{"id":69,"date":"2024-12-14T01:26:47","date_gmt":"2024-12-14T06:26:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/?p=69"},"modified":"2024-12-14T01:26:47","modified_gmt":"2024-12-14T06:26:47","slug":"what-can-hopeful-pessimism-look-like-for-haiti-media-sensationalism-and-the-creation-of-disastropolitans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/2024\/12\/14\/what-can-hopeful-pessimism-look-like-for-haiti-media-sensationalism-and-the-creation-of-disastropolitans\/","title":{"rendered":"What can Hopeful Pessimism Look Like for Haiti?: Media Sensationalism and the Creation of Disastropolitans"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a recent visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston my family and I found something a bit unsettling in the exhibit \u201cPower of the People: Art and Democracy\u201d : an interactive piece that created a mind map,collaging words visitors associated with \u201cdemocracy.\u201d Included in were words ranging from names of politicians and philosophers, to adjectives of both positive and negative connotations, to countries of origin. Naturally, we wanted to participate in the collective art-making so I typed \u201cHaiti,\u201d and despite several variations was met with the same response: \u201cplease try a different word.\u201d Knowing the history of our country, it was unbelievable that it could be excluded from any conversation on \u201cdemocracy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

While this damper in our visit may seem inconsequential, it reflects a wider phenomenon of the social and political\u00a0 \u2018othering\u2019 of Haitians both in the country and in diaspora. Haiti has always been haunted by the way it\u2019s represented through the Western gaze. <\/span>Every time Haiti comes into the news or cultural purview abroad, it\u2019s in light of the most recent disaster. Consider the 2010 earthquake, its longstanding title as the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, gang activities, government corruption, and international intervention, borders to migration and social isolation: Haiti is always depicted as the locus of several disasters. Whether it\u2019s environmental, economic, political or social disaster, all of these issues are crises that, because of colonially cemented power imbalances have been exacerbated, and because of the erasure of the underlying causes of these disasters, Haiti and its alterity are consistently sensationalized. Through this framework, I propose that the majority (or at least most visible) media and pop cultural portrayals of Haiti work to first conceive of Haiti as a disaster state and then to inscribe that disaster onto Haitians in Haiti and the diaspora. <\/span><\/p>\n

Haiti and its \u2018Disastropolitans\u2019\u00a0<\/b><\/h1>\n

To even begin to address the media disaster that has befallen Haiti and its people, one must first understand what constitutes a disaster. In the context of post\u2013hurricane Mar\u00eda Puerto Rico, political anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla writes about the coloniality of disaster emphasizing \u201cthe \u2018slow violence\u2019 of colonial and racial governance which sets the stage for the accelerated dispossession made evident in a state of emergency\u201d(Bonilla 2). Here, disaster is not characterized by any sort of extraordinary, unforeseeable, or natural hazard or event, but is largely determined by the violent forces associated with colonialism and neo-colonial exploitation or other cultural violences with roots in those same atrocities. Though disaster is often associated with \u201cnatural disasters\u201d like earthquakes and hurricanes, these are neither the root cause of disastrous circumstances nor are they the only types of disasters that follow Haitians (though the 2010 earthquake and its aftermath has significantly marked the way Haiti and Haitians are perceived). Haiti is construed as a locus of disasters, especially in the context of the Americas. This can be attributed to what one could call the original disaster of colonialism. When the violence of colonialism was inflicted on Haitians, they fought for and in 1804 gained their independence as the first independent Black nation in the world and in the same moment they became symbols of Black sovereignty and the event which \u201cradically upend[ed] the basic premise of white supremacy\u2026transform[ing] global conception of freedom\u201d cemented the nation as \u201cthe physical manifestation of white people\u2019s deepest fear\u201d (Alexander 5). This has only been exacerbated by the <\/span>recent events that constitute political disaster<\/span><\/a>, and have led to large scale migration from Haiti.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because of the compounding disasters in Haiti, the already large diaspora has grown with immigration mainly to the United States, the Dominican Republic, Chile and the Bahamas.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
A population map from the Haitian Times depicting the Global Haitian Diaspora as of November 2021.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This reveals an important aspect of the Haitian condition: Haitians are as marked by disaster as Haiti. For example, Gina Ulysse in <\/span>Why Haiti Needs New Narratives<\/span><\/i> laments the \u201cfragmentation\u201d and \u201cdehumanization\u201d of Haitians, particularly in media portrayals that either use \u201csubhumanity\u201d to posit Haitians as \u201cirrational-devil-worshippingprogress-resistant-uneducated-accursed-black-natives overpopulating this godforsaken land\u201d or \u201csuperhuman[ity]\u201d to describe Haitian resilience (10). Haitians are reduced to the positions disaster forces them into and stripped of their personhood because of it. However, in the media, this association of Haitians with disasters extends beyond any logical or direct connection to disaster. Haitians migrating to other places in the Americas have been criticized and dehumanized in a variety of contexts from the<\/span> large-scale deportations announced and carried out by Dominican President Abinader<\/span><\/a> to the U.S.<\/span> President-elect Donald Trump’s violent, baseless, yet continuous remarks against Haitians<\/span><\/a>. However, the issue of negative representations of Haitians goes beyond the dehumanization that is weaponized against migrants everywhere. Haitians are so marked by otherness, that even in contexts where there\u2019s\u00a0 no link to migration or political status Haiti and Haitians are simultaneously evoked as bad examples. Take a recent New York Times article with the headline <\/span>\u201cA Power Vacuum in Gaza Could Empower Warlords and Gangs\u201d<\/span><\/a> the only common thread between the subject of the article and Haiti is the broad idea of gangs which exist everywhere.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This perpetual attribution of violence and disaster onto not only Haiti but Haitians is reflective of \u201clocating vulnerability within geographies, neighborhoods, social identities, or even bodies [thus] render[ing] those [same localities] as \u2018weak\u2019 or \u2018risky\u2019\u201d (Marino and Faas). This reduces Haiti into a disaster state and turns all Haitians everywhere into\u00a0 what I call disastropolitans.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Current Imagery<\/b><\/h1>\n

Upon a simple Google search of Haiti there are copious images that either completely collapse the complexity of Haiti into the pornographic depiction of poverty and violence or trade it in for fetishized wallpaper-like images of nondescript beaches.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
The results of a Google search for “Haiti” in 2024. Photo by author<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

However, even in media portrayals the images that circulate most depict Haitians through desperation and or resilience. To illustrate this point, some of the photos of Haitian immigrants that received the most attention in the past few years are from 2021 with Haitians crossing the Rio Grande River under extremely dangerous conditions. While these images are incredibly important as they display the lived realities of Haitians, when these are the only types of images of Haitians on the cultural landscape, it reduces them to the position of disastropolitan which then takes away from other aspects of their lives and experiences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Haitian immigrants cross the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas, and back into Ciudad Acuna, Mexico. (John Moore \/ Getty Images). From the LA Times<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

(Post) Disaster Artists and Hopeful Pessimism<\/b><\/h1>\n

Now that we have established the issue of not simply a lack of representation of Haitians in the media and popular culture, but a reductive misrepresentation of them as nothing more than disastropolitans, the question becomes how can this be remedied?<\/span><\/p>\n

One solution, considering this as an issue of vision and imagery, is to turn to the arts. The arts offer an avenue through which Haiti, Haitians, and their personhood, desires, interests, etc can be explored beyond the exploitative and often non-critical lens of disaster. What\u2019s more interesting is that Haiti and Haitians themselves have already been generating new images to craft new narratives. Speaking from the contemporary art world, artists have been on the art scene both in Haiti and abroad from decades reimagining what Haiti and Haitians and their experiences can and does look like. As a painter and sculptor, Edouard Duval-Carri\u00e9 uses his work to anticipate and materialize futurity for Haitians in which they are allowed to be more than \u201cpoor,\u201d \u201cdesperate,\u201d or \u201cresilient\u201d migrants. For example, in a series of paintings called <\/span>Imagined Landscapes <\/span><\/i>Duval-Carri\u00e9 uses imagery that could simultaneously romanticize the landscape in a way that has been done in the colonial past, and re-envision what it should still and perhaps can again look like for Haitians. He also employs the images of spirit-like figures showing an ambiguity with who is inhabiting the land, drawing on spiritual and perhaps ancestral imagery to reckon with the ways colonialism and neocolonialism have battled with traditional aesthetics.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
A painting in Edouard Duval Carri\u00e9’s Imagined Landscapes Series. From pamm.org<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another contemporary artist is Steven Baboun who uses photography and his co-founded creative studio to not only actively create new images for Haitian immigrants and diasporans, but to work with others to co-create these narratives. Baboun has photographed other Haitian artists and creatives but also families managing to capture them in new and more dignified lights.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
The portrait of a recently immigrated family was taken by New York- based photographer Steven Baboun.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is not even to mention the rich art scene <\/span>in <\/span><\/i>Haiti, that continues to thrive even in the midst of disaster. It seems that if nothing else, perhaps even the only one, the \u201cdisaster state\u201d of Haiti hasn\u2019t experienced a creative disaster.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond the poetics of representation there are real impacts for the socio-political trajectory of the country. Dr. Bonilla\u2019s framework of hopeful pessimism, that is, an acute awareness of \u201cthe hard tasks required to transform the here and now\u201d which can motivate efforts to \u201cbuild politically in the face of ruin and the promise of further decay\u201d seems helpful here (157). It\u2019s useful in re-examining the role of pop cultural representations of Haiti and Haitians because fully responding to Haiti\u2019s disasters will take time (the disaster state isn\u2019t rebuilt in a day). However, this doesn\u2019t mean nothing can be done to improve the reality of Haitians today, and any positive attention and alternative narration brings Haitians closer to more wholly legible personhood beyond the disastropolitans they are made to be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/span><\/p>\n

Alexander, Leslie M. <\/span>Fear of a Black Republic : Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism In the United States.<\/span><\/i> First edition. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2023.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bonilla, Yarimar (2020) \u201c<\/span>The coloniality of disaster: Race, empire, and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico, USA<\/span><\/a>\u201d <\/span>Political Geography Vol 78<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Marino, Elizabeth K., and A.j. Faas. 2020. <\/span>\u201cIs Vulnerability an Outdated Concept? After Subjects and Spaces.\u201d<\/span><\/a> Annals of Anthropological Practice 44 (1): 33\u201346.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Taub, Amanda. \u201cA Power Vacuum in Gaza Could Empower Warlords and Gangs.\u201d <\/span>The New York Times<\/span><\/i>, 1 December 2024, https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/12\/01\/world\/middleeast\/a-power-vacuum-in-gaza-could-empower-warlords-and-gangs.html?searchResultPosition=1. Accessed 14 December 2024.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ulysse, Gina Athena. <\/span>Why Haiti Needs New Narratives : A Post-Quake Chronicle<\/span><\/i>, Wesleyan University Press, 2015.<\/span> ProQuest Ebook Central<\/span><\/i>, http:\/\/ebookcentral.proquest.com\/lib\/princeton\/detail.action?docID=1844186.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a recent visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston my family and I found something a bit unsettling in the exhibit \u201cPower of the People: Art and Democracy\u201d : an interactive piece that created a mind map,collaging words visitors associated with \u201cdemocracy.\u201d Included in were words ranging from names of politicians and philosophers, to adjectives of both positive and negative connotations, to countries of origin. Naturally, we wanted to participate in the collective art-making so I typed \u201cHaiti,\u201d and despite several variations was met with the same response: \u201cplease try a different word.\u201d Knowing the history of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6284,"featured_media":89,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,4,6,7,5],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-art","tag-disaster","tag-haiti","tag-migration","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/lao383-f24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}