The Haiti Exception

The Haiti Exception

Author: Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2016-06-01

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1781384525

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A collection of essays from international critics that considers the ways and extent of Haiti’s exceptionalisation – its perception 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.


The Haiti Exception

The Haiti Exception

Author: Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1781382999

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This collection of essays considers the ways and extent of Haiti's 'exceptionalisation' - its perception 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 at once as repulsive and attractive, abject and resilient, singular and exemplary, Haiti has long been framed discursively by an extraordinary epistemological ambivalence. The nation has served at once as cautionary tale, model for humanitarian aid and development projects, and point of origin for general theorizing of the so-called Third World. What to make of this dialectic of exemplarity and alterity? How to pull apart this multivalent narrative so as to examine its constituent parts? The contributors to The Haiti Exception take up these and other such questions from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives, among which Africana Studies, anthrohistory, art history, Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, education, ethnology, Jewish Studies, literary studies, performance studies, and urban studies. As they revise and interrogate their respective praxes, they accept the challenge of thinking about the particular stakes of and motivations for their own commitment to Haiti. Engaging in the decidedly risky anthropological practice of reflexivity, the scholars, activists and other social actors gathered here consider their own often fraught role in constructing Haiti in and as narrative.


Haiti for the Haitians

Haiti for the Haitians

Author: Brandon R. Byrd

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2023-08-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1837644608

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. The world-historical significance of the Haitian Revolution is now firmly established in mainstream history. Yet Haiti’s nineteenth-century has yet to receive its due, this despite independent Haiti’s vital importance as the first nation to permanently ban slavery and its ongoing struggle for sovereignty in the Atlantic World. Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855–1911) is one of the foremost Haitian intellectuals and diplomats of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His prolific oeuvre offered enduring challenges to racist slanders of Haiti and critiques of the global inequalities that arose from European colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Through his writings, Janvier influenced the international debates about slavery, race, nation, and empire that shaped his era and, in many ways, remain unresolved today. Arguably his most powerful work, Haiti for the Haitians (1884) provides a searing critique of European and U.S. imperialism, predatory finance capitalism, and Haiti’s domestic politics. It offers his vision of Haiti’s future expressed through a remarkable phrase: Haiti for the Haitians. Haiti for the Haitians is the first major English translation of Janvier. Accompanied by an introduction, annotations, and an interdisciplinary collection of critical essays, this volume offers unprecedented access to this vital Haitian thinker and an important contribution to the scholarship on Haiti’s nineteenth century.


Transnational Hispaniola

Transnational Hispaniola

Author: April J. Mayes

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1683403169

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In addition to sharing the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, Haiti and the Dominican Republic share a complicated and at times painful history. Yet Transnational Hispaniola shows that there is much more to the two nations’ relationship than their perceived antagonism. Rejecting dominant narratives that reinforce opposition between the two sides of the island, contributors to this volume highlight the connections and commonalities that extend across the border, mapping new directions in Haitianist and Dominicanist scholarship. Exploring a variety of topics including European colonialism, migration, citizenship, sex tourism, music, literature, political economy, and art, contributors demonstrate that alternate views of Haitian and Dominican history and identity have existed long before the present day. From a moving section on passport petitions that reveals the familial, friendship, and communal networks across Hispaniola in the nineteenth century to a discussion of the shared music traditions that unite the island today, this volume speaks of an island and people bound together in a myriad of ways. Complete with reflections and advice on teaching a transnational approach to Haitian and Dominican studies, this agenda-setting volume argues that the island of Hispaniola and its inhabitants should be studied in a way that contextualizes differences, historicizes borders, and recognizes cross-island links. Contributors: Paul Austerlitz | Nathalie Bragadir | Raj Chetty | Anne Eller | Kaiama L. Glover | Maja Horn | Regine Jean-Charles | Kiran C. Jayaram | Elizabeth Manley | April Mayes | Elizabeth Russ | Fidel J. Tavárez | Elena Valdez Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.


Mobilities and Forced Migration

Mobilities and Forced Migration

Author: Nick Gill

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1351558137

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Whether precipitated by political or environmental factors, human displacement can be more fully understood by attending to the ways in which a set of bodily, material, imagined and virtual mobilities and immobilities interact to produce population movement. Very little work, however, has addressed the fertile middle ground between mobilities and forced migration. This book sets out the ways in which theories of mobilities can enrich forced migration studies as well as some of the insights into mobilities that forced migration research offers.The book covers the challenges faced by both forced migrants and receiving authorities. It applies these challenges to regions such as the Middle East, South Asia and East Africa. In particular, the chapter on Iraq to Jordan foced migration tests the sincerity of the concept of Pan-Arabism; the chapters on Bangladesh and Ethiopia deal with the more historically familiar variables of warfare and famine as drivers of forced migration.This book will be of value to practitioners in the area of human rights and to scholars of racial and ethnic politics, human geography and globalization.This book was published as a special issue of Mobilities.


Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti

Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti

Author: Mark Schuller

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2016-01-12

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0813574250

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Winner of the 2016 Anthropology in Media Award from the American Anthropological Association The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was one of the deadliest disasters in modern history, sparking an international aid response—with pledges and donations of $16 billion—that was exceedingly generous. But now, five years later, that generous aid has clearly failed. In Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, anthropologist Mark Schuller captures the voices of those involved in the earthquake aid response, and they paint a sharp, unflattering view of the humanitarian enterprise. Schuller led an independent study of eight displaced-persons camps in Haiti, compiling more than 150 interviews ranging from Haitian front-line workers and camp directors to foreign humanitarians and many displaced Haitian people. The result is an insightful account of why the multi-billion-dollar aid response not only did little to help but also did much harm, triggering a range of unintended consequences, rupturing Haitian social and cultural institutions, and actually increasing violence, especially against women. The book shows how Haitian people were removed from any real decision-making, replaced by a top-down, NGO-dominated system of humanitarian aid, led by an army of often young, inexperienced foreign workers. Ignorant of Haitian culture, these aid workers unwittingly enacted policies that triggered a range of negative results. Haitian interviewees also note that the NGOs “planted the flag,” and often tended to “just do something,” always with an eye to the “photo op” (in no small part due to the competition over funding). Worse yet, they blindly supported the eviction of displaced people from the camps, forcing earthquake victims to relocate in vast shantytowns that were hotbeds of violence. Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti concludes with suggestions to help improve humanitarian aid in the future, perhaps most notably, that aid workers listen to—and respect the culture of—the victims of catastrophe.


A Critical Anthropology of Childhood in Haiti

A Critical Anthropology of Childhood in Haiti

Author: Diane M. Hoffman

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-01-11

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1350321354

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This book offers a critical anthropological perspective on contemporary childhood in Haiti. It is based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork carried out over a period of 13 years with vulnerable children in Haiti. Diane M. Hoffman raises important questions about how interventions by well-meaning foreigners and 'white saviors' often misrepresent Haitian culture and society as deficient, while privileging their own emotions alongside supposedly universal ideas about children that reinforce their own power to define and intervene in Haitian lives. She argues for a new approach to Haitian childhood that centers children's informal learning and self-education alongside indigenous spirituality and constructions of personhood that can resist the hegemony of neo-colonial and neo-liberal forces. Instead of representing the country and its children as a place of "problems to be solved," the book shows the importance prioritizing aspects of Haitian world-views in order to develop a more culturally-informed understanding of childhood in Haiti that can support genuine social change.


Island Futures

Island Futures

Author: Mimi Sheller

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-10-16

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1478012730

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In Island Futures Mimi Sheller delves into the ecological crises and reconstruction challenges affecting the entire Caribbean region during a time of climate catastrophe. Drawing on fieldwork on postearthquake reconstruction in Haiti, flooding on the Haitian-Dominican border, and recent hurricanes, Sheller shows how ecological vulnerability and the quest for a "just recovery" in the Caribbean emerge from specific transnational political, economic, and cultural dynamics. Because foreigners are largely ignorant of Haiti's political, cultural, and economic contexts, especially the historical role of the United States, their efforts to help often exacerbate inequities. Caribbean survival under ever-worsening environmental and political conditions, Sheller contends, demands radical alternatives to the pervasive neocolonialism, racial capitalism, and US military domination that have perpetuated what she calls the "coloniality of climate." Sheller insists that alternative projects for Haitian reconstruction, social justice, and climate resilience—and the sustainability of the entire region—must be grounded in radical Caribbean intellectual traditions that call for deeper transformations of transnational economies, ecologies, and human relations writ large.