoretical interventions in the following years was his exploration, in various Caribbean societies, of what he called a ‘reconstituted peasantry’ that emerged after emancipation. And thinking about these individuals and communities, in turn, became the foundation for his influential thinking about creolization, and ultimately for his intervention in the book Sweetness and Power about the way the precociously ‘modern’ spaces of the Caribbean were also at the foundation of Europe’s habits of consumption, exchange and economic development (Mintz, 1986). What can be forgotten too easily in all this, however, is that Mintz’s apprenticeship in the markets and peasant life in Haiti was guided almost entirely by women. They were the ones in the market he observed and counted, who taught him what was going on underneath the surface. They spoke to him about the way in which the state, then in the early years of François Duvalier’s regime, weighed on their practice through taxation. Because they concentrated exchange, the markets had become the major site for the collection of tax revenues by officials, who constituted another part of the system. Local governments, wrote Mintz, retained 85% of what was collected, the rest going to the central government. He calmly and parenthetically added that ‘the

82

The Haiti Exception

benefits deriving from such funds are rarely, if ever, felt in the marketplace or by its customers’, which was another way of saying what he had likely often heard, which is that the taxes felt like a kind of extortion. ‘I watched market women seventy-five miles from Port-au-Prince tell me, the morning after it happened, that Duvalier had put another 1 cent tax on soap’, he recalled at Duke in 2013 (Mintz, 1960: 45; 2010: 127). Mintz left a slightly hidden monument to all that he learned from these market women in the form of an essay in the 1964 edited collection Capital, Saving and Credit in Peasant Societies. His piece focuses specifically on ‘the employment of capital’ by Haitian market women, and offers a remarkably dense, thoughtful and detailed analysis of their economic activity. The prose, again, is relatively unassuming: what dominates the piece is a density of detail, a care and precision relating to language and practice, the constitution of a portrait of a world of constant, small transactions embedded in a web of striving and uncertainty. And yet the ultimate effect is of an intervention with far-reaching implications for how we might think about gender, economics and the ‘modern’. Through Mintz’s description, the daily activity of Haiti’s market women comes to resemble nothing so much as the constantly adjusted financial speculation and recalibration of Wall Street. For these women, Mintz writes, one of the central precepts of their practice is ‘to keep capital working’, to make sure it is always moving, to transform profit into new investment for more profit. They describe money that sits still as ‘spoiled’ or ‘eaten’, and have a very precise understanding of the difference between money and capital. ‘The assumption underlying this precept seems to be that if capital is not expanding, it must be contracting’. This principle is captured in the term used to describe capital: mâmâlajâ, or ‘mother money’ (Mintz, 1964: 260–64). Mintz catalogues the various pressures that limit this marketing activity, as well as the way in which certain kinds of carefully cultivated relationships – notably the development of long-term collaborations between two women known as pratik that allow for the consolidation and cultivation of certain niches within the marketplace – help to structure this world and also to explain how it has come about. His work stops short of offering a broader, historical explanation for the constitution of this order, something that thinkers such as Jean Casimir and Georges Anglade would offer in their work (Casimir, 2001; Anglade, 1982). And yet it still also offers a more bracing, delicate and detailed portrait of the actuality and actualization of this practice in the daily lives and thought of market women than any other writing on the topic. A decade after publishing his long piece on Haitian market women, Mintz returned to the topic in a French-language collection edited by anthropologist

Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory

83

Roger Bastide – La femme de couleur en Amérique Latine. Mintz’s essay dwells on a broad and fascinating question: how to explain, historically and anthropologically, the fact that women control the markets of Haiti? Mintz is cautious about a tempting hypothesis, namely that this represents the direct transmission and continuation of West African traditions in Haiti. He accepts this as part of the explanation, but also argues that ultimately this kind of broad cultural argument doesn’t really explain the particularities of the Haitian context. First of all, Mintz points out, women’s economic roles in Africa are far from consistent and, given the diversity of African origins in Haiti, a simple continuity argument doesn’t really hold up. Furthermore, the comparison between Haiti and other colonies of what Mintz nicely calls les ‘Antilles africaines’ – the ‘African Caribbean’ – shows that variations in local history have also led to widely different gender norms. In particular, he compares Jamaica and Haiti with the Hispanic Caribbean, where, he argues, women’s economic roles are much more curtailed. The key, he argues, is developing a historical and cultural understanding of why Haitian men and women have come to imagine their gendered identities as they have, in relation to one another. Why, he asks, did Haitian men ultimately come to feel comfortable with and accept the economic roles of women within their families, when men in other societies did not? (Mintz, 1974: 115–48). He offers a few tentative lines of historical analysis in response. There is no proof, Mintz notes, that women played a predominant role in markets during the period of slavery itself, when the enslaved cultivated plantation plots and sold goods in the town markets. Instead, the taking over of the market by women was a post-emancipation process that was part of a larger formation of new forms of family life and labour based on the cultivation of plots of land. Given the fact that the experience of slavery – as well, Mintz might have added, the entire experience of the Haitian Revolution itself – had taken place after the arrival of men and women from Africa, a holistic picture of the impact of these historical experiences had to be drawn up to explain the phenomenon. He points to various potential factors concerning the way in which men’s access to land created a division of labour between cultivation and selling in the market (Mintz, 1974: 138). Mintz presents the Haitian rural construction of gender as one to be lauded, indeed emulated. He notes early on, in his discussion of contemporary Africa, that ‘Western “modernization” can lead to significant regressive change in the status of women,’ despite the fact that ‘“Western society” presents itself as the guarantor of civil equality, individual rights and “free enterprise”’ (Mintz, 1974: 118). And he concludes with a powerful, indeed political, defence of African and African Caribbean societies as models and sites of a more advanced understanding of gender:

84

The Haiti Exception West Africa and the African Caribbean, so long and so profoundly influenced by European power and domination, elaborated a version of equality among certain sectors of the population that European societies, with their fundamental vision of ‘woman as property’, have neither understood nor accepted. The day may yet come when the contribution of black women to the maintenance of their respective societies will be recognized. But it is still far away. Even further away, perhaps, is our ‘recognition’ of the contribution of African and Afro-American societies – much important than that of the West – to a vision of the equality of all individuals that goes beyond sexual chauvinism. (Mintz, 1974: 145–46)

Mintz is, suddenly, hopeful and even utopian here, imagining a future – far-off, certainly, inevitably deferred, but still imaginable – in which women in Africa and the Caribbean are not only acknowledged as central contributors to their own societies but also as leaders and pioneers in the broader global struggle for gender equality. There is one other place in the article where Mintz dreams of the future, in this case a scholarly one. It comes in a footnote in which he writes: ‘We hope to proceed to a comparative study on the institutions of the market and the roles of men and women in these institutions throughout African America’. The goal of this study would be to examine several questions on a broad comparative level, among them the impact of ‘African traditions’ on the practices of market women, the role of slavery in the ‘flattening and homogenization of the division of labor between the sexes’ and the role of internal conflicts within societies in the distribution of tasks among the sexes. ‘It is,’ Mintz sighed realistically, ‘pointless to remark that a complete tableau of these factors will probably never be achieved’, but he added that bringing all this data together could still be ‘useful and enlightening’ (Mintz, 1974: 137–38). That future scholarly work never came to pass, at least not on the scale Mintz imagined in 1974. And these earlier works by Mintz, focused on gender, came to form a somewhat subsidiary part of Mintz’s corpus as it was ultimately constituted and passed on. The question of Caribbean market women has been taken up recently, and brilliantly, in the work of Gina Athena Ulysse (Ulysse, 2007), yet Mintz’s vision of a broad study, and even the emergence of a broad field of analysis, on the question has not yet come to pass. What operations – institutional, intellectual, social, biographical – ultimately sidelined these major questions? Why would it ultimately take several decades, and the emergence of a new generation of anthropological thinkers, to really foreground gender as a central category of analysis in work on Haiti?

Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory

85

This question is a personal one for me. A number of my key mentors as an undergraduate and graduate student – Barbara Browning and Colin Dayan during my time at Princeton; Rebecca Scott, Ann Stoler and Ruth Behar at the University of Michigan graduate school – emphasized gender in their work and their teaching. I wrote an essay for Ruth Behar’s collection Women Writing Culture on the male gendering of anthropological fieldwork, one of my first scholarly publications. But my engagement with gender in my own work on the Caribbean has been variable: it is foregrounded in some works but much less so in others (Dubois, 1995). As I think about this, it becomes clear that truly integrating gendered analysis into historical work on the Caribbean requires a reconceptualization of many of the categories through which we imagine what constitutes history itself. My most sustained engagement with gender came in my book A Colony of Citizens, in my analysis of post-emancipation society in Guadeloupe. Indeed, my very first session of research in notarial archives, which got me hooked on the social history approach that became central to the work, involved finding and untangling the history of land ownership among three women in Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe. But the reason I paused when I found the sources on these three women, which I might otherwise have overlooked, was the vivid depiction of women’s lives in Guadeloupean novels about the period, notably in Daniel Maximin’s Lone Sun. Those stories, in other words, were in a sense legible to me precisely because I had been enabled to see them for what they were – a central rather than a marginal piece of history – through fiction whose aim was to rewrite and upend narratives of history (Dubois, 2004b). When I look at other works I have written, particularly Avengers of the New World and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, it is clear that my privileging of certain visions of what constitutes the historical narrative – the political and military, a certain vision of what constitutes the structural and economic, the foregrounding of certain realms of cultural practice – helped to make these largely male-focused stories. But in each case I might have written a very different history. I could have crafted a history of the Haitian Revolution in which the question of women’s labour, family structure, pregnancy and birth, was placed at the centre of this history of political and social transformation – as it is in the work of Karol Weaver (Weaver, 2006). Doing so would require a different kind of research, narrative and imagination, but it is certainly possible. Similarly, my history of Haiti might have taken on a very different scope and emphasis if I had followed the lead of scholars like Dayan and Karen McCarthy Brown, who have written Haiti’s history as women’s history in compelling ways precisely by using different approaches and archives (Dubois 2004a, 2012a; Dayan, 1995).

86

The Haiti Exception

Why didn’t I write a different kind of history? There are many ways to answer that question: focusing on my own choices, conscious and unconscious, notably about how I constitute my own theoretical lineage (notably the one laid out in this very piece); thinking through the ways in which theory or genealogies of what constitutes theory are inflected by gender; and confronting the daily and micro aspects of intellectual practice and praxis and how they are determined by the intersections of position and broader structures of thought and practice. What is clear is that certain categories of analysis surrounding what constitutes history, politics and economic structure enable a marginalization of women in broader narratives. Nevertheless, of course, nothing is set in stone, and part of the point of realizing the silencing or avoidance of certain critical questions is to incite a different kind of future orientation. Returning to Mintz’s earlier work, and recognizing the ways in which both the subsequent canonization of his work and my own relationship to it have obscured the foundational place of gender in his thinking on Haiti, can serve as an incitement to break the cycle. It suggests that any truly successful form of anthrohistory dedicated to Haiti will need to make gender itself central and constitutive of the way in which we think about culture, politics, society and economics.

*** When he was conducting his research in Haiti, Sidney Mintz was deeply struck and influenced in his thinking by one particular market woman. In his 1964 article, she appears without a name as an example of what could be achieved within this system. The most successful rural market women, Mintz writes, deploy ‘accumulated experience’ and ‘fine judgement’ in creating resilient businesses ‘in a position to stand losses that would knock out resellers of scantier means’. They ‘distribute their capital in several different areas of endeavor’, and this ‘commercial versatility’ is their strength. Mintz goes into great detail describing one woman who has successfully developed such a strong foundation: the way she changes stock in different seasons; the way she travels back and forth to Port-au-Prince, where she has many connections that allow her to eke out greater profits than some others might; the way she gathers information and studies the market situation during her travels, and carefully hedges her investments in order to guard against potential catastrophes. In a book published in 2010, over half a century after his fieldwork in Haiti, Mintz again wrote about this woman, this time naming her as ‘my friend Nana, a market woman from Duverger’. He included a photograph of Nana Adrien and her relatives taken in 1959. Her story stretched back to the

Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory

87

beginning of the twentieth century: she was born in 1902 and had been going to market since she was a baby: Her first business dealing was sugar; her mother gave her 1 centime to buy a packet of sugar, which she resold for 2 centimes on returning home. She explained to me that the centime she earned was bénéfis (profit) whereas the centime she had been given was not lajâ but mâmâlajâ – that is, not money, but capital. Nana recalled that the main impact of the US occupation was that it made the regular trips to Port-au-Prince easier because of the improvement of the roads. She made her livelihood buying products around Fond-des-Nègres through a carefully cultivated network of contacts with other market women and with peasant producers and transporting them to Port-au-Prince by truck, then returning with goods to sell back home. Every two weeks she travelled to the capital and spent the weekend there, ‘selling and sleeping on sacks of grain in the depot’. Mintz remembered Adrien among so many others: ‘The sidewalks, along the market streets, some of them arcaded, were always lined at midnight with hundreds of sleeping women from all over the nation, each on her own burlap sack’ (Mintz, 2010: 122–27). Mintz recalled asking Adrien what she would do faced with various classic economic conundrums, such as the appearance of another supplier selling at a lower price in the market. Her answers demonstrated a keen grasp of economic practice and theory. ‘Nana knew about oligopsony all right; as well as about capital, long-term supply costs, zero opportunity costs, marginal utility and arbitrage – but she and her sisters had no need of Western terminology. The contributions people like Nana make to their society are enormous’, Mintz wrote: sustaining the countryside, feeding the population, paying for their children’s education and making ‘the internal market system the vibrant institution it has been for more than two hundred years’. He emphasized that this system made women ‘economically independent of their families’, creating a context of equality in which husbands ‘take great pride in the marketing skills of their wives’ and ‘a woman’s success never shames her husband’ (Mintz, 2010: 131–32). There was, interestingly, something Adrien never shared with Mintz during his fieldwork, and that was one of the main things she did with her money. Mintz had noted in his 1964 article that she had ‘made sacrifices’ to make sure one of her sons learned to ‘speak, read and write French’, though he described this as a ‘noteworthy if slightly pathetic demonstration of the upward striving some of these women feel and manifest’. In a footnote, he added that another ethnographer who had since worked with ‘the same revendeuse’ had found out that she ‘commits a very considerable part of her

88

The Haiti Exception

earnings to religious (vodoun) ceremonies’, information that Mintz admitted he had ‘failed’ to get during his ‘less intensive work with her’. In his 2010 work, he described how he had been ‘genuinely surprised’ when this other ethnographer – who was in fact Mintz’s student – told him ‘that she was a serious, enthusiastic, and generous supporter of vodoun’ (Mintz, 1964: 282; 2010: 125). In this space of the unspoken and unknown is an entire world of meaning. Adrien’s intense work in the marketplace, her cultivation of networks of exchange, her speculation and her investments, her travels back and forth, and her nights spent on the floor of the market were meant not just to support her living family but a much larger family that included ancestors and the lwa. This small piece of information exists in Mintz’s work a little like that ‘labyrinthine path’ in Fernando Coronil’s reflection that leads us to Saint-Domingue. For it connects Adrien’s hardnosed and sophisticated understanding and deployment of economic concepts like oligopsony with an entire other realm of layered, sedimented and complex relationships and exchanges. It connects her with a world of offerings to the dead, with links to Ginen, with healing, with a world of responsibilities but also of dreams. It is no accident that some of the most important ethnographic and historical work on Haiti done in recent decades – including McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, Karen Richman’s Migration and Vodou, Dayan’s Haiti, History and the Gods and, most recently, Mimerose Beaubrun’s Nan dòmi – has inhabited this space of practice, ritual, memory and future-oriented action on the part of women (Dayan, 1995; McCarthy Brown, 2001; Richman, 2005; Beaubrun, 2010). Each in its own way, these works deal with the link between the spiritual and the economic, the ritual and the political. They have demonstrated powerfully that to write the history and anthropology of Haiti is necessarily to write a woman’s history. This was, in a sense, something Mintz himself realized during his own research, though ultimately the trajectory of his own theorization – embarked upon, of course, in a very different time within the history of the disciplines of anthropology and history – focused elsewhere. And Mintz’s reflections on the peasantry in Haiti and other Caribbean societies is often shadowed by a sense of doom, a worry – one that is of course common and well-rooted in anthropology – that the world being so lovingly documented is in the process of disappearing. ‘In Jamaica, the peasantry declines with each passing day’, Mintz wrote in 2010. ‘In Haiti, the peasantry is dying now’. And it is, of course, striking to read his descriptions of a Haiti in the late 1950s whose population was overwhelmingly rural, one in which small-scale agricultural production and rural marketing remained robust and sustaining for many more people than today, in relation to a set of

Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory

89

contemporary anthropological problems centred around mass urbanization, disaster, neo-liberal economic policies, development and humanitarian intervention (Mintz, 2010: 132; Schuller, 2012; Caple James, 2010). It is ultimately in the concatenation and accumulation of these various ethnographic journeys, as well as in the flourishing of the varied forms of writing to come out of them, that the future anthrohistory of Haiti will be written. Mintz’s 1964 description of the deployment of capital by Haitian market women should, on its own, deflate any sense that outsiders might need to bring a sense of entrepreneurialism or economic rationality to Haiti. Those who really need to hear such messages, of course, are most often comfortably wrapped in the web of denial that Trouillot so ably described in Silencing the Past. But if Haitianist anthrohistory fulfils its promise, it will continue to refuse to write Haiti as an exception, and instead to think with Haiti precisely in order to cultivate the sense that the alternatives crafted in the country need not be exceptional, that the unthinkable can in fact be perfectly thinkable, and that there is no reason to imagine that some day what has so long been naturalized as the rule – a world of racial exclusion, labour exploitation presented as necessary and an unending and insistent burying of alternatives – might itself become the exception.

Works Cited Anglade, Georges. 1982. Atlas Critique d’Haïti. Montréal: Groupe d’études et de recherches critiques d’espace, UQAM. Beaubrun, Mimerose P. 2010. Nan Dòmi, le récit d’une initiation vodou. La Roque d’Anthéron: Vents d’ailleurs. [Nan Dòmi: An Initiate’s Journey into Haitian Vodou. Trans. by D. J. Walker. San Francisco: City Lights Books.] Beckett, Greg. 2013. ‘Thinking with Others: Savage Thoughts about Anthropology and the West’. Small Axe 17.3: 166–81. Bonilla, Yarimar. 2013. ‘Ordinary Sovereignty’. Small Axe 17.3: 152–65. Caple James, Erica. 2010. Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma and Intervention in Haiti. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Casimir, Jean. 2001. La Culture opprimée. Delmas, Haïti: Imprimerie Lakay. Coronil, Fernando. 2011. ‘Pieces for Anthrohistory: A Puzzle to Be Assembled Together’. In Chandra Bhimull, David William Cohen, Fernando Coronil, Edward L. Murphy, Monica Patterson and Julie Skurski (eds), Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press: 301–16. Dayan, Colin. 1995. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dubois, Laurent. 1995. ‘“Man’s Darkest Hours”: Maleness, Travel and

90

The Haiti Exception

Anthropology’. In Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon (eds), Women Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 306–21. —. 2004a. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. —. 2004b. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press. —. 2012a. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Metropolitan Books. —. 2012b. ‘Eloge pour Michel-Rolph Trouillot’, Transition 109: 21–32. McCarthy Brown, Karen. 2001. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn Updated and Expanded Edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mintz, Sidney W. 1960. ‘A Tentative Typology of Eight Haitian Market Places’. Revista de Ciencias Sociales 4.1: 15–16. —. 1962. ‘Living Fences in the Fond-des-Nègres Region, Haiti’. Economic Botany 16.2: 101–05. —. 1964. ‘The Employment of Capital by Haitian Market Women’. In Raymond Firth and Basil Yamey (eds), Capital, Savings and Credit in Peasant Societies. Chicago, IL: Aldine: 256–86. —. 1974. ‘Les Rôles économiques et la tradition culturelle’. In Roger Bastide (ed.), La Femme de couleur en Amérique Latine. Paris: Éditions Anthropos: 115–48. —. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books. —. 2010. Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Richman, Karen E. 2005. Migration and Vodou. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Schuller, Mark. 2012. Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1990. “The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean and the World’. Cimarrón: New Perspectives on the Caribbean 2.3: 3–12. —. 1992. ‘The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory’. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 19–42. Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2007. Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Weaver, Karol K. 2006. Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Interrogating the Enquiring Self

‘Written with Love’: Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham’s Island Possessed Kaiama L. Glover

Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham

Ah! Who will give me my country Haiti You are my only paradise Haiti Ah! God reminds me Your so beautiful forests Your broad horizons Far from your shores The best cage Is a prison Yes! My desire, my cry of love Haiti I´ll be back one day Oh, beautiful blue country Far, far away in other skies I lived happy days But it’s all over Alone in my exile today I sing, with wounded heart Yes! My desire my cry of love Haiti I’ll be back one day Haiti! – ‘Haiti’ (1934) sung by Josephine Baker 93

94

The Haiti Exception

From ‘home’ to Haiti I first picked up African-American dancer, intellectual and social activist Katherine Dunham’s 1969 ethnographic memoir Island Possessed with no ulterior motive, no particular scholarly intent. Having relatively recently earned tenure at my institution, I had decided to grant myself the gift of reading for the pure pleasure of the exercise. I had no plan for the text; I did not see any specific way I would incorporate it into any of the work I was doing (or had promised to do) at the time – those at once heady and oddly disconcerting three months between my promotion and the beginning of the fall term. I was fairly certain, of course, that the book would fall at least to some extent within the scope of my ‘professional purview’ as a Caribbeanist with a particular interest in Haiti. Written by Dunham during the 1960s at her home in Senegal, and based on fieldwork conducted in Haiti in the mid-1930s, there was no question but that the narrative would be a ‘fit’ within the intellectual collage I had been building over the course of my academic career to that point. But again, I had picked up Island Possessed without any expectations regarding its usefulness to my scholarly work. I was simply curious to know something about Dunham’s story. Acting on this curiosity felt like an indulgence in that moment. This wasn’t the first time that, out of curiosity and with some time on my hands, I had traced the path of an intentionally lone, perpetually expatriated black woman across the Atlantic. There was some precedent for this. As an undergraduate working through a combined program of study in French history and literature and Afro-American Studies at Harvard, my mentor and advisor was Henry Louis Gates, Jr. He had introduced me to AfricanAmerican performer and activist Josephine Baker. Determined to write a senior thesis that would somehow bridge organically my interest in French history and culture and the African-American experience, I left Cambridge, Massachusetts for Paris, France during the summer preceding my final undergraduate year, equipped with two letters of introduction – the first to a Baker archive, and the second to Genevieve and Michel Fabre, eminent cultural historians who had dedicated their careers to exploring the black American experience in France. From the Fabres, and through my archival research, I became aware of the deliberateness with which Baker and her handlers had transformed her – a black girl from Saint Louis, Missouri, USA – into an exceedingly marketable French colonial fantasy. There were two particularly remarkable manifestations of this Pygmalion project. In 1934, Baker performed the lead role in the film Zouzou. One of the most memorable and oft-referenced musical numbers in that film is a scene in which a scantily clad Baker, swinging languorously in a gilded birdcage, sings

Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham

95

the song ‘Haiti’, whose lyrics I have quoted in their entirety in the epigraph above. The second phenomenon to catch my attention was Baker’s selection as Queen of the Colonies for the 1931 Universal Colonial Exhibition in Paris – despite the fact that she was neither a French citizen at the time nor, of course, had ever been a French colonial subject. Though Baker-in-the-birdcage was to be the first time ‘Haiti’ crossed my radar, it was in fact my fascination with the earlier event that turned my intellectual focus back towards the Americas. Intrigued by the absurdity of Baker being in the running for this symbolic title, I began to look more closely at the Exhibition itself and, especially, at its exoticist, shamelessly imperialist foundations. It wasn’t long, of course, before I came across the Surrealists, a group of avant-garde artists, writers and intellectuals who had staged the ‘Anti-colonial Exhibition’, also in 1931, by way of protest. It was in delving more deeply into the Surrealists and their poetry-based commitment to radical social change, that I found myself back on the other side of the Atlantic – literally, for graduate school in New York City at Columbia University, and intellectually, via a francophone Caribbeanist programme of study. In effect, while in Paris I had decided to follow the de facto ‘head’ of the Surrealists, André Breton, to Haiti, where in 1945 he had delivered a series of lectures praising the Haitian people’s exceptional capacity to marry poetics and politics, art and revolution. It was in the context of researching these lectures, and the dramatic political events of 1946 that they inspired, that I first encountered Haitian writer and militant political activist René Depestre. Depestre’s engagement with Surrealism and socialism became the subject of my Master’s thesis, which anchored me more or less firmly in Haitian Studies. If I have begun this piece by recounting in such detail the intellectual itinerary that preceded the time I’ve chosen to spend here, now, with Katherine Dunham, it is because it is somehow reassuring to remind myself thus of where I stand as a scholar and why – to take stock, in a sense, of the path that led me, personally and professionally, from ‘home’ to Haiti. Thinking here, now, about Dunham and her travels from the United States to Haiti, to Senegal and back, has, I realize, in many ways been a critical effort to come to terms with my own rhizomatic trajectory. Thinking, that is, about the choices Dunham made as a non-Haitian, non-native franco- or creolophone American intellectual has enabled me to quell, in some measure, nagging worries about the legitimacy and the stakes of my own positioning as a non-Haitian, non-native franco- or creolophone American intellectual vis-à-vis an Other culture. Island Possessed has been for me a model of the very bravest kind of reflexivity. That there is Haiti so unabashedly and so lovingly at its centre has been an offering of permission I had not admitted needing but had perhaps very much desired.

96

The Haiti Exception

*** ‘My desire, my cry of love – Haiti!’ In this essay, I trace two distinct but related paths of inquiry in Island Possessed from the perspective of a literary theorist. Taking as my point of departure the text’s ambivalent generic positioning as memoir and ethnography, I consider Dunham’s words and tone inasmuch as they reveal an anthropological praxis based in intimacy and subjectivity. I begin by discussing the autobiographical dimensions of Island Possessed, paying close attention to Dunham’s boldly subjective and self-focused stance as firstperson narrator. I reflect in particular on her attentiveness to both the limitations of her anthropological practice of intimacy and the singular opportunities presented by her indeterminate status vis-à-vis both race and gender norms. From there, I go on to think about how this intimacy translates into a relationship with Haiti that highlights the nation’s cultural opacities while evoking its multiple points of connectedness with the wider Afro-Americas and Africa. Looking in part through the lens of Glissant’s concept of Relation, I suggest that anthropology is two things for Dunham. First, it is a disordering practice – an intervention with respect to skewed geo-political perceptions of Others who are in important ways, she insists, Same. Second, it is a practice of solipsistic enlightenment, prerequisite for ethical humanist functioning within a global community. Several scholars have offered compelling analyses of the significant ways in which Dunham more and less explicitly critiques the discipline of anthropology in Island Possessed, ‘her work providing a sounding board for a number of crucial questions in respect to the anthropological construction of the Caribbean space and ethnographic writing as a discipline’ (FischerHornung, 2008: 350). She has been widely lauded for her innovativeness as a scientist and the extent to which her unique methodology – commonly referred to as ‘dance anthropology’ – ‘marked a departure from conventional practices of objectivity and participation observation’ and ‘disrupted the outsider and insider dichotomy and modes of armchair scholarship that characterized classical ethnological fieldwork’ (Cruz Banks, 2012: 160, 161). Dunham has also been credited with having managed this dichotomy through what dancer, scholar and certified instructor of the Dunham Technique Halifu Osumare has eloquently described as ‘an anthropological postmodern sensibility – self-reflexivity and a privileging of the subjective along with the objective – long before it was even theoretically cognized, let alone articulated’ (Osumare, 2010). Touching on, without rehearsing in excessive detail, the

Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham

97

depth and breadth of Dunham’s contributions to the field of ethnology, I attempt to read Island Possessed through the lens of love – of intimacy and desire. Examining Dunham’s many evocations of her relationships with a transnational and, ultimately, transatlantic cast of male characters, I discuss the ways in which intimacy impacted upon her scholarship. I look in particular at Dunham’s ‘friendship turned romance’ (Dunham, 1969: 27) with then-future Haitian presidential candidate Dumarsais Estimé, both considering the risk she takes in exposing her emotional relationship with this controversial historical figure and pointing to the role of this love story as a motivating force in her scientific project. I argue that Dunham renders herself vulnerable in a particular way in Island Possessed, flaunting the extent to which she has ‘behaved badly’ with respect to any number of authorities and even to a readership potentially discomfited by the decidedly unfeminist self-positioning that marks her dealings with the politician Estimé and other men, and thus issuing something of a challenge to her mentors and readers. In introducing this particular element of the personal into her narrative – and through the practice of dance anthropology that she crafts from this vulnerable and ambiguous space of intimacy – Dunham makes a precocious intervention into a black Atlantic conditioned by humanist understandings of Relation.

*** From Haiti to the ‘human’ Much attention has been paid, rightly, to the somatic elements of Island Possessed – the exquisite detail with which Dunham conjures the sights, smells, sounds, tastes, feel and other sensory experiences of her life and work in Haiti – the ‘egalitarian process of cross-cultural exchange based on shared bodily experience’ (Durkin 2011; 135) that infuses her prose. Her detailed – thick – description of Vodou rituals of initiation are, indeed, extraordinary, offering as they do open windows onto the most private dimensions of folk life in Haiti and onto Dunham’s own visceral, situated reactions to those elements of Haitian culture. It is this very deeply embodied practice of her discipline that made Dunham a veritable pioneer of the participant-observer method. Refusing to impose, artificially and in the interest of science, a distance between her researcher-self and the observed community in which she is embedded, Dunham embraces proximity. She dances alongside, lies prostrate next to, leans against, stands hand-in-hand with, shares food and mingles sweat with any number of individuals who make up the community

98

The Haiti Exception

of the faithful she is studying. Yet, rather than the sensory and the embodied, it is the emotional nature of her engagement with Haiti that I will explore here. Beyond proximity, intimacy. The dedication to Island Possessed very much sets the stage for the explicit evocation of emotion – and of love in particular – throughout the narrative. In both its form and content, it lays out the essential elements – the foundations – of Dunham’s project of writing her experiences in Haiti. ‘This is a book written with love’, she writes, ‘dedicated to my husband John Pratt, and to the Republic of Haiti, explaining, I think, much about the author and the island’ (Dunham, 1969). This one sentence of dedication is the author’s first offering to the reader. It is a declaration of love through which Dunham plainly acknowledges her emotional investment in Haiti and links herself fundamentally to her object of study. She implies what later becomes clear to the reader: that a critical aspect of her scientific practice is the process of self-discovery, and that she places this process on a par with her discovery of Haiti. Also of note are the very particular stylistics of this one sentence of paratext. In ‘stacking’, so to speak, multiple dependent clauses, Dunham subtly mitigates her own authority, the ‘I think’ being the clearest marker of this self-positioning. Her tone is vulnerable, even a touch self-deprecating, and it is the tone she takes throughout the whole of her text. Island Possessed is, I want to emphasize, a first-person narrative recounted in an unabashedly personal and intimate voice. It is the work of a highly self-conscious performer that makes an explicit claim to reveal its author as it reveals a deep knowledge of and connection to the Haitian folk. Dunham foregrounds her individual, multivalent interactions with her field of study: she is an anthropologist on a research mission, yes, but she is also a would-be Vodou initiate, an artist and a woman of passion. All of these are subject positions she occupies in equal measure and they are all determinates of her engagement with and investment in Haiti and its people. Dunham is clearly very much aware of her singularity as an enquiring subject, and she makes this plain from the very beginning of the text: Harold Courlander had been there and Melville Herskovits had just published the first serious and sympathetic study of the people and their social structure. They were white and male, these writers. Of my kind I was a first – a lone young woman easy to place in the clean-cut American dichotomy of color, harder to place in the complexity of Caribbean color classification. (Dunham, 1969: 4) With these opening remarks, Dunham insists that the reader take into account her not-white, not-male subjectivity – both her radical racial and gender difference from the typical anthropologist of her time and her uniqueness

Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham

99

with respect to the community with which she hoped to become familiar (if not to say intimate). Though certainly embraced to an extent by the community of vodouisants she studies as a displaced daughter of Nan-Guinée, Dunham makes clear that she is as much scientist as she is kin. She ‘took her obligation to science very seriously: her research commitment was prior to her initiation vows’ (Aschenbrenner, 2002: 70) – or, as Dunham herself asserts, ‘[f]ellowships were a trust more sacred than any vows yet taken’ (Dunham, 1969: 68). Dunham thus deftly negotiated any opportunity for intimacy afforded by her skin colour as an opportunity both to feel and to learn. Despite her insistence in Island Possessed that she would be hard pressed to determine precisely ‘where the participant begins and the scientist ends’ (Dunham, 1969: 106), Dunham is unfailingly rigorous and deliberate in articulating, rearticulating and adhering to the objectives that underpin her fieldwork. Her overarching project is always clearly at the foundations of her engagements and never far from her mind: to reveal thoroughly – and as respectfully as possible – the dynamism of the Haitian folk and its humanist legitimacy within a global community that persists in degrading and maligning it.1 Thus, throughout Island Possessed Dunham ever so subtly pushes back against the praise she receives from white male anthropologists like Herskovits, Alfred Métraux and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who, in their overwhelmingly favourable evaluations of Dunham’s work in Haiti, all make a point to note her ‘favoured position’ and the ‘personal advantages’ (Lévi-Strauss, 2005: 383) she obtained by virtue of her ‘racial origin’ (Métraux, 2005: 386) – the fact that she, like her subjects of enquiry, is brown. But when it comes to the supposed blood ties that connect her to the people she studies in Haiti and to their Afro-Atlantic traditions, Dunham situates herself in a ‘borderplace’ between practitioner and researcher – ‘a position of honesty as well as risk’ (Ramsey, 2002: 211) from which she embraces and mobilizes ‘the feeling of being outsider within, or vice versa, as the occasion dictates’ (Ramsey, 2002: 106; emphasis added). This ‘as the occasion dictates’ signifies the space of negotiation Dunham very consciously inhabits. It signals Dunham’s clear recognition of her Others have noted Dunham’s unwavering commitment to a broader sociopolitical agenda in her practice of anthropology. Hannah Durkin, for example, describes ‘Dunham’s lifelong project, by which she sought to realize an artistic and cultural legitimization of Haiti by incorporating its ritual dance forms onto the concert dance stage’ (Durkin, 2011: 126); and Joyce Aschenbrenner asserts that ‘[i]n her dance and teaching career, [Dunham] was committed to reveal to African Americans, along with other races and nationalities, the value, dignity, and beauty of African expressions’ (Aschenbrenner, 2002: 71). 1

100

The Haiti Exception

positioning in Haiti as ‘fluid and adaptable’ and, moreover, her generally ‘self-reflexive focus on shifting constructions of identity’ in Island Possessed (Durkin, 2011: 130–31). A subtle but provocative example of this practice of subjectivity navigation is visible in Dunham’s description of her initiation experience. She recounts the moment when, lying on the floor of a Vodou temple, uncomfortable and tired, ‘wet by someone else’s urine, chilled, disconsolate, feeling none of the promised ecstasy, and no signs of it, alien to gods, people and land’ (Dunham, 1969: 65), she had found herself thinking – of all things – about her intellectual training in the United States and the path that had led her to this Haiti. ‘Melville Herskovits was a fantastic guide for getting people to the bottom of things’, she writes. ‘So often I have regretted not staying closer, not remaining faithful to the path that Herskovits had chosen for me […]’ (Dunham, 1969: 65). With these remarks, Dunham praises Herskovits in his capacity as mentor and scholar, and seems to lament her own relative inadequacies. Yet, by recalling these particular meditations at this particular point in the narrative – the culmination of her initiation – and, further, placing them in the original context in which they first occurred, Dunham makes two subtle but incisive commentaries on her own practice of ethnology. First, she reminds the reader of her unease and her non-belonging to this Afro community – the extent to which satisfying her curiosity as a scholar required hard work and sacrifice and could not repose on any ‘natural’ racial affinities. Second, belying her ostensible self-deprecation is the fact that it was precisely in not following ‘the path that Herskovits had chosen’ that she found herself lying on the floor of that temple and beginning to unravel the mysteries of one of the Afro-Atlantic world’s most significant religions. It was in not following Herskovits’s rules that she had been welcomed into an intimate social space to which her mentor likely would never have had access. Again, while Dunham acknowledges the value of the race-based commonality that connects her to the subjects of her study, she also makes a point here and throughout Island Possessed of outlining the strategies – rooted in both her instincts and her training – that she devised to work most effectively with/in the affordances and the limits of any presumed kinship: Being a member of the race was a distinct advantage […] however, it was perseverance, many common interests apart from common ancestry, love for babies and old people, enough medical background to see my way through diagnosis and prognosis of minor cuts and burns and snake-bite and intestinal parasites and first-stage venereal disease […] and intuition, and the flawless training in social anthropology by my professors at the University of Chicago and polished off by Melville Herskovits, that tipped the scales in my favor. (Dunham, 1969: 74)

Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham

101

Dunham also evokes the particular set of challenges – and opportunities – presented by her gender. A young, ‘unattached’, foreign, female scientist – clearly Afro-descended, but in ways not immediately legible with respect to the colour-class codes that structure Haitian society – Dunham cut a puzzling figure in mid-century Haiti, to be sure. She was a decidedly suspect being. As such, she found that her comings and goings and behaviours were monitored and judged at once by the bourgeois proprietresses of her rooming house and by the wider elite community of Port-au-Prince. What is fascinating, though, is that despite this constant surveillance and the unwanted counsel it often inspired, Dunham consistently qualifies her ambiguity as a real advantage – a liberated subject position. She insists that her complex subjectivity made her impossible to pin down, allowing her to blur the lines of the socially acceptable and to cultivate intimate relations with a wide range of individuals and contexts. Frequenting both bourgeois and peasants, men and women, mulatto, black and white, human and divine, Dunham was capacious – promiscuous – in her engagements with those she encountered in Haiti. And these engagements were, she makes very apparent, invested and emotional. In reflecting, for example, on her marriage to the powerful and ‘remarkably jealous’ (Dunham, 1969: 61) lwa Damballah, she reveals: At the time of my wedding to Damballah I was already married, though hardly mature enough of spirit to realize it […] I felt myself in love with a dear friend […] I was smitten with one or more college professor, fascinated by Dumarsais Estimé, and engaged in more ways than one to Fred Alsop. Seen now after time and distance, I realize this might be considered peculiar […]. (Dunham, 1969: 111) ‘Peculiar’, indeed. Unafraid to admit these emotional realities into the performance of her public self, Dunham defies any expectations of professional objectivity or personal ‘respectability’, be it during her lived experience in Haiti in the 1930s or in her narrative of that experience in Island Possessed in the late 1960s. She situates herself both literally and metaphorically outside – in a public, politically charged space – taking advantage of her outsider status to circumvent many of the strictures that would otherwise govern an individual of her colour, class and gender.2 Though she gets tripped up from time to time, Dunham is, on the whole, impressively savvy in her assessments of what any given ‘occasion dictates’. There is a sense throughout her narrative that she knows the value and, depending on the ‘occasion’, is Osumare has noted the extent to which Dunham’s ‘awareness of her positionality as a black female yielded a continual negotiation simultaneously of race, gender and culture’ (Osumare, 2010: 4). 2

102

The Haiti Exception

perfectly willing to make use of her femininity and her sexuality as they figure in the realization of her professional and personal objectives. This ‘lone young woman’ is no lost lamb fighting off potential predators. On the contrary, she handles herself expertly in dealing with the various figures who seek to condition or constrain her and, when so compelled, readily ‘sought freedom from their shepherding’ (Dunham, 1969: 149–50). Dunham is frank about the many instances in which she flat out ignored – even deceived – well-meaning male ‘friends’ who advised her not to attend this or that bush ceremony, not to be seen with this or that person or not to ask certain questions: ‘Fred tried to discourage me from entertaining the notion of becoming a hounci, and, by consequence, I grew more determined’ (Dunham, 1969: 58). She admits her tendency to break the rules – social and methodological, all the while adopting a sort of ‘wasn’t I naughty?’ tone that belies her very deliberate choices. These men became her escorts, her bodyguards, her confidants, her chauffeurs and her ‘rescuers’ as needed (Dunham, 1969: 37); she truly loved some of them, merely flirted with others and, through them all, advanced her project of more deeply understanding Haiti and herself. Dunham’s relationship with Dumarsais Estimé is perhaps the most fascinating instance of her negotiated intimacy with Haiti. At the time of their encounter in 1935, Estimé was President of the Chamber of Deputies. An ambitious young black nationalist with connections to Port-au-Prince’s elite political circles and a sincere investment in the social welfare of the nation’s most disadvantaged, he was to have an enormous impact on Dunham’s personal and professional life in Haiti and long afterward. Dunham devotes an entire chapter to her discussion of Estimé and evokes him throughout her book, admitting plainly, ‘I must have been, in my way, in love with the Deputy, and he, in his way, with me’ (Dunham, 1969: 144). Estimé embodies for her, in a very physical way, the transatlantic linkages connecting Africa to the Americas: I have thought of Estimé when looking at bronzes of Benin, at Bambara and Baule masks: the head large for the body, because there in the head the artists of the ancient kingdoms of Benin placed the spirit and soul and intelligence of a man […] the full, sculptured Fon kingdom lips; the almond eyes might have been the model for Bambara masks. (Dunham, 1969: 45)3 Beyond her evocation of his physical appeal – his ‘personal and physical magnetism’ (Dunham, 1969: 145), Dunham describes Estimé as the man I feel I would be somewhat remiss not to note the irony of Dunham’s rather rapturous, male body-based evocation of ancient Africa within the context of Senegal, where she was an intimate acquaintance of President Léopold Sedar Senghor, author of the well-known Negritude paean ‘Femme nue, femme noire’. 3

Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham

103

who ‘would be responsible for most of what I know about Haiti, much of my recognition of the truths and failings among men, and an intellectual awakening in a physical sense – previous experiences having been for me confused emotionalism’ (Dunham, 1969: 18). Estimé is, then, the veritable lynchpin for Dunham’s project; he brings together her dual ambition – to understand Haiti, to understand herself. He admired Dunham’s intellectualism and supported her scholarly interest in Haiti, escorting her through the slums of the capital and speaking to her at length about Haiti’s contemporary struggles and their historical foundations. He gave her regular access to his tan Oldsmobile and driver for her various excursions around the capital. Dunham speaks plainly about the nature of their relationship, this despite the fact that both were married at the time of their meeting: ‘Our evenings together were few. All Haitian men lead multiple lives and Dumarsais Estimé was no exception. A few who might not have approved of our relationship referred in my presence to the Oldsmobile as the “tomb of young girls”’ (Dunham, 1969: 44). Her use of his car was the source of some conflict for Dunham, however, and her narration of this conflict offers a striking illustration of the extent to which she ‘navigates’ intimacy in the pursuit of her research goals. There were two elements of Haitian culture that Estimé condemned in equal measure: its mulatto elite (Dunham, 1969: 21–22) and Vodou. He perceived the former as self-interested traitors to the republic, indifferent to the needs of the majority of Haiti’s citizens, and the latter as a hindrance to the social, moral and political advancement of Haiti’s underclass. Thus Estimé disapproved as strongly of Dunham’s willingness to frequent members of Port-au-Prince’s bourgeoisie as he did her insistence on attending Vodou ceremonies. Single-minded in her quest to gain better purchase on any and all perspectives available to her, however, Dunham had not hesitated at first to use Estimé’s car to meet with, among others, his sworn enemy, former president Louis Borno in the tony suburb of Pétionville, despite the fact that the vehicle’s presence in Borno’s driveway ‘particularly offended’ (Dunham, 1969: 22) her friend. Similarly, as concerned her field research, she was well aware of but wholly indifferent to the fact that Estimé ‘hated the vaudun’ (Dunham, 1969: 26). Bribing his driver when necessary, Dunham would use Estimé’s car to venture well outside of the capital to attend various ritual events. It was after one particularly egregious such excursion that Estimé finally put his foot down with his self-centred paramour. The scene merits quoting at length: Estimé was not angry; he was offended and hurt that I had lied and that I had involved an innocent person, the driver […]. As he talked I was

104

The Haiti Exception

ashamed and for the first time realized how little I knew about this man who must care for me or wouldn’t put up with the way I was […] I felt closer to him than ever, and after I had tried to explain, and apologized as I could […] he agreed to remove his pistol and holster, which he never allowed me to touch, and have me lie beside him on the bed and try and make up for the wrong that I had done by being quiet and letting him speak and letting his problems and tension drain into the afternoon sun that flooded the little room. This is the way I remember Estimé, and these were the occasions when he taught me in his oblique way, instructing me in the tools of humanism, awakening a conscience which had been selfish not social. (Dunham, 1969: 41–42) I linger here on this lovers’ quarrel because I believe it reveals several of the most significant elements of Dunham’s relationship to Haiti. First, it evinces the skilful manner in which Dunham was able to use her femininity to her advantage as she made self-interested choices in furtherance of her research objectives. There is, in effect, a marked tension between the image of this woman lying contritely and supportively next to her powerful lover as he unburdens himself of his troubles, and the intrepid field researcher who, only a week prior, had ‘crashed’ the ceremonial wake of a recently deceased bocor. And this discrepancy between the woman who loves and the scholar who studies is present throughout the narrative: ‘At the height of our arguments I might burst into tears of anger, feel comforted at the slightest sign of tenderness, suffer remorse, then continue to do as I always had, which was more or less what I wanted to do or felt destined to do’ (Dunham, 1969: 145). Also embedded in this incident is a hint of Dunham’s conflation of Estimé with Haiti itself. Her realization – and admission – of ‘how little [she] knew about this man’ speaks to the very essence of her anthropological practice. Dunham readily admits the limits of her ability to know – to ‘relate’ – which undergirds a relational understanding of human societies. This is confirmed in her description of yet another of their political/personal disputes. In this instance, Dunham had given a dance performance that was widely attended by the mulatto elite of the capital: ‘not until long after was the performance forgiven [by Estimé]’, writes Dunham. ‘In some numbers I appeared lightly clad – word of which had reached him – but more than that I had entertained members of the opposition party, had misused his friendship and courtship’ (Dunham, 1969: 155). While she makes plain the extent to which her romantic entanglement with Estimé was at play in this dispute, Dunham also comes to understand his (over)reaction as a specific function of his Haitianness: ‘The strongest motivating force beneath Estimé’s rancor was the common Haitian maladie […] the mulatto-black dichotomy, which approximates a

Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham

105

caste system […] a system that is hard for an American to grasp, even though living close to prejudices of color and religion at home’ (Dunham, 1969: 156; emphasis added). It is this tension between proximity/empathy and distance/ opacity that explains to a degree Dunham’s widely noted reluctance to make claims to expert knowledge or to assert ‘an objectifying ethnographic authority on the one hand, and a mystifying experiential authenticity on the other’ (Ramsey, 2002: 211). Dunham recognizes and accepts – respects, that is – the fundamental opacity of the people and traditions she studies in Haiti (and elsewhere). In this sense, we might think of Estimé and/as Haiti as Dunham’s conduit to a more fully actualized humanist praxis. Linked, in Dunham’s eyes, phenotypically to Africa and ideologically to Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture, Dumarsais Estimé nourishes both specifically/personally and politically/intellectually the precocious advocacy of Relation that serves as guiding principle in her practice of ethnography. He was a welcome and influential interlocutor as she worked through the complexities of her own subject position. Very much invested in ‘the placing of the black race in its proper perspective and accord with the rest of the world’ (Dunham, 1969: 46), yet loath to fall into what she perceived as the ghettoizing traps of black nationalism increasingly in vogue in her time, Dunham walked a line. As a woman and as a scholar she was well aware, as discussed above, that ‘[b]eing a member of the race was a distinct advantage’, but she makes certain in her text to nuance this reality: ‘Skin color, hair texture, facial measurements, yes, these are the external part of “race”’, she acknowledges. ‘I am, however, sensitive to “kind”, to blackness in the sense of spirit […] This “kind” that I speak of is of the human race’ (Dunham, 1969: 74). She explains that well before her encounter with Estimé she had always thought ‘only of “man” in the broadest, most inclusive usage of the term’ (Dunham, 1969: 79). Thus Dunham’s relationship with the future Haitian president was an expansion and expression of the principles Dunham had long brought to her work. Her ethical and political project had from its beginnings been a call to ‘blur the boundaries between self and other’ (Durkin, 2011: 140) – to find a way, as both a researcher and a human being, to the simultaneously ‘weightless’ and ‘weighted’ feeling she describes as ‘belonging to myself but a part of everyone else’ (Dunham, 1969: 136) and also to recognize this existential duality in those she encountered. Thus, while I by no means want to suggest that Estimé was responsible for her humanist stance, there is no question but that his ‘socially conscious approach to Haitian politics directly inspired Dunham to contemplate the humanities of her subjects and to treat her presence on the island as a long-term commitment both to individuals and to complex cultural rites’ (Durkin, 2011: 129).

106

The Haiti Exception

*** Loving my work Not long ago, I had the great good fortune to visit L’Habitation Leclerc, Katherine Dunham’s former home in Port-au-Prince, a physical, architectural testament to Dunham’s ‘long-term commitment’ to the island and its people. Dunham purchased the property in 1944 and for several years – many of them under the regime of François Duvalier – she worshipped and rehearsed there with members of her company. She also set aside parts of the property to function as the Clinic Leclerc, which offered free healthcare services to members of the surrounding neighbourhood of Martissant, then – as now – one of the worst slums of Port-au-Prince. Dunham’s dream, realized only in part in her lifetime, was to transform Leclerc into Haiti’s first and only botanical garden – a protected oasis of healing green in the midst of Haiti’s ailing capital city. Its future was still uncertain when she wrote Island Possessed. Having functioned in the 1970s as a glamorous watering hole for members of the international jet set, it was looted during the déchoukaj that followed Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier’s departure from Haiti and, in the mid-1990s, was ransacked and overrun by gang members and squatters. As recently as 2002, the property was described in the New York Times as a ‘botanical garden being held hostage by a criminal gang’ (Gonzalez, 2002).4 In 2007, L’Habitation Leclerc was declared a public park by presidential decree, and management and development of the property – since named Parc Martissant – was granted to activist and cultural organization FOKAL (Fondasyon Konesans ak Libète or Foundation for Knowledge and Freedom). Spearheaded by former Haitian prime minister Michèle Duvivier Pierre-Louis, FOKAL is in the process of renovating Leclerc and transforming it into a cultural centre and, indeed, a botanical garden. It was as a guest of FOKAL that I found myself meandering through the gardens of Martissant alongside a Haitian and an American historian (the latter also an anthropologist by training, it should be noted), listening to a staff member describe the astonishing diversity of trees, flowers and other plants that all but engulfed us. I was in Port-au-Prince for the Haitian Studies Association conference, almost exactly a year after the conference at which I had first spoken about Dunham. The coincidences were not lost on me in For a thorough and insightful account of the park’s troubling past and of the sociopolitical and religious significance with which it is imbued, see Beckett (2004). 4

Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham

107

the moment, so the opportunity to think them through now, here, feels once again like a delicious indulgence. Perhaps, though, instead of ‘coincidences’ I will say ‘symmetries’. Because, from the initial drafting of this paper as a talk for an interdisciplinary panel at the HSA’s annual meeting in 2012 to my interdisciplinary stroll through Dunham’s beloved former home a year later, there has been a reassuring coherence. My intellectual and physical wanderings with Dunham are of a piece with the journey that brought me from ‘home’ to Haiti in the first place. And while there is certainly an academic imperative underlying these movements, there is also, less tangible perhaps, a certain heart instinct that has guided me through these transatlantic spaces and histories, texts and contexts. Towards the end of her narrative, Dunham writes: ‘I now understand why the study of man is a thing apart, and why it becomes a passion’ (Dunham, 1969: 210). As with her evocation of love in her dedication, this reference to ‘passion’ in the context of ‘study’ is revealing. It is an admission that, from beginning to end, Island Possessed is a chronicle of Dunham’s love affair with Haiti. It serves thus as a reminder that to place oneself far from ‘home’ – whether it be in history or anthropology or literature or any number of disciplines; whether it be in intellectually ‘falling for’ an African-American chorus girl or a militant Surrealist Haitian writer – is to admit (both senses of the term) love in one’s scholarly practice. For it is in looking back on her own intellectual and emotional trajectory that Dunham came to understand Haiti as a critical piece of the ever-expanding puzzle that was her work and her life. It was in thinking Haiti’s exceptional role that she was able to trace connections between the most essential points of her scholarship and to chart the cartography of a multivalent humanist project – to keep alive a Relation between Same and Other. In so doing, she managed to make plain the value of sustaining such potentially productive tensions and asserting Haiti’s centrality to a transatlantic and multidisciplinary understanding of the Afro-Atlantic world. Dunham’s narrative suggests that while we must be concerned with – wary about – our legitimacy as scholars in approaching so-called Others, we can embrace rather than become undone by opacity. For it is, of course, deeply true that we follow the traces of ourselves as we read, analyse, interpret and ultimately translate the lives of the Others we encounter in our work. Moved, as I have long been in my own research, by Colin Dayan’s gorgeously visceral scholarly practice – ‘Let me admit at the outset that I am obsessed by Haiti’ (Dayan, 1995: xii) – I have become more capable, through Katherine Dunham, of admitting my desiring self into my work. I am better able to admit the extent to which I – as a ‘racialized intellectual’ – have in many ways put personal and professional faith in ‘the precious promises of self-identification,

108

The Haiti Exception

knowledge, and location’ (Cheng, 2009: 90) that my work contains. And so, if Haiti functions for me both centrifugally and centripetally, and if I often see the world through its prism, this is because there is something ‘in it’ for me – something beyond my commitment to engage in sustained dialogue and debate with fellow scholars or to train and educate students. There is an effort at ethical self-construction undergirding my scholarship. Moving outwards towards the human from within the insular space of Haiti, articulating the ways in which Haiti’s writers have sought – via the marriage of poetry and revolution, the metaphor of the zombie, the symbolism of the spiral – to make meaningful extra-insular connections has been my objective. Have I rendered Haiti exceptional in the process? I don’t know. I hope not. I do know, however, that I have anchored Haiti at the heart of my scholarship, as much for the specific stories its writers have told about that one small nation as for the stories they have told about the worlds upon worlds outside its borders.

Works Cited Aschenbrenner, Joyce. 2002. Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Beckett, Greg. 2004. ‘Master of the Wood: Moral Authority and Political Imaginaries in Haiti’. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 27.2: 1–19. Cheng, Anne Anlin. 2009. ‘Psychoanalysis without Symptoms’. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 20.1: 87–101. Clark, VèVè, and Sara E. Johnson (eds). 2005. Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Cruz Banks, Ojeya. 2012. ‘Decolonizing Anthropology through African American Dance Pedagogy’. Transforming Anthropology 20.2: 159–68. Dayan, Colin (Joan). 1995. Haiti, History and the Gods. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Dunham, Katherine. 1969. Island Possessed. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press. Durkin, Hannah. 2011. ‘Dance Anthropology and the Impact of 1930s Haiti on Katherine Dunham’s Scientific and Artistic Consciousness’. International Journal of Francophone Studies 14.1–2: 123–42. Fischer-Hornung, Dorothea. 2008. ‘“Keep Alive the Powers of Africa’: Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Deren and the Circum-Caribbean Culture of Vodoun’. Atlantic Studies 5.3: 347–62. Gonzalez, David. 2002. ‘Port-au-Prince Journal; In Katherine Dunham’s Eden, Invaders from Hell’. The New York Times 6 August. Available at http:// www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/world/port-au-prince-journal-in-katherinedunham-s-eden-invaders-from-hell.html (consulted on 13 February 2015).

Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham

109

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1950. Foreword to Katherine Dunham, Les Danses d’Haïti. Paris: Pasquelle Editeurs. [Trans. by Jeanelle Stovall. 1983. Dances of Haiti. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. In VèVè Clark and Sara E. Johnson (eds). 2005. Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press: 382–84.] Métraux, Alfred. 1962. ‘Katherine Dunham: An Appreciation’, from the program for performances of Bamboche! at the 54th Street Theater, New York. In VèVè Clark and Sara E. Johnson (eds). 2005. Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press: 385–87. Osumare, Halifu. 2010. ‘Dancing the Black Atlantic: Katherine Dunham’s Researchto-Performance Method’. AmeriQuests 7.2. Available at http://ameriquests.org/ ojs/index.php/ameriquests/article/viewFile/165/182 (consulted on 13 February 2015). Ramsey, Kate. 2000. ‘Melville Herskovits, Katherine Dunham and the Politics of African Diasporic Dance Anthropology’. In Lisa Doolittle and Anne Flynn (eds), Dancing Bodies, Living Histories: New Writings about Dance and Culture. Banff: Banff Centre Press.

Dance, Haiti and Lariam Dreams1 Barbara Browning

Dance, Haiti and Lariam Dreams

I should perhaps begin with a disclaimer of sorts. I don’t consider myself by any means a specialist in the history, religion or arts, broadly speaking, of Haiti – though many Haitian artists, scholars, religious practitioners and political figures have influenced my own scholarship, beliefs and artistic practice. Haiti has figured in my own work in ways that resonate with the work of US-based dance figures whom I’ll consider in this essay, and if I trace here some of the troubling or disconcerting moments in their own texts, I am surely equally implicated.2 But I don’t disavow the impulse – neither theirs nor my own – to try to fathom the interpenetration of Haiti’s aesthetic, spiritual and political experimentation with our own. Experimental dance practice, as well as dance scholarship, here in the US has been remarkably inflected by Haiti – as a choreographic source, but also as an imaginary, both spiritual and political. The extraordinary Katherine This essay was occasioned by an invitation to speak at the Performa Institute. My thanks to curator Adrienne Edwards for the invitation, and to all of the symposium’s fruitful and insightful questions and comments – most particularly those of Gina Athena Ulysse. 2 Perhaps this relation is most fully articulated (if paradoxically through a sense of absence) in the opening chapter ‘Haiti is Here / Haiti is Not Here’ of my Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (1998). 1

110

Dance, Haiti and Lariam Dreams

111

Dunham (1909–2006) spent much of her life researching and living in Haiti, and the movement technique to which she would give her name was deeply indebted to the dance vocabulary she learned in the hounfor, that is, the inner sanctuary wherein ceremonies take place. She wrote about her experiences in Haiti in both ethnographic and autobiographical texts (often blurring the lines between the two), and throughout her life was a committed activist in support of Haitian causes. Maya Deren (1917–61) was drawn to Dunham’s work, and served for a time as her assistant, later spending time in Haiti performing her own research and compiling footage for experimental films. It was through Haitian dance that Deren would begin to consider the temporal dimensions of trance, which she would go on to employ in her groundbreaking work on dance in film. The third figure I will look at here is Ralph Lemon (1952–), a conceptual artist who emerged from the world of experimental dance and found himself drawn, midway through his artistic trajectory, to consider the relationship of his work to both Africa and the Caribbean. And so with these preliminaries, I turn now to a passage from John Edgar Wideman’s short story, ‘Fever’, about an eighteenth-century epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia, spread through the vector of the Aëdes aegypti mosquito: Curled in the black hold of the ship he wonders why his life on solid green earth had to end, why the gods had chosen this new habitation for him, floating, chained to other captives, no air, no light, the wooden walls shuddering, battered, as if some madman is determined to destroy even this last pitiful refuge where he skids in foul puddles of waste, bumping other bodies, skinning himself on splintery beams and planks, always moving, shaken and spilled like palm nuts in the diviner’s fist, and Esu casts his fate, constant motion, tethered to an iron ring. In the darkness he can’t see her, barely feels her light touch on his fevered skin. Sweat thick as oil but she doesn’t mind, straddles him, settles down to do her work. She enters him and draws his blood up into her belly. When she’s full, she pauses, dreamy, heavy. He could kill her then; she wouldn’t care. But he doesn’t. Listens to the whine of her wings lifting till the whimper is lost in the roar and crash of waves, creaking wood, prisoners groaning. If she returns tomorrow and carries away another drop of him, and the next day and the next, a drop each day, enough days, he’ll be gone. Shrink to nothing, slip out of this iron noose and disappear. (Wideman, 1990: 130) Wideman recounts the epidemiological rumour circulating at the time, that the fever had come from Frenchmen fleeing the Haitian Revolution with their infectious African slaves. Epidemia in the story provokes spreadings

112

The Haiti Exception

of other kinds: ‘Membranes that preserved the integrity of substances and shapes, kept each in its proper place, were worn thin […]. What should be separated was running together’ (Wideman, 1990: 135) ‘What should be separated was running together’ – which means that even political identities could be disintegrating – one’s notion of what ‘makes one what one is’. Wideman’s dream-like – one might well say surreal – narrative recounting of the horror of the Middle Passage, the oceanic voyage in which ‘Africans’ became ‘Americans’, resonates uncannily with a sequence of other feverish dream-narratives, water crossings in which entry into and out of the Caribbean – and most particularly Haiti – represents, for better or worse, an acknowledgment of bodily, spiritual, cultural and political interpenetrability, and this is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the writings of those concerned with black (and) experimental dance. This becomes clear to me each time I teach my graduate seminar on dance ethnography. The field of dance studies (and the discipline is certainly not unique in this respect) often appears to assert a clear division between ‘ethnographic’ scholarship and the study of artistic experimentation. But in fact, the two are inextricably intertwined and, in the US at least, some of the most seminal ethnographic scholarship has been penned by writers with a profound commitment to aesthetic experimentation – and to Haitian religion, history and politics. Likewise, some of the most compelling genredefying choreography has entailed an ‘anthropological’ impulse – with Haiti again serving as the terrain for rethinking both dance aesthetics and cultural identity. These artists/scholars have documented the nexus of their commitments and preoccupations through highly personal, sometimes erotic, sometimes chaotic and often stunningly and uncomfortably honest first-person accounts. In this essay, my own course through these narratives will also be, as it were, anti-navigational – non-linear, temporally and geographically dispersed, confused and confusing – even though I begin, ironically, with a text entitled Geography. When he initiated the multi-partite, decade-long project of that name, and when he published the strange, lyrical book that records the experience, Ralph Lemon wasn’t interested so much in mapping his identity as in watching it disintegrate: ‘[t]he pieces collapsing, waterlogged’ (Lemon, 2000: 53). There is doubtless something immensely freeing about non-objective, disintegrative performance. But unmoored identity in seemingly free-floating, geographically dispersed intercultural collaborations isn’t always simply liberating. Lemon’s own anxieties about his collaboration with West African and Haitian artists were distilled (as our anxieties often are) in a dream. Before retiring one night in Abidjan, just at the beginning of his research, Lemon ate a dish of poulet créole, drank a Flag

Dance, Haiti and Lariam Dreams

113

beer, worried over the teeming little insects trying to invade his leftovers and then, I quote, ‘from my bed I got up and took another Lariam, because of my discipline and without a belief in this season of mosquitos’ (Lemon, 2000: 51). Why does the malaria prophylactic inspire less faith, or at least so it seems, than fear? And why does the fear express itself in dreams in which the membrane holding the body intact dissolves, blood disperses in an oceanic flow and other bodies begin to absorb one’s own? Why the panicked desire for hygiene, skin, transparent tape, hermeticism, self-containment? Here is the dream: I am lying at the bottom of the ocean […]. Other bodies swim by and eat bits of me. I watch with horror the pieces collapsing, waterlogged. What happened to the blood? Every time I am touched I take on another layer of filth, ancient bacteria, hatred. I am obsessed with washing my body. Even now I am taking a vast shower, holding my breath and almost passing out. The next time I will use a wide transparent yellowed tape to cover my lips. (Lemon, 2000: 53) Waterlogged, the nightmare of the body coming apart at the bottom of the ocean, permeated and consumed by other bodies, contaminated, obsessed with reasserting some membrane, skin, something to hold oneself in, and to keep out what one isn’t … the dream is vivid, horrific and very possibly induced, or at least enhanced, by the Lariam Lemon was taking to stave off malaria. Lariam continues to be the malaria prophylactic of choice for most travellers from industrialized nations to those – including both Haiti and the Ivory Coast, where Lemon’s dream took place – where malaria is endemic. This, despite the fact that Lariam’s side effects have caused concern among medical practitioners and, even more so, travellers relying on anecdotal evidence. These side effects range from ‘vivid dreams’ to paranoid psychosis.3 Throughout Geography (the book), Lemon ponders malaria, which may or may not be causing the fevers and wasting away of one of his dancer/ collaborators, not in Abidjan, but in New Haven, in Brooklyn, in Durham, North Carolina. While malaria isn’t, of course, endemic in these sites, it isn’t Mefloquine is prescribed against malaria and can have ‘adverse’ ‘psychiatric effects’ which ‘include anxiety, hallucinations, depression, unusual behavior, and suicidal ideations, among others. Neurologic effects include dizziness, loss of balance, and tinnitus. The label warns that mild symptoms may presage more serious ones, and that the drug should be discontinued at the first sign of symptoms. Mefloquine should not be used in people with a history of psychiatric problems’. See the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mefloquine (consulted on 15 February 2015). 3

114

The Haiti Exception

implausible that the parasite could be causing these symptoms, as a person can harbour the disease, undetected, for months. But even another of the dancers who has lived for years in Brooklyn ‘assumes, being African, [that malaria] is part of his inheritance’ (Lemon, 2000: 112). Later, yet another diagnosis is made: a case of what they once euphemistically termed a ‘social disease’, acquired by one of the dancers during the run in New Haven. Antibiotics treat the infection, but still an undiagnosed, unnamed condition remains. Watching his feverish dancer struggle through chills, sweats and painful spasms, Lemon reflects: ‘If he were American I would think that he had some disease. By the way his eyes do not focus and because he is so skinny. I think this because his magic has turned my seeing backward. And anyway, there is very little that I understand about being African’ (Lemon, 2000: 135). And yet, that’s the point, ostensibly, of the piece, the premise of the collaboration: to find a dialogical space through performance, to understand across diasporic identities. Maybe the anxiety of the body whose limits have disintegrated is more about that permeability, the acknowledgment of how much a North American might understand about Haiti and West Africa through performance, than it is about malaria. The excessive, almost obscene intimacy implied in cross-cultural research, in which one sees oneself and one’s own violence played back across a geo-political divide, seems to manifest itself in the pathology of the anthropological gaze. This may be what is behind Lemon’s disconcerting comment that his dancer/collaborator’s ‘magic has turned my seeing backward […]. If he were American I would think that he had some disease’. It is reminiscent of one of the most telling moments in ethnographic literature, the famous passage in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques that recounts the disturbing story of ‘The Writing Lesson’, when the ostensibly ‘non-literate’ Nambikwara chief turns the pedagogical tables on Lévi-Strauss, teaching him the violence of the letter. I will not rehearse that scene for you in detail, as it has been done so many times before, notably in Derrida’s Of Grammatology. But I want to remind you of the weird and anxious dénouement, in which Lévi-Strauss’s wife must be evacuated because she has contracted an eye infection ‘gonorrhoeal in origin’ (another ‘social disease’) from the locals.4 Lévi-Strauss arrived at that scene after another harrowing oceanic crossing – a hastily arranged flight from Vichy France on the ship Capitaine Paul-Lemerle. André Breton was also on board, and he documented his journey to the Caribbean in one of his most under-studied but beautiful And beyond that attempt is the truth of trying to understand some of the possible contamination of his gaze onto her eyes, which is both disconcerting and weirdly poignant. Dina Dreyfus and Lévi-Strauss subsequently divorced. 4

Dance, Haiti and Lariam Dreams

115

books, Martinique: charmeuse de serpents. Upon his arrival, Breton was promptly sent by the island’s Vichy authorities to the Lazaret concentration camp, a former leper colony. Of course, by then the pathology they hoped to contain was another – both racial and ideological. Breton would soon be released, and the exchanges that ensued between him and politically resistant Caribbean intellectuals would prove impossible to contain or control. Breton’s exchanges with Martinican intellectuals – particularly with Aimé and Suzanne Césaire – are well documented. The Césaires explicitly embraced Surrealism for what they considered its revolutionary potential. But somewhat less well known is Breton’s subsequent friendship with another figure who journeyed to the Caribbean some years earlier – the brilliant ethnographer and choreographer Katherine Dunham. In 1936, Dunham was granted a Rosenwald Fellowship to study ‘primitive dance and ritual in the West Indies and Brazil’. Her first stop: Haiti. Her encounters there would change not only her artistic trajectory, but also her personal and political lives. She bought a property on the island and would dedicate much of the rest of her life to publicizing both the magnificence of Haitian culture and the political indignities suffered by its people. Her entry into Haiti, however, wasn’t so auspicious, and has uncanny resonances with Ralph Lemon’s. Dunham had arrived on the heels of the US occupation and, despite her race, her nationality raised some hackles. In Island Possessed, the book she published some thirty years later documenting her initial experiences in Haiti, Dunham recalls vividly the lush palm grove near the bay of entry, ‘the truly painful beauty of which sheltered ordure; yaws (skin syphilis) infested parents and babies […]’ (Dunham, 1969: 6). In fact, the spectre of disease is on the face of the Coast Guard official who examines her documents. The possibility of her entry into Haiti is determined by this mythic figure, ‘a seedy, almost mulatto type, who would be a “griffon”, with spots on his face, artlessly covered by talcum powder. This only accentuated the spots, which were so placed and of such a texture as to have been unmistakably yaws […] I made a mental note never to be without hygienic handshaking protection when on foreign territory’ (Dunham, 1969: 9–11). Although Dunham’s telling of the story of her entry into Haiti seems to indicate a discomfort similar to that of Ralph Lemon, she similarly identified with the nation’s people, and ultimately dedicated much of her life to exposing the repeated acts of inhumanity waged against them. She converted her property at L’Habitation Leclerc (once presided over by Napoleon’s sister, Pauline) into a clinic, and her life-long work integrating Haitian dance technique into a modern dance vocabulary was always intertwined with her concern for both the political and physical welfare of the Haitian people. But it is interesting how much of her memoir, like Lemon’s, is preoccupied

116

The Haiti Exception

with the permeability of bodies, with anxiety over contagion and contamination – even as the very idea of bodies’ interpenetrability, and spiritual penetrability, seems to fascinate and inspire her, both aesthetically and politically. Visceral descriptions of her Vodou initiation ceremonies detail the smells and sensations of bodies pressed up against one another, the scent of commingled sweat, the sensation of another woman’s hot urine hitting her thighs as they lay pressed together on the floor of the hounfor. The smell of snake, viscous mouthful of raw egg, granular sensation of cornmeal rubbing against her skin; all of these, as well as the selfless sensation of her dancing body moving in concert with others, take Dunham to a place that she never quite feels justified in calling one of religious transcendence, but one that certainly was a part of the process of her coming to terms with her political identification with the people of Haiti. I am stirring the waters of these somewhat disparate stories because I think they tell us something important about the ways that the Caribbean, and particularly Haiti, has worked and continues to work in the imaginary of artists in the rest of the African diaspora – and particularly significantly among choreographers. The fact that Dunham and Lemon express anxiety about a notion of Haitian infectiousness isn’t simply evidence of their own susceptibility to virulent racist narratives – they each ultimately recognize the disease they fear as, in a sense, their own disease – the pathologizing gaze of anthropology, in which the eye can only see its own infection. Lemon and Dunham both had to confront the fact that they weren’t immune to an Other-ing gaze, in which they were themselves implicated. But working through that recognition brought them both to another – perhaps more politically potent – way for the membranes of individual, national and cultural identity to begin to collapse. It’s also perhaps one of the reasons someone like Dunham found a kindred spirit in Breton. Indeed, in the words of Mary Ann Caws, ‘Fluid interpenetration is a major point of surrealism, too often overlooked in favor of the more easily explained automatism’ (Caws, 1999: 14). ‘La beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas’ [‘Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all’]. André Breton wrote this famous line as the conclusion of Nadja in 1928 and repeated the formulation in L’Amour Fou in 1936, the same year that Katherine Dunham entered the harbour of Port-au-Prince, destined to come to the same conclusion. Dunham would go on to found a dance company, and a technique profoundly influenced by the religious dances she had studied in Haiti. Dunham never embraced the term ‘Surrealist’ in describing her own work and, indeed, there is perhaps something ironic about the development of a rigorous ‘technique’ of dance inspired by the apparent abandonment of control that, despite what the automatist Breton (might have) wanted to believe, takes place in Haitian possessional dance.

Dance, Haiti and Lariam Dreams

117

Breton wasn’t alone. Maya Deren, on encountering Dunham’s dancing, would become obsessed with learning about Haitian religious dance. She aggressively pursued Dunham, finally insinuating herself into the company in the role of ‘secretary’. When she first contacted Dunham, in 1941, she claimed to have ‘a very deep feeling for the dance with some uncultivated talent in that direction’ (Clark, Hodson and Neiman, 1984: 431). Although Dunham would take her on as an assistant on the strength of her obvious intelligence, she was never convinced that Deren really had a gift, uncultivated or otherwise, for dance. Deren worked prolifically on her experimental films throughout the 1940s, and in 1947 secured funding to go to Haiti, where, on several trips over the next seven years, she shot several hours’ worth of footage. But her encounter with Vodou cosmology left her at a loss as to how to respectfully and truthfully use documentation of religious dance in art film, and she ended up shelving that film stock, publishing instead the book-length ethnography Divine Horsemen in 1953. Nearly thirty years later, well after her death, her ex-partner Teiji Ito and his then-partner Cheryl Ito would, contrary to Deren’s own impulses, edit the closeted footage into a film of the same name. It needs some contextualization. Many viewers have objected to the oddly documentary cast given the footage by the Itos’ edit, with voiceovers derived from Deren’s text. She herself had shot the footage envisioning an experimental, not an ethnographic or documentary, film. But from what she wrote and said about her entire artistic trajectory, it is clear that her exposure to Haitian religious dance, through Dunham, and subsequently during her stays in Haiti, profoundly affected her thinking about both dance and film. Certainly parts of the book Divine Horsemen might give us pause – moments where Deren waxes poetic, for example, about a kind of supposedly inherent grace to Haitian movement: ‘The bodies of the market-bound women are like fine dark stalks, at once supple and steady […] the bodies’ bearing is so manifest that it imparts elegance to even the most poorly cut dress and the most patched and baggy overalls’ (Deren, 1983: 225). Deren calls this technical prowess a ‘natural grace’, but also a ‘stylization’, learned through habit and necessity. Stylization, one might also note, is inherent in the description itself, which effectively stages and choreographs a context for Haitian movement aesthetics. The passage is highly theatricalizing, even as it attributes theatricality to the landscape and the culture of Haiti. There are moments of exquisite grace in the Haitian footage that Deren shot. But the visual moments for which the film is best known are moments of more difficult beauty.5 When I presented a version of this essay as a public lecture at the Performa

5

118

The Haiti Exception

“La beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas.” Maya Deren, like Katherine Dunham, was disinclined to take up the label of Surrealism for her own work, but others have often applied it to her films. She too knew Breton, and collaborated with Marcel Duchamp (Witch’s Cradle, 1943). Certainly she had aesthetic concerns that resonated with those of the Surrealists, but she was quicker to articulate them in relation to Haitian cosmology and dance than in relation to European artists, even before her research trip to Haiti. It was during her initial work with Dunham’s company that she began to make some of the short experimental films that would secure her reputation as one of the great cinematic experimentalists of her time. And in her writings on these works, she consistently mentioned the shifting temporal perception brought on by trance dance as it informed her own experimentation with altered time on film. Deren suggested that the manipulation of cinematic time and perspective mirrored the ways in which spirit possession extended both the sensory and expressive capacities of the dancer in a Vodou ceremony. And she called this manipulation a choreographic act. In this regard, she might be seen as attempting something parallel to Dunham’s artistic interventions, incorporating Vodou dance into modern movement aesthetics. Deren’s 1947 film Choreography for Camera, features the Dunham dancer Talley Beatty. The ‘Choreography’ of the title doesn’t so much reference Beatty’s pirouettes or grand-jetés as it does what Deren considered her own choreographic intervention: radically changing the temporal and spatial possibilities of Beatty’s technique through her own cinematic manipulation. Many observers have called the effects of that manipulation ‘surreal’. Deren herself preferred to reference Haitian cosmology and dance aesthetics in situating her work. What it meant for her, as an artist, to penetrate and alter another’s dancing body is a complex Institute symposium, I was aware that the film would be screened in its entirety. In my talk, I felt compelled to remove the disconcertingly ethnological voiceover added by the Itos, and to protract even further the temporality of the most infamous footage, already significantly slowed down by Deren (I slowed it down even further). This included a close shot of a young man receiving a lwa, and the uncannily balletic footage of a white chicken having its neck snapped. My impulse was to privilege the very aesthetic experimentation (with temporal distortion and convulsive beauty) that Deren was trying to glean from Haitian dance. That said, these images have circulated in such troubling ways (often with an unexamined explanatory cast) that they will always need unpacking, which is precisely what the symposium’s participants helped me to do in the discussion that followed – for which I was and remain deeply grateful.

Dance, Haiti and Lariam Dreams

119

question with spiritual, aesthetic and political ramifications. As both she and Dunham would argue, these same questions were perhaps already posed by the Haitian divinities, and we are still trying to figure them out.6

Works Cited Caws, Mary Ann. 1999. The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, VèVè, Millicent Hodson and Catrina Neiman (eds). 1984. The Legend of Maya Deren, Vol. 1 Part 1: Signatures. New York: Anthology Film Archives. Deren, Maya. 1953. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co. Lemon, Ralph. 2000. Geography: Art, Race, Exile. Wesleyan, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Wideman, John Edgar. 1990. Fever: Twelve Stories. New York: Penguin.

My book Infectious Rhythm examined the lengthy and complex history of the metaphor of African contagion – specifically in relation to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Infectious Rhythm was published in 1998, just as medical protocol for the treatment of HIV/AIDS was undergoing drastic changes. Northern hemisphere perceptions of HIV have changed, altering or diluting some of the racist narratives of blame that I tracked in that text, although global inequities in treatment continue to manifest structural violence that is inextricably linked to all of our violently entwined histories. I type my final revisions of this essay just as new fears are mounting regarding the spread of the Ebola virus and, unsurprisingly, though dishearteningly, familiar, virulent, racist genealogies and projections are emerging. Scrutinizing those fears and projections may be our only hope of finding a more productive, humane way of understanding our interpenetrated pasts and futures. 6

‘Haitian Art’ and Primitivism: Effects, Uses and Beyond1 Carlo A. Célius

‘Haitian Art’ and Primitivism

I shall take as my point of departure an objection that was once addressed to me as an occasion to interrogate certain critiques of primitivism and to expose the impasses to which such critiques might lead. Primitivism, a gaze that relegates the Other to some original state of being, is a projection. The question is to figure out whether the object or person on which or on whom such a discourse is projected can be thus simplified, including when that thing or person has been appropriated – that is, taken hold of and reworked. In the end, there are multiple levels of analysis at stake – always remaining to be clarified when it comes to the plastic arts, where the complex matter of the relationship between production, circulation and reception is in question. We might position ourselves at one given level of analysis or seek to articulate several at once. Yet, when it comes to Haiti, there is a tendency to privilege a single register – a register presumed to be exclusive, definitive.

Objection! Invited to participate in a research seminar, I presented data from some current research. The question at hand was that of the place of the body in the creative process. This was an interesting perspective on two levels for it offered me an as yet unexplored entry into existing scholarship related Translated from the French by Kaiama L. Glover.

1

120

‘Haitian Art’ and Primitivism

121

to the subject of my research, and it seemed an ideal opportunity to begin thinking about the new art scene. In the new creative forms that began to appear in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the body seemed to have great importance. Of course, the body is never absent from the creative process, but the way in which it is implicated in the different stages of this process can vary. Presumably, the new art scene, was mobilizing it – implicating it in the creative process, presenting and representing it in the works – differently than in earlier styles. An example: Lionel St-Eloi’s shift from painting on canvas to the construction of three-dimensional objects using recycled materials! He discovered this new approach at the beginning of the 1990s as a way of circumventing the difficulty of acquiring tubes of paint during the economic embargo imposed upon Haiti following the ousting of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. From then on he stopped stocking up on paints and canvases borrowed (or to be borrowed) from a store and instead collected used objects from every corner of the city. This changed quite lot of things: the places and the means of acquiring the materials, their storage, all the provisions needed to work with them, the work habits, posture and gestures involved, the time it took to do the work … It became necessary to call for assistance and even to acquire new skills. St-Eloi now prefers working with aluminium objects, which he often cuts up into little pieces then assembles, adjusts, attaches – all to create a surface, like the scales of a fish, that is placed over a metallic structure, at times outsized and requiring soldering. In fact, the increased importance of three-dimensional creation is one of the remarkable aspects of the new art scene. Practices that call for a different use of the body have been developing, as much with respect to the creative process as to the viewing experience, as is the case with art installations and performance art. Even two-dimensional works seem to interpellate the body differently. The approaches and proposals all differ, obviously, but one nonetheless notes the appearance of a number of themes, subjects, leitmotifs and processes that seem to be common to several artists. Two figures in particular, that of the bizango and the gede, take on a role they seem not to have had before. In my presentation to the seminar, in an effort to better distinguish them, I compared them to the zonbi, arguably a more familiar figure outside of Haiti. I considered the increased importance of these figures, the specific ways of treating the body they encourage and their possible meanings in the post-Duvalier sociopolitical context, a period marked by multiform violence, epidemics and repeated natural disasters, not to mention the proliferation of slums and the explosion of prostitution. I considered the possible links, echoes and analogies between plastic works, literary and musical creations. One might imagine that these trends, as I have attempted to lay them

122

The Haiti Exception

out, are not limited to the explicit treatment of the figures evoked here, including within the world of plastic creation. It is for this reason that in my presentation I considered works ostensibly removed from, yet nevertheless reminiscent of, such figures. The link is founded in the treatment of bodies subjected to violence, deformity, decay, illness and death as well as in considerations of sex and sexualities, of derision, of imitation …2 The discussion that followed my presentation focused on the figure of the zonbi. Despite my efforts at clarification, I had not succeeded in making clear its distinction from the other two figures. In the end, the artistic trend of which I spoke came off as an avatar of primitivism. It was reduced to nothing more than a response to a Western call – nothing more than a response to Western expectations. It was simply merchandise that had been conceived to satisfy the primitivist demands of the West – to the point where, at the next day’s session, which began with summaries of the talks given the day before, the summary of my presentation was simply omitted. I mean to say that nothing of the argument I had developed was recalled. All that was said was that I had shown primitivist objects that belonged to an aesthetic of the ugly. Apparently, my presentation was deemed so inconsequential that it was pointless to recall its content. Apparently, I had been unaware that I was in fact speaking at length about something I had been incapable of naming – unless it was a question of wilful blindness. In that case, it would have amounted to a defence mechanism – the preservation of objects truly devoid of the dignity I had accorded them.

Pathway The objection is understandable, primitivism being at the very foundations of the most well-known discourses of plastic creation in Haiti. The debate surrounding primitivism – in all its forms and with respect to whichever society it is applied – makes ‘suspicion’ understandable, even more so given that we are clearly in a context in which primitivism, despite the constant claims of its extinction, is alive and well, as several recent publications will attest. In 2008 Brigitte Derlon and Monique Jeudy-Ballini published the results of a study of ‘primitive art’ collectors in France that confirmed ethnographically the robustness of the primitivist paradigm. The study describes a group with its own networks, practices, rituals and discourses that interacts with other spheres, the two most important of which are the market and the museums. For a more developed understanding of certain characteristics of this new scene, see Célius (2015). 2

‘Haitian Art’ and Primitivism

123

The category ‘primitive art’ has a social, economic and institutional base that assures its survival. The imaginary operates via certain complex mechanisms to produce and reproduce primitive alterity. Here, for example, are two of its valences. To begin with, the so-called primitive object must have had a function; this usefulness gives it its ‘credibility’, its ‘realism’ and its ‘life’. Yet there is no actual obligation to be aware of the specific functionality of the object. On the contrary, the tendency is to prefer a measure of ignorance – ignorance that then serves to shore up the object’s mystery, its ‘absolute mystery’. Such processes of hollowing out facilitate emotional investment. Emotion is privileged over knowledge, in the name of aesthetic purity, as the object itself is cloaked in a sort of fantastical apparatus sustained by primitivist stereotypes. We are not far removed here from the museographic position adopted by the Quai Branly Museum (dedicated to non-European societies) inaugurated in Paris in 2006. An ethnographic study of a visit to the museum makes this clear, and also shows that its appreciation by a random sampling of its publics is very complex. The collection inspires, according to the authors of the study, diverse attitudes towards and considerations of the provenance of the objects, the enigmas they contain or are said to contain, the circumstances of their arrival in France, the general diversity of cultures, etc. James Clifford, who penned the preface to this study, highlights its subtlety and intellectual value in that it shows how visitors of the museum are active, engaged, ask themselves questions, imagine: ‘they feel something profound, something vaguely and excessively “human”’. Nevertheless, the study ‘confirms the critics’ worst fears. Neo-primitivism is alive and well. It contributes to a host of newer, subtler forms of colonial reappropriation’ (Debary and Roustan, 2012: 7). From the moment of its conception and throughout its development, the museum was the subject of lengthy debates. Certain of the questions raised had been stirred up before in the context of a number of important international exhibitions like Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1984; Magicians of the Earth, organized in Paris at the Centre Georges-Pompidou and at La Villette in 1989; or, another example, Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, which travelled to Düsseldorf, London, Paris, Tokyo, Stockholm and Johannesburg between 2004 and 2007. 3 In June 2008 I participated in the colloquium Comparative Approaches to Multicultural Situations (Quebec and France) held in Quebec as part of For an analysis of the debates engendered by this exhibit, see Toussaint (2013). 3

124

The Haiti Exception

the 133rd meeting of the Committee for Historical and Scientific Projects (France). In my paper, ‘Art, Temporality and Alterity’,4 I tried to identify how these three categories were defined vis-à-vis the discursive context of art in France, keeping in mind two of the events mentioned above: the Magicians of the Earth exhibition and the opening of the Quai Branly Museum. I stressed the point that despite the recurrent proclamation of its decline, primitivism remained perfectly viable. I also showed that between 1980 and 2000, although hotly debated, rejected and left for dead, there had also been a call to understand the modernity of the concept of a ‘primitive mentality’ and its great heuristic value, which resides principally in the universality of the term ‘primitive’. There was an effort to tinker with the concept, to give it greater nuance, to bring out its subtlest elements. In the end, the concern was more with making a few adjustments than with initiating a true process of reconceptualization. It is as though it were too difficult, if not to say impossible, to think about figures of otherness outside of the primitivist paradigm. It seemed to me that all the ambiguities, the attempts at reconfiguration that emerged from the 1989 exhibition at the inauguration of the new museum in 2006 attested to the difficulty of escaping the beaux arts/primitivism dyad that continued to regulate the formula ‘art, temporality and alterity’. ‘Difference’ continued to signal ‘distance’, via the continued circulation of a temporal construction of primitivism that assured the survival of the primitivist paradigm. A strategy of temporal distancing that attests or once attested to the denial of co-temporality conceived by Johannes Fabian remained very much central to the modes of valorization of non-Western creations (Fabian, 2006 [1983]). These reflections from 2008 emerged out of earlier concerns, evidenced in an academic study of the critical reception of Magicians of the Earth (Célius, 1996). This study enabled me to get a clear sense of the state of discussions concerning primitivism in the 1990s. I conducted this enquiry because, some years prior, it had seemed necessary to me to attempt a clarification of the links between primitivism and naïve art. This is what I subsequently attempted to accomplish in my doctoral thesis (Célius, 2001), one section of which ultimately became the subject of a published paper (Célius, 2007). Naïve art emerged in Haiti thanks to an aesthetic accident. It is the result, in effect, of a fortuitous encounter between a perspective and a work – the pronouncing of an aesthetic judgment that was transformed into a founding discourse.5 This ostensibly valorizing ontological judgment, offered by the The conference papers have not been published. This idea, developed in my thesis, became the subject of articles published in 2004 (RACAR) and 2007. 4 5

‘Haitian Art’ and Primitivism

125

Cuban art critic José Gómez Sicre in 1945, associates a painting by Philomé Obin with a previously labelled artistic style. He inscribes Obin’s work in this tradition and thus makes possible the promotion of similar creations, leading to the establishment of a new artistic trend. The works were labelled naïve art, a genre that had already been established by the primitivist current in its later nineteenth-century European avant-garde formulation. It is in fact through the modernist invention of primitive alterity that naïve art emerges and that we are better able to understand the naïve art-modern art dichotomy. Defined as the art of the ‘Other’ by the so-called modern art that invented it, naïve art was necessarily excluded from modernity. Thus it is the discursive self-definition of the modern as such that excludes an otherness (‘othernesses’) that it also created and is constitutive of it. In this respect, naïve art participates in modernist movements. This naïve art-modern art dichotomy, which adjusts itself to the dualism that undergirds the social sciences and humanities with respect to Haiti, merits revising.6 It is also necessary to consider the effects of primitivism in so far as it was mobilized in the rise and promotion of naïve art. In effect, because of its links to primitivism, naïve art called into question the value system of a Haitian society founded on the ideology of ‘Civilization’. The upset was particularly significant given that the establishment of this new genre was accompanied by the social advancement of individuals belonging to a marginalized social class. The impact of this phenomenon becomes clear once we take into account the fact that the ‘fine arts’ alone had been legitimated at that time by the elites in their attempts at self-valorization.

Perspectives The preceding remarks lead us to new perspectives. Let us turn back to primitivism via an interrogation of the relationship between art and ethnology. Intervening in this debate, Jean-Marie Schaeffer identifies the problematic: the relationship between art and aesthetics and the reigning confusion with respect to these terms. According to Schaeffer, undoing this confusion presupposes the deconstruction of a concept of the work of art that is far from ‘a robust cognitive category, as is attested to by the insufficiencies of any existing definition’. For this reason, he proposes integrating the concept into a more expansive perspective that would conceive of ‘works of art’ as ‘one of the crystallizations of a much vaster class of objects and events that all relate to a functional transcultural and transhistorical constant, notably that which For considerations of the dualist approach see, among others, Célius (1998 and 2013). 6

126

The Haiti Exception

in biology and sociology are called “costly signals”’.7 This hypothesis permits, among other things, to avoid relying on ‘an essentialist definition of the work of art conceived of as a determined ontological class, dichotomously opposed to all material and representational productions’ (Schaeffer, 2008: 175). This fine-tuning invites an interrogation of the construction of the essentialist conceptualization of the notion of the ‘work of art’, despite the proposed deconstruction of ‘flaky ontologies’ (Cometti, 2012) that are implicit. This concept of the ‘work of art’ belongs to the history of the system of the ‘fine arts’ put into place in Europe beginning with the Italian Renaissance. The specialized meaning of the notion of ‘fine arts’ (the arts of drawing) was sedimented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It simultaneously evokes an extensive meaning that coincides with the various institutions of the fine arts (schools, fine art museums, fine art history) and those of the arts more broadly (schools and art museums, art history). It is from this successful synonymy that this essentialized categorization of works of art emerged. We begin to understand to what point the stated ends of the ‘fine arts’ do not imply the end of the hegemonic practices of the ‘fine arts’ as a system, as is evidenced by, if nothing else, their designation of schools, museums, periodicals, teachings, etc. Moreover, the most widely shared conception of art was fashioned and remains a tributary of the long tradition of the ‘fine arts’. This constrains in large measure, of course, a fair number of aesthetic behaviours. The realm of the fine arts was established, developed and became dominant at the very moment where European expansion began, spread and was consolidated – an expansion of which one modality was colonization, itself linked, first and foremost, to the slave trade. The situations of initial contact thus created contributed greatly to the establishment of the ‘fine arts’ as a constitutive element of European culture. Defined as an intrinsic value of ‘polite’, ‘civilized’ societies, the ‘fine arts’ served to evaluate the plastic creation of non-European societies and to situate them on the ladder of ‘Civilization’. It was this operation of hierarchization that qualified the creative practices of non-Europeans as archaic, primitive and primal, within a reformulation of primitivism, whose long genealogy Ernst Gombrich (2004) has traced in discourses on the creative arts dating to the rhetorical constructs of antiquity. Thus, the fine arts constitute one form of organization of plastic creation among many. It is critical to acknowledge this point in proposing new forms of analysis. It invites constant interrogation of the use of ‘fine art’ categories and the vague desire to project them on all forms of artistic For further details regarding the notion of costly signals see Schaeffer, 2008: 174, 175. See also Schaeffer (2009). 7

‘Haitian Art’ and Primitivism

127

creation. This proves particularly difficult in so far as the constellation of discourses known as ‘art history’ and ‘aesthetics’ have been structured and developed within the frame of the hegemony of the ‘fine arts’ – and have themselves been the veritable tools of the consolidation of that hegemony. Anthropological, cultural, postcolonial and visual studies have already charted alternatives. They have posed a certain number of problematics and sharpened our analytical tools so as to allow for enquiry from a long historical perspective. This is certainly necessary in the case of Haiti. When, beginning in the 1930s–1950s, the discourse around plastic creation in Haiti began to be constituted, a thesis was formulated according to which there had been nothing but an artistic void prior to that period. This discursive current, which made Haitian authenticity and Haitian artistry contingent solely upon naïve art, then used this thesis of the void to prove its point, to provide support for its claims regarding the artistically pure, ‘pure of all alloy’, innocent, primal, literally without tradition, without any point of reference. The void thus postulated was, in fact, that of the ‘fine arts’. The discursive current in Haiti ultimately showed that there existed a ‘fine art’ tradition dating to the colonial period (Lerebours, 1989). But the thesis of the void has another side to it: absent the ‘fine arts’, it was presumed that the art that emerged in Haiti had its roots in the permanence of Africa, racial memory and atavism. This explanation also supported the idea of a pure, primitive, originary art: Africa as synonymous with the primitive. ‘Africa’ was thus said to have re-emerged (despite the slave trade and slavery, it was noted consistently) in the form of a ‘miracle of color’ in Haiti – a veritable ‘enigma’ for André Malraux, who considered ‘Africa’ to have ‘no tradition of painting’. Scholarly inquiry ultimately yielded new premises: the establishment of the existence of the ‘sacred arts of Vodou’ (Cosentino, 1998 [1995]). Thus, it was determined that there is a realm of plastic creation specific to Vodou that in fact coexists with the ‘fine arts’ and its avatars. It is necessary from this point on to revisit the history of plastic creation from the period of colonialism, beginning with the existing categories whose origins, formation, development and transformations must be better understood. They must be considered with respect to one another in order to enable an understanding of their parallel formations, as well as the level of exchange between them during different periods in history. Perhaps we can expect a clearer understanding of the circumstances and the sociopolitical stakes of the crystallization of forms of representation, the circulation of signs and symbols during various periods in the evolution of society. For the role of such phenomena are far from negligible in the construction and legitimization of forms of collective self-representation.

128

The Haiti Exception

Crossroads The historicization of the fine arts allows us to establish the existence of distinct realms of plastic creation in a society born of colonization like Haiti. It thus reopens research and analytical perspectives on both the diachronic and synchronic planes. It retraces a global frame that can be articulated, as needed, in accordance with more pointedly circumscribed analytical frames – that of actual works of art and their creators, for example, taken together or individually. Creators act and react, often participating in the definition, maintenance and transformation of the universalizing categorizations within which they have evolved. Primitive discourse allowed for a sort of unlocking. In valorizing a form of artistic creation produced by individuals who had not followed an academic trajectory, it rendered possible an artistic explosion that expanded the social base of the art world, as it had been legitimated previously on the global collective level. The shaking up of frames of social value that this produced personally affected the individuals who gained a certain acknowledgment and a new source of revenue and found themselves implicated in new forms of social interaction. The artists in question perfectly understood the stakes and the results of these changes, one of the most significant being the external gaze and market. All of these parameters, along with several others, constituted a new dynamic. Let us take Hector Hyppolite (1891 or 1894–48) as an example. His brief career (1945–48) coincided with the process of upheaval that led to the establishment of the naïve trend in Haitian art. He was not simply ‘discovered’; he played a determining role in his own exposure. He was the source of his own legend – the legend that undergirded his celebrity. This legend reposed on a particular representation that functioned as a kernel of meaning fixed once and for all: Hyppolite, a Vodou ‘priest’ – a oungan – painted under the influence of the Vodou spirits, the lwa, thus leaving us with a body of work belonging to the domain of the religious, the mystical and/or the sacred. Thanks to an unexpected encounter, he dictated an autobiographical narrative, which was quickly translated from the Creole, reworked and widely circulated. This origin story ultimately constrained both the production and the reception of his works. The story was initially reported by Haitian writer Philippe Thoby-Marcelin – who first met Hyppolite in July or August 1945 (Thoby-Marcelin and Chenet, 1948) – for the archives of the Art Centre, in the wake of the impact of Gómez Sicre’s pronouncement. Hyppolite had been ‘discovered’ thanks to some décor work he had done for a bar. Thoby-Marcelin’s text facilitates an understanding of both the manner in which Hyppolite constructed his own narrative and

‘Haitian Art’ and Primitivism

129

the way in which that narrative was promulgated. In comparing it with other publications relating Hyppolite’s claims, taking into consideration the embellishments added by various writers, one sees how the central theme of Hyppolite’s legend emerged and was sedimented. The key task consists of identifying the ruse embedded in his story. For it is far from smooth, uniform or univocal. Hyppolite elaborates in fragments; he adds, retracts, rectifies, reaffirms … all of which gives the character he created an ever-shifting rather than a fixed quality – one that relies on ambiguity, mystery, allusion, humour, reversals. All of these elements invite reconsideration of his work. Thus can one unearth in his drawings the supposed vèvè (ritual Vodou drawings) that he produced for an ethnographic study (Marcelin, 1949–50) and consecrated via writing, a strategy of self-promotion that is supported by his paintings (Célius, 2010, 2014 [2012] and forthcoming). Hyppolite is emblematic on several levels. He rose to the rank of model of the ‘authentic’ Haitian artist and served to confirm the thesis of Haitian authenticity founded in Vodou. The character of Hyppolite supplied the theme of the artist who creates in a state of spirit possession. However, Hyppolite was also mocking all of this, going so far as to indicate that he had asked permission of the lwa to dedicate himself exclusively to his new life as a painter, thus making the decision to stop painting under their influence. This point and others, which has generally been elided or not taken seriously, suggests the possibility of looking elsewhere than to the realm of the devotional and the reverential: that of the possible uses of a field of reference which responds to a particular set of expectations while simultaneously exploring the creative springboards proposed by that field. Thus we see the point to which the rejection of his work (or of that of others) is impossible, because the work was solicited, rendered viable and even promulgated by a discourse of primitivism. Hyppolite’s work emerged within a context of encounters, exchanges and dialogue. All of these parameters must be taken into consideration. This brings me back to the objection evoked at the very beginning of this text. It is moving towards the very analytical perspective that I have just outlined – the situation wherein I was ‘informed’ of the primitivist nature of the objects I presented. During the follow-up discussion to my presentation, as I have noted, it was the figure of the zonbi that attracted the most attention. It was suggested that this figure might have backfired, that the representational modes of the zonbi in the US-American universe had been appropriated and projected onto ‘new’ objects that thus responded to a particular demand. The targeted objects were above all those that explicitly incarnated the figures of the bizango and the gede. I must clarify that I had highlighted the problems posed by the

130

The Haiti Exception

bizango statues in Marianne Lehmann’s collection, taking up key elements of a prior analysis (Célius, 2009). I argued in this article that my research had not led me to confirm the antiquity of these objects, as had been affirmed by experts in the past. My hypothesis was that they had not been produced any earlier than the 1980s or ’90s, which had led me to place them in the movement of the ‘new artistic scene’. Communicating these findings on the origins of these objects was no doubt one of the reasons for the objections posed to me at the seminar. In the context of a renewed, if well-contested, primitivism and a global perception of ‘Haitian art’ as a massive ‘naïve’ production destined for export, my analysis amounted to showing that those works that appeared to be new creations (re)produced the same logic as productions expressly conceived to seduce ‘white people’ – be they tourists or others – looking for a little exoticism. It is true that, from a certain distance, it may seem difficult to distinguish between the differing constitutive strata that make up the world of the plastic arts in Haiti. If indeed there are fluid, porous zones, gateways and even deliberate strategies of incoherence, there certainly are levels of distinction that classify and hierarchize the objects in the internal market. It is for this reason that when creators advance from the status of ‘artisan’ to that of ‘artist’, it is a meaningful and consequential phenomenon. It brings with it significant changes in the expectations about and (e)valuations of their works with respect to potential opportunities for exhibition and inclusion in other distributional circuits, as well as promotional strategies, sales prices, etc. Creators can play both sides of the equation, but only once the higher status – that of artist – is considered obtained. These strategies are, of course, by no means unique to Haiti or to the present moment. The itinerant exhibition that debuted at the Geneva Museum of Ethnography in December 2007 introduced the Lehmann Collection to Europe. In the meantime, bizango statues had entered into commercial circuits, to the point where the Quai Branly Museum was trying desperately to procure one (in 2008).8 For there was, presumably, a not insignificant period during which these objects had been gathered in one place. Lehmann’s Swiss nationality had evoked a certain disdain, on which the argument for external solicitation was based. Lehmann had resided in Haiti since the 1950s, but she would not resell the objects she had chosen to keep in Haiti for she wished to restore them to the Haitian people within the context of a museum. The external market thus was not a determining factor in either the creation of the objects or in the project of their patrimonialiFor the history of the acquisition of such objects, see Benoît and Delpuech (2015). 8

‘Haitian Art’ and Primitivism

131

zation. Nevertheless, the collection’s necessarily limited capacity ended up pushing the creators of these objects into the gallery circuit, henceforth incorporating these individuals into their networks, and generating much conversation and interest. Let us remember for a moment where this all began. It was in the days immediately following the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 when, one day, a vendor approached Marianne Lehmann with a concrete statue to sell her. In response to her questions about the object’s provenance, her interlocutor informed her that it came from an ounfò, a Vodou temple. Intrigued, she inquired about the reasons for the object’s sale given its status, as she understood it, as a ‘sacred object’. Allusions to economic difficulties sufficed to convince her to move forward with the transaction. It was from this point on that Lehmann decided to save what she perceived to be a vulnerable patrimony. The same vendor – and then several others – continued to bring her diverse objects, making certain to cloak them in rich stories of their original ‘circumstances’. As regards the bizango statues, the absence of solid ethnographic information confirming their status as cultural objects makes it difficult to resist a comparison with other encounters that have generated new phenomena – like José Gómez Sicre’s ostensibly valorizing ontological pronouncement on the work of Philomé, the catalyst for the emergence of the ‘naïve art’ movement in Haiti; or again the autobiographical narrative put forward by Hector Hyppolite upon his first encounter with Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, which ultimately proved as determinant for the circulation of his work as for its reception. It would seem easy to situate Marianne Lehmann’s enterprise within the frame of these encounters that, on each occasion, have made possible the appearance and development of new types of creation and new artistic categories in the world of the plastic arts in Haiti since the second half of the twentieth century. The three moments I have evoked here are not identical, of course. There was a well-established context in place when this more recent phenomenon emerged. Indeed, looked at from this perspective, the first vendor’s approach might be understood as a long-standing practice, with its sales strategies that include mobilizing all sorts of discursive tricks to close the deal. If, in these conditions, narratives conceived to accord with certain expectations are the most common, they take shape and are deployed in a particular moment, and so may have unexpected consequences. And any potential buyer – including Haitian collectors, established in situ – can adjust. Most important is to take note of these practices as participating in the modes of creation and in their futures. There are also relationships to be understood between the outcomes of an oraliture always at work and the creativity that is deployed in the practices of figurative representation.

132

The Haiti Exception

It is evident that an artwork’s reception, at whatever level it is considered, is insufficient as sole analytical frame. Moreover, that reception is itself multiple, variable. The different museums that exhibited the Lehmann Collection proclaimed a renewed perspective on Vodou, beyond the clichés. It is possible that, here and there, a number of scenographic positionings ended up reinforcing stereotypes or creating misunderstandings. The complexity of the situation becomes even clearer if we are aware of the fact that the collection was caught up in the dynamics of internal militant debates concerning the reorganization of Vodou (Célius, 2009). In this respect as well, the approach I have adopted in this text might also be disqualified. It is clear that, according to one’s particular point of view, concerns or interests, it can be difficult to admit that there exist ‘many ways for an object to “testify”: as synthesis of the intentionality of a legitimate or an erroneous referent – as foundational sign for an individual, as instrument of exchange between human beings, as simple material factor, as indicator of the singularity of a collective or as work of art’ (Descola, 2007: 152–53).

Works Cited Benoît, Catherine, and André Delpuech. 2015. ‘Trois capitaines pour un empereur! Histoires de bizango’. Gradhiva 21: 130–55. Célius Carlo A. 1996. La Critique des expositions: magiciens de la terre (1989). Ed. by Marie-Clarté O’Neill. Paris: École du Louvre. —. 1998. ‘Le modèle social haïtien. Hypothèses, arguments et méthode’. Pouvoirs dans la Caraïbe Université de juillet: 110–43. —. 2001. L’avènement de l’art naïf en Haïti. Discours institué et nouvelle approche. PhD thesis, EHESS, Paris. —. 2004 ‘L’avènement de l’art naïf en Haïti. La portée instauratrice d’un jugement esthétique’. RACAR 19.1–2: 47–64. —. 2007. Langage plastique et énonciation identitaire. L’invention de l’art haïtien. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval. —. 2009. ‘Le vodou haïtien: patrimonialisation et dynamique de restructuration’. Martor 14: 89–100. —. 2010. ‘Hector Hyppolite, l’insolite’. Recherches en esthétique 16: 167–73. —. 2013. ‘Créolité et bossalité en Haïti selon Gérard Barthélemy’. L’Homme 207–08, 313–31. —. 2014 [2012]. ‘The Creator’s Vèvè’. In Mystical Imagination: The Art of Haitian Master Hector Hyppolite. Washington, DC: Haitian Art Society: 42–55. —. 2015. ‘Quelques aspects de la nouvelle scène artistique d’Haïti’. Gradhiva 21: 104–29. —. [forthcoming] ‘Parole de lwa, œuvre d’artiste. À propos du peintre Hector

‘Haitian Art’ and Primitivism

133

Hyppolite’. In Gaetano Ciarcia and Éric Jolly (eds), Oralités secondes. L’identité travaillée par l’écrit, la parole et l’image. Cometti, Jean-Pierre. 2012. Art et facteurs d’art. Ontologies friables. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Cosentino, Donald J. (ed.). 1998 [1995]. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, 2nd ed. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Debary, Octave, and Mélanie Roustan. 2012. Voyage au musée du quai Branly. Paris: La documentation française. Derlon, Brigitte, and Jeudy-Ballini Monique. 2008. La passion de l’art primitif. Enquête sur les collectionneurs. Paris: Gallimard. Descola, Philippe. 2007. ‘Passages de témoins’. Le Débat 147: 136–53. Fabian, Johannes. 2006 [1983]. Le temps et les autres. Comment l’anthropologie construit son objet. Toulouse: Anacharsis. Gombrich, Ernst H. 2004. La préférence pour le primitif. Épisodes d’une histoire du goût et de l’art en Occident. Paris: Phaidon. Lerebours, Michel-Philippe. 1989. Haïti et ses peintres de 1804 à 1980. Souffrances et espoirs d’un people (2 vols). Port-au-Prince: Imprimeur II. Marcelin, Milo. 1949–50. Mythologie vodou. Rite rada (2 vols). Port-au-Prince: Les Éditions Haïtiennes and Éditions Canapé-Vert. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 2008. ‘Le musée du quai Branly entre art et esthétique’. Le Débat 148: 170–78. —. 2009. Théorie des signaux coûteux, esthétique et art. Rimouski: Tangence. Thoby-Marcelin, Philippe, and Jean Chenet. 1948. ‘La double vie d’Hector Hyppolite, artiste et prêtre vodou’ (extraits). Conjonction 16: 140–44; 17: 37–41. Toussaint, Évelyne. 2013. Africa Remix. Une exposition en question. Bruxelles: La Lettre volée.

On Nation-Building: Histories, Theories, Praxes

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions Deborah A. Thomas

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions

There are two stories that Haiti opens for political anthropology. The first has to do with the kinds of politics that have and have not been possible in the region, and the kinds of sovereignty that have and have not been recognized and valued. The second, related, story has had to do with the links between cultural alterity and nation-building or national identity. Both these stories, of course, are not bounded regionally, but reflect broader modernist imperatives. While the editors of this volume have asked us to think about the relationship between Haiti and the discipline of anthropology using Trouillot’s Global Transformations and René Depestre’s ‘La France et l’Haïti’ as points of departure, this essay posits three additional cornerstones: Jean Price-Mars’s Ainsi parla l’oncle, Melville Herskovits’s Life in a Haitian Valley and Trouillot’s State against Nation. These texts provide us with certain frames for thinking about the various kinds of relationships between states and nations, between revolution and everyday life, between cultural practice and nationalist ‘patrimony’, and between the past and the present. Together, the texts also show us, in different ways, how and why particular questions have been foregrounded while others have remained marginalized. In this essay, I want to use these texts, among others, to think through questions of nationalist integration, peasant incorporation and global developmentalism. I will argue that the anthropology of Caribbean peasantries from the 1930s to 1950s is directly related to the anthropology of violence in the 2000s and 2010s, and that in both cases what has really been at stake is the 137

138

The Haiti Exception

question of sovereignty – how it is to be framed, addressed and expressed. My purpose is to show how peasants became key to nation-building in the British West Indies in two ways: first, in relation to developmentalist models rooted in respectable missionary values (rather than in the decadence of the plantation); and second vis-à-vis the elaboration of a set of cultural practices that could be shared as foundational to a national identity. If, within the British West Indies and Haiti, the burning debates of the 1930s had to do with what kind of development strategies would move these societies forward and what forms of subjectivity could be nurtured in order to generate a nationalist concept of belonging and citizenship, today the questions that keep us up at night in both contexts have to do with violence – political, structural and epistemological. By reading Jamaica through Haiti, I hope to show that these questions are deeply linked, and that they are rooted in the problem of attaching sovereignty to the state.

‘Haiti’ and the imagination of political possibility As someone who has long been interested in the cultural politics of nationalist development in Jamaica, in its histories and its legacies, Haiti – as both material reality and conceptual frame – has always cast a broad shadow. As for most other Jamaicans, and indeed for many throughout the black Atlantic world, the conventional narratives related to Haiti, both glorious and disastrous, have resonated through the aspirational example of early black political triumph as well as through a fear of ‘obeah’, or the colloquial naming of particularly destitute sections of a community.1 In both cases, Haiti is cast as an exception, a cautionary tale, the problem space for thinking about various kinds of failure (even in success), and it is the common sense-ness of this exceptionality that propels many people’s interest in the country. Jamaica, of course, has its own discourses of exception, typically regarding crime and violence, though also more happily rendered in relation to global recognition for musical and athletic prowess. In the case of Haiti, however, this exceptionalism has more general effects, and these have to do with the ways it inevitably seems to be overwhelmed by a discourse of crisis. On one hand, this discursive frame produces a seemingly positive moral-ethical response to natural disasters and political turmoil, which places Haiti on the global humanitarian map, however briefly. On the other hand, discursive attention to crisis tends to prevent a long-term engagement with the histories This, of course, is why scholars like Gina Athena Ulysse argue for the development of ‘new narratives’ about Haiti (Ulysse, 2012). See also Forsdick (2013), Smith (2013), Bonilla (2013). 1

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions

139

and political economies that produce the everyday conditions leading to intermittent crisis. This means that Haiti remains always a ‘problem’ to be solved (or an example to be avoided) rather than a complex, dynamic and situated global historical space like any other. And as the quintessential example of a ‘problem’ for the West – the oft-cited poorest nation in this hemisphere – Haiti also becomes emblematic not only of Caribbean experiences, but also of Africa and the diaspora more generally. What does it mean to be a problem? asked W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk. Haiti. These kinds of exceptional narratives dominate the popular public sphere, but encountering Haiti through anthropology as a graduate student in New York in the early 1990s generated two additional frames of reference: the sociopolitical and economic violence of state formation, and the politics of African cultural survivalism. Within Haiti, as well as in Jamaica, both of these frames hinged on the peasantry. Much of what we know about the structural position of Caribbean peasantries is the result of ethnographic field research conducted in the 1950s and 1960s in Puerto Rico, Haiti and Jamaica. Sidney Mintz’s pioneering work positioned peasant production and marketing in relation to other modes of production – including, importantly, the plantation – both within and between Caribbean territories and vis-à-vis global transformations in capitalism. Mintz argued that in the more mountainous islands, ‘proto-peasantries’ developed during slavery as the result, in Jamaica, of the system of provision-ground farming and internal marketing, a system which planters neither interfered with nor regulated, even allowing slaves customary rights to bequeath the use of provision grounds to their descendants. After emancipation, these proto-peasantries became what he termed ‘reconstituted peasantries’; that is, they began as slaves and became peasants as ‘a mode of response to the plantation system and its connotations, and a mode of resistance to imposed styles of life’ (Mintz, 1989 [1974]: 132–33). Mintz’s position on the question of the extent to which peasant practices constituted forms of resistance to the plantation regime, however, was nuanced. To those who were promulgating this emergent trend within West Indian scholarship, he responded that Caribbean populations ‘have not generally responded to the plantation regimen in terms of their class identity but along other dimensions of social affiliation’ (Mintz, 1989 [1974]: 154), but that the significance of land to Caribbean people reflects an attempt to ground their identity as persons in a common commodity: ‘In these terms, the creation of peasantries was simultaneously an act of westernization and an act of resistance’ (Mintz, 1989 [1974]: 203). In other words, Mintz acknowledged that provision grounds and the internal marketing system, and later free villages, provided the ability to cultivate a degree of autonomy from the plantations, but he did not see them as out-and-out resistant. Nor did

140

The Haiti Exception

he see them as separate spheres, arguing against the idea that it was conflict that characterized the relationship between plantations and peasantries. Instead, he wrote, ‘[i]n the contemporary Caribbean these modes are in fact often cooperant, and individuals or even whole communities may maintain a peasant adaptation while engaging in part-time work on the plantations (Mintz, 1989 [1974]: 133).2 This insight regarding the complementarity between peasant and plantation production reiterates an argument made by William M. Macmillan some two decades earlier in his Warning from the West Indies (1936). Macmillan, a Scottish-born South African historian who in 1934 resigned from the department he had founded and built at the University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg, was invited to visit Jamaica, and the West Indies more broadly, by Lord Sydney Olivier. Olivier knew Macmillan was working on a book about development possibilities on the African continent, and suggested that the West Indies would provide a model for the newer African colonies to emulate.3 Olivier, a Fabian socialist and advocate of communal land ownership, had been Governor of Jamaica on three occasions in the first decade of the twentieth century. He was convinced that the future of the West Indies lay in the support of peasant production, and was eager for others to recognize what he saw unequivocally as an example of peaceful, multiracial development: If a mixed community of Europeans and Africans is to develop wholesomely it is essential that the black people shall be left economically and industrially free; and that the first condition of this development is that they shall have command of their food-supply by possessing their own land, and not to be deprived of it, as they have been in South and East Africa. Granted this basis, the African is fully capable of progressing as he has done in Jamaica, to take his part in every vocation of a civilized European community. (Olivier, 1936: 436–37) For a development of peasant ambivalence, see Burton (1997); for a more recent example of historical sociology that reads post-emancipation Jamaica and post-independence relationally, see Sheller (2000). 3 Having been funded in 1934 by the Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York to visit the Negro colleges of the southern United States, Macmillan was given additional resources by the Phelps-Stokes Fund to travel to the West Indies. His tour began in Jamaica, where he spent a few months before departing for Trinidad, Grenada, Saint Vincent, Barbados, Saint Kitts, St. Lucia and Montserrat (Macmillan, 1980). For more on the context of Macmillan’s West Indian experience, see Murray (2013), Macmillan (1980), Macmillan and Macmillan (2008). 2

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions

141

Macmillan, however, was appalled by the conditions of poverty and apathy in each of the islands he visited. While granting that ‘race relations’ were relatively harmonious, he nevertheless displeased Olivier by reporting that the intransigence of planters, coupled with the failure of the Crown Colony imperial government ‘to carry its burden of responsibility for the unrepresented masses’, provided no positive example for African colonial development (Macmillan, 1938 [1936]: 63). Indeed, his sense in the original edition of Warning was that poverty, hunger and the lack of provision for public health, education and infrastructure prevented the development of political consciousness among the masses of the population.4 Of course, this sense was to be proven wrong when labour riots broke out across the British West Indies after the book’s original publication. This occurrence – ‘unthinkable’ for him at the time just as the Haitian Revolution had been ‘unthinkable’ among planters in its moment (Trouillot, 1995) – prompted Macmillan to write a new preface for the 1938 Penguin paperback edition. Here, he asserted that what had happened in the West Indies was a ‘warning of what we are to expect in other parts of the Empire unless our responsibilities come to be deliberately accepted’ (Macmillan, 1938, [1936]: 12). 5 While Macmillan’s original recommendations supporting significant land redistribution and reform were not immediately taken on, his suggestion to extend and augment the 1929 Colonial Development Act – through which funds were allocated throughout the empire for projects that would support general welfare – was. In 1940 a more generous sum was made available, with an additional allocation specifically for the West Indies, and Comptroller General of Services was appointed. These new development and welfare schemes built upon (and ultimately subsumed) the work of Jamaica Welfare, Ltd., which had been established in 1937 as a result of negotiations between Norman Manley, who would become the leader of the People’s National For Macmillan, this sense was true everywhere except Saint Kitts, where riots had broken out in 1935, largely, in his view, as the result of a more politically aware proletariat, many of whom had recently returned from working in the United States (Macmillan, 1980: 214). 5 Macmillan would go on to write an even more trenchant tract against imperial neglect and supporting the move towards self-government for the colonies as the Second World War began (Macmillan, 1941). Warning was not favorably received by local government administrators in Jamaica upon its original publication, but the text is now acknowledged as the primary catalyst for a change in colonial policy towards the West Indies. Macmillan eventually returned to Jamaica in 1954 for a year as a visiting professor and chair in the history department at the University of the West Indies. 4

142

The Haiti Exception

Party at its founding in 1938, on behalf of striking banana workers, and Lorenzo Dow Baker, President of the Boston Fruit Company (which would become the United Fruit Company). These were the initial mechanisms put in place in the 1940s, as a result of the global dislocations during the 1930s, geared towards development and state formation in rural Jamaica, with the longer-term project of ‘preparing’ people for eventual self-government. I will return to a discussion of this project below. The 1930s were also a key decade in the elaboration of another framework – that of tracing purportedly African cultural ‘survivals’ within peasant practices throughout the Atlantic world. This is a framework ordinarily attributed to Melville Herskovits, whose opus The Myth of the Negro Past (1990 [1941]), though largely rejected by African-American scholars and activists pursuing a project of equality vis-à-vis social, economic and political rights, eventually became a sort of Bible for later cultural nationalists.6 While Herskovits publicized the survivals paradigm, conducting research in Haiti, Trinidad and Dahomey as well as Harlem, he was, as Kevin Yelvington has argued, one scholar within a broader network concerned about thinking through the political uses of elaborating an African cultural heritage (Yelvington, 2006; Magloire and Yelvington, 2005). This network, of course, included Jean Price-Mars, whose 1928 publication of Ainsi parla l’oncle re-evaluated and affirmed African-derived folklore in Haiti as the necessary foundation for nationalist development and cultural self-esteem within the context of the US occupation.7 Herskovits’s unacknowledged Other anthropologists (aside from Sidney Mintz) were visiting both Jamaica and Haiti in the 1930s and up through the 1950s, and here I am principally thinking of George Eaton Simpson and Zora Neale Hurston. Although Hurston worked with Herskovits measuring heads in Harlem, her book (Hurston, 1990 [1938]) was not directly framed in relation to the Africanisms paradigm. Instead, it was part travelogue and part documentation of folklore. Simpson, on the other hand, later published comparative volumes focusing on New World religions, though he also conducted the first research on Rastafari, also documenting (aurally and visually) their practices and lead figures in Trench Town (Simpson, 1970, 1978). 7 During the 1960s and 1970s, West Indian scholars like E. Kamau Brathwaite (1971) and Sylvia Wynter (1970), built on Price-Mars’s points to reject the notion that a process of acculturation is what characterized Caribbean societies. They argued that the dominant European sector, often absent, did not provide a cultural and social scaffolding to which dominated Africans had to acclimatize, but that Afro-West Indians, in maintaining, reconstructing and transforming their own cultural practices (especially those relating to land use and religious expression) underwent a cultural process of indigenization that rooted them 6

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions

143

theoretical debt to Price-Mars is evident throughout Life in a Haitian Valley, in which he discusses the combite system of cooperative economic production, marketing, extended family systems and the institution of plaçage, deference towards elders and especially Vodou as elements of a West African (specifically Dahomean) cultural heritage.8 Herskovits’s problématique had to do with the effects of culture contact and change, the importance of history and the relationship between culture and personality, at the time a key conceptual frame within US anthropology. For him, culture contact (European and African) within the context of unequal valuation of these cultures produced a ‘psychological conflict’ or ‘psychic strain’ (Herskovits 1971, [1937], 292, 294), because individuals ‘must meet the demands of two traditions which, in many aspects, are in anything but accord’ (Herskovits 1971, [1937], 295). Herskovits believed that Haitians’ response to this situation was one of ‘socialized ambivalence’, an adjustment characterized by rapid shifts in behaviour and attitude, and emotional vacillation. And while the broader politics of his African survivals project had to do with generating a sense of confidence through the demonstration that African-descended people in the Americas were culturally connected to a past, his conclusion that socialized ambivalence ‘underlies much of the political and economic instability of Haiti’ (Herskovits 1971, [1937], 295) was politically myopic in the extreme.9 in the New World. For these scholars, it was the African heritage embedded within the folk culture of West Indian slaves that should be seen as the basis for Caribbean cultural creativity, and thus developed as a modern national culture. Elsewhere, I have discussed the broader effects of and transitions within this kind of cultural politics in Jamaica, arguing that these ‘folk nationalisms’ were, by the 1990s, supplanted by a form of modern black nationalism (Thomas, 2004). 8 Herskovits had begun correspondence with Price Mars after the publication of Ainsi and met him in 1928 en route to Suriname. Subsequently, Price-Mars assisted Herskovits in selecting a field site, and reviewed his books (Yelvington, 2006; Magloire and Yelvington, 2005). 9 In a discussion about the politics of the extraordinary anthropological interest in Haiti immediately following the US occupation, Kate Ramsey has argued that neither Herskovits nor George Eaton Simpson, who also conducted ethnographic research in northern Haiti in 1937, nor Métraux nor Roumain, who detailed the Catholic Church’s persecution of Vodou during that period, make explicit critique of either the US marines, protestant missionaries or Catholic repression of Vodou (Ramsey, 2005, 2011). These silences are rooted in a number of factors that she outlines, but Herskovits’s own was rooted in a sense of cultural determinism that sidelined overt discussions of power dialectics within the local context of research.

144

The Haiti Exception

For Price-Mars, however, the politics of acknowledging Vodou and other peasant practices as central to Haitian culture writ large had to do not only with the rejection of US occupation but also with what he called ‘bovarysme collectif’ among middle-class Haitians (Price Mars, 1935: 10). He was not alone in seeking to jump-start radical politics during the so-called second independence post-occupation. As Matthew Smith (2009) has shown, a number of Marxist and noiriste organizations formed after 1934, but because these oppositional groups were divided in their attempts to grab state power, and because these attempts became increasingly violent, the noirisme that ultimately became dominant under Duvalier was not the political solution Price-Mars had envisioned, one of a shared national culture – rural and urban – rooted in a dynamic Vodou, among other peasant practices. In 1974, when the Africanisms paradigm was seeing a resurgence among black cultural nationalists in the US and the West Indies, Sidney Mintz returned to the question of resistance and the ways its relation to ‘African-ness’ might (or might not) resonate in both Haiti and Jamaica. It is worth quoting him at length: African (or putatively African) cultural materials have rarely had any political significance in Haiti, except in relation to the ways class membership is imputed. Vodoun instead of (or in addition to) Catholicism; the creole language instead of (or in addition to) French; rural life instead of urban life – such aspects of culture expressed as values separate the privileged from the poor rather than the ‘African’ from the ‘non-African.’ Only during the period of the United States occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) did the issue of African origins gain political significance – when Haitian scholars and intellectuals urged their colleagues to rediscover their own identity by acknowledging just how “African” their culture and their ancestors were. The picture is otherwise in Jamaica. There, the genuine or putative African content of local culture is somewhat less pronounced than in Haiti. But the effects of British colonial rule have been far more profound in Jamaica than the effects of French colonial rule in Haiti […]. Class standards – often best represented by the attitude and style of life of local teachers – posed conflicts for the Jamaican child that were rooted in class differences but were expressed in substantial measure as a rejection of what was (or was supposed to be) African in character. Thus there have always been substantial grounds for suspecting that any form of cultural resistance or protest (as in religious expression, dialect, and philosophy of life) would become involved somehow with the African past and its interpreted significance. In recent years, this imposed linkage between things African and modes of resistance to class and color prejudice has

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions

145

grown stronger – particularly as Jamaicans have gained a wider knowledge of outside events, a fuller understanding of the nature of colonialism, and a more disillusioning sense of a world from which they feel excluded. (Mintz, 1989 [1974]: 136) Here, as before, Mintz’s stance on the resistance question is nuanced. He is rejecting Herkovits’s typology and ‘scale of Africanisms’, as well as the more general interest in ‘Africa’ among North American scholars, believing it to be essentialist and reductionist. He feels that it is more important to trace the peasant adaptations between the sixteenth century and the present. In this way, scholars could root changes in cultural practice in a material and historical context. Emerging from these two paragraphs is also a charge to explore the differences in colonial and postcolonial state formation across Caribbean territories, though this is not explicitly stated. It is to this project that I shall now turn as it forms the crux of an analysis of state violence. For Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the Duvalier state emerged not only because of the fractured opposition in the post-occupation years, but more generally as the result of an ‘increasing disjuncture between political and civil society’ (Trouillot, 1990: 10). Civil society, for Trouillot, is largely represented by the peasantry, and in his classic work, State against Nation, he demonstrates how this stratum was increasingly marginalized from the state after the revolution, unable to make claims in its own interest and, during the occupation, disarmed, overtaxed and eventually terrorized. Trouillot’s is a Gramscian argument that sees political and civil society as ‘moments’ of the same process, and positions postcolonial state formation as inherently unstable, leading to a ‘permanent tension between the centripetal forces of the state and the centrifugal forces inherent in democracy’ (Trouillot, 1990: 18, 23). Like Mintz, Trouillot argues that peasantries developed in Dominica, Jamaica and Haiti within the midst of plantation slavery, but his emphasis is on the struggle between ‘those committed to this labor process and the local and international forces that tried to destroy it, circumvent it, or absorb it’ (Trouillot, 1990: 39). Moreover, he argues that the Africanist movements that developed in the wake of the US occupation ultimately paved the way for the totalitarianism of Duvalier. For him, this is because the economic dependence of the bourgeoisie on the US and Europe prevented them from developing a truly democratic political platform, despite their espousal of culturalist rhetoric valuing the mass of the population. The story here is one of peasant isolation from and persecution by the state, which comes to be embodied within the figure of Duvalier. While the outcome might be similar, the Jamaican story is quite different, in part due to the focus of the post-war colonial, and later nationalist, states

146

The Haiti Exception

on developmentalism. Historical sociologist Michaeline Crichlow has located Jamaican state formation squarely within the public elaboration of a discourse of development aimed at rural peasants with a view towards transforming them into suitable citizens. She positions what she calls ‘smallholders’ in relation to a ‘coincidence of various agendas, oppositional in some respects, which serves to produce more governable subjects via submission, consent, and participation’ (Crichlow, 2005: 1) within a broader context of capitalist modernization and development, thereby framing development as mutually transformative of the state and the people whom the state seeks to govern, rather than merely oppositional or resistant. To do so, she tracks agricultural policy from the post-emancipation period to the present in order to show how, in opposition to immediate post-emancipation policies and taxation practices that disproportionately threatened the livelihoods of peasants (in relation to planters), the late colonial and early nationalist states in Jamaica presented rural smallholders with a promise of development and sovereignty – as long as they adhered to particular notions of respectability – through which they could exercise their own citizenship and participate in a sense of a shared national project, and therefore a nationalist identity.10 This promise brought together the interests of the nationalist elites of both political parties and smallholders, giving all a stake in nation-building, while also politicizing the lives of peasant producers by creating significant linkages between middleclass political leaders and rural working people. These linkages solidified a particular notion of the developmentalist state among diverse sectors of the society, which also meant that ‘those who opposed development and sociocultural policy found themselves unable to imagine alternatives to the structures through which the state had legitimated itself’ (Crichlow, 2005: 64). This created a situation in which, among those who were antagonistic to capitalist modernization, only Rastafari conceptualized progress outside the orbit of a state structure. Crichlow demonstrates how politicized, democratically oriented middleclass organizers lost control of the development project as the institutions through which they had worked – like Jamaica Welfare – became arms of an increasingly bureaucratized state. This sidelined the participatory ethos that structured earlier interventions and generated instead a kind of dependency upon the institutions of the state, now led by individuals hand-picked to carry out centralized development policy. This was occurring simultaneous to an enhanced focus on urban development, towards which end links were See Catherine Hall (1995) and Diane Austin-Broos (1992), as well as the authors of Jamaica’s Jubilee (1888), for an explication of the relationship between respectability and citizenship. 10

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions

147

being forged between politicians and constituencies in downtown Kingston through the promise of housing and employment contracts in exchange for votes and loyalty, a loyalty that was increasingly enforced by violence. Even these arrangements eventually broke down, however, as privatization became the mandate of the 1980s, at which point ‘the state no longer represented the loci through which citizens might realize their socio-economic potential’ (Crichlow, 2005: 12). Within the new economic order of neoliberalism, peasants became invisible and the lives of the urban poor were increasingly entangled within the networks of illicit trade (guns and drugs) that came to characterize the most lucrative opportunity structures of the downtown ‘garrisons’. Despite differences in approach and the particularities of the different contexts, both Trouillot and Crichlow attempt to facilitate an understanding of how extraordinary state violence can emerge within the context of intense and shared nationalism as peasant production becomes ever more marginal to global capitalism, as the cultural politics of Africanisms become increasingly commodified and as power is increasingly centralized within the state, despite the neoliberal trend towards shrinking the power of the state in favour of global markets.11 I want to turn now to an explicit discussion of violence, and of how and why archiving the contemporary forms of state violence can lead us in new directions as we explore what sovereignty means today. Just as early anthropological enquiries sought to archive modes of production and forms of cultural practice thought to be West African in derivation in order to destabilize our commonly held notions of history, modernity and struggle, archiving state violence can catalyse new possibilities for seeing connections previously unexamined and for reordering our ontological taken-for-granteds, like time and space, politics and justice.

Archiving state violence Over the past seven years, I have been involved in two projects that have been oriented towards creating archives of state violence. In both projects, the audiovisual representation of violence (and particularly state violence) has raised questions about the different truths variously located members of a community are willing and able to acknowledge and examine, and about the potential for repair or transformative justice. The first project dealt In this regard, Trouillot also shows us that neoliberal globalization has not, in fact, caused the state to wither away, but that new institutional spaces at varying scales are taking on state-like functions (Trouillot, 2003). 11

148

The Haiti Exception

with state violence against Rastafari and one particular event in 1963, now euphemistically called the Coral Gardens ‘incident’. As a result of an ongoing land dispute near the community of Coral Gardens close to Montego Bay, the government, security forces and civilians were part of a massive round up of Rastafari across western Jamaica. Hundreds of brethren were jailed, beaten and tortured, and an unknown number were killed. This ‘incident’ was the basis of the 2011 documentary film I made with John Jackson and Junior ‘Gabu’ Wedderburn, Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens. The second project, which currently consumes my time and energy, concerns the state of emergency in West Kingston beginning 24 May 2010 that was declared to apprehend Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke – leader of the Shower Posse and ‘don’ of the Tivoli Gardens community – who had been ordered for extradition to the United States on charges related to drug and gun trafficking. By the end of the week, Coke had not yet been found and at least 73 civilians had been killed. Despite the immediate activities of various civil society organizations, such as Jamaicans for Justice and the Jamaican Civil Society Coalition, it took almost three years for the Office of the Public Defender to submit an interim report to parliament regarding the conduct of the security forces. While the report called for an enquiry that would hold accountable those responsible for the operation, a list of the dead still has not been released, and community members still feel that their stories haven’t been fully heard. Over the past two years, therefore, I have been collaborating with Junior, again, and with psychologist Deanne Bell to create ‘Tivoli Stories’, a multimedia social memory project designed to provide a platform through which participants from the Tivoli Gardens and neighbouring communities can recount their experiences during May and June 2010, and name and publicly memorialize loved ones they lost. The narratives shared by community members tell us not only about what they experienced (which in most cases challenges official narratives about ‘what happened’). They also tell us about three related aspects of their lives in West Kingston and, more broadly, about life in contemporary Jamaica. They say something about the everyday conditions of structural and symbolic violence (and how these are expressed through gender and status) that lay the foundations for the periodic eruptions of exceptional violence; they tell us about how extreme violence also produces the experience of time compression, which provides some windows onto the entanglements that undergird forms of structural violence; and they give us a sense of the extent to which people are able to imagine, or imagine themselves enacting, alternative political futures. Here, I want to briefly flesh out this last point. One of the most striking patterns within the narratives we have been archiving is the fact that, with only one exception, community members do

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions

149

not say Christopher Coke’s name. They duck and parry. They refer to ‘that man’, ‘the man they were looking for’, ‘the one they wanted to extradite’. It is important to remember here that we are developing these aural and visual archives with community members in Tivoli Gardens very much in the thick of things. This is evident through the clear parameters we have been given (by community members themselves, who are negotiating dual power structures – that of the state and that of the Coke family) for what can and cannot be asked, and what community residents should or should not say (or what we should edit out if they do), in order for everybody (including ourselves) to remain safe. By this logic, saying his name out loud positions one as either loyalist or informer, and everybody in Jamaica knows that ‘informa fi dead’. However, we feel that this phenomenon is also related to a broader structural issue within garrison communities that has to do with a narrowing of political imagination. When we ask community residents what they think could and should happen to change their situations, beyond the Commission of Enquiry that has finally begun (and about which most community members are sceptical), they seem unable to articulate any kind of transformative program, instead leaving it obliquely up to the next generation. Now, this is not striking because we are looking to them for the next emancipatory political vision, or because we are seeing in them the potential vanguard of ‘resistance’ that will finally transform the organization of the state. It is striking because it constitutes the single biggest difference between the archive we created about the Coral Gardens ‘incident’ and this one. Those Rastafari elders who were humiliated and tortured by police and civilians in April 1963 could find strength in a worldview that positioned them as already possessing the tools of their own freedom – physically and psychologically – as part of a redemptive transnational struggle against racial degradation and white imperial supremacy. The political and spiritual worlds of the garrison, on the other hand, are considerably more circumscribed, despite some community members’ transnational family networks and most Jamaicans’ access to all things American. What we are trying to think through is how the complex calculus between loyalty and benefits (both financial and juridical) seems to have generated a sociopolitical sphere in which imagination beyond the localities of the here and now is exceedingly difficult. If imagination is the basis for a relational politics of transformation, then this difference between the Coral Gardens and Tivoli Gardens archives also marks the end of a particular version of revolutionary political possibility throughout the region.12 If we were to think about the 2010 state of emergency 12

This is something with which David Scott has also long been concerned, and

150

The Haiti Exception

as a kind of ‘revolution’, similar to the Haitian achievement of independence or to the nationalist movements of the mid-twentieth century, it would be one to end politics as usual (Lewis, 2012). This would mean, of course, upending the foundations upon which, and the mechanisms through which, liberal democratic nationalism was built and actualized in Jamaica, just as the Haitian Revolution upended the notion that slaves would not organize collectively to transform themselves into subjects – rather than objects – of governance. Yet, as in Haiti, this revolution in Jamaica neither comprehensively destroyed the foundations it set out to challenge, nor laid the basis for an alternative organization of political authority. Indeed, in many ways, the ‘incursion’ was a necessary response to a revolution that had already happened; the scaffolding of patron-clientelism had already been significantly bent not only by the general climate of neoliberalism, but also by ‘Dudus’ himself who, more than any don before him, operated independently of politicians, united dons across Jamaica and transnationally (even, in some cases, across political parties), and created opportunities within private enterprise for himself and others. This is decidedly not the revolution imagined by mid-twentieth-century nationalists, nor by turn-of-the-century ‘Black Jacobins’. This revolution, instead, instantiates the reorganization of sovereignty outlined by both Crichlow and Trouillot, and brings to light the new he has addressed it eloquently in his recent analysis of temporality vis-à-vis the collapse of the Grenada Revolution (Scott, 2014). Scott’s argument here is that temporal disjunctures live on in the aftermaths of political catastrophe, and that these disjunctures dislodge a relationship between history and time that had been taken for granted by the revolutionary generation. No longer is time experienced as linear and redemptive – itself, as many have noted, a product of liberal modernity – where more perfect futures are brought into being through the realization of a political project that will, ironically, mark the end of history. Instead, in the wake of revolutionary failure, that generation experiences time traumatically as stalled in the present, as a cyclical loop without expectation of change. For them, as Scott writes, ‘the past is a wound that will not heal’ (Scott, 2014: 13). The new hegemony of neoliberalism, however, has produced a ‘post’revolutionary generation that is less enmeshed in the liberal temporalities that organized political time before them, and therefore more immune to the sense of vulnerable longing that characterizes their parents’ sense of time. This means that their histories of the present are ‘disconnected’, as Scott writes, ‘from the temporal structure of revolutionary desire’ (Scott, 2014: 123). For Scott, the younger generation of Grenadians about whom he is writing can blast open new futures because they are able to act in the present, unfettered by the expectations of a global left and a politics of non-alignment. In a context like Tivoli Gardens, however, this seems significantly trickier.

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions

151

mechanisms through which governance is happening. If sovereignty in the British West Indies was originally built on an alliance between peasants, political parties and unions, who channelled (co-opted, for some observers) the energy of the region-wide workers’ strikes during the late 1930s into a legible anti-colonial struggle, and if this alliance was eventually destabilized in places like Jamaica by the emergence of garrison politics writ large, where the emphasis is on loyalty not to party or principle but to individual leaders (both politicians and strongmen), what we are now seeing is an attempt to dismantle the latter without truly exposing the transnational links that have facilitated the wealth, privileges and protections that have made this kind of system possible. This suggests that, like pan-Africanists and Rastafari, we must think sovereignty beyond the state, instead addressing both the entangled meta-state dynamics of trade and governance that shape the contemporary world and the individual and local action geared towards performing and enacting sovereignty within the realm of everyday practice. It also suggests that archiving state violence in Jamaica, the way Trouillot (1990) does in Haiti, can expose the complexities of interests among diverse and shifting stakeholders within a transnational analytic frame over time, and could provide insights into how we might shift the politics of reparations away from discretely local and legally verifiable events and towards the long and slow processes undermining our ability to forge social and political community together (Clarke, 2009; Thomas, 2011). It would also direct us to focus on the everyday ways people innovate life without constantly projecting today’s struggle onto a future redemption.

What sovereignty feels like David Scott has argued that the crisis of the current moment in Jamaica (as elsewhere) ‘is a crisis of the nation-state project as a whole, and not of any single position within it’ (Scott, 2003: 6), and that this is because old ‘clientelistic dependencies and obligations are unraveling’ and are ‘no longer able to provide a rubric for governance, however imperfect, because the new regulatory regimes associated with neoliberalism have diminished the role both of political parties and of nationalist middle class brokers’ (Scott, 2003: 21). What if we did not see this as a crisis? What if we instead saw it as an opportunity to think through what sovereignty feels like? Yarimar Bonilla (2010, 2011) is doing this kind of work in Guadeloupe, examining the labour movement – and in particular the massive strikes in 2009 – as an exercise in sovereign practice that generated new feelings related to agency, history and community whose central goal was not the seizure of state power. And Melissa Rosario’s (2013) research on the affective

152

The Haiti Exception

dimensions of contemporary social movements in Puerto Rico theorizes the ethnographic work she has done with environmental activists and with the student strikers who shut down the University of Puerto Rico campus in 2010 and 2011 as forms of unfinished radical praxis, themselves the goals of what she calls ‘revolutionary time’. Dealing with these kinds of revolution in sovereignty requires what Rosario calls ‘a radical openness to the future even as it is underwritten by a powerful sense of uncertainty (Rosario, 2013: 2). Thinking about what sovereignty feels like might also mean it comes to look something like what Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) has called ‘endurance’, as something that can be lived in the every day, something people carry with them even as the material movements that promised alternatives ‘fail’. Notions of endurance have undergirded mid-twentiethcentury social movements like the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, and endurance is also coded through concepts like survival and resilience, concepts that have come to instantiate everyday modalities of being among the globally excluded. In Jamaica, as in many New World locations, this is even indexed in language. When one asks someone, ‘What’s going on?’ the most common response is ‘Me deh yah’ – ‘I’m here’. Still. Despite everything. We must take seriously these affective dimensions of sovereignty. If we are open to ‘revolutionary time’, then we do not seek closure; we do not aspire to history’s end; and we do not need vanguards. Nor are we co-opted by the discourse of crisis that frames much public attention to Caribbean events because we are not thinking episodically or teleologically. We are, instead, committed and attuned to archiving and analysing the non-monumental, unspectacular world of the everyday, as well as the deeply historical and dynamic structuring categories through which it is lived. It is through this kind of analytic process that we reveal the local and transnational entanglements that discursively create crisis and, in doing so, bring to light the quotidian practices of sovereignty developed to endure, ignore or transcend this discourse. Thinking about what sovereignty feels like, in other words, can also compel us to cultivate a sense of mutual recognition that not only exposes complicity but also demands collective accountability. It is this kind of framing that might encourage students to examine poverty, the contradictions of ‘aid’, political corruption, sex trafficking, the drug trade or alternative religious cosmologies from the vantage point of their own backyard (wherever that may be), rather than automatically decamping for Haiti or Jamaica. Understanding our histories and political economies as intertwined and our geographical spaces as connected in myriad ways is what ultimately has the power to trouble the exceptionality that divides us and haunts our approaches to Caribbean pasts and presents.

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions

153

Works Cited Austin-Broos, Diane. 1992. ‘Redefining the Moral Order: Interpretations of Christianity in Post-Emancipation Jamaica’. In Frank McGlynn and Seymour Drescher (eds), The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture after Slavery. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press: 221–44. Bonilla, Yarimar. 2010. ‘Guadeloupe is Ours: The Prefigurative Politics of the Mass Strike in the French Antilles’. Interventions 12(1): 125–37. —. 2011. ‘The Past is Made by Walking: Labor Activism and Historical Production in Postcolonial Guadeloupe’. Cultural Anthropology 26.3: 313–39. —. 2013. ‘Ordinary Sovereignty’. Small Axe 42: 152–65. Brathwaite, E. Kamau. 1971. Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica. London: New Beacon Books. Burton, Richard. 1997. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Clarke, Kamari M. 2009. Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crichlow, Michaeline. 2005. Negotiating Caribbean Freedom: Peasants and the State in Development. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Forsdick, Charles. 2013. ‘After the Earthquake: Some Reflections on Recent Scholarship’. Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies 4.2: 2–8. Hall, Catherine. 1995. ‘Gender Politics and Imperial Politics: Rethinking the Histories of Empire’. In Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey (eds), Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Kingston: Ian Randle Press: 48–59. Herskovits, Melville. 1971 [1937]. Life in a Haitian Valley. New York: Doubleday. —. 1990 [1941]. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston, MA: Beacon. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1990 [1938]. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. New York: Harper Collins. Jamaica’s Jubilee; or, What We Are and What We Hope to Be, By Five of Themselves. 1888. London: S. W. Partridge & Co. Lewis, Rupert. 2012. ‘Party Politics in Jamaica and the Extradition of Christopher “Dudus” Coke’. The Global South 61: 38–54. Macmillan, Mona. 1980. ‘The Making of Warning from the West Indies: Extract from a Projected Memoir of W. M. Macmillan’. Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 18.2: 207–19. Macmillan, Mona, and Hugh Macmillan (eds). 2008. Mona’s Story: An Admiral’s Daughter in England, Scotland and Africa, 1908–51. Oxford: Oxford Publishing Services. Macmillan, W. M. 1938 [1936]. Warning from the West Indies. London: Penguin.

154

The Haiti Exception

—. 1941. Democratise the Empire! A Policy for Colonial Change. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd. Magloire, Gérarde, and Kevin A.  Yelvington. 2005. ‘Haiti and the Anthropological Imagination’. Gradhiva 1.1: 127–52. Mintz, Sidney W. 1989 [1974]. Caribbean Transformations. New York: Columbia University Press. Murray, Bruce. 2013. ‘W. M. Macmillan: The Wits Years and Resignation, 1917–1933’. South African Historical Journal 65.2: 317–31. Olivier, Lord Sydney. 1936. Jamaica: The Blessed Island. London: Faber & Faber. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Price-Mars, Jean. 1935. Ainsi parla l’oncle: Essais d’ethnographie. New York: Parapsychology Foundation, Inc. Ramsey, Katherine. 2005. ‘Prohibition, Persecution, Performance: Anthropology and the Penalization of Vodou in the mid-20th Century’. Gradhiva 1.1: 165–79. —. 2011. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rosario, Melissa. 2013. Ephemeral Spaces, Undying Dreams: Social Justice Struggles in Contemporary Puerto Rico. PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University. Scott, David. 2003. ‘Political Rationalities of the Jamaican Modern’. Small Axe 7.2: 1–22. —. 2014. Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sheller, Mimi. 2000. Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Simpson, George Eaton. 1970. Caribbean Papers. Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro Intercultural de Documentación. —. 1978. Black Religions in the New World. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, Matthew. 2009. Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. —. 2013. ‘Haiti from the Outside in: A Review of Recent Literature’. Radical History Review 115: 203–11. Thomas, Deborah A. 2004. Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —. 2011. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1990. Haiti, State against Nation: Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press. —. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Books.

Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions

155

—. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2012. ‘Why Haiti Needs New Narratives Now More Than Ever’. In Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales (eds), Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press: 240–44. Wynter, Sylvia. 1970. ‘Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the Interpretation of Folk Dance as a Cultural Process’. Jamaica Journal 4.2: 34–48. Yelvington, Kevin A. 2006. ‘The Invention of Africa in Latin America and the Caribbean: Political Discourse and Anthropological Praxis, 1920–1940’. In Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press: 35–82.

Haitian Culture in the Informational Economies of Humanitarian Aid Valerie Kaussen

Haitian Culture and Humanitarian Aid

When the earthquake hit Port-au-Prince in January of 2010, I had just left my Kreyòl lesson at a school inside the crowded and sinuous alleyways of the Solino neighbourhood. My teachers were members of a grassroots solidarity organization who, two years prior, had been my students in a seminar I was teaching on Frantz Fanon, part of their popular university programme. To conclude my lesson on 12 January 2010, they had taught me a Kreyòl proverb, carefully spelling it out onto the chalkboard: bat bliye, kò songe [the stick or weapon forgets, but the body remembers]. After the lesson, my teachers saw me onto a crowded tap-tap and waved goodbye, and the earthquake hit as the makeshift bus travelled up the narrow street of Poste Marchande. In the turmoil that followed, I forgot ever learning the proverb. But a few months after the quake, on my first trip back to Haiti and the now half-destroyed schoolroom, the words were still visible on the chalkboard, seemingly prescient of what was to come. In the months following the quake, I returned to Haiti regularly. I was pursuing a new research project on post-earthquake spaces as spaces of exception, the phenomenon of the squalid tent cities and their relationship to the gated compounds of the foreign aid community (my pre-quake project on literary and media representations of the political turmoil of 2004 no longer seemed relevant). I was also trying to help, to combine research with praxis, and I was doing neither terribly well. I was also trying to get back some of my Kreyòl: the chalkboard in Solino seemed to remember more than I could, 156

Haitian Culture and Humanitarian Aid

157

and I was certain that whatever I had learned had been knocked out of my head by the earthquake, an event that my body remembered all too well. My post-earthquake research and solidarity work led me to a housing rights activist coalition, a collective of various Haitian grassroots organizations that included my Kreyòl teachers. The coalition was working to mobilize the masses of displaced people (peaking at 1.5 million) by educating them on their rights to housing guaranteed by the 1987 constitution and on the illegality of forced evictions. It was abundantly clear that I was getting more out of the coalition than I was able to give. I was both fascinated and relieved to be in the midst of a culture of activism, of political mobilization represented by the more seasoned organizers, people who had seen the popular movement wax and wane – sometimes violently – over the years. Despite this, and despite what seemed to me their own unimaginable traumas, they remained committed, calm and steady, clear that their project did not begin with the earthquake and that it would not end when the scores of NGOs packed their bags to chase other disasters. Of course, the younger activists were less patient; they talked of revolution, mostly amongst themselves, and I’d seen them throw rocks at a MINUSTAH (i.e., UN’s Stabilization Mission in Haiti) truck during a rally on the Champs-de-Mars, an act which excited much discussion in the group and for which the rock throwers were thoroughly chastised. For the first anniversary of the quake, the housing rights coalition organized several animations in various tent camps: they screened short documentary films, and one long-time popular organizer would ‘animate’ the crowd with traditional songs and give the microphone to the more intrepid camp residents – from children to grandmothers – who wanted to tell their stories. Then activists and lawyers would inform the audience about their rights, about what to do if they faced illegal eviction (a problem that was becoming critical during this period) and about the politics and economics of aid. When the speakers referred to their movement as part of a local history that included slave revolt, the resistance to the US occupation of 1915 led by Charlemagne Pérault and the toppling of the Duvaliers, I felt I was in the midst of the Haitian exceptionalism that is evoked in so much scholarship, including my own: Haiti as the site of the only successful slave revolution in world history, the first black republic and the second republic in the Americas after the US; a place that had developed popular traditions of political engagement and mobilization; Haiti, where négritude stood up for the first time. The earthquake anniversary events were mostly successful, meaning that a crowd of camp dwellers gathered and participated, and that those who were facing eviction, lack of water, sanitation or other problems were able

158

The Haiti Exception

to communicate face-to-face with other Haitians who, importantly, did not work for NGOs. The coalition acted on the problems communicated to them, even if they were not able to solve them. However, one such event went awry, and the conflict that ensued offered a stark demonstration of the fragility of political organizing and mobilizing in the chaotic post-earthquake moment, and the ways in which this tradition was in conflict with other cultural formations – both local and foreign – that were perhaps more powerful. The event in question was to take place one afternoon in Camp Kanaran, located on a dusty plain about ten miles from Port-au-Prince. An ‘unofficial’ or ‘squatters’ camp that at the time received no aid or assistance, Kanaran, ‘the promised land’, was where internally displaced persons (IDP) went when they had nowhere else to go. People were likely drawn there by the possibility of receiving aid or services left over from the nearby official camp, Corail-Cesselese, a camp built by the US Army on an equally waterless and denuded stretch of desert. The coalition group arrived and as usual set up a small sound system and projector, and pinned up photos of earthquake wreckage on the rough walls of Kanaran’s makeshift community centre, a wooden shelter. While Haitian rap blared from the speakers (to the consternation of the older coalition members), a small group of organizers and camp residents began to have a heated conversation. A certain Pastor Franc, the self-appointed chef of the camp, claimed that the coalition had not received permission from his people to hold their event. Trying to grasp the real reason behind his refusal, the coalition tried to convince him that they had no affiliation with a political party. The pastor then stated that he already had an event planned for the afternoon and, indeed, a short distance away, a large professional sound stage was being constructed, crowned by a banner bearing the name of a US evangelical organization. The coalition members promised that their event would be over long before the event approved by the pastor began. But the pastor and his spokesperson, a well-dressed young woman in pressed jeans and gold-toned earrings, were adamant. Suddenly, the young woman began to scream, and someone pulled the plug on the rap music. Then, belying her delicate frame, the woman pushed the coalition organizers towards their cars. Sound systems, photos and banners were quickly repacked, engines started and the coalition fled, leaving a cloud of red dust in their wake. The few camp residents that we saw in Kanaran that day remained at a distance or stayed inside their tents, gazing tiredly from the doorways, unwilling to enter the fray. The incident necessarily troubled my narrative of Haiti’s exceptional status as a place of popular political action and of a resilient culture of collective resistance. I was reminded instead of other less salutary versions of Haitian exceptionalism: passive and dependent people who follow corrupt strongmen;

Haitian Culture and Humanitarian Aid

159

a place where nothing gets done; a ‘failed state’; a ward of the international community, ‘republic of NGOs’ and, it should be added, of Christian missions. When I went to do research on the large international organizations working on the IDP housing issue, I expected to hear this version of the Haitian exception, or else the version that assigned to Haitians an exceptional penchant for violence, rioting and looting. However, these discourses of Haitian exceptionalism were by no means dominant. What I heard more often represented was what I propose may be an emergent version of Haitian exceptionalism, and it related in paradoxical ways to the botched animation at Camp Kanaran. For while the effort to communicate information was being suppressed in Kanaran by Haitians themselves, humanitarian organizations like the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in reports, programme initiatives and in the mainstream press, were extolling the Haitian public’s embrace of and, even, their cultural penchant for communicating and enabling the free flow of information through their participation in new innovative programmes that were variously termed ‘two-way communications’ and ‘behaviour change communications’. An article in the New York Times on an IOM initiative called ‘Voices of the Voiceless’, which installed suggestion boxes in the camps, quotes the IOM Communications Director Leonard Doyle stating that the initial success of the programme was an ‘absolute blow-me down surprise’ for within only a few days the IOM had received 700 letters, which Doyle described as ‘real individualized expressions of suffering’ (Sontag, 2010). Echoing the same sentiment, an IOM fact sheet of the same period characterizes the letters that camp residents deposited in the suggestion boxes as ‘a torrent of pent-up emotion’. Haitians traumatized by the earthquake, it seemed, had a particularly strong disposition to express themselves through the individualized modality of the personal letter, communiqués that also asked for water, food and, most often, jobs. But, as the New York Times piece states, ‘the $400,000 program was intended to give voice to the voiceless, not food to the hungry or money to the destitute’ (Sontag, 2010). Voices of the Voiceless was part of a series of intersecting and converged two-way communication projects developed by the IOM’s communications staff, who were leading innovators among the many humanitarian communications professionals working in post-earthquake Haiti.1 The IOM’s projects The International Organization for Migration is an intergovernmental agency whose member nations are also members of the UN. Following the Haiti quake, the IOM took on a number of roles: it was the ‘camp manager of last resort’, or the organization that provided aid to camps that had not been picked up by organizations like Oxfam or Samaritan’s Purse. IOM also chaired the ‘Camp

1

160

The Haiti Exception

included a Kreyòl-language graphic newspaper called Chimen Lakay [The Way Back Home], which at its height had a circulation of 500,000, and a radio programme of the same name that aired on a major station out of Port-auPrince. Letters collected from the Voices suggestion boxes and kiosks were sometimes published in Chimen Lakay, or read aloud on the radio show. The IOM also created special SMS codes for calling in or texting needs or suggestions to a call centre, but, as with the Voices letters, these messages and the needs they expressed were not responded to, but were collected, coded and their locations mapped on a web platform called Noula.ht [We’re here]. There were also special codes for responding to surveys that appeared in the graphic newspaper or were recorded onto CDs and played by tap-tap drivers, who received phone minutes for their efforts. Two-way and behaviour change communications were sometimes described as ‘self-help’, sometimes as projects of ‘democracy promotion’ and sometimes as part of efforts to improve ‘civic governance’. The last two claims situate these new communications initiatives under the broad umbrella of beneficiary participation, a priority of the development community at least since the 1980s, and codified in the 2005 Paris Declaration on aid effectiveness. The new imperative to increase ‘participation’ and also ‘empowerment’ was the other side of the coin of the World Bank’s downsizing of states in the Global South (structural readjustment) as a condition for granting aid. In the marketdriven ethos of neoliberalism, civil society should hold states accountable and thus, in the Global South, foreign-funded NGOs, the representatives of civil society, were tasked with the job of creating a more participatory and empowered citizenry. Of course, this amounted to yet another way of marginalizing the postcolonial state. As Tanya Li, Nancy Postero and Erica Caple James all suggest, participation is also a concept critical to neoliberal governmentality in the Global South, and to projects that seek to train citizens to internalize conducts and behaviours that conform to the goals of international interests. Governance, or social regulation through governmentality, is necessitated by the weakening of state power and capacity under neoliberalism. In ethnographic studies of Indonesia, Bolivia and Haiti, conducted in the period between 1995 and 2005, Li, Postero and James, respectively, argue that neoliberal governmentality functioned through foreign-funded NGO projects that had a mandate to train and educate populations to be participatory citizens, which meant adopting the individualistic behaviours of personal responsibility, rational Cluster’, and was thus responsible for coordinating the various organizations’ aid priorities and delivery. They also monitored IDP numbers, kept track of locations of camps and coordinated registration.

Haitian Culture and Humanitarian Aid

161

decision-making and calculation and risk aversion (Li, 2007; Postero, 2007; James, 2010).2 Foucault elaborated the theory of neoliberal governmentality, which he also termed ‘governance at a distance’ or ‘the conduct of conduct’, to describe a non-sovereign form of power that directs conduct so that individuals govern or regulate themselves in conformity with the needs of the authorities. As suggested above, the models of conduct disseminated in neoliberal governmentality are particularly oriented towards personal responsibility, which Wendy Brown argues is carried to new heights under neoliberalism (Brown, 2005: 42). Brown also asserts that neoliberal governmentality imagines the ideal citizen as a ‘rationally calculating individual [who] bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action no matter how severe the constraints on this action’ (Brown, 2005: 42), a particularly cruel mode of governance in an environment like Haiti. As suggested by the numerous reports that were published by communications professionals in the humanitarian community following the Haiti quake, two-way and behaviour change communications represented a radical change in the way that organizations were meeting the participation challenge, and thus the goal of governance at a distance, or governmentality. According to the reports’ authors, initiatives like two-way communications were enabling direct communication between aid-givers and aid-receivers, thus diminishing the need, they implied, for the intermediary of the local NGO.3 As Ann Kite Yo Pale [Let Them Speak] (Wall and Gerald, 2012) and Time to Listen: Hearing People on the Receiving End of International Aid (Anderson, Brown and Jean, 2012) argue, SMS messaging, mobile phones, touch-tone phone surveys and NGO-sponsored call centres were giving voice directly to the voiceless and permitting ‘one-to-one communications’ between donors and beneficiaries, thus revolutionizing the possibilities for increasing participation.4 Since most Haitians had access to radios and mobile phones (often shared) with texting capabilities, advocates argued in the various reports written from 2011 to 2013 that vital information could See also Grewal (2005). Importantly, reports on two-way communication programmes published following the earthquake [see n. 3] rarely mention the role played by local NGOs in the ‘networked flows’ of information. 4 Additional reports from this period on the technology/disaster aid nexus include: Media, Information Systems and Communities: Lessons from Haiti (Nelson and Sigal, 2013), and Closing the Loop: Responding to the People’s Information Needs from Crisis Response to Recovery and Development (Mandel and Somerfeldt, 2012). 2 3

162

The Haiti Exception

now move from ‘person to person’, or directly from agency to individual and individual to agency. This created a ‘dynamic information flow’, which was ‘two-way but […] also networked, not merely one-to-one communications but many-to-many’ (Mandel, 2012: 6). One report, Humanitarianism in the Network Age (OCHA, 2013), in which the Haiti quake response and two-way communications figure prominently, claims that the emergence of responsible and ‘connected’ communities in places like Haiti was leading to nothing less than ‘a fundamental shift in power from capitals and headquarters to the people aid agencies aim to assist’ (OCHA, 2013: 2).

Rumours and revolution As suggested by their categorization as ‘self-help’, two-way and behaviour change communications redefine ‘participation’ by describing it, not only in terms of agency-beneficiary relations, but also as part of psychosocial support initiatives, or forms of psychotherapy. Ann Kite Yo Pale claims that ‘providing channels for people to talk about their experiences is an important psychosocial exercise in and of itself’ (Wall and Gerald, 2012: 13), while an issue of the IOM’s quarterly magazine Migration claims that IOM staff working with tent camp residents were ‘encourag[ing] active communication […] giving voice and identity to those likely to be seen only through the prism of the helpless victim’ (Baptiste, 2010: 13), that is, giving people the feeling that they were being listened to, which was also the goal of the Voices of the Voiceless suggestion boxes and call-in numbers. The link between therapeutic self-expression and governmentality was suggested to me by an IOM communications staff member, who admitted that one goal of the various Voices of the Voiceless programmes was in fact to let people ‘vent’ so that they wouldn’t do so in more dangerous ways. Indeed, working with a population long demonized for its exceptional propensity for ‘savagery’, revolution, violent mass movements and general ungovernability give critical importance to the perceived need to channel these tendencies into other less ‘destructive’ directions. The issue of Migration magazine cited above describes the effort to mitigate the risk of violence as an effort to quell rumours or misinformation: ‘rumors that forced evictions may occur is spreading talk of popular resistance’ (Baptiste, 2010: 11). Community mobilizers were thus talking to camp residents, listening to their concerns and giving them accurate information in order to prevent ‘misunderstandings from blowing up into violence’ (Baptiste, 2010, 11). The author of the Migration piece rehearses the fetishization of information and communication that we’ve seen elsewhere, by associating the ‘threat of violence’ and ‘popular resistance’ with ‘rumour’ and ‘talk’. In the often

Haitian Culture and Humanitarian Aid

163

therapeutic language of such reports, then, ‘pent up emotion’ and suffering, if circulated as ‘rumour’, had the power to ignite violence. Mass mobilizations were the result of self-expression run out of control, and Haitians had to be trained to redirect their need to vent into more civilized forms of self-expression equated with voice and participation. Governmentality, then, was in part enacted by encouraging IDPs to vent their ‘feelings’ through individualistic modes of communication – writing letters and sending text messages – not necessarily to each other but to humanitarian organizations. But giving IDPs the feeling that they were being listened to was also a way of short-circuiting and halting the spread of their messages of critique, rage and dissent. As Brown asserts, putting the case slightly differently, neoliberal governmentality’s crafting of individualized subjects creates ‘political passivity and complacency’ and diminishes the desire to ‘alter’ or effect change in a given social, economic or political environment (Brown, 2005: 43). Brown adds, rather darkly, that a ‘fully realized’ neoliberal body of citizens would ‘barely exist as a public’ (Brown, 2005: 43), an apt description for the kind of citizenry that two-way and behaviour change communications programmes seemed to be envisioning.

Communicating culture In a sense, we could say that two-way and behaviour change communications, as a project of governmentality, tried to intervene and alter Haitians’ exceptional ‘nature’ as unruly, rebellious and given to popular revolt, by replacing it with a different version of exception: Haitians who loved to communicate, and who could thus be trained to practice ‘better’ forms of communication (i.e., individualized and rational) and to reproduce ‘positive’ forms of information (i.e., official and sanctioned). In this respect, in post-earthquake Haiti, humanitarian communications as governmentality targeted culture, identifying particular cultural traits or behaviours that were imagined to support or impede Haiti’s prospects of economic and social recovery. Despite analysing interventions into behaviour and conduct, governmentality theorists have little to say about culture. This is partly a disciplinary issue, as most major theorists of Foucauldian governmentality are sociologists (like Nikolas Rose) or political theorists (like Wendy Brown and Barbara Cruikshank). As the cultural critic Tony Bennett points out, areas that would normally be designated ‘culture’ are categorized otherwise in governmentality theory. As an example, he points to Mitchell Dean’s enumeration of the areas of analysis that distinguish governmentality theories from theories of the state: ‘characteristic forms of visibility, ways of seeing and perceiving’, ‘distinctive ways of thinking and questioning relying

164

The Haiti Exception

on definite vocabularies and procedures’, ‘specific ways of acting, intervening and directing’ (Dean, 1999, qtd in Bennett, 2003: 47). As early as 1992, Bennett, in contrast to the prevailing trend, asserted in the influential edited volume Cultural Studies that culture is governmentality (Bennett, 1992). But Bennett’s work on culture and governmentality corresponds to governmentality theory more generally by focusing on the post-welfare states and ‘advanced democracies’ of the Global North. To find scholarship on how culture might play into (neoliberal) governmentality outside of these contexts, we must turn to anthropology, whose principal object of analysis is culture, and usually cultures outside of the Global North. In her ethnography of governmentality and development in the Sulawesi highlands of Indonesia, Tanya Li argues that under the liberal Dutch colonial administration of the mid-nineteenth century, governmentality was enacted precisely through interventions into local culture, a project that was officially termed the Culture System (Li, 2007: 34–38). Li sees a genealogical relationship between the governmental practices of the colonial Dutch Culture System and the World Bank’s neoliberal social development programmes that targeted post-Suharto Indonesia with the goal of transforming society and social relations (Li, 2007: 230). Li’s discussion implies that culture is a critical category in the analysis of governmentality, as deployed in colonial and developmentalist projects (neoliberal or otherwise). It would seem, then, that two things distinguish analyses of post-welfare state governmentality (of the North) from analyses of neoliberal governmentality in the Global South: first, the role played by development and humanitarian actors, and, second, the role assigned to culture. This coincidence of development and culture is not an accident; it attests to the mutual influences and benefits that have long characterized the relationship between anthropology and development (and, before that, colonialism) (see Asad, 1979). On the one hand, colonial administrators, humanitarians, and development and international policymakers have long derived their ideas about culture from the discipline of anthropology; on the other, anthropology, focused largely on ethnographic studies of culture, has strong historical ties to colonial and imperialist projects in the Global South. James Clifford suggests that the ‘ethnographic authority’ behind the culture concept, which allows the fieldworker to define an object of study by isolating or ‘represent[ing] discreet, meaningful worlds’, is informed by Western colonial epistemologies (Clifford, 1988: 39). He asserts further that, while the culture concept was developed to replace the nineteenth century’s evolutionary models of culture, ‘for all its supposed relativism […] the concept’s model of totality, basically organic in structure, was not different from […] [what] it replaced’ and that ‘despite many subsequent redefinitions the notion’s organicist assumptions have

Haitian Culture and Humanitarian Aid

165

persisted’ (Clifford, 1988: 273). Michel-Rolph Trouillot, seeking to account for the persistence of the organic notion of closed cultures, argues that it results from anthropology’s failure to acknowledge how context and power have shaped its key concepts. Anthropology, he argues, has allowed the idea of culture to be reified into ‘culture concepts’, because its practitioners have not resisted the borders of the nation-state system, which have also served to delimit and define particular cultures, thus determining the object of ethnographic study. For Trouillot, the dearth of ethnographies on AfricanAmericans is evidence of the determining role of the nation-state (the US in particular) in the definition of cultures as closed systems whose members inhabit what he terms the ‘Savage slot’ (Trouillot, 2003: 103–14).5 Humanitarianism and development are among the global institutions that have instrumentalized anthropological notions of culture, and they therefore do more than disavow and benefit from the colonial power that Trouillot identifies in anthropology’s culture concept. Rather, the ongoing colonial authority and relations of power inherent in the culture concept enable humanitarianism to exercise that power by intervening in or targeting culture. Such colonial humanitarian practices are perhaps most obviously revealed in contemporary projects that seek to ‘civilise the savage’, that is, to change behaviours by promoting democracy, empowerment, human rights, participation or communication skills; in short: governmentality. Culture as a closed system played a vital role in the two-way and behaviour change communications projects that were rolled out in post-earthquake Haiti. In this respect, humanitarian communications adopt the cultureas-communication version of the culture concept that begins with Radcliff-Brown’s functionalist models based on cybernetic feedback, and leads to the work of Clifford Geertz, who argued, as part of his formulations of the culture concept, that culture is communication itself (Geertz, 1973: 93). Indeed, since culture is communication, understanding in order to instrumentalize it is among the raisons d’être of humanitarian communication efforts. For humanitarian communications, culture functions as a vector, a ready-made machine of information flow that must be harnessed in the project of changing behaviours, or governmentality. The International Federation of the Red Cross’s report Beneficiary Communications Evaluation: Haiti Earthquake Operation 2011 represents a particularly vivid example of the way the culture concept grounds the Trouillot further argues that the reification of culture in US-based anthropology has led to the field’s silence on the question of whether or not ‘culture’ is merely a code word for ‘race’ and thus carries implications of racism (Trouillot, 2003: 111–13). 5

166

The Haiti Exception

colonial governmentality of two-way communications. The report deems the communication practices of Haitians as particular or exceptional, and demonstrates its (anthropological) expertise and authority by educating its readers on the language of Haitian communication, listing Kreyòl expressions that signify conversation or word of mouth – radyo bouche [sic, mouth radio] radyo 32 (i.e., mouths have thirty-two teeth), radyo dyol [sic, a difficult to translate term that means something like ‘snout’] and ti parle [sic, a little chat]. The report’s playful use of this abundance of expressions and the glossary that appears in the appendix suggest, as we’ve seen elsewhere, that Haitians have a unique cultural penchant for communication, a trait that the report’s authors instrumentalize by representing it as a particularly fertile opening for projects of (new) communications. The task of the communications specialist working with this population, then, is to ‘select […] the right entry point’, that is, an opening into this closed system, in order to ‘assure wide and accurate diffusion’ of Red Cross information. Further, the report’s authors counsel practitioners that closed systems of communication (or ‘communities’) allow the work of communication to be outsourced, because, ‘in a cohesive community, people will share information with neighbours’ (IFRC, 2011). Haitians, here, are targeted as consumers of models of conduct and behaviours presented as ‘information’. Their own cultural practices are put in the service of modelling neoliberal conduct and citizenship, and Haitians are called upon to reproduce information or governmentality, which, if they are properly trained, can take place through their informal everyday communicative practices. Indeed, the IFRC report implicitly suggests that understanding the cultural symbols and practices of the ‘Other’ is as necessary to the humanitarian communications entrepreneur as it is to the anthropologist, or the marketing professional. As did the IFRC, the IOM used culture, traditional Haitian symbols and Kreyòl expressions to brand its various programmes and to articulate its messages, with common Haitian symbols, proverbs and practices acting as ‘entry points’ into communities in order to change behaviours or enact governmentality. In the interests of pursuing one of the primary goals of governmentality as it appeared in post-earthquake Haiti – dissuading popular and collective forms of political mobilization – visual and textual materials, like the Chimen Lakay graphic newspaper, translated or recoded symbols that denote and connote Haitian histories of popular democratic action and the public spaces and identities to which they are linked. One widely disseminated graphic illustration that appeared in Chimen Lakay and on flyers, websites and T-shirts announcing a number of the IOM’s communications programmes, depicts a curvy Haitian woman dressed traditionally in headscarf and homespun blue cloth, bending down on one knee as she

Haitian Culture and Humanitarian Aid

167

blows into a conch shell with shiny lips. In one version, a series of half circles flow from the shell’s opening, evoking radio waves or internet connection bars and suggesting the modernity (and civilization) of official information, which is conflated with new modes of communication. In the colonial era of Saint-Domingue, the conch shell was used to call the slaves to assemble for work. Independent Haiti reappropriated the symbol to signify freedom from enslavement: according to the founding narrative of the Haitian nation, the conch shell called on the slaves to begin their revolution. The conch-bearing slave appears most prominently as a symbol of Haiti’s national founding and national culture in the statue of the Nèg Mawon [Maroon Slave] which sits on the Champs-de-Mars in Port-au-Prince (not far from the now destroyed National Palace). The male slave, shell to his lips, tilts his head back so that the tip of the shell creates the apex of the statue, suggesting both the power and the reach of his message. He also holds a machete at his side. In the IOM’s rendering, the conch-blower is neither a slave nor a man and, of course, she is not in possession of a machete. The gender switch is crucial here as part of the resignification of the symbol: freedom becomes ‘empowerment’ (discourses of which generally target women) and empowerment is modernity, achieved through the unencumbered flows of open communication. Furthermore, while the original symbol represents a message of revolt, a message that names itself as political and demands action and a response, the IOM transforms the slave and the conch into a symbol of communication as an end in itself, communication as ‘empowerment’, ‘voice’ or ‘participation’. In this version of the symbol, governmentality is both the message’s means and its end. Colourful drawings of tap-taps, Haitian busses that are important sites of social exchange, also appeared regularly on IOM products and in publications as symbols of communication and information sharing. References to tap-taps also appear in the titles of particular programmes and IOM-sponsored cultural productions (the sitcom Tap-Tap; Radyo Tap-Tap). In IOM materials, the tap-tap signifies a moving yet closed system of culture or communication, continually replenished with new members. As such, the tap-tap represents an ideal version of culture as communication: closed and thus possessing a ‘captive audience’ (as one report on Radyo Chimen Lakay asserts), its members would potentially carry the official and authoritative messages disseminated back to their various communities (on CDs played by drivers at the IOM’s behest). Tap-taps also appeared on the banner of an IOM-managed website or ‘people’s blog’, a clearing house for its various ‘converged’ projects, which was called nothing less than ‘Citizen Haiti’. The latter transformed Haitian public or national identity (also evoked by the tap-tap) into the cultural identity of the citizen-communicator engaging

168

The Haiti Exception

in proper conduct in a networked world. Citizenship is thus drained of its associations with legal rights and agency here, just as the symbol of the conch shell-bearing slave is drained of its revolutionary connotations, its message of freedom from enslavement appropriated and ‘modernized’ to signify freedom as open and networked communication.

Camp cultures and communicability Shortly after the earthquake, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) produced a soap opera called Anba syèl la [Under the Skies]. It was filmed at Camp Carradeux near the Tarbarre neighbourhood outside of Port-au-Prince. Screenings of Anba syèl la began in tent camps in early summer of 2010, and within a month or so, when the New York Times ran a story on the project, the series was being screened three nights per week in sixteen camps around Port-au-Prince, including the camp where it was filmed, Carradeux. The New York Times article quotes an unidentified screening organizer who states that ‘the programs will fill in for a government that has failed to communicate effectively, letting rumours and schemes spread among those desperate for help’ (Cave, 2010). In echoing the article in the IOM’s Migration magazine cited above, which identifies ‘rumours’ or unregulated communication as a potential source of ‘popular resistance’ and violence (Baptiste, 2010: 11), the organizer’s words suggest why MINUSTAH might have financed a soap opera. As stated above, rumours signal the unruliness of communication, information’s potential for unregulated movement and mobility; rumour is a kind of metonymy for the perceived unruliness of the ‘mass’. As we have seen, though, when the mass or crowds are defined as ‘closed’ communities or cultures, they become a natural resource that humanitarian communications projects can exploit in the service of spreading official messages and information, for disseminating colonial forms of governmentality. Anba syèl la indeed represents the tent camp as a space whose intimacies created the conditions for contamination by the violent virus of ‘rumours’ but also for nourishing the flows of and dissemination of authoritative information. The crowded space of the tent camp is thus imagined as another resource for spreading ‘good’ official information, a vaccination against rumour and revolt, and was thus a critical tool in the arsenal for governing at a distance. Anba syèl la includes a series of comic interludes in which one character, the grandfather, insists that his tent is private and not open to flows of people – and messages – from the outside. The grandfather requires his camp neighbours to follow the protocol of ‘knocking’ before entering his family tent, to which his family members repeatedly respond that a tent is

Haitian Culture and Humanitarian Aid

169

not a home, and that ‘no one has a house right now’ (MINUSTAH, #1).6 The grandfather’s old-fashioned rules are thus dismissed not only as antisocial but also as signs of refusal of his social obligation; for visiting friends always have much valuable and ‘life-saving’ information to impart. People with good information will not aid the family, but impart the knowledge that will allow them to help themselves and then integrate them into the network of information sharing. The tent itself, with its permeable and undefined borders between public and private, operates as an ideal ‘entry point’ for the messages of governmentality that the humanitarian community wished to disseminate among camp residents. In its attempt to train spectators to adopt approved information and modes of communication, Anba syèl la represents a version of governmentality that Charles Briggs calls ‘communicability’. In his analysis of governmentality in public health programmes among poor populations in Venezuela, Briggs argues for this expanded notion of governmentality, which evokes the structural conditions of viruses and their spread, unacknowledged in the public health discourses disseminated to poor populations. As such, communicability allows us to see how governmentality is linked to political economy (Briggs, 2005: 274), how it ‘helps shape material inequalities’ and hierarchies within a particular ‘sphere’ that is itself created by the authoritative ideologies that subjects are called upon to internalize (Briggs, 2005: 274). Citing Bourdieu, Briggs argues that communicative competence ‘constitutes symbolic capital, locating individuals and populations in social hierarchies’ based on their possession of specialized forms of knowledge and information, especially important in an age in which information is a highly valued commodity (Briggs, 2005: 273–74). Communicability is thus central to self-regulation or governmentality, because through it individuals ‘interpellat[e] themselves’ into hierarchies ‘as producers, translators, disseminators, or receivers of particular types of discourse’, or else are positioned as marginal or ‘out of the game’ entirely (Briggs, 2005: 274). Anba syèl la is about an extended middle-class Port-au-Prince family forced to live under the same tent. The family consists of the grandmother (unnamed), grandfather (Jean-Joseph), daughter (Marie-Lise), son-in-law (Akim) and grandson (Prince). Each character acts as a representative of particular discourses and models of behaviour, and each can thus be positioned in the hierarchy of communicability, as a producer, disseminator, translator or receiver of the symbolic capital of authoritative information whose aim is to govern conduct and behaviour. While Akim (and his friend This and all subsequent quotations of Anba syèl la were translated by the author. 6

170

The Haiti Exception

Jacques) are disseminators and sometime translators, poised to rise up in the communication hierarchy, Marie-Lise and her mother (the ‘Grandmother’) are mostly receivers, the latter showing some capacity to learn and thus become a disseminator of good information. The son, ‘Prince’, inhabits all three positions (receiver, disseminator and translator), but in addition, as an unformed and thus flexible subject, he shows signs of mobility, a possible future as an authority or ‘producer’ of knowledge himself. Indeed, in one episode, after Prince has demonstrated his highly developed communication skills, his mother exclaims that he will one day become President. As willing receivers and translators of ‘good’ information, Akim, Jacques and Marie-Lise all communicate rationally in the language of psychology, self-help, entrepreneurialism, calculation and risk aversion. The grandfather is an interesting case, as the communicative role he inhabits does not appear in Briggs’s lists of possible subject positions. As suggested by his definition of his tent as a private (i.e., closed) space, Jean-Joseph is ‘out of the game’ since, in contrast to the others, he refuses to welcome the ‘new’ information and the neoliberal languages of the younger generation. Instead, Jean-Joseph communicates anger, stubbornness, incivility, nationalism and traditionalism, qualities that are often conflated. Yet Jean-Joseph is not merely ‘out of the game’, he refuses to play. Jean-Joseph is thus a blocker or disabler of governmentality as effected through person-to-person communication within the space of the camp. At one point, Akim tells him, ‘you […] understand […] nothing. Your mind is closed up like a clogged gutter’ (MINUSTAH, #8). Indeed, Jean-Joseph not only positions himself outside of the imposed sphere of communicability, he tries to block or ‘clog’ its flows of information. He refuses official solutions, regularly tries to undermine the family’s efforts to engage in good communication and rational conflict resolution, and distrusts the authorities, whom he calls blan-yo [the foreigners], and their information. In one episode, the family listens to an official radio broadcast, which states that ‘in the days to come, there will be a solution to help fix things […] keep following the news so you can find out what will take place next’ (MINUSTAH, #1). While the grandmother is relieved to receive this information (which only promises that there will be information), Jean-Joseph expresses the suspicion that ‘there’s something corrupt behind this’ on the part of both the state and the blan-yo. Episode Five focuses on the problem of trash in the camp and provides an occasion to articulate and model neoliberal ideologies of personal responsibility. When Jean-Joseph has injured himself on a rat trap and begins to blame everyone around him, the ever-present neighbour Jacques enters the family’s tent to opine, ‘trash. That’s our biggest problem in the camp’ (i.e., not food or water) (MINUSTAH, #5). The entrepreneurial son-in-law Akim,

Haitian Culture and Humanitarian Aid

171

immediately adds, ‘we can’t continue like this. We can’t just do nothing. We must act’. Jacques then gives the obvious neoliberal interpretation that personal responsibility is the problem and the answer: ‘the people are those who are responsible for what’s going on […] the problem is that people refuse to use the trash receptacles’. Jean-Joseph then begins his efforts to derail the ‘positive’ direction of the conversation. He accuses the group of blaming the poor for the trash problem, and then links the absence of sanitation services to the failures of the aid apparatus: ‘so where are the state representatives? Where are all those foreigners here in the country to help us?’ Jean-Joseph critiques the neoliberal discourses of Akim and Jacques that do indeed blame the poor camp residents, rather than the aid systems that are failing them. But Anba syèl la articulates this critique in order to marginalize, dismiss and contain it, putting it in the mouth of an ‘old man’ who is also sexist, uncivil, naïve and untrustworthy. Reinforcing the rejection of this critique, Akim and the others ridicule Jean-Joseph’s musings as irrational, irrelevant and, most importantly, a waste of valuable time that should be applied to the practical effort of solving the trash problem. In these scenes and others, those who possess a greater share of symbolic capital within this communicative sphere enforce the division between officially sanctioned information and ‘rumour’, and thus have the legitimacy (and duty) to contain the latter. As the disabler communication, Jean-Joseph represents an odd assemblage of discourses, which are all coded as irrational, unruly and potentially violent. In the trash episode, after Jean-Joseph has asked the other men why they are blaming the poor ‘for everything that goes wrong’, he recounts childhood memories of an earlier moment in Haitian history, when the streets were clean and when there were different models of giving voice and agency to the poor: ‘when I was a little boy in Port-au-Prince, Fignolé’s woulo konpresè [steamroller] would come into Bel-Air and force both the bourgeoisie and the state authorities to respect the working-class people’. Daniel Fignolé was President of Haiti for three weeks in 1957. A labour organizer, he led the massive Mouvement ouvrier paysan (Peasant Worker Movement), and was supposedly able to mobilize mass protests at a moment’s notice, what was termed his woulo konpresè [steamroller]. Fignolé’s legacy is controversial, but his popular democratic movement is often cited as one of the more legitimate democratic movements in twentieth-century Haiti. Here, Fignolé’s ‘steamroller’, described by the irrational and untrustworthy disabler Jean-Joseph, is coded as a dangerous popular movement, connoting both the violence of political mobilizations and the specific political conflicts that beset the presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who supposedly hired gangs of impoverished young men, called chimères,

172

The Haiti Exception

to intimidate his opposition.7 In addition to the specific connotations that are loaded onto this historical reference – the danger of rumour, of groups of people working together, the spectre of the chimères, etc. – Jean-Joseph’s reference to history itself is coded as irrational. His story of the woulo konpresè and his reminiscences of the formerly tidy streets of Port-au-Prince are indeed idealized and contain selective detail, but that’s not the problem registered by the family. Rather, no one understands why Jean-Joseph is talking about his childhood and Haitian history in the first place, as they see no relationship between the past and the current (trash) problems. Ultimately, Akim chides the group: ‘this discussion is not getting us anywhere. Rather, let’s sit and think about how we can help people in the camp wage a battle [batay] against trash’. Acting here as translator, Akim resignifies and depoliticizes Jean-Joseph’s historical references by making the object of their struggle trash itself (and the retraining of the social misfits who don’t throw it in the receptacles), rather than justice or the right to basic sanitation services. Where Jean-Joseph critiques the international aid community for its shortcomings, Akim lets it off the hook. In an ironic moment, Jean-Joseph suggests using violence, a baton [heavy stick] to beat the message about throwing trash away into the people. On the one hand, the reference links Jean-Joseph to the violence of the popular mobilizations in Bel-Air, which he remembers with pride, but, on the other, Jean-Joseph’s ironic suggestion that they beat the message of proper hygiene into people implicitly connects neoliberal governmentality, the project of behaviour change communications, to the repressive apparatuses (represented by the MINUSTAH forces themselves) that were everywhere being exercised to contain, subject and regulate the IDP population. Jean-Joseph’s ironizing, then, reveals the mutually supportive relationship between governmentality and the international policing that was called upon when governmentality failed. Such forces of repression are of course entirely absent from the universe depicted in Anba syèl la, as well as from all the cultural products disseminated as part of behaviour change and two-way ­communications projects. The ironic suggestion that humanitarian communications projects were beating information, or messages of governmentality, into the Haitian people’s Richard Sanders explains that ‘Chimère is an insulting invective that expresses utter contempt and hostility for people of a certain colour, class and political persuasion’ and ‘[n]ot surprisingly, the U.S. government agencies that coordinated the 2004 coup, such as the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the military, all embraced the pejorative label’ (Sanders, 2007: 50). Furthermore, the class politics that undergird the use of the invective ‘chimère’ are confirmed by the fact that the word is used with its French spelling. 7

Haitian Culture and Humanitarian Aid

173

hearts and minds also leads me back to the proverb with which I began: bat bliye, kò songe. If people were indeed internalizing the modes of conduct that the humanitarian community was trying to drum into them, how did they do so? And what messages did they remember, and how did they respond? What messages did they try to communicate through the new vehicles of communication made available to them? While the Haitian IDPs’ reception of humanitarian communications projects is beyond the scope of this article, I will close by relaying two suggestive anecdotes. I returned to Camp Kanaran and Pastor Franc several months after the housing coalition had tried and failed to hold their event. This time, I was shadowing the IOM communications staff, who were organizing their own tent camp animations as part of BCC and two-way communications efforts. The pastor (who didn’t recognize me from my earlier visit) of course warmly welcomed the IOM crew and he and I, the only two people in attendance who were given chairs, sat side-by-side to watch the show. First, the emcee, Wilkenson, an actor by training, got the crowd warmed up and laughing with jokes and stories. Then he said a few words about the difficult situation in the camps, before launching into a recitation of slogans that appeared in Chimen Lakay – met ko veye ko [the one who owns the body looks out for the body] and atansyon pa kapon [prudence is not cowardice] – which he encouraged the crowd to repeat. Those who did so the loudest received IOM T-shirts and other small gifts. PSA films were then shown on the usual topics (cholera prevention, how to secure your tent, the virtues of citizen trash clean-up projects) and, following each short film, Wilkenson tested the crowd’s ‘capture’ of the message communicated: ‘what do you do to secure your tent?’ and the entire crowd would scream in unison, ‘Klourè! Mare! Fouye!’ [Nail! Tie! Dig!], and more T-shirts would sail through the air into the crowd’s outstretched hands. Rote memorization of slogans seemed to equate with ‘participation’ in this particular experiment in behaviour change communications, which showed overtly that the goal was governmentality, a modelling of communicative conduct that felt distinctly undemocratic. Indeed, when not called upon to repeat slogans, the crowd remained silent and obedient, perhaps self-consciously performing because they were under the watchful gaze of their pastor, the IOM staff and even me, the only blan in the group. The crowd knew all too well that all three of us had the power to give them much more than information, and so the stakes of internalizing and performing the conduct communicated to them were high. The second anecdote, relayed to me by several people who were in attendance, involved another IOM camp animation that was perhaps more indicative of the tensions that could disrupt communication/governmentality projects. Unsurprisingly, this one employed therapeutic self-expression.

174

The Haiti Exception

During the summer of 2011, when camp evictions were becoming a critical problem, IOM communications staff were sent to camps slated for relocation in order to inform the residents about what was about to take place as well as to give them the chance to process and air their feelings. The event in question went badly: camp residents were furious and frightened about the imminent relocation. They expressed anger, frustration, threats and generally did not demonstrate the proper ‘communicative conduct’ that such events were supposed to produce. These IDPs were not ‘processing’ their feelings or ‘venting’; they were making demands and they wanted answers. When no answers were forthcoming, they became unruly and rudely heckled the IOM staff members, who quickly packed up and shut down the event. This was precisely the kind of exchange that the housing coalition would have welcomed: a conversation, a possibly heated debate (or worse), but both sides would at least have agreed that they were engaged in a communicative process whose goal went beyond the act of communication for its own sake, an imagined scenario in which communication would not have served governmentality, but resisted it. We can only hope that as Haitians are further integrated into the information society and its neoliberal modes of governance, they will maintain their own versions of radyo bouche and the ‘unruliness’ of their local traditions of communication.

Works Cited Anderson, Mary B., Dayna Brown and Isabella Jean. 2012. Time to Listen: Hearing People on the Receiving End of International Aid. Cambridge, MA: CDA Collaborative Learning Projects. Available at http://cdacollaborative.org/ media/60478/Time-to-Listen-Book.pdf (consulted on 6 May 2015). Asad, Talal. 1979. ‘Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter’. In Gerrit Huizer and Bruce Mannheim (eds), The Politics of Anthropology: From Colonialism and Sexism Towards a View from Below. Boston, MA: De Gruyter-Mouton: 87–93. Baptiste, Mackendy Jean. 2010. ‘Informing the Population through Community Mobilizers’. Migration Summer: 11–12. Bennett, Tony. 1992. ‘Putting Policy into Cultural Studies’. In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge: 23–34. —. 2003. ‘Culture and Governmentality’. In Jack Z. Bratch, Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy (eds), Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press: 47–63. Briggs, Charles. L. 2005. ‘Communicability, Racial Discourse, and Disease’. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 269–91.

Haitian Culture and Humanitarian Aid

175

Brown, Wendy. 2005. ‘Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’. In Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 37–59. Cave, Damien. 2010. ‘Haiti’s Displaced See their Stories on TV’. New York Times 9 June. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/ americas/10haiti.html (consulted on 6 July 2015). Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dean, Mitchell. 1999. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. International Federation of the Red Cross. 2011. Haiti Beneficiary Communications Evaluation. Available at https://www.ifrc.org/Global/Publications/disasters/ reports/IFRC-Haiti-Beneficiar y-Communications-Evaluation-EN.pdf (consulted on 1 November 2014). James, Erica Caple. 2010. Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mandel, Jennifer, and Erich Somerfeldt. 2012. Closing the Loop: Responding to People’s Info Needs from Crisis Response to Recovery to Development: A Study of Post-Earthquake Haiti. Available at http://www.internews.org/sites/ default/files/resources/Haiti_ClosingTheLoop_2012-05-screen.pdf (consulted on 5 May 2015). MINUSTAH. 2011. Anba syèl la. Jacques Roc (dir.). Episode 1. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_toimU78-B8 (consulted on 5 May 2015). —. 2011. Anba syèl la. Jacques Roc (dir.). Episode 5. Available at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=n97H_gludM0 (consulted on 5 May 2015). —. 2011. Anba syèl la. Jacques Roc (dir.). Episode 8. Available at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=NGcAqXhTuW8 (consulted on 5 May 2015). Nelson, Anne, and Ivan Sigal. 2013. Lessons from Haiti: Media, Information Systems and Communities. Available at http://www.knightfoundation.org/ media/uploads/publication_pdfs/KF_Haiti_Report_English.pdf (consulted 5 May 2015). Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). 2013. Humanitarianism in the Network Age. Edited by Daniel Gilman and Andrea Noyes. Available at: https://docs.unocha.org/sites/dms/Documents/ WEB%20Humanitarianism%20in%20the%20Network%20Age%20vF%20 single.pdf (consulted on 6 May 2015). Postero, Nancy Grey. 2007. Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Postmulticulture Bolivia. Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press.

176

The Haiti Exception

Rose, Nikolas. 1996. ‘Governing “Advanced” Liberal Democracies’. In Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Rationalities of Government. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press: 37–64. Sanders, Richard. 2007. ‘Afterword: Chimère, the N Word of Haiti’. Press for Conversion 61: 50–51. Sontag, Deborah. 2010. ‘Haitians Cry in Letters: “Please – Do Something!”’. New York Times 19 September. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/ world/americas/20haiti.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (consulted on 8 August 2014). Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan. Wall, Imogen, and Cheryl Y. Gerald. 2012. Ann Kite Yo Pale: Best Practices and Lessons Learned in Communication with Disaster Affected Communities Haiti 2010. Available at http://www.cdacnetwork.org/contentAsset/raw-data/ 940adbcd-d86a-4e5a-9d3f-05003ce3ba28/attachedFile 9 (consulted on 5 May 2015).

Urban Poetics Michèle Duvivier Pierre-Louis1

Urban Poetics

A hostile city? On 12 January 2010, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude on the Richter scale shakes Port-au-Prince to its very foundations. The suddenness and scale of the disaster is unprecedented. Total destruction of the capital’s nerve centres and of the countless surrounding neighbourhoods and slums, all built without any regard for basic standards of safety, of decency. The toll is heavy, very heavy. Massive loss of life. Utter physical and financial devastation within the space of thirty-six seconds. Complete disorientation. Strange feeling that the symbolic order of this intense living space has been permanently disordered, its landmarks no longer recognizable amid the churches, temples, prison, morgue, public squares, schools, universities, markets, shops, etc. The initial shock should have opened the way to a paradigmatic transformation in order to rethink the city. An audaciously inclusive city. But to do that we would have had to face one another, talk, debate, argue, do away with our old demons and reclaim our common ground. For the great Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire, the formidable citadel built by King Christophe at the dawn of Haiti’s independence was intended as the unique and powerful expression of a people standing tall against the will of the imperial West to bring it to its knees. Thus, in the wake of the earthquake, we, as a people finally defeated, needed to imagine the capital city of a nation back on its feet (Césaire, 1963: 63). Translated by Kaiama L. Glover.

1

177

178

The Haiti Exception

Yet, in January 2010, the authorities at the highest level were silent, speechless, as if paralyzed. The words called for, hoped for, expected, never came. This silence was perceived as an unacceptable indifference, guilty powerlessness and even contempt. Our disappointment, equalled only by our uncertainty, translated into the worried sense that there would be no new direction, no new city, no rallying of what was left of our energy and our creativity to dream up a different, more humane city – that once again we would be left to get by as best we could, with the limited means available to us. An ‘every man for himself’ buttressed by the good and less good intentions of international aid, with its many faces and conflicting actions. Why? Why could an urban policy not be developed? The earthquake was the perfect opportunity to do so. How did the people of the city imagine their relationship to the place? Could it be that the representation of the city as it had been determined from the moment of independence had remained as an original trauma frozen in time, inhibiting any possible evolution towards an alternative form of urbanization? There is precedent. In his book on the history of the city of Cap Haïtien, La ville éclatée: décembre 1902–juin 1915 [The Fragmented City: December 1902–June 1915], Marc Péan informs us: Let us first note that the earthquake of 7 May 1842 entirely destroyed the city. Begun in 1844, reconstruction was very slow […] it lumbered along for some time before finally taking off in 1890. Despite all this, nearly half of the city was still in ruins, with all the concomitant implications. (Péan, 1993: 100) More than fifty years to rebuild the country’s second-most important city after its destruction by an earthquake, the city that had been the capital of Haiti before and after independence. Could it be that in 2010 we were still haunted by the injunctions of the first constitution of 1805? Let us recall the warning given by the Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines to his generals in Article 28. Without equivocation. Given the understandable fear of a return to French colonial order based on slavery, the imperative was for the entire country to mobilize: ‘[w]ith the first warning shot of the canon, cities disappear and the nation stands in arms’. Cities were and are the first enemy. They do not belong to us, and it can only be on their ashes that the nation rises. Throughout our history, rare were the cities not burned or looted. This was the fate of the capital during every major political crisis, up to the most recent. The current Haitian Constitution, massively approved by referendum in 1987, some 182 years after the original one (it was superficially amended in 2011), never makes reference to the city. One would think that, since

Urban Poetics

179

the importance of this communal living space has increased so considerably over the years, some form of official acknowledgement would have emerged in the post-dictatorship charter in order to codify its existence and establish its rules. Yet the Constitution only makes reference to departments, neighbourhoods, counties and communal sections, never to the city. There is no mention of the capital, the ‘Republic of Port-au-Prince’, where all power has been concentrated since the 1915–34 US occupation – this, despite the fact that today, for the first time, more than half the population lives in cities and ekes out an existence in the thousand and one shantytowns that surround all the cities in the country, especially its capital (which in and of itself contains nearly a third of the nation’s 10 million inhabitants). Might it be that the city is still perceived as an enemy of the nation? And might this be one of the reasons that researchers – particularly anthropologists – have been most interested in the world outside the city? There is no shortage of studies on the Haitian peasantry and the rural environment. The interest in these spaces is even at the origin of the Faculty of Ethnology2 and of a whole school of thought that has reduced the notion of ‘the people’ to the peasant world, its customs and mores. What to make of this disconnect between academic interest and the real hegemony of the capital? This is not to say, of course, that the rural sector is unimportant. The Haitian peasantry is an essential component of the demographic, economic and cultural reality of the country. Created sui generis, it remains a fascinating object of study for all branches of the social sciences. Its history remains intimately linked to those of colonization, slavery, the struggle for independence and the period immediately following the revolution. And one must credit the peasantry for having managed to bear the weight of the economy throughout the whole of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, all the while remaining largely marginalized and excluded from public life (Gaillard, 1990; Blancpain, 1999; Turnier, 1989). If the peasantry was once able to survive within a sort of autarky – what some have called ‘the counter-plantation’ (Casimir, 1991) and others ‘State-averse spaces’ – the crisis of peasant production, demographic pressure, ‘macoutisation’ [terrorizing and exploitation by the Duvalier militia] and the impoverishment of rural areas, mass exoduses to the city and into the diaspora (‘boat people’) have all dramatically altered the urban and rural cartography of the country. Hence the urgent need to understand the complexity of this new urban fabric being woven in and around cities – its colonizing of the para-urban foothills with anarchic structures and labyrinthine corridors, its See Jhon Picard Byron’s and Claudine Michel’s chapters in this volume for more information about the creation of the Faculté d’Ethnologie. 2

180

The Haiti Exception

creation of an outsider environment somehow still deeply connected to rural society. And the catastrophe of 12 January has in no way slowed down the flood of newcomers. Quite the contrary.

Port-au-Prince: a historical overview This was by no means Port-au-Prince’s first disaster. A colonial city, it was conceived in 1737 by Charles Brunier, Marquis de Larnage, GovernorGeneral of Saint-Domingue: it was he who decided that the capital should abut the foot of the bay. After much hesitation and procrastination from his metropolitan colleagues, debating whether Léogâne or Petit-Goâve might be the better choice, the King of France took the marquis’s recommendation and declared Port-au-Prince capital of the Leeward Islands on 26 November 1749. The capital was given its name by one Monsieur de Saint-André, captain of The Prince, who, in his effort to avoid an English attack had taken refuge among the small islands of the bay, which already bore the name ‘The Prince islets’: ‘The commander was so pleased with the safety and convenience of the port that he associated it with the name of his ship and so called it Port-auPrince’ (Corvington, 2001: 17). Since that time, it should be noted, the location of the capital has been the subject of debate: there were those who thought to establish it on the Ferron plantation, in the area of Martissant, a popular neighbourhood located in the southwestern outskirts of the city, and to call it Port-Royal (Corvington, 2001: 19).3 In considering the history of this city since its creation, one becomes aware of a number of constants that dominate its inter-, intra- and extra-urban relations. First, the city was subjected throughout the nineteenth century to ‘gunboat diplomacy’ – that is, the constant threat of foreign warships appearing whenever a German, French or English national found himself at odds with the Haitian government (Joachim, 1986; Gaillard, 1987, 1988; Blancpain, 2001; Berloquin-Chassany, 2004). In other words, the capital of this independent country has suffered, more often than acknowledged, the humiliation of having to bend under the external threat of attack. How could one possibly build under these conditions? How could one possibly imagine a viable city? There is an additional constant to consider: a persistently colonial social hierarchy that partitions and compartmentalizes people according The Martissant neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince has existed since colonial times and has been the focus of various urban settlement plans. We will return to a discussion of its importance in the history of Port-au-Prince later in this text. 3

Urban Poetics

181

to wealth, colour and status. To each his own neighbourhood. Yet, while relations of power and dominance define the connections between classes and clans, there has long existed a hazy zone of interpersonal contacts that has managed to transgress prejudices and to break down the barriers of the established order. Postcolonial society has inherited this ambivalent socio-spatial hierarchy, dealing no longer with slaves but with servants and workers of all kinds. And the grey area has also consolidated over time, exacerbating the original paradox. Indeed, the social structure of the country and the widespread use of domestic labour calls for forms of interaction between urban social groups – and these fundamentally inegalitarian practices often reinforce distance and established hierarchies, and lead to the well-known excesses we have seen play out under several administrations, including the most recent. This capital is also in the land of hurricanes, earthquakes, devastating fires, epidemics and riots, which cyclically bring near-total destruction to inhabitants and their homes, markets, buildings, public structures, historical and cultural heritage sites. In 1802, on the eve of the outbreak of the War of Independence: The city is in a pitiful state […] the houses are filthy, the roads dirtier than ever. Several fountains, for years, no longer provide a drop of liquid, and it has been a long while since the streetlamps have been lit. At night a foul stench permeates the darkness of the neighbourhoods. With the islets ravaged by fire, its potholed streets, and its sordid houses, Port-au-Prince would seem to be an anguished and abandoned city. (Corvington, 2001: 321) Our first heads of state continued to perceive Port-au-Prince as a colonial capital. It simply could not be the capital of a free and sovereign country that had won its independence by force of arms against one of the most powerful European armies of the eighteenth century. The symbols had to change. Thus did the capital move to Marchand, in the centre of the country – an impregnable site where the Emperor, Haiti’s first national leader, erected five magnificent defensive forts. In 1807, after the Emperor’s assassination, Port-au-Prince once again became the capital and remained so, despite recurring threats to move it elsewhere whenever a return to the old order seemed imminent, or whenever the national territory divided into rival states. The city ultimately changed little over time. It suffices to read French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher’s account of his 1841 visit to Haiti to understand as much. ‘The first steps one takes in Haiti are rather frightening’, writes Schoelcher of his journey through the Republic, from Cap-Haïtien to

182

The Haiti Exception

Port-au-Prince (Schoelcher, 2012 [1843]). Moving from one political or social crisis to the next, the period 1867–70 marks a veritable turning point. The city counted about 29,000 souls at the time, but this number continued to grow as the crisis of peasant production brought a migration of the rural masses to the outskirts of the capital. The peasants came to constitute a significant social force. They participated in demonstrations in support of whichever head of state seemed sensitive to their demands. Many women took part in the riots (Adam, 1982). This popular urban political dynamism became a real factor in the political landscape, with all its ebbs and flows, right up to the moment of the US occupation of 1915–34 (Gaillard, 1987, 1988; Hector, 2000). Thus, during this time the city acquired new monuments, new symbols, new buildings. Its boundaries were extended, its network of roadways became denser – the latter possibly occurring under the US occupation, although this remains to be more thoroughly documented. Nevertheless, the comment below stands true: The spatial and demographic extension of the Haitian capital poses increasingly grave problems in services, infrastructure and hygiene. Today the state no longer controls the growth of the metropolis. Deteriorating infrastructure and poor urban management, due to the deficiency of administrative services and institutional corruption; the weaknesses of urban legislation; non-compliance with current zoning and planning ordinances and problems related to the land tenure system are some of the many obstacles faced by the capital. (Holly, 1999: 28) Again, all this is indisputable. But have we truly sought to understand why? The answers are by no means unequivocal, of course, but might it be possible that a hint – a trace – of the long-standing representations of the city as space of plunder for people here and elsewhere persists? Perhaps. Over time, some original and imaginative attempts at reorganizing certain neighbourhoods have begun to show the way to better future forms of urban life.

The case of Martissant As noted above, the Martissant neighbourhood, located in the southwest periphery of Port-au-Prince, has been brought up in debates concerning how to lay out the city since the eighteenth century. Two centuries later, the late Georges Corvington, historian of the city, mentions that Martissant is still a quasi-rural area, largely wooded, in the 1950s, where a smattering of inhabitants grow corn and millet, and raise goats, Creole pigs and cows

Urban Poetics

183

on the northern face of the mountains that make up the city’s southern perimeter. The streets are unpaved, and winding corridors lead to Vodou peristyles4 where the sounds of singing and rhythmic drums fill the night sky. The Martissant neighbourhood is often mentioned in discussions of the history of Port-au-Prince. One contemporary chronicler remarked of the area: On the road from Léogâne to Martissant, one saw only a few buildings that stop just before the neighbourhood called Bois Witty, reputed as a den of thieves. The whole area, from Dalles to Carrefour-Feuilles […] was nothing more than a tract of land covered with large trees and dense green foliage. This sombre place […] was uninhabited […]. In the area are only a few huts housing merchants of acassan,5 starch or millet. (Lamaute, 1999: 47) The names of Martissant’s many sub-districts refer to its first landowners: Décayette and Deluy are names of ancient dwellings of the colonial period; Soray is the family name of landowners whose descendants are still trying to sell off pieces of their inheritance; Crepsac and Dantès were owners in the nineteenth or twentieth century – Fernand Crepsac was mayor of Port-auPrince during the presidency of Stenio Vincent (1930–41); and the family of Dr Dantès Destouches has owned land in the neighbourhood since the nineteenth century (Oriol, 2009). The capital and its surroundings continued to bear the marks of the colonial past well into the mid-twentieth century. During the 1950s, two characters with very little in common decided to settle in the neighbourhood and make it their primary residence. African-American anthropologist Katherine Dunham had received a scholarship to complete her Master’s study in Haiti and became passionate about Vodou dance. In 1953, she acquired approximately five acres of property in Martissant known as ‘L’Habitation Leclerc’, General Leclerc being the brother-in-law of Napoleon Bonaparte sent to then Saint-Domingue in 1802 to re-establish slavery, an expedition that failed miserably. Legend has it that he and his wife, Pauline Bonaparte, resided on this particular property. This rumour has held fast and the name Leclerc is used to this day, despite attempts to make clear that the property is now a part of Martissant Park. Why Dunham chose to acquire property that, according to local legend, belonged to General Leclerc and his wife remains a mystery. Perhaps she bought it precisely for this reason. She was never clear on the subject, but made the property her second home for more than half a century. Religious spaces akin to a temple or church. A cornmeal porridge.

4 5

184

The Haiti Exception

Towards the end of the 1970s, Dunham rented out L’Habitation Leclerc to a consortium of developers that built a luxury hotel for jet-setting international celebrities from the worlds of politics and entertainment. But tourism in Haiti declined dramatically, first following the discovery of HIV-AIDS in 1980 and its cynical attribution to Haitians, and then later as a result of the political turmoil that led to the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship. In the succeeding years, the property largely fell into decline. Well before Dunham’s death in 2006, the grounds had become the de facto headquarters of a number of armed gangs, a hideout for people and goods; and locals looking for cheap housing had become either tenants or squatters in the dozen or so hotel bungalows. Fortunately, the trees were not destroyed and the vegetation remained lush. This was the condition of the property when the state declared it a public space in 2007. The second person to leave a noteworthy trace in Martissant was architect Albert Mangonès (1917–2002). In 1958, he and his wife (who had once been married to the son of Dr Dantès Destouches) acquired approximately two acres of land a few metres from L’Habitation Leclerc. But where Dunham had been captivated by dance and popular songs, Mangonès was interested in the city and its development. He believed that the capital should be extended from Martissant as a gateway to the southwestern strip of land situated between sea and mountains containing the main aquifers for the capital’s water supply and opening out to four geographical departments (South, Southeast, Nippes, Grand’Anse). Martissant had the potential to anchor a project of urbanization adapted to the climate and life skills of the population. Thus, Mangonès envisioned the neighbourhood as offering the developing city a means of resolving some of the many challenges it faced. Having recently completed his architectural studies at Cornell University, Mangonès was hired by the Haitian government to work on an architectural plan for the Universal Exposition on the occasion of Port-au-Prince’s bicentennial in 1949. In these initial forays into architecture, Mangonès proposed pavilions and an overall design style that made entirely innovative use of the climate and natural light. Some years later, under Duvalier, he was entrusted with other projects, among them the central plaza and the Statue of the Unknown Maroon, the restoration of the historic monument Citadelle Laferrière, amongst other buildings and monuments. But his vision of the urban expansion of Port-au-Prince towards the southwest was never adopted. He believed the wealthy families in the capital made the wrong decision, choosing a chaotic urban swarm in Pétionville located five kilometres east of Port-au-Prince, one of the few cities that boasted a semblance of urbanization and had long been a community of second homes for the wealthy. Wedged between two mountain ranges that should have been protected, it now faces

Urban Poetics

185

the very worst of misfortunes: devastation of the mountain face by both rich and poor; a ring of shantytowns; massive deforestation; a lack of water and electricity; a tangle of streets, alleys and insalubrious passageways; one-way streets leading to even more offshoots of the city – all developed without regard to planning, building codes, etc. From the late 1940s, Albert Mangonès began warning the Haitian authorities and the wider public about the consequences of state indifference and the absence of public services in the development of the city. His series of articles ‘En Toute Urbanité’ [Urbanely Speaking], published in the journal Reflets d’Haïti during the 1950s and then as a collection in 2001, reveals the full heft of his warning: ‘[l]ike all living things, a city can atrophy, gangrene, wither, suffocate and die. It can also kill. But it can also reimagine itself, develop and blossom’ (Mangonès, 2001: 31). Aware of the stakes, but also of the symbolic value of urban space, Mangonès noted that: The city, as Lewis Munford asserts, is the point of maximum concentration of power and culture of any given human community. It is the form and symbol of social exchange and interdependence […]. It is there that the achievements of a civilization grow and flourish. It is there that human experience is transformed into signs, into symbols, into a way of life, into a viable system. (Mangonès, 2001: 84) But also, and perhaps above all, the city must be a conscious and collective work of art. It is the utilitarian structure through which man responds to the demands of communal living; but it is also a symbol of the goals, desires, collective aspirations and unifying principles of a culture, of a nation, while being at the same time a true picture of its inconsistencies, its ruptures and its social and economic conflicts. (Mangonès, 2001: 85) Constituting one of the last remaining wooded areas in the capital, the Mangonès and Dunham properties needed to be saved at all costs, if only to prove that it might be possible to ‘create the city’ out of this forsaken district.

Martissant: ‘the urban challenge’ It was in the post-earthquake chaos that FOKAL (www.fokal.org), of which I am president, proposed to the government that the state work with us and two groups of donors on a project of urban renewal in two marginal Port-au-Prince neighbourhoods, Martissant and Baillergeau. A few months after the earthquake, the Inter-Ministerial Commission on Zoning and Land

186

The Haiti Exception

Use (Commission Interministérielle d’Aménagement du Territoire, CIAT) seemed well disposed towards our initiative: The linking of environmental, social, cultural and urban issues in pilot projects will be a major axis of the reconstruction effort. If such projects are inscribed within well-defined and manageable parameters, they may well serve as methodological and operational laboratories for urban transformation. The site of Martissant Park located west of Port-au-Prince perfectly exemplifies this type of project. (CIAT, 2010: 59) The project in Baillergeau was to be supported by the French NGO GRET (Groupe de Recherche et d’Echanges Technologiques).6 Martissant, a stone’s throw away from downtown, was thus singled out as the site for a potentially unparalleled urban experiment. Three years prior to the earthquake, we had managed to convince the government to designate the Mangonès, Dunham and surrounding properties ‘public utilities’ and to create a public park complete with a botanical garden and community infrastructures. It had been three years since we began the architectural work and, more importantly, since we had begun building relationships with the area’s marginalized population – remaining fully conscious of the fragility and reversibility of any actions undertaken in a neighbourhood the media never failed to characterize as ‘lawless’. Urban violence, gang warfare, kidnappings, rapes, fire, theft and crimes of all kinds: this was the quotidian reality for a population estimated at about 300,000 souls in the entirety of the district. The Presidential Order had defined a buffer zone, with a population of about 40,000 inhabitants, around Martissant Park as the Concerted Development Zone (ZAC in the original French) to which our activities were confined. But our ‘way in’ to the neighbourhood remained the public space, the park. To better understand the environmental, land tenure, social, economic and demographic realities in the Development Zone, we engaged the services of a sociologist and her team in 2008 to conduct an ‘urban diagnostic study’ that proved to be a critically important tool. We were in the midst of the implementation process when the earthquake shook the city, obliging us to deploy a new strategy. We began a process of restoring these properties, and became accountable to the state for a project that would also contribute to improving the overall living conditions of the neighbourhood’s residents. Up to that point, we had worked primarily in rural areas in an effort to better understand the peasant way of life. Engaging with communities in a marginalized urban neighbourhood was a very different kind of challenge, one that required us For further information see http://factsreports.revues.org/2828.

6

Urban Poetics

187

to have an open mind and to base our actions on our actual experiences on the ground. We also remained very conscious not only of the fact that success in establishing the park and earning a measure of trust from this overlooked and stigmatized population would represent a major achievement in and of itself, but also that the methodology we chose, if successful, might become a model for use in other marginalized neighbourhoods in the capital as well as in other cities facing similar challenges. The question was how to address this population while fully acknowledging the distance that has long characterized – that has long opposed – the different social groups in Haiti. How to explain to these urbanized communities our presence, the park project and what the ‘issues’ were, as we understood them? How to give proper recognition while bearing in mind that in our postcolonial societies, on which slavery and the slave trade have left deep scars, skin colour, physical attributes and external signs of social status are given a great deal of importance? How to make clear that we share the same desire for freedom and justice, despite everything that seemed to divide us: family, education, status, residence, profession, language, etc.? And how to do so in a context where a population still traumatized by the earthquake and its aftershocks was not even able to properly bury its dead, the rubble not having been cleared until two years after the disaster? It was important to acknowledge that this population had been politicized by the social and political struggles waged since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986 and, having borne the heavy burden of seemingly endless disillusionments, was less and less trusting. Suspicion poisons human relations, imprinting them with a subtext of blackmail, intimidation and threats. We too had had our own share of disappointing political experiences. How, then, to create the bonds necessary for common hope and action? How, in short, to face the philosophical issue of alterity? Frantz Fanon, a thinker we certainly do not read enough, forged a way forward for us: At the foundation of Hegelian dialectic there is an absolute reciprocity which must be emphasized. It is in the degree to which I go beyond my own immediate being that I apprehend the existence of the other as a natural and more than natural reality. If I close the circuit, if I prevent the accomplishment of movement in two directions, I keep the other within himself. Ultimately, I deprive him even of this being-for-itself. The only means of breaking this vicious circle that throws me back on myself is to restore to the other, through mediation and recognition, his human reality, which is different from natural reality. The other has to perform the same operation. ‘Action from one side only would be useless, because

188

The Haiti Exception

what is to happen can only be brought about by means of both …’; ‘they recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other.’ (Fanon: 2008 [1952, 1967], 169) Our intention was twofold: to create a public space of great beauty that would transcend stigmatization and exclusion, while at the same time opening a space for sustained dialogue with the population living in the Urban Development Zone around the park. With the help of a clinical psychologist, we created ‘open discussion spaces’ – safe spaces within which people could express their fears, doubts and anger as well as their satisfaction at having found a space where those feelings towards ‘the other’ might be expressed with respect, a space within which to encounter the other, a space of hope, however tenuous. The diagnostic study showed us that the Development Zone was not a homogeneous place with across-the-board characteristics of extreme poverty. Both spatial organization and the individual constructions indicated significant variety, which enabled us to draw up a differentiated typology of the neighbourhoods and its homes. We also gleaned this through our open discussion spaces. Haitian society had never seriously considered its own demographic transition in terms of social mobility. Nothing, or very little, has been envisioned for a growing middle class that, faced with the city’s lack of opportunities, dreams only of leaving the country. This explains the surprising social mix within marginalized neighbourhoods. Even when families make every effort to push their young to rise above the condition of peasant or poor city dweller through education, these kids rarely manage to obtain decent employment and housing. As they search for ways and means to escape into the diaspora, their only choice is to settle in these peripheral, precarious neighbourhoods and to develop complex strategies of communal living. Urban studies scholar Jean Goulet explains this in his 2008 article ‘La gestion urbaine aux antipodes de la technocratie: l’expérience des bidonvilles de Port-au-Prince’ [Urban management as the opposite of technocracy: the experience of Port-au-Prince shantytowns], in which he proposes a differentiated analysis of life in the poor neighbourhoods surrounding the capital: In the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince (Haiti) there are more than 350 shantytowns or cités occupying more than half of the urban space, and in which perhaps 1.6 million people live. The Haitian state barely intervenes, if at all. Slum communities are left to themselves in a degraded space, where conditions of extreme poverty prevail. (Goulet, 2008: 245) After making this point, the author develops the following argument:

Urban Poetics

189

Port-au-Prince’s shantytowns are not temporary encampments; they have a history, sometimes multigenerational; they are home to a rich urban life that encompasses a wide range of functions and activities (mostly informal but all very real); they are the site of sustained and diverse social relations […]. The shantytown is therefore a form of land appropriation for the less fortunate, thanks to the low cost of properties that, though deemed unattractive, nonetheless correspond with the demands (or prospects) of low-income households. The shantytown also often emerges out of an institutional vacuum and state indifference. It is, of course, a poorly structured space that has been left to fend for itself. However, it is not the chaotic hell described by observers dealing in humanitarian sensationalism. It is a genuine milieu whose fundamental nature, though perhaps highly resource-poor and without codified rules of living, well and truly exists – and this is evident in its everyday practices and gestures. (Goulet, 2008: 249–50) There remains much work to be done in order to truly comprehend the complex and evolving networks that make up urban life in Haiti, for we must first try to understand the aspirations of these diverse populations. We also need to gain better purchase on the nature of the relationships they continue to maintain with rural society or with their provinces of origin. Contrary to popular belief, these places are not homogeneous. Rather, they contain a multitude of perspectives out of which we must discern the common ground – that linking force that enables the composition and recomposition of the social fabric. We must also consider the deep desire for recognition of which Emmanuel Renault and Axel Honneth have spoken: ‘The current situation appears to be marked by the growth of populations that, excluded from the circuits of global production, do not even have the chance to be dominated and exploited, and suffer an injustice’ (Renault, 2004: 9; see also Honneth, 2006). By injustice, Renault means exclusion and non-recognition, which are the deep causes of the irrepressible desire to escape and try one’s luck elsewhere. This form of injustice also causes various forms of frustration and violence.

Conclusion The now urgent question of urbanization remains open. It demands that we consider the evolving relationship between the city and the countryside beyond the hackneyed concept of dichotomy that has reigned thus far. The question cannot be limited to the study of gangs and bases [the extended family coaxed or coerced into supporting the gang], which seems to mark a

190

The Haiti Exception

new trend in certain academic circles. Ultimately, urban questioning leads to the philosophical issue of inhabiting. Haitian rural populations have settled in this country with their gods, their mode of living and their particular relationship to the land and the environment, surviving in precarious conditions. But, given that now both the city and the country seem to be undergoing profound transformations, we must at last ‘conceive of the city’ in the complexity of its networks and flows, in its relations within and without, in order to overcome the broader challenge of living in this country, of living in this city. We Haitians need to put an end to our persistent and crippling self-doubt regarding the possibility of making the urban space inhabitable for all. In reminding us to ‘dwell poetically’, Hölderlin may be understood today within the context of our ‘space for open discussion’ (espaces de parole). In order to inhabit time and space, in order to embrace the world, in order to create our common space, we must first own our body in its tension and tragic conditions, own our language, thought and space.

Works Cited Adam, André Georges. 1982. Une crise haïtienne 1867–1869, Sylvain Salnave. Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Imprimerie Deschamps. Berloquin-Chassany, Pascale. 2004. Haïti, une démocratie compromise 1890–1911. Paris: L’Harmattan. Blancpain, François. 1999. Haïti et les Etats-Unis 1915–1934, Histoire d’une occupation, 1999. Paris: L’Harmattan. —. 2001. Un siècle de relations financières entre Haïti et la France (1825–1922). Paris: L’Harmattan. Casimir, Jean. 1991. La Caraïbe une et divisible. Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Imprimerie Deschamps. Césaire, Aimé. 1963. La tragédie du roi Christophe. Paris: Présence Africaine. Commission Interministérielle d’Aménagement du Territoire (CIAT). 2010. Haïti Demain. République d’Haïti. Corvington, Georges. 2001. Port-au-Prince au cours des ans, Tome I: 1743–1804 Montréal: Editions du CIDIHCA. Fanon, Frantz. 2008 [1952, 1967]. Black Skin, White Masks, with forewords by Ziauddin Sardar and Homi K. Bhabha. Trans. by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press. Gaillard, Gusti-Klara. 1990. L’expérience de la dette extérieure ou une production caféière pillée (1875–1915). Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Imprimerie Henri Deschamps. Gaillard, Roger. 1987. Les blancs débarquent (7 volumes). Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Imprimerie le Natal.

Urban Poetics

191

—. 1988. La république exterminatrice (8 volumes). Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Imprimerie le Natal. Goulet, Jean. 2008. La gestion urbaine aux antipodes de la technocratie: l’expérience des bidonvilles de Port-au-Prince. Ville Management 6, Démocratie et management local sous la direction de Robert Le Duff et Jean Jacques Rigal, Etudes Dalloz, Montréal. Hector, Michel. 2000. Crises et mouvements populaires en Haïti. Montréal: Editions du CIDIHCA. Holly, Gérald (ed.). 1999. Les problèmes environnementaux de la région métropolitaine de Port-au-Prince. Commission pour la commémoration du 250ème anniversaire de la fondation de Port-au-Prince, Haïti. Honneth, Axel. 2006. La société du mépris. Paris: La Découverte. Lamaute, Emmanuel. 1999. Le vieux Port-au-Prince, une tranche de la vie haïtienne. Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Imprimerie de la compagnie lithographique d’Haïti. Mangonès, Albert. 2001. En toute urbanité. Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Editions mémoire d’encrier. Oriol, Michèle. 2009. Le quartier de Martissant dans la commune de Port-auPrince. Essai de diagnostic urbain. [unpublished]. Péan, Marc. 1993. Vingt-cinq ans de vie capoise. Tome III: La ville éclatée (décembre 1902–juillet 1915. Port-au-Prince, Haïti: L’Imprimeur II. Renault, Emmanuel. 2004. L’expérience de l’injustice, reconnaissance et clinique de l’injustice. Paris: La Découverte. Schoelcher, Victor. 2012 [1843]. Colonies étrangères et Haïti. Paris: Hachette Livres. Turnier, Alain. 1989. Quand la nation demande des comptes. Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Imprimerie Le Natal.

Epilogue: Kalfou Danje: Situating Haitian Studies and My Own Journey within It Claudine Michel

Epilogue

As the world changes, so do disciplines.

– Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Haitian Studies has reached a crossroads, a crossroads at which contemporary political crises and cultural revitalization efforts demand that we remain alert to the often shifting and confounding contemporary realities of the island nation. My own work aligns with what Kwame Nimako describes as a ‘strong belief in equal opportunity and social transformation as an alternative to inequality embedded in racism’ – a commitment to ‘mass education as the basis of political mobilization and as a strategy to undo colonial indoctrination’ (Nimako, 2015: 58). Although Nimako speaks more generally about an ‘Africana intellectual tradition’, his words also describe my conviction that intellectualism, pedagogy, religious ethics and education at all levels must constantly be in conversation with each other. It is this holistic and integrated approach to research, education and activism that has shaped my career and my commitment to Haitian Studies. I offer in this essay a series of critical reflections on the evolution of Haitian Studies over the past twenty-five years, both in Haiti and in its North American dyasporas.1 I reflect on my own journey, offering a narrative I wish to dedicate this piece to the late Ati Max G. Beauvoir and to the late anthropologist of religion Karen McCarthy Brown along with her sister-comrade, 1

193

194

The Haiti Exception

about my early course of study, in particular at the Faculté d’Ethnologie in Haiti, and my academic experience within the field of Black Studies, in my ‘home department’ at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the United States. As I travel back through this personal and professional past, I make connections between my scholarship on Haiti and questions of moral pedagogy and religious ethics as accessed through Vodou, connections that I have come to understand as a reawakening and call to action from within the ‘ivory tower’. Indeed, I call on the Haitian concept of the kalfou – the crossroads – to evoke the position of Haitian Studies at the junctures of history, culture, geo-politics and metaphysics, and the term danje – danger – to signal the urgent need to recognize, both in the realm of academia and in ‘real’ life, that truly understanding these junctures – or not – can either enhance our collective human experience or further diminish the lives of marginalized communities throughout the world.

Kalfou: critical reflections on a discipline The notion of the kalfou usefully describes the intentions underlying this volume of essays – its efforts to acknowledge the breadth and depth of Haitian Studies, to identify methodological puzzles and problems, and to consider various intra- and interdisciplinary solutions. The reflexive approach that grounds the present volume is a refreshing instance of the kinds of work being done to address and to accept accountability for our individual orientations as scholars and researchers, a challenge I accept in this concluding essay. Expanding out from a Haitian framework to include transatlantic contexts Alourdes Champagne, Mama Lola. Special thanks also to Kyrah M. Daniels, daughter and colleague, for her research on the kalfou and its role in Caribbean religious formations (2015), which has partly inspired this present article. In my historicizing of the UCSB Center for Black Studies Research (CBSR), which has served as a lifeline to Haitian Studies in the United States, I wish to recognize Nadège Clitandre, the late Clyde Woods, Diane Fujino and George Lipsitz. I use the Kreyòl term dyaspora (with a lower-case ‘d’) because of the political connotation that this spelling carries (for me and others). Brinda Mehta, drawing on journalist Jean Dominique, writes, ‘Haitian writers express the distinctiveness of their experience in the dyaspora as a conduit to negotiate identity and the parameters of belonging. They affirm this particularity by retaining the Kreyòl spelling of dyaspora as a unique experience conditioned by the trajectory of history […]. Jean Dominique’s comments also highlight the ways in which dyaspora reconfigures national boundaries by creating a liminal spatiality between nation (nanchon) and diaspora (dyaspora) through a transnational geopolitical framing’ (Mehta, 2009: 14).

Epilogue

195

both directly and indirectly connected to Haiti, the kalfou also refers to a network of crossings that integrate varying intellectualisms. George Lipsitz explains that the concept of the kalfou is intended: to connect anti-surbordination scholarship to ideas, experiences, archives and imaginaries of organic intellectuals, activists and artists from aggrieved communities. Today engaged scholars all across the nation and all around the world are increasingly developing original and generative research questions by blending together campus and community knowledge into a new synthesis. This efflorescence of engaged anti-racist scholarship has no single professional home. It cuts across different disciplines, fields, areas, institutions. (Lipsitz, 2014: 7) Although Lipsitz is outlining here the objectives and scope of a new academic journal named Kalfou,2 his words describe the contours of an emerging relational Ethnic Studies, drawing attention to comparative studies and analyses of relationships among powers, amidst ideologies and within nations. Such relationality in studies of race and ethnicity not only refers to cuttingedge methodologies in the humanities and social sciences, but also gesture towards an often ignored but nevertheless important genealogy of Haitian Studies in the academy. Haitian forms of intellectualism over the centuries have constantly interrogated and struggled against ‘the twin scourges of colonialism and racism’ (Bellegarde-Smith and Michel, 2013: 477). A number of persistent questions came to my mind in reading these essays in this volume. What does it mean that Haitian Studies has exploded on the academic scene as a distinct discipline, and that it has done so primarily outside of Haiti?3 How did we get to this point? Is such visibility a ‘good thing’? Who currently writes on Haiti and in what spaces? How are Kalfou: A Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies Journal was recently launched through the CBSR at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With Melvin Oliver I serve as founding editor. I first envisioned this journal in December 1999 after organizing the first large-scale, multidisciplinary Ethnic Studies conference ever to take place across the University of California system. A few years later, upon joining the University of California, Santa Barbara faculty, Melvin Oliver, Dean of the College of Letters and Science, and Kalfou’s senior editor George Lipsitz joined in the quest to create this scholarly forum that would reflect at once the pressing intellectual and social concerns of our time and offer ways to reconfigure the rapport between academia and those communities that we, as Ethnic Studies scholars, are called on to represent and serve. 3 Haitians writing in Haiti have always produced scholarship in the field of Haitian Studies; the difference is that most Haitian scholars still view their work as disciplinarily bound – as historians, anthropologists, philosophers, 2

196

The Haiti Exception

scholars residing in Haiti shaping the discipline? Has the Haitian Studies Association succeeded in forging sustainable scholarly collaborations between Haiti, the dyaspora and allies? Do the current volume and other recently published books represent a new trend that includes multiple sets of voices? What relevance, if any, does Haitian Studies scholarship have for projects on the ground in Haiti? While I do not aspire to answer all of these questions here, I do hope that the reader will keep these queries in mind as we make our way through the trajectory, and even the history of the field of Haitian Studies, acknowledging where the field has been and what it might become. These questions emerge as much from my reading of the essays in this volume as from my ongoing concerns about Haiti and Haitian Studies. Inspired by the editors’ call for contributors to consider their own relationship to Haiti, I offer here what is at once a memoir and a commentary on the field. These reflections are perhaps more collage than chronicle. In this, they reflect the many overlapping dimensions of my engagement with Haitian Studies as well as the multidimensional nature of the field itself. As such, the goal of my epilogue is twofold. First, I complement the thorough work of this volume’s first section, ‘Tracing Intellectual Histories’, offering a trajectory of the development of Haitian Studies in the United States of America as it has specifically related to my own personal experience and, more generally, to the disciplines of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies. Second, in proposing the kalfou, and particularly kalfou danje/re4 as a theoretical model, I suggest that the work of scholars is essential to claiming the importance of Haitian Studies to more general research questions in the humanities and social sciences, but also fraught with the danger of creating narratives that exceptionalize Haiti detrimentally. Furthermore, engagement with and about Haitian Studies beyond mere scholarship suggests that one must reflect and act at a crossroads, and do so ethically in the face of certain realities that affect lives. Given this conundrum, I recognize the fact that in this particular moment I am, and I think we as scholars of Haiti all are, standing at a kalfou danjere, at a ‘dangerous crossroads’.

art historians and so forth – whereas the notion of Haitian Studies as an ­interdisciplinary field of study was born in the dyaspora. 4 In my conclusion, I refer specifically to the 1992 album titled Kalfou Danjere by Haitian group Boukman Eksperyans. Danje means ‘danger’ and danjere ‘dangerous’.

Epilogue

197

Haitian Studies: interdisciplines and interspaces ‘Haitian Studies’ is at once a discipline and interdiscipline. It is not quite an ‘area study’, as its geographic reach extends to the diverse expressions of dyasporas throughout the world and its spheres of influence include both such physical landscapes as the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean, and ideological spaces, like the transatlantic and the Afro-Atlantic worlds. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work has done much to reveal the geo-historical relationships of power that shape these spaces from the overlapping perspectives of anthropology, economics and history. As such, many of his writings emphasize the importance of continually re-evaluating the contributions and limitations of one’s field(s) of study. As he maintains in his influential essay collection Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, scholars must be willing to acknowledge ‘the many dead ends within the human disciplines brought about or brought to light by current global transformations, including the death of utopia. We might as well admit that all the human sciences may need more than a mere facelift; most will be deeply modified’ (Trouillot, 2003: 36). With such reflections in mind, I ask myself what it means to study Haiti as both a ‘foreign’ and ‘familiar’ space in the West, and what it has meant for me to study Haiti as ‘home’, either in the dyaspora or in the nation itself. I probe this question with great self-awareness, as a Haitian national who first studied Haiti in the context of a discipline-specific Haitian university and then continued to work on Haiti in a large public research university in the United States. There are many ways to link: sometimes we weave stories, sometimes we become entangled in them. It is true that much of my time in the various spaces that I trace below has been spent navigating the treacherous waters of subjectivity and cross-cultural bridge building. I write these reflections with great appreciation for the communities in which I have participated and which, through collective prowess and inspired calls to action, I have helped to develop.

Haiti at ‘home’ In my last year of high school in the Fall of 1976, I enrolled at l’École de Jardinière Enfants (ENJE), a specialized private college for the training of pre-school teachers.5 The curriculum was strong in the disciplines of In the 1960s and ’70s preschool education did not exist in Haiti except for Jacqueline Turian Cadozo’s kindergarten. ENJE’s directors, Marie-Thérèse Colimon-Hall and Lucienne Rameau Leroy, were trailblazers in their introduction 5

198

The Haiti Exception

psychology and pedagogy. In fact, I learned almost everything I know about teaching from that two-year institution. I was dissatisfied, however, by the lack of specificity about local subjects; for our classroom texts referenced literature and experiences based primarily on European or US-American models and data. Later, I also enrolled at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), responsible for training educators for secondary school. Though I studied Haitian literature, philosophy, history and linguistics, among other topics at ENS, I remained disappointed not to see more realistic portrayals of Haitians in the courses offered at these institutions. Between those two programmes, my favourite course, which I took at ENJE, was ‘L’Enfant Haïtien’ [The Haitian Child] as I realized that I had been constantly asking myself: Who will be the subject – the child, the person whom I aspire to teach in the Haitian school system? I wondered who was going to teach us about the importance of social difference and notions of identity in our pedagogy; about how people perceive themselves, how they deal with linguistic negotiations, with rural versus urban realities, and about how all of these factors impact students’ schooling. What were the homes of our students like? Which religions did their families practice? Who were their parents? What did they define as their struggles and their successes? And what did they expect of their children and of the education they would receive? These questions drove my desire to find an intellectual home and I realize in retrospect that I was already searching for this new discipline that I would later embrace in my career as a professor. With new motivation, I decided to enrol at the Faculté d’Ethnologie in 1977, and my three years there opened the door for me to enter the fields of Black Studies and Haitian Studies. I sought answers in that space that I had not gotten from ENJE and ENS. Exploring the field of ethnologie – or anthropology, as it is most often called in the US6 – permitted me to feel more in touch with my nation and gave me a sense of connecting with what I perceived to be the ‘real Haiti’. I was also able to confront notions of ‘home’, and began to understand my own privileged positionality as a light-skinned Haitian woman from a highly educated family that, despite its ‘elite’ social of preschool education more broadly in Haiti, offering systematic training to jardinières d’enfants. (This note is partly a tribute to these two visionary educators who influenced me tremendously as a young undergraduate). The school still exists today and its current co-directors, Jacqueline Baussan Loubeau and Michäelle Baussan Stines, continue the work and vision of the school’s late founders. 6 In step with Jhon Picard Byron in his piece in this volume, I choose not to distinguish among the terms anthropology, ethnography and ethnology.

Epilogue

199

status, has been dedicated to the advancement of Haitian society across class lines, through individual projects and community development. At last, questions I had been posing about the reality of life in contemporary Haiti were being answered. Faculty members actively considered notions of rural versus urban; they raised questions about population growth, issues of land and public health; our national folklore and religion were seen as worthy subjects of study. I viewed all of these topics as having great relevance for Haiti, for Haitians and, more generally, for democracy in Haiti. When I reflect on my years at Ethnologie, one particular notion acquired from my readings of Jean Price-Mars (who was, in effect, a precursor to the cultural studies movement both in Haiti and abroad)7 stands out: the importance of looking inwards, towards the classes populaires, and of privileging the non-elite as social agents. Or, as Patrick Bellegarde-Smith has since declared so powerfully: ‘Haitian democracy will occur only when state institutions are made to reflect the national culture’ (Bellegarde-Smith, 1990: 171). It was during my time at Ethnologie that I first encountered Vodou in the classroom, in the context of a class on Haitian folklore. Soon afterwards, I found myself watching a television programme in which Max Beauvoir declared his investment in our national religion. Hearing this member of the Haitian elite say publicly, ‘Profession, houngan’ (Vodou priest) was a revelation to me. It was also during this period that I began attending Vodou ceremonies. Despite my otherness as a fair-skinned woman little familiar with the rites of the tradition, I soon came to understand, and have only become more convinced over the years that Vodou offers a site wherein members of society considered to be racially, socially, educationally or otherwise ‘lesser than’ are specialists, experts and knowledgeable contributors. A complex system, Vodou locates ways of knowing inside conditions of being. It is a religion of praxis as well as philosophy, a tradition that reveals the need for ‘Western hegemonic powers to realize that they may indeed be able to learn something about being human from non-Western societies’ (McCarthy Brown, 2010 [1991]: 14). I have been humbled by how close to home Vodou has struck with respect to my scholarship. Though I certainly did not envision a career dedicated to studying this topic while I was a student in Haiti, it may very well be that my early ‘academic initiation’ to studies of Vodou inspired the work I would later do on Haiti’s national religion, both at home and abroad. These moments were crucial to the evolution of my personal-intellectual relationship with Haitian Studies and my overall understanding of the field. For an in-depth analysis of the dissemination and legacy of Jean Price-Mars’s work, again see Jhon Picard Byron’s essay in this volume. 7

200

The Haiti Exception

Haiti abroad I arrived in southern California in 1980 and enrolled in a graduate programme in comparative education at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), hoping to continue my research on Haiti, among other nations. It occurred to me then that my positioning had undergone a radical shift: while I had continued my education research, I was now studying Haiti, my ‘home’, as a citizen of the onzième département (eleventh department), a member of the Haitian dyaspora abroad. I therefore sought out and connected with a community of similarly positioned scholars. Thus it was then that I connected with Alix Cantave, Gerdès Fleurant, Marc Prou and Josiane Hudicourt-Barnes, who, in 1988, along with the late AfricanAmerican scholar VèVè Clark and other researchers from the Boston area, envisioned the research institute and forum for thinking about Haitian Studies that ultimately became the Haitian Studies Association (HSA). After several years, I became part of the leadership of the organization, ultimately assuming the role of editor of the association’s publication, the Journal of Haitian Studies, a position I have held since 1997. It was also around this time that, having recommitted to my research on Haitian religious practices as integral to my training in education and my position as a Black Studies professor, I turned enthusiastically to studies of Vodou in Haiti, in New York City, Miami and later in Boston and in Montréal.8 Working closely with Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Ati Max Beauvoir and ten other Haitian scholars, I helped to found KOSANBA, the Kongrè (Congress) of Santa Barbara, a scholarly association for the study of Haitian Vodou housed at the UCSB Center for Black Studies Research.9 In 1991, Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn had made a remarkable and somewhat unpredictable entry into the American Academy of Religion and other prestigious university venues, receiving major accolades from religion, anthropology, sociology and, in particular, feminist scholars. This marked a turning point for Vodou, and also for my own scholarly journey. The book allowed me to re-envision the work I had been doing – research on education and morality – in order to merge it with Haiti once again. 9 Approaching its twentieth anniversary, the organization remains strong today, having produced several scholarly books and organized eleven international conferences, including one in Mirebalais, Haiti in 2009. Our goal was to meet in Haiti every other year but, in fact, KOSANBA did not meet for four years after the 2010 earthquake as board members were involved in reconstruction projects, which left little time for scholarly gatherings. What was going on in Haiti mattered most for us during those years. We came back in force in 2013, at which time we held a successful conference at Harvard University; our Fall 8

Epilogue

201

As a collective of Haitian scholars, we have established the HSA as our (academic) ‘home away from home’. A quarter of a century se pa de jou,10 and the fact that this organization continues to lead in chronicling past achievements, charting new research and empowering local and global Haitian communities is a testament to the vitality of this original dedication. The HSA has helped expand academic canons and the very framework of Haitian Studies as a discipline, creating models of scholarship that merge theory and praxis. Together with the journal, it has forged the way for a new field of study present in university curricula worldwide and has offered different paths for meaningful interventions on the ground in Haiti. Increasingly able to move beyond the insularity of old narratives, the association has created a shift wherein the local subject is taken seriously as creator of knowledge. In the Fall of 2013, the twenty-fifth annual HSA conference took place in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A series of events were held in public spaces around the conference. During one such colloquium, Journées d’Etudes, scholars and researchers at both professorial and student level were able to discuss ethnology of and in Haiti – past, present and future. This was an especially moving experience for me personally, as it provided the opportunity to bridge my many years of early ‘Haitian Studies’ in Haiti at the Faculté d’Ethnologie and my later work on Haitian Studies in the United States within the context of HSA. In my view, the strength and power of Haitian Studies arises from and is nourished by the Haitian traditions of lakou and konbit, both of which are fundamentally communal, fundamentally Haitian.11 It has become clear to me that the Haitian Studies lakou has sustained our work. The widening presence of disciplines and of collaborations across fields of study is our konbit.

Haitian Studies and/as Black Studies: race, activism and the US academy As we continue to move forward in redefining our fields, Haitian Studies must prepare itself for considerations of ‘race talk’. Area studies cannot be substituted for disciplinary and methodological strategies offered in Ethnic 2015 meeting took place at the Université de Montréal, Canada, in conjunction with the Haitian Studies Association meeting. 10 Literally ‘it is not two days’, meaning, ‘it is not insignificant’. 11 Lakou (a relational physical space between land, family, community and spirituality) and kombit (collective agricultural work that may last several days) are powerful epistemological notions that shape the Haitian world view. New theoretical work on these notions is emerging. See, for example, Charlene Désir (2011) and Lily Cerat (2015).

202

The Haiti Exception

Studies and critical race theory. Discussions of ethnicity and race are far too often exclusively regarded as the domain of ‘Black Studies’ or other ‘Ethnic Studies’ disciplines, as if to suggest that African-Americans have emerged as the only ‘raced’ subjects of the past several centuries. It is certainly true that area studies have made several key contributions to scholarship – notably in identifying the exchanges, fissures and bonds between neighbouring nations of the Global South in relation to one another rather than simply in relation to the West. However, it is imperative that we not isolate Haiti and nations of the African continent as somehow devoid of ‘the race problem’.12 My time in one of the oldest Black Studies departments in the US, housed within a predominantly white research university and located in a rich enclave of the West coast, has impressed upon me that new research pertaining to Haiti must take a race/Ethnic Studies approach. As with African Studies, we must not elide discussions of race in research on Haiti, even as we acknowledge the remarkable variety of definitions of race, ethnicity, nationality and citizenship across (and within) nations of the Atlantic world. While Ethnic Studies and critical race theory have been wonderfully developed in the United States and in Europe, they remain largely understudied next to identity markers such as class, gender and sexuality in countries of the Global South. It was in my graduate programme at UCSB that I first had the opportunity to ground notions of educational access and classroom interventions in a global context, still highlighting blackness and black nations, and Haiti in particular, as my sites of study. I began questioning larger questions of equity and access – and the social and political roots of these inequities – not only in the United States but globally. These questions of positionality matter tremendously in continuing our studies of Haiti. In my case, despite a great deal of valuable learning in my graduate school experience, it was a challenge to translate the concerns of international educational disparities (and national inequities for that matter) to some of my colleagues (and certain professors) who remained limited in their understandings of inequality. In part because of this, when I finished my doctoral work, I made the conscious decision to pursue a position in a Black Studies department rather than a school of education. It is true that the latter would most likely have provided more resources and more opportunities,13 and likely would have garnered The irony here, of course, is that Africa has served as both the moving target for definitions of ‘blackness’ and a key site for discussions of postcolonialism (this is also true of Haiti itself, to a certain extent), yet continues to be left out of conversations about Ethnic Studies and methodologies of critical race theory. For an important intervention on this very theme, see Jemima Pierre (2012). 13 Upon finishing my doctorate, I received an invitation from Lawrence 12

Epilogue

203

more institutional respect. However, working in a Black Studies department allowed me to continue researching Haiti, and also provided an opportunity to better understand how Haiti fit into the larger black world and the global world, which was something I had not yet had the chance to explore fully. There I learned much about the black radical tradition and the struggle for social justice from my African-American colleagues.14 I first taught in the French Department at UCSB while a graduate student. How I ever managed to create some type of home for myself despite the ideological differences between France and Haiti speaks volumes about the power of language, for this otherwise challenging environment felt familiar, in that my colleagues spoke one of the national languages of my country. My genuine passion for students is the other factor that sustained me. After completing my doctorate, I was hired in 1986 as a lecturer in the Black Studies department. In 1989, the students at UCSB made several demands of the university, engaging in a twenty-one-day hunger strike that led to the establishment of an Ethnic Studies requirement, in place to this day as part of the general education requirement of the University of California, Santa Barbara.15 As a result of their list of demands, I was eventually hired in 1990 on a tenure-track line, effectively making me the first black female – and a Haitian immigrant, at that – to be included among the ladder faculty at this institution. Over the past twenty years, the UCSB Center for Black Studies Research (CBSR) has become a well-recognized hub for the study of Haiti, thanks to the collective efforts of Black Studies faculty members there and Haitianists at various institutions across the US and beyond. Given my position as Director of the CBSR for well over a decade, the insertion of Haitian Studies in the Kohlberg, a leading scholar in the fields of ethics and moral development, to continue my research in his lab at Harvard University for a year, but I chose to remain in Black Studies at UCSB. 14 I recognize here the influence of Charles H. Long, Gerald C. Horne, Shirley Kennedy and, in particular, Douglas H. Daniels in my development as a Black Studies scholar. 15 I also note here the courageous leadership of the UCSB Black Student Union Demands Team between 2012 and 2015, which once again pressured the administration to effect change on campus, forty-five years after insurgent students created the Black Studies Department and the Center for Black Studies in 1968. Among many other gains, these most recent efforts led to the creation of a new post-doc position at the CBSR that specifically included Haitian Studies alongside other academic disciplines encompassed under the larger umbrella of Black Studies. In 2014, Kansas State University advertised for the first tenuretrack position fully designated as Haitian Studies at an American University.

204

The Haiti Exception

CBSR’s primary agenda proved a natural choice. Though we often lacked resources, both human and financial, the Haiti projects seemed to have found a more or less permanent scholarly home at UCSB and have yielded collaborations with initiatives on the ground in Haiti. Moreover, in the past decade or so, the CBSR has also demonstrated an impressive commitment to situating Haiti within our nexus of Ethnic Studies. As these Haiti-related projects develop inside and outside of the campus community, and as students’ interests are piqued, Haitian Studies continues to grow: UCSB’s course catalogues now offer five to ten courses that include significant focus on Haiti and Haiti-affiliated communities. In collaboration with the Haitian Studies Association, the CBSR’s most recent contribution is the Onward commemorative book series. This project aims to publish books and monographs that consider the relationship between power and historiography to engage issues of representation and to propose new possibilities for sustainable personal, cultural, social and political regeneration. All in all, this new HSA/CBSR venue seeks to provide opportunities for growth and responsible engagement, serving as space to critique, educate, heal and restore self and community. Our first volume, Beyond Shock: Charting the Landscape of Sexual Violence in Post-quake Haiti by Anne-christine d’Adesky, was launched in 2013; two more volumes are forthcoming in 2016.

Academic otherspaces at the kalfou As I write this epilogue, Haitian scholar-activist-performer Gina Athena Ulysse’s Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle has just been released in a trilingual edition by Wesleyan University Press. The publication of this book in English, as well as in French and Kreyòl – the two official languages of Haiti – is a first in the United States. It is a non-conforming text in both content and form. Ulysse’s rallying cries to create new narratives for Haiti have been heard – heard by a major university press, heard by the group of scholars who put together The Haiti Exception (two of them anthropologists, the other two deeply interested in ethnology and the narratives of its historiography) and heard by scores of scholars, activists, people and citizens on the ground who have been critically reflecting on Haiti’s history and present reality, and who seek to change the course of public conversation about Haiti’s imagined futures. In effect, this anthology has aimed to propose new lenses through which to perceive Haiti’s realities more clearly, and to render them more complexly. It has recognized the importance of claiming a different type of space in the academy for serious forms of scholarly engagement that can only emerge from incorporating different world views and from committing to what sociologist Oyèrónké Oyêwùmí has called

Epilogue

205

‘worldsense’.16 We need alternate mediums and otherspaces – performances, poetry, music videos, popular books, songs, crafts, social media archives – to tell stories from multiple perspectives, in multiple voices, using platforms grounded in epistemologies and modes of being that are unique and uniquely suited to represent diverse realities. Academic research, interventions in social projects in Haiti and artistic contributions offer not only new critical frameworks of analysis but also spaces within which to heal, to restore the self, to educate and to create opportunities for growth and sustainability. These new modes of study position Haiti at the centre of cross-cultural and international dialogues. They allow us to imagine a future for Haiti that is more egalitarian and self-sufficient – to analyse complex interactions between religion, race, culture, dyaspora, transnationalism and citizenship against the backdrop of an aspired-to politics that proposes equal rights and equal participation for all. The editors of The Haitian Exception have crafted this anthology into a wonderfully intricate mosaic of voices. Emerging from the fields of anthropology, literature, psychoanalysis, sociology and religion, these interventions speak to each other across regions and themes, resulting in a complex web of Haitian realities and Haitian Studies experiences. It is fitting that research from both white and black perspectives, with Haitian, French and US-American cultural orientations provides entry into Haitian Studies today. New narratives such as the ones included in this volume serve as a call to think about Haiti from multiple perspectives in conversation with one another and with those who offer them, reverting the gaze and, more generally speaking, demanding that researchers and journalists engage Haiti more ethically and with respect for their subject. Should we view this need to revolve, even revolutionize the way Haiti’s stories are told as the type of anthropologie de combat et en contexte advocated by Haitian scholar Edelyn Dorismond? (Dorismond, 2014). Understanding that others will continue to write about Haiti, might we hope for the sort of engaged scholarship that participates in training responsible global citizens, honouring the ways in which the ‘studied’ bring knowledge both to and from their respective communities? Oyèrónké Oyêwùmí has provided an excellent distinction between European world view and African worldsense. She explains, ‘The term “worldview”, which is used in the West to sum up the cultural logic of a society, captures the West’s privileging of the visual. It is Eurocentric to use it to describe cultures that may privilege other senses [… over] a more inclusive way of describing the conception of the world by different cultural groups [… such as] the Yorùbá or other cultures that may privilege senses other than the visual or even a combination of senses’ (Oyêwùmí, 2005: 4). 16

206

The Haiti Exception

Kalfou Danje/re: Haitian Studies at the crossroads In their incredibly powerful Kalfou Danjere album of 1992, leading Haitian rasin mizik group Boukman Eksperyans produced a number of revolutionary songs, including ‘Tande M Tande’, which announces ‘se moun yo ki pral gouvènen’ [the time has come for the people to govern and be in charge]. This was a moment when Haitians were under attack once again at home and abroad; a time when Haitians were emigrating en masse to the United States due to heavy economic and political pressure – the so-called ‘boat people’ who arrived by the thousands on US shores; a time when one of the four principal causes of HIV was simply being Haitian; when HaitianAmerican Abner Louima was horrendously assaulted by police in New York City and crowds took to the streets to march in protest. At that juncture – that crossroads – Boukman Eksperyans declared that the revolution had to come from the people. Through marronnage: ‘Tande m Tande […] I am not sure but this is what I have heard […] possibly through the people, through the grapevine. I have heard that the revolution is coming. Jou nou revolte, the day we will revolt has arrived’. These musicians felt the urgency then. We feel that urgency now. In Vodou, the kalfou is the site where Legba, spirit of change and transformation, appears before humans. The kalfou presents another way of approaching research and interventions on the ground. It is simultaneously notions, methodologies, epistemologies, imaginaries and projects that intersect. It invokes interconnectedness and a multitude of choices; it inspires us to reflect on continuing paths as well as interruptions and changes in direction. I regard the kalfou as an ideal symbol for new methodological approaches to Haitian Studies. Based on a Haiti construct and a sound epistemological foundation of native (and dyasporic) origin, the kalfou takes into consideration Haiti’s position as a crossroads, historically and since the quake. As we move forward, we must do so using maps that reflect shifting geographies, empowered with energy from collaborative efforts, multifaceted initiatives and shared vision for uplift and rerooting in indigenous ways of being and in comprehending the universe. I invite us all to examine multiple avenues before committing to a particular (courageous) path. This is an invitation to envision the world in terms of both scholarship and commitment to an improved quality of life for our fellow human beings and global citizens. In this way, we may begin to reconcile the new understanding that Haiti as nation/notion serves as giver as well as recipient, and that as scholars we must pose and answer questions respectfully vis-à-vis the people we study and serve. As the authors insist throughout this volume, and as is

Epilogue

207

inherent in the volume’s provocative title, it is crucial that we tread carefully so as to not further enact ‘predicament’ of narrative that exceptionalize Haiti. I thus invite readers of this anthology to be informed actors, to consider standing with Haiti and Haitians at the crossroads – the kalfou – with the heightened sense of urgency that the word danje evokes.

Works Cited Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick. 1990. Haiti: The Breached Citadel. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick, and Claudine Michel. 2006. Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth and Reality. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. —. 2013. ‘Danbala/Ayida as Cosmic Prism: The Lwa as Trope for Understanding Metaphysics in Haitian Vodou and Beyond’. Journal of Africana Religions 1.4: 458–87. Cerat, Marie Lily. 2015. ‘The Haitian Language: Defying Odds and Opening Possibilities’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 233: 97–118. Clitandre, Nadège. 2011. ‘Haitian Exceptionalism in the Caribbean and the Project of Rebuilding Haiti’. The Journal of Haitian Studies 17.2: 150. Daniels, Kyrah Malika. 2015. ‘Let Us Call it a Crossroads or, the Fatiguing Trope of Syncretism’. Caribbean Studies Association: Panel titled Beyond the Bounds of Syncretism: The Politics of Mixing Metaphors in the Multireligious Caribbean, New Orleans. Désir, Charlene. 2011. ‘Diasporic Lakou: A Haitian Academic Explores Her Path to Haiti Pre- and Post-Earthquake’. Harvard Educational Review 81.2: 248–95. Dorismond, Edelyn. 2014. ‘L’ethnologie haïtienne: le vodou et la paysannerie. L’obsession d’une discipline en terre haïtienne’. In Jhon Picard Byron (ed.), Production du savoir et construction sociale. L’ethnologie en Haïti. Port-auPrince: Editions de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti. Lipsitz, George. 2014. ‘Introduction: A New Beginning’. Kalfou 1.1: 7–14. McCarthy Brown, Karen. 2010 [1991]. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, with a new foreword by Claudine Michel. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Mehta, Brinda. 2009. Notions of Identity, Diaspora, and Gender in Caribbean Women’s Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mudimbe, V. Y. 1998. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Nimako, Kwame. 2014. ‘Location and Social Thought in the Black: A Testimony to Africana Intellectual Tradition’. In Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker (eds), Postcoloniality Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press: 53–62.

208

The Haiti Exception

Oyêwùmí, Oyèrónké. 2005. ‘Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects’. In Oyèrónké Oyêwùmí, African Gender Studies: A Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 3–21. Pierre, Jemima. 2012. The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Polyné, Millery. 2013. The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis and Development. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2015. Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle, with foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Notes on Contributors Notes on Contributors

Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken is Assistant Professor of Caribbean and Postcolonial Literatures in the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of the M.A. and B.A./M.A. in the Study of the Americas at the City College of New York. With a PhD in French from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a DEA from the Sorbonne (Paris-IV), Benedicty-Kokken’s most recent publication is Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (Lexington Books, 2015). She is the second editor of Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine, a special issue of Yale French Studies. She is Series Editor for Brill’s Caribbean imprint and has also served as a project manager for multiple lecture series, the most recent being the Human Rights Forum at the City College of New York. Previously, she has worked as attachée for governmental and university affairs at the Québec Government House, and later as director of development for the French Embassy in the United States. Barbara Browning received her BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 1983, spent a year in Brazil on a Fulbright fellowship, where she studied dance, and then returned to Yale to complete her PhD in 1989. She has taught in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University for the last twenty years, serving for a time as Chair. Her first book, Samba: Resistance in Motion (Indiana University Press, 1995), received the de la Torre Bueno Prize for an outstanding 209

210

The Haiti Exception

publication in the field of dance scholarship. Her second academic book was Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (Routledge, 1998). Browning began writing fiction in 2004. Her 2011 novel The Correspondence Artist received a Lambda Literary Award. Her 2012 novel, I’m Trying to Reach You, is a multimedia project linked to a series of ‘chamber choreographies’, which she has published on YouTube. She is also a poet, a dancer and an amateur ukuleleist. Jhon Picard Byron is Professor at the State University of Haiti (UEH), Chair of LADIREP Research Unit and Director of the Department of Anthropology/ Sociology at the Faculté d’Ethnologie. Particularly interested by the history of Haitian Ethnology, he recently published an essay on the relation between Haitian ethnology and Duvalierist discourses in Bérard Cénatus and others, Haïti. De la Dictature à la démocratie? (Mémoire d’Encrier, 2016). He is Editor of the volume Production du savoir et construction sociale. L’ethnologie en Haïti (Presses de l’Université Laval and UEH, 2014). He has also published ‘Séquelles de l’esclavage, identité culturelle et construction de la citoyenneté en Haïti dans l’œuvre de Jean Price-Mars’, in Francine Saillant and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier Afrodescendance, cultures et citoyennetés (Québec, PUL, 2012) and ‘Jean Price-Mars, la formation de “l’école haïtienne d’ethnologie” et le vodou’, in Emile Eadie L’Esclavage de l’Africain en Amérique du 16e au 19e siècle (Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2012). Carlo A. Célius is a historian and art historian, as well as a researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and a member of the Institut des mondes africains (IMAF, Paris). He earned his degrees at the École du Louvre (Paris) and his doctorate at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, Paris). His research deals most prominently with Saint-Domingue/Haïti, encompassing a rather vast period from colonial Saint-Domingue to modern-day Haiti. He deals with three themes: art, the history of ethnology, and the experience and knowledge of the past. He is the author of Langage plastique et énonciation identitaire. L’invention de l’art haïtien (Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2007). He has also edited the books Le défi haïtien: Économie, dynamique sociopolitique et migration (L’Harmattan, 2011) and Situations créoles. Pratiques et représentations (Éditions Nota Bene, 2006), and special volumes of the journals Gradhiva: création plastique d’Haïti (21, 2015), Cahiers des anneaux de la mémoire: création plastique, traites et esclavages (12, 2009), Ethnologies: Haïti: face au passé/Haiti: Confronting the Past (28.1, 2006) and Haïti et l’anthropologie (1, 2005).

Notes on Contributors

211

Laurent Dubois is the Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History and the founder and Faculty Director of the Forum for Scholars & Publics at Duke University. From 2010 to 2013, he was the co-director of the Haiti Laboratory of the Franklin Humanities Institute. He is the author of five single-authored books, including Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2004), A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), which won four book prizes including the Frederick Douglass Prize, and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (Metropolitan, 2012). He also writes on the politics of soccer, with Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (University of California Press, 2010) and as the founding editor of the Soccer Politics Blog. His most recent book is The Banjo: America’s African Instrument (Harvard University Press, 2016). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Fellowship and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship to support his work on music, some of which is also showcased on the Banjology website. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, the New Republic and the Los Angeles Times. Kaiama L. Glover is Associate Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool University Press, 2010), and she has also published articles in The French Review, Research in African Literatures, The Journal of Haitian Literature, Small Axe, French Forum and The Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She has been on the editorial board of the Romanic Review since 2002 and on the board of Small Axe since 2012. Kaiama is co-editor of New Narratives of Haiti, a special issue of Transition magazine; co-editor of Translating the Caribbean, a volume of critical essays on translation in the Americas published as a two-part special section of Small Axe; first editor of Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine, a volume of critical essays published as a special issue of Yale French Studies; and co-editor of the forthcoming Duke University Press Haiti Reader. She has translated Frankétienne’s Mûr à crever (Ready to Burst, Archipelago Books, 2014) and her translations of Chauvet’s Danse sur le volcan (Dance on the Volcano) and René Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (Hadriana in All My Dreams) are forthcoming in fall 2016 and spring 2017, respectively. She has received awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and The National Endowment for the Humanities. She has been a host of PBS television series History Detectives: Special Investigations and is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

212

The Haiti Exception

Valerie Kaussen is Associate Professor of French and an affiliate of the Film Studies and Digital Storytelling programs at the University of MissouriColumbia. She holds a BA in English from the University of California, Los Angeles, a maîtrise in études cinématographiques from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III and a PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, US Imperialism, and Globalization (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) and has published articles in The Monthly Review, Research in African Literatures, Small Axe, Current Anthropology and Francosphères as well as in several collections and anthologies. Her current projects include a book-length study of humanitarianism, network society and the fetishization of communication in post-earthquake Haiti, and a co-authored book on Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and transnational cinema. Claudine Michel is Professor of Black Studies and Assistant Vice-Chancellor for Student Affairs at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the former Director of the Center for Black Studies Research. Since 1997 she has served as editor of the Journal of Haitian Studies and was President of the Haitian Studies Association in 2013, a year during which the Faculté d’Ethnologie, Université d’Etat d’Haïti recognized her work in Haitian studies with the prestigious Médaille Jean Price-Mars. She is a founding member of KOSANBA, a Scholarly Association for the Studies of Haitian Vodou and founding editor of Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative Ethnic and Relational Studies, both housed at the UCSB Center for Black Studies Research. She holds a BA in Education from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Université d’État d’Haiti and a degree in Early Childhood Education from the École Normale de Jardinières d’Enfants (ENJE). She also studied at the Faculté d’Ethnologie in Port-au-Prince and earned an MA and a PhD in International Education from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the 1980s she produced two children’s television series: Dodo Titit and Pawol Ti Moun for La Télévision Nationale d’Haiti. She is co-author of Théories du Développement de L’Enfant. Etudes Comparatives (De Boeck, 1994), author of Aspects Moraux et Educatifs du Vodou Haïtien (Haitiana, 1995) and has co-edited a number of volumes, including Black Studies: Current Issues, Enduring Questions (Kendall/Hunt, 2001), The Black Studies Reader (Routledge, 2004), Brassage: An Anthology of Poems by Haitian Women (Multicultural Women’s Presence and the Center for Black Studies Research, 2005), Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth and Reality (Indiana University Press, 2006), Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Remembrance/Re-Mémoire. After the Quake/Après le Séisme (2015) and God in Every Woman: Gender and Power in Haitian Vodou (forthcoming, 2016).

Notes on Contributors

213

Michèle Pierre-Louis was Prime Minister of Haiti from September 2008 to November 2009. Since November 2009, she has been President of the Fondasyon Konesans ak Libète (Knowledge and Freedom Foundation, FOKAL), a non-governmental organization financed by George Soros, where she coordinates special projects linked with reconstruction following the earthquake. She has an honorary doctorate in Human Sciences from Saint Michel College in Vermont and another from University of San Francisco. Since 1989, Michèle Pierre-Louis has been a member of the review Chemins Critiques in which she has written several articles, along with other Haitian and Caribbean writers, on politics, economics, arts and culture. She teaches the history of the Caribbean at Quisqueya University, Haiti. Mark Schuller is Associate Professor of Anthropology and NGO Leadership and Development at Northern Illinois University and an affiliate at the Faculté d’Ethnologie, l’Université d’État d’Haïti. Supported by the National Science Foundation Senior and CAREER Grant, Bellagio Center, and others, Schuller’s research on NGOs, globalization, disasters and gender in Haiti has been published across two dozen book chapters and peer-reviewed articles as well as public media, including a column in the Huffington Post. He is the author of two monographs, including Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti (Rutgers University Press, 2016) and co-editor of four volumes, including Tectonic Shifts: Haiti since the Earthquake (Kumarian Press, 2012). He co-directed/co-produced the documentary Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy (2009). Recipient of the Margaret Mead Award, Schuller is co-editor of Berghahn Books’ ‘Catastrophes’ in Context: A Series in Engaged Social Science on ‘Disasters’, board chair of the Lambi Fund of Haiti and is active in several solidarity efforts. Deborah A. Thomas is Professor of Anthropology and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2004) and Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2011), and co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2006). Her articles have appeared in a diverse range of journals including Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Radical History Review, Small Axe, Identities and Feminist Review. Thomas edited the journal Transforming Anthropology from 2007 to 2010, and currently sits on the editorial boards of Social and Economic Studies and American Anthropologist, for which she also co-edits the Visual Anthropology Section. Thomas was also co-director and co-producer of the

214

The Haiti Exception

documentary film Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens, which chronicles violence in Jamaica through the eyes of its most iconic community; she is currently working on a multimedia installation project addressing the state of emergency in West Kingston in 2010. A member of the Executive Council for the Caribbean Studies Association from 2008 to 2011, Thomas currently sits on the board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) and is the incoming editor of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. Prior to her life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women dance company.

Index Index

Abélès, Marc 39 accountability feminist 98–99 first-person accounts 98–99, 112 Haitian intellectualism as an ethics of accountability 63–70 Judith Butler on accountability 68–69 kalfou as an ethics of accountability 194–96 racial 63–70, 98–99 scholarly in studying ‘Haiti’ 8, 18, 29, 43, 77, 165, 194–96 state accountability 148–52, 160–65, 186 acculturation 23, 58, 142 Adesky, Anne-christine, d’ 204 Adrien, Nana 86–88 Africanisms 31, 51, 63, 71, 142–47 Agamben, Giorgio 5 Alexis, Jacques-Stephan 46 Alfonso Arinos Law (Brazil) 62

Alourdes, Champagne (Mama Lola) 7, 88, 90, 194, 200, 207 American Academy of Religion 200 American Anthropological Association 23–24, 214 Herskovits’s Statement on Human Rights 59–60 Amerindian 43 Amnesty International 24 Anba syèl la [Under the Skies] 168–75 Anglade, Georges 82 Ann Kite Yo Pale [Let Them Speak] 161–62 anthropology critical 8, 34, 40–41 cultural see culture dance see dance ethnology (see Ethnology) 22, 33–51, 97, 100, 125, 179, 198, 201, 204 foreign/Western 16–19, 22, 42, 52–110

215

216

The Haiti Exception

Haitian 3, 5, 15, 17, 30, 32, 33–51, 76 imagination 18–19, 21, 72, 85, 138–47, 149, 154 linguistic 17–18 physical 18, 47 postmodern 34–35 public 24, 30, 54–63 sociocultural 17 anti-colonialism 53, 151 Anti-colonial Exhibition (1931) 95 anthrohistory 74–92 Appadurai, Arjun 35 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 53, 65 archive 41, 85, 94, 128, 147, 149, 195, 205 Area Studies 21, 26, 201–02 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 75, 121, 171 art 5, 93–136 artisan 130 Aschenbrenner, Joyce 99 Assessing Progress in Haiti Act (2014) 18 atavism 127 Atlantic Slave Trade 52, 70 authenticity 105, 127–29 Bad Friday 148, 214 Baker, Josephine 93, 94 Baker, Lee D. 17, 20, 58–61, 93–95 Baker, Lorezo Dow 142 Baillergeau (Haiti) 185–86 Barthélémy, Gérald 23, 132 Bastide, Roger 62 Baussan Loubeau, Jacqueline 198 Baussan, Stines Michaëlle 198 Beaubrun, Mimerose 88–89 Beauvoir, Ati Max G. 193, 199, 200 Behar, Ruth 7, 26, 85 Bel-Air, Haiti 36, 171–72 Bell, Beverly 7 Bell, Deanne 148

Bellegarde, Dantès 46 Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick 69, 195, 199–200 Benedicty-Kokken, Alessandra 4, 8, 21, 33 Benin 21, 102 Benjamin, Walter 75 Black Jacobins 150 blackness 20, 52–53, 58, 62–70, 105, 202 Black Studies 58, 61, 194, 196 Blake, William 74 blan, foreigners 19, 170, 173 Boas, “Papa” Franz 17–20, 41, 57–59 Bogomolov, Alexandre 60 Bois Witty (Haiti) 183 Bonilla, Yarimar 6, 78, 138, 151 Bolívar, Simón 17 Bolivia 160 Bonaparte, Napoleon 115, 183 Borges, Jorge Luis 74 Borno, Louis 103 Boston Fruit Company 142 Boukman, Dutty 74–75 Boukman Eksperyans 196, 206 bovarysme 144 Brodkin, Karen 65–70 Brouard, Carl 48 Brathwaite, Kamau 142 Brazil 53–63, 115 Breton, André 9, 63, 95, 114–18 Brown, Karen McCarthy 7, 22, 85, 88, 193, 199–200 Brown, Vincent 52–54, 62, 64, 67, 70 Brown, Wendy 161, 163 Browning, Barbara 9, 22, 85 Bureau National d’Ethnologie 22, 45, 47, 57 Butler, Judith 68 Byron, Jhon Picard 4, 8, 16, 22, 179, 198–99

Index Cadozo, Jacqueline Turian 197 Cadre de Coopération Intérimaire (CCI) 28 Calargé, Carla 5, 29 Calvino, Italo 74 Cambridge, Massachussetts 94 Camp Carradeux (Haiti) 168 Camp Kanaran (Haiti) 158–59, 173 Camp evictions 157, 162, 174 Candomblé 57, 62 Cange (Haiti) 24 Cantave, Alix 200 Cap Haïtien (Haiti) 178, 181 capitalism 18, 26, 35, 139, 147 Cardan, Paul 36 Caribbean Studies 4, 23, 214 Carnegie Corporation of New York 58, 140 Carpentier, Alejo 75 Carrefour-Feuilles (Haiti) 183 Carter, J. Cameron 58, 61 Casimir, Jean 82, 179 Cassin, René 60 Castoriadis, Cornelius 36 Célius, Carlo A. Haitian art, practice and criticism 9, 10, 16, 17, 122, 124–25, 129 neo-colonial social model 17, 42, 44 Cénatus, Bérard 36, 210 Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) 210 Césaire, Aimé 37, 41, 115, 177 Césaire, Suzanne 115 Chang, Peng-chun 60 Chaulieu, Pierre 36 Chávez, Hugo 17 Chimen Lakay [The Way Back Home] 160, 166–67, 173 Chor Maio, Marcos 56, 61–62 Christophe, Henri 74 Cimarròn 76 Citadelle Laferrière 184

217

citizenship 57, 64, 138, 146, 166–68, 202–05, 213 civilization, civilizing mission 42, 125–26, 167, 185, 152 Civil Rights Movement (USA) 55–63, 152 civil society 145–60 Clark, VèVè 108, 117, 200 class middle-class Haitians 144, 146, 188 popular classes 42–43, 103, 125, 199 race and class 101, 103, 144, 15, 172, 181, 199 social category 2, 3, 101, 139, 202 social inequality of 22 working class movements in Haiti 35–36, 172 Clifford, James 5, 7, 15, 26, 41, 123, 164–65 climate change 18, 27, 150, 184 Clinic Leclerc 106 Clinton, Bill 10, 23 Clinton Bush Haiti Fund 10 Clitandre, Nadège 6, 194 Coke, Christopher ‘Dudus’ 148–49 Colbert Report, The 23 Cold War 26, 56 Cole, Johnnetta B. 52–53, 70 Colonial Development Act, 1929 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, 1931 Columbus, Christopher 18 combite system 143 Commission Interministérielle d’Aménagement du Territoire, CIAT (Inter-Ministerial Commission for Land-Use Planning) 186 Commission on Human Rights (UN) 59 Commission on Zoning and Land Use (Haiti) 185–86

218

The Haiti Exception

Concerted Development Zone (Haiti) 186 Copans, Jean 33, 39 Corail-Cesselese (Haiti) 158 Coral Gardens (Jamaica) 148–49, 214 Coronil, Fernando 9, 74–76, 88 Corvington, Georges 180–82 Courlander, Harold 22, 98 creolism 16 Crepsac, Fernand 183 Crichlow, Michaeline 146 crossroads 193–208 Cruikshank, Barbara 163 culture critique of culture concept 1, 9, 16, 19–26, 36–49, 83–85, 94, 96–97, 99, 105, 112–16, 125–33, 137–47, 158–59, 163, 166–67, 179, 181, 186, 193, 197, 199, 204–05 cultural politics 138, 143, 147 cultural relativism (and human rights) 59–62 Cultural Studies 164 Cultural Studies 23, 38, 44–45, 48, 199 Haitian Culturalist Tradition 36–37 Dahomey 21, 142 Dalleo, Raphael 5 Dalles (Haiti) 183 Damballah 101 Danticat, Edwidge 7 dance 9, 22, 86, 94–119, 183–84 Daniels, Douglas H. 203 Daniels, Kyrah M. 194 Dash, J. Michael 6, 37, 54 Dayan, Colin (Joan) 1, 7, 22, 68, 85, 88, 107 deconstruction as critical methodology 44, 125–26 Deloria, Jr., Vine 26

Depestre, René 3–5, 36–37, 95, 137, 211 Deren, Maya 7, 9, 22, 25, 111, 117–18 Désir, Charlene 202 Desmangles, Leslie G. 7 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 178 Destouche, Dantès 183–84 development 15–32, 137–92 disease 23, 59, 77, 100–16, 122 diaspora 54–57, 63–64, 70, 116, 139, 179, 188, 194 dyaspora 193–94, 196, 197, 200, 205 Dominique, Jean Leopold 194 Dominique, Max 37 Don Bosco Club 36 Donnelly, Jack 60 Dorismond, Edelyn 205, 207 Dorsainvil, Justin 48 Doyle, Leonard 159 dreams 76, 84, 88, 106, 110–19, 178, 188, 211 drugs 113, 110–19, 147–48, 152 Du Bois, W.E.B. 53–55, 60, 139 Dubois, Laurent 4, 8, 9, 23, 64–65 Duchamp, Marcel 118 Dukes, Charles 61 Dumont, Louis 36 Dunham, Katherine 7, 9, 22, 25, 27, 57, 62, 93–109, 11, 115–19, 183–86 Duno-Gottberg, Luis 5 Durban I 61 Durkin, Hannah 97, 99, 100, 105 Duvalier, François “Papa Doc” 22, 34, 35–37, 45–48, 63, 77, 81–82, 131, 144–45, 157, 179 Duvalier, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” 106, 121, 184, 187, 210 early childhood education 56, 212 earthquake of 2010 5, 10–11, 15, 17–19, 25–29, 156–74 Ecole de Jardinière Enfants (ENJE) 197, 212

Index Ecole Normale Supérieure (Haïti) 33, 35, 198, 212 education 4, 33, 45–46, 66, 87, 141, 187–88, 193, 197, 203, 212 Eleventh Department (see onzième department) 200 e-misphérica 25 empire 2, 21–22, 141, 211 Endore, Guy 70 Ethnic Studies 195–96, 202–04 epistemology 3, 36, 40, 44, 47, 63, 138, 164, 201, 205–06 essentialism 19, 44, 126, 140, 145, 179 Estimé, Dumarsais 97, 102–04 ethnology 22, 33–51, 97, 100, 125, 179, 198, 201, 204 ethnography 2, 5, 8–9, 16–17, 22, 33, 38, 41, 48, 54, 67, 96, 105, 112, 117, 130, 164, 198 ethnogenesis 23 Eurocentrism 77, 205 exceptionality 1–12, 15, 19, 28, 54, 77–78, 89, 95, 107–08, 138–39, 148, 152, 157–59, 162–63, 166, 196, 207, 213 exile 62, 76, 93 exotophilia 6–7, 10, 16, 19, 20, 22, 25, 28, 39, 95, 130 Fabian, Johannes 35, 40, 124 Fabre, Genevieve and Michel 94 Faculty/Institute of Ethnology (Faculté/Institut d’Ethnologie) 34, 38, 48, 179, 195, 199, 203 Fanon, Frantz 37, 66, 156, 187, 188 Farmer, Paul 16, 23–24 Favret-Saada, Jeanne 39 Fédération Nationale des Etudiants Haïtiens (FENEH) 35 feminism 16, 25 Ferguson, James 28 Fignolé, Daniel 171 Fignolé, Jean-Claude 68

219

film 52, 94, 111, 117–18, 148, 157, 168, 173, 212 Firmin, Anténor 17, 35, 40–41, 44, 46 Fischer, Sibylle 5, 64 Fleuhr-Lobban, Carolyn 17 Fleurant, Gerdès 200 FOKAL (Foundation for Knowledge and Freedom/Fondasyon Konesans ak Libète) 33, 106, 185, 213 folk, folklore 19, 21, 40, 46, 70 Fond-des-Nègres (Haiti) 79–80, 87 food 18, 77, 97, 140, 159, 170 Ford Foundation 58 Forsdick, Charles 5, 138 Foucault, Michel 26, 67, 161 France 36, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 54, 55, 57, 60, 62, 94, 114, 122–24, 137, 180, 203, 211 Frazier, E. Franklin 58–59 Freyre, Gilberto 63 Fujino, Diane 194 Galtung, Johan 24 Gates, Henry Louis 94 gender 3, 9, 26, 76, 82–86, 96, 98, 101, 148, 167, 202, 212, 213 genealogies, intellectual 8–9, 48–49, 59, 86, 119, 126, 164, 195 Geneva Museum of Ethnography 130 Gershenhorn, Jerry 55, 58–59 Glissant, Edouard 96 global analysis 23 Global Transformations 16, 25, 39, 137, 197 Glover, Kaiama L. 4, 9, 22, 42, 52, 120, 211 Gobineau, Arthur de 17 Goodale, Mark 60 Goody, Jack 36 Goulet, Jean 188–89 Gradhiva 5, 210 Grenada Revolution 140, 150 Grinker, Roy Richard 55

220

The Haiti Exception

Groupe de Recherche et d’Echanges Technologiques (GRET) 186 Guadeloupe 85, 151 Guggenheim Fellowship 57, 211 Guimarães, Antonio Sérgio Alfredo 57–58 Guinée/Ginen 88, 99 Guyana (Guiana) 63 gwo bon anj 68 habeas viscus 68 Habitation Leclerc 106, 115, 183–84 Haitian Constitutions (1801, 1805, 1987) 42, 64, 82, 157, 178–79 Haitian intellectualism 4, 21, 34, 37, 40–41, 43, 45, 49, 54, 63–70 Haitian people, Haitian folk see folk, folklore Haitian Studies Association 4, 24, 106, 196, 200, 201, 204, 212 Hall, Stuart 23 Harrison, Faye V. 26, 61 Harrison, Ira E. 30 Harvard University 24, 94, 200, 203 Headley, Clevis 5 healing 88, 150, 204–05 health 24, 106, 141, 169, 199 Hebblethwaite, Benjamin 25 Hegel, Friedrich 10, 74, 187 Heidegger, Martin 74 Heinl, Robert 77 Herskovits, Frances 57 Herskovits, Melville 8, 20–21, 23, 26, 52–73, 98–100, 137, 142–43 Herskovits at the Heart of Darkness (documentary) 52–53, 67 heritage versus uplift debate 58–59 historical truth 74–75 Hodgson, William 61 Hoggart, Richard 45 Hölderin, Friedrich 190 Holocaust 56, 66, 69–70 Holly, Arthur 48, 182

home as concept 18, 37, 55, 57, 62, 76, 79, 87, 94–96, 105–07, 160, 169, 181, 183, 184, 188, 189, 194–95, 197–206 Honneth, Axel 189 Horne, Gerald C. 203 housing coalition 173–74 Hudicourt-Barnes, Josiane 200 Huffington Post 18, 213 human rights 7–8, 52–73, 165 humanitarianism 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 19, 25, 28, 54, 56, 89, 138, 156–76 aid 2, 3, 5, 10, 28, 138 intervention 19, 25, 56 media and culture as used by humanitarian organizations 156–76, 189 scholarship, studies 8, 25, 54, 212–13 Humphrey, John P. 61 Hurbon, Laënnec 34 Hurston, Zora Neale 7, 20, 27, 108, 142 Hyppolite, Hector 128 imperialism 15, 20, 30, 31, 212 Indigenism 37, 48, 51 Indonesia 160, 164 inequality 3, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 59, 193, 202 infection 30, 114, 116 internally displaced persons 158 International Criminal Court 70, 153 International Organization for Migration (IOM) 159 intersectionality 26 Inuits 39 Ito, Teiji and Cheryl 117, 118 Jacobson, Matthew Frye 65 Jamaica 10, 23, 25 and Sidney Mintz 78, 83, 88 town of Kingston 147–48

Index Jamaican Civil Society Coalition 148 James, Erica Caple 160–61 Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne (ou Catholique) 36 Jewish, Jewishness 8, 52–73 Jewsiewicki, Bogumil 38 Jim Crow 19 Johannesburg 123, 140 Journal of Haitian Studies 200 kalfou 194–96, 204, 206–07 Kansas State University 203 Kennedy Administration (USA) 62 Kennedy, Shirley 203 Kidder, Tracy 23 Kim, Jim Yong 24 Kincaid, Jamaica 52, 70 King Christophe (see Henri Christophe) 74, 177, 190 kò kadav 68 Kochon Gra 21, 28 Kohlberg, Lawrence 202–03 Komite Inisyativ Lit Etidyan (KILE) 35 KOSANBA, A Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou 200 Kreyòl 25, 156, 157, 160, 166, 194, 204 Laferrière, Dany 54 lakou 81, 201 Legba 74, 206 Léogâne 180, 183 Li, Tanya 160–61, 164 Leclerc, Charles Victoire Emmanuel 183 Lehmann, Marianne (see also Marianne Lehman Collection) 130–32 Lemon, Ralph 9, 11–116 Lorde, Audre 28 lwa 22, 88, 101, 118, 128, 129 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1, 7, 9, 21, 74, 99, 114 Lipsitz, George 194, 195

221

Long, Charles H. 203 Louverture, Toussaint 42, 105 Luso-tropicalism 63 Lycée Pétion 36, 45 Mabille, Pierre 63 Macmillan, William M. 140 Magloire, Gérarde 16 Magloire, Paul Eugène 46 Malik, Charles 60 Malraux, André 127 Mama Lola see also Alourdes, Champagne 7, 88, 90, 194, 200, 207 Mangonès, Albert 184–86 Marcelin, Philippe-Thoby 128, 129, 131 Marcus, George 5, 24, 35 Marshall Plan 24 Martissant 11, 106, 180, 182–86 Marxism 36, 37, 47, 48 masks (Bambara and Baule) 102 Maternowska, M. Katherine 18 Mauss, Marcel 41 Mazrui, Ali 66, 67 Mbembe, Achille 41 McGee, Adam 20 Mead, Margaret 21, 22, 24 Meridians 25 Métraux, Alfred 8, 21, 52–70, 99, 143 Métraux, Rhoda 57 Mexico 58, 63, 75 Michel, Claudine 11, 69 Middle Passage 112 Migration 162, 168 Mills, C. Wright 18 Ministry of Culture (Haiti) 38 Mintz, Sidney 9, 10, 22, 23, 74–84 MINUSTAH 157, 168, 172 Mirebalais, Haiti 57, 200 modèle social haïtien (Haitian social model) 42, 44 Montego Bay 148

222

The Haiti Exception

Montilus, Guérin 34 Moyn, Samuel 53, 61 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 20 mulatto-black dichotomy 104 Munford, Lewis 185 Munro, Martin 5 Musée du Quay Branly 123, 124, 130 Nader, Laura 24 Nana (see Adrien, Nana) 86–88 naïve art 124–25, 127, 130–31 nanchon 194 Nation, The 24 National Science Foundation (NSF) 27 Negritude, négritude 37, 41, 44, 102, 157 neoliberal, neoliberalism 10, 26, 147, 150, 151, 160–74 new art scene 121–22, 130 New York Times 19, 106, 159, 168 NGOs 10, 27, 60, 157–61, 186 Nicholls, David 43, 46 Nimako, Kwame 52, 66, 67, 193 normative judgment 60 Northwestern University 57, 58 Noula.ht 160 noirisme 37, 47, 48, 144 oligopsony 87, 88 Olivier, Sydney (Lord) 140 Optique 46 onzième département 200 opacity 105, 107 oraliture 131 Orientalism 25, 41 Ortiz, Fernando 58 Osumare, Halifu 96, 101 Oyêwùmí, Oyèrònké 204–05 Palisse, Marianne 34 parasites 100, 114

Park, Robert E. 58 Pattee, Richard 58 patrimony, Maîtrise d’Histoire, mémoire et patrimoine (UEH) 38 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, 2005 160 participant-observer 97 Partners in Health 24 Past, Mariana 25 Péan, Marc 178 peasantry 43, 54, 79, 81, 88, 139, 145, 179 Pérault, Charlemagne 157 Performance Studies 7 Pétionville (Haiti) 103, 184 Phelps-Stokes Fund 140 Pierre-Louis, Joseph Nemours 45 Pierre-Louis, Michèle Duvivier 10–11, 106 Piquion, René 37, 41 political economy 15, 18, 23, 169 Polyné, Millery 5, 19 Portail St. Joseph (Haiti) 36 Port-au-Prince (Haiti) 10, 23 positivism 21 postcolonialism 25, 181, 187, 202 postcolonial state formation 145, 160 Postcolonial Studies 48, 127 postcolonial theory 37, 42 Postero, Nancy 160–61 post-emancipation 83, 85, 140, 146 poto mitan 9 Poto Mitan (documentary) 18 postmodern 9, 16, 34, 35, 40, 96 Pratt, John 98 Pressley-Sanon, Toni 52 Price-Mars, Jean 8, 10, 33, 36–37, 41–49 primitivism 120, 123–26, 129, 130 Prou, Marc 200 Public Anthropology 54–63 Puerto Rico 23, 40, 78, 139, 152

Index Quay Branly Museum (see Musée du Quay Branly) 123, 124, 130 Rabinow, Paul 7, 35 Racines (cultural movement) 48 race 2, 3, 8, 9, 17, 42, 48, 53–54, 63–67 Dunham, Katherine 100, 101, 105 Firmin, Anténor 42 Herskovits, Melville J. and Métraux, Alfred 70 ‘Race Question’, UNESCO 61–62 relations in the Caribbean 141 relations in the US, civil rights 55–56 theory 25, 195, 201–02, 205 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 165 Vodou 68–69 radyo bouch 166, 174 Ramos, Arthur 57–58 Ramsey, Kate 19, 54, 57, 99, 105, 143 Rancière, Jacques 36 Rastafari 142, 146, 148, 149, 151 Reconstruction 19 Red Cross 165–66 reflexivity 6–7, 26, 67, 95, 96 Relation (Glissantian) 96 relational ethnic studies 195 Rémy, Anselme 22 Renault, Emmanuel 189 resilience 152 révâdez 79–80 Revista de Ciencias Sociales 79 Richman, Karen 88 Rigaud, Milo 21 Rockefeller Foundation 57 Romain, Jean Baptiste 47 Roosevelt, Eleanor 60 Roumain, Jacques 47, 48, 54, 57, 143 Rose, Nikolas 163 Said, Edward 20, 37

223

Saint-Domingue 64, 74, 75, 88, 167, 180, 183 Sanders, Richard 172 Santa Cruz, Hernan 61 Savage slot 16, 19, 25, 67, 165 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 24 Schoelcher, Victor 181 Schuller, Mark 4, 8, 18, 52, 89 Schulmann, Fernande 53 Senegal 94, 95, 102 Senghor, Léopold-Sédar 37, 41, 102 Sicre, Gómez 12, 128, 131 Simpson, George Eaton 142, 143 slavery 20–23, 66, 70, 83–84, 127, 139, 145, 178–79, 183, 187 Slocum, Karla 26 Smith, Matthew 144 Smithsonian Institution 56 Société d’ethnographie de Paris 40 Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie 39 Solino neighbourhood of Port-auPrince (Haiti) 156 Song, Hoon 67 sovereignty 137–38, 146, 147, 150–52 Stanford University 17 Statement, AAA’s Human Rights 59–61 Statements, UNESCO on ‘Race Question’ 61 Steward, Julian H. 56 Stocking, George 17 structural violence 10, 16, 24, 119, 138, 148 Structuralism 21, 74 Suriname 63, 143 Surrealism 95, 115, 116, 118 sustainability 205 Sylvain, Bénito 40 Tande M Tande 206 Thomas, Deborah 10, 26

224

The Haiti Exception

Thompson, E.P. 36 Timachann 19 Time to Listen: Hearing People on the Receiving End of International Aid 174 ti bon anj 68 Ti Noel 74 Tivoli Gardens 148–50 tonton makout 22 Trinidad 140, 142 Trouillot, Duverneau 41 Trouillot, Hénock 46 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 55, 67, 76, 78, 145, 165, 197 critique of anthropology 3–4, 10, 16, 20, 25, 28, 48, 53, 55, 67–68, 76, 165, 193 Global South studying Global North 25, 40, 67, 165 Global Transformations 16, 145 Haitian academic perspective on Trouillot, 34, 39 historian 5, 9, 15, 77–78 literary scholar 5 Mintz as antecedent, 23, 77–78, 89 on reflexivity 26 Ti Dife Boule sou Istoua Ayiti [Burning Questions on Haiti’s History] 25 Silencing the Past 15, 77–78, 141 State against Nation, 137, 145, 150–51 Savage slot 3, 16, 20 Ulysse, Gina Athena 25 Ulysse, Gina Athena 4, 5, 15, 18, 25–26, 63–64, 84, 110, 138, 204 UNESCO 60–62, 69 Kochon Gra 21, 56 UNESCO, Race Division, Race Question (4 ‘Statements’) 60–61

United Nations 21, 23, 55, 60, 62, 70, 168 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 54, 55, 60, 61 Université d’Etat d’Haïti (UEH) 35, 38, 45–46, 49 Université de Montréal (Canada) 201 Université Lava (Canada) 38 University of California at Berkeley 24 University of California at Santa Barbara 17, 194, 195, 200, 203 University of Chicago 34, 100 University of Michigan 75, 85 Unknown Maroon 184 uplift versus heritage debate 58–61 Urban, Urban Studies 146–47, 177–90 U.S. Department of Defense 21 U.S. Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934 19, 20, 28, 29, 44, 46, 48, 62, 87, 115, 142–45, 157, 179, 182 Verger, Pierre 63, 69 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 36 vèvè 129 Vichy government 62, 114–15 Vietnam 22 Villette, la 123 Vincent, Sténio 183 Voices of the Voiceless 159–62 Vodou 7, 19, 22, 23, 46, 64, 67–70, 87–88, 97–100, 103, 116–18, 127, 128–29, 131–32 see also accountability; Alourdes, Champagne; Damballah; dance; kalfou; gwo bon anj; Haitian intellectualism; kò kadav; lakou; lwa; McArthy Brown, Karen; ti bon anj Weheliye, Alexander 55, 68, 69 Weitz, Eric D. 64

Index West Africa 84, 114 West Indies 115, 138, 140–41, 144, 151 White, Leslie 55 white nihilism 67 whiteness 65, 67 Wilentz, Amy 7 Willoughby-Herard, Tiffany 26 witchcraft in Normandy 39 Wolf, Eric 22–23 Woods, Clyde 194

225

World Bank 24, 160, 164 World Conference against Racism 61 World Social Forum 18 Writing Culture 5, 15, 24, 26, 34, 35, 41, 85 Wynter, Sylvia 142 Yelvington, Kevin A. 16–18, 28, 142 zonbi 20, 121, 122, 129 Zouzou (film) 94