Why Haiti Needs New Narratives. Gina Athena Ulysse
his presence on the popular scene, stigmatized Haitians (youths especially) often hid their national identity to protect themselves from bullying and other negative responses.
3 I should note that this, of course, is with my full understanding of the complex impact of one’s formative years on development as a social being.
4 Up until 2003, the country used to be divided into nine geographic and political departments. With over one million Haitians living in the United States, Canada, the Dominican Republic, France, and other countries in the Caribbean and elsewhere, the tenth department emerged as an informal category in the early 1990s that has since become more established in as far as Haitians abroad continue to seek political representation, demanding the Haitian Constitution be amended to allow dual citizenship.
5 For the director of the Center for Public Anthropology Robert Borofsky, public anthropology “demonstrates the ability of anthropology and anthropologists to effectively address problems beyond the discipline—illuminating larger social issues of our times as well as encouraging broad, public conversations about them with the explicit goal of fostering social change.” From “Conceptualizing Public Anthropology,” 2004, electronic document accessed July 13, 2013. As I discuss later, this is a contested term among practitioners both inside and outside academe.
6 I have yet to decode the complexity of this position as a Haitian-American among Haitians at home, as a Haitian among blacks in the United States, and/or as an other among white anthropologists, which I have discussed at greater length in my first book, Downtown Ladies, an ethnography of female international traders in Kingston, Jamaica. To make sense of this location, I draw upon Faye V. Harrison’s work on peripheralized scholars engaged in the decolonizing anthropology project. As Harrison so rightfully notes in accord with sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, who deploys this term, “‘outsiders within’ travel across boundaries of race, class, and gender to ‘move into and through’ various outsider locations. These spaces link communities of differential power and are commonly fertile grounds for the formulation of oppositional knowledge and critical social theory”: Faye V. Harrison, Outsiders Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 17.
7 I wrote numerous other pieces about bell hooks, Audre Lorde, President Obama, Oprah, art, feminism, performance, and other topics that went live, as well as others I wrote just for the sake of practice.
8 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti’s Nightmare and the Lessons of History: Haiti’s Dangerous Crossroads, ed. Deidre McFayden (Boston: South End Press, 1995), 20.
9 For more on Mead see Nancy Luktehaus, Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
10 Building on the work of Charles Hale (2006), Michal Osterweil has argued that the notion of “activist research” and “social critique” as disparate is a falsified one since knowledge is a crucial political terrain, and both these approaches actually “emerged as responses to the increasing recognition of anthropology’s role in maintaining systems of oppression and colonization that were unintentionally harming the marginalized communities anthropologist were working with.” See Michael Osterweil, “Rethinking Public Anthropology through Epistemic Politics and Theoretical Practice,” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4 (2013): 598–620, and Charles Hale, “Activist Research v. Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the Contradictions of the Politically Engaged Anthropology,” Cultural Anthropology 21, no. 1 (2006): 96–120.
11 A big issue is what exactly distinguishes applied, practicing, and public anthropology from each other. Applied anthropology has its origins in (international) development work and is policy driven. Practicing anthropology, on the other hand, often emphasizes collaborative work with communities, also with the aim of using the work to affect public policy. Public anthropology is also action driven, with the aim of transforming societies. While definitions of these approaches vary and depend on the schools of thought from which they stemmed, as Louise Lamphere (2004) has rightfully argued, in the last two decades these approaches have been converging as collaboration, outreach, and policy are becoming more common in certain graduate programs.
12 Setha Low and Sally Merry mapped out the following ways that anthropologists can be more engaging: “(1) locating anthropology at the center of the public policy-making process, (2) connecting the academic part of the discipline with the wider world of social problems, (3) bringing anthropological knowledge to the media’s attention, (4) becoming activists concerned with witnessing violence and social change, (5) sharing knowledge production and power with community members, (6) providing empirical approaches to social assessment and ethical practice, and (7) linking anthropological theory and practice to create new solutions.” See Low and Merry, “Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas,” Current Anthropology 51, no. S2 (2010).
13 Academics in general, including anthropologists, who engage with the public sphere are still stigmatized and are not taken as seriously by some peers. At the same time, anthropologists, especially in the United States, are concerned that, in the media, matters regarding human conditions tend to be discussed by non-specialists. For more on this issue, see Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), and Thomas Hyllan Eriksen, Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006).
14 American Anthropological Association website, AAAnet.org.
15 Besteman and Gusterson, Why America’s Top Pundits, 3.
16 See Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison, eds., African-American Pioneers in Anthropology (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999).
17 Indeed, my work stems from a much bigger lineage that includes Haiti’s own tradition of ethnology, which dates back to the work of nineteenth-century anthropologist and politician Anténor Firmin. The Bureau d’Ethnologie in Port-au-Prince founded by Jean Price-Mars incorporated works that not only blurred the lines between ethnology and the literary but also stemmed from a radical activist perspective against U.S. occupation and other forms of imperialism. The particularities of my training, though steeped in North American traditions, did include area studies that incorporated and recognized the impact of the Haitian school.
18 See Faye V. Harrison, “The Du Boisian Legacy in Anthropology,” Critique of Anthropology 12, no. 3 (1992): 239–60.
19 Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis: The Study of Negro Life in a Northern City was first published by Harper & Row in 1945 and was reprinted twice, in 1962 and 1970, with updates commissioned by the original publishers. The first printing included an introduction by the popular novelist Richard Wright.
20 St. Claire Drake, “Reflections on Anthropology and the Black Experience,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1978).
21 For a critique of the problems of “allyship” see Aileen McGrory, “Queer Killjoys: Individuality, Niceness and the Failure of Current Ally Culture” (Honors thesis, Department of Anthropology, Wesleyan University, 2014).
22 Prior to the quake Farmer joined the office of the UN envoy that was headed by Bill Clinton. There was a strange irony in this trio of white American men—Farmer, Clinton, and Penn—as the “saviors” of Haiti, which at times prompted me to refer to them as “the three kings.”
23 This question is answered in part by Raoul Peck’s documentary Fatal Assistance (2013), a two-year journey inside the challenging, contradictory, and colossal post-quake rebuilding efforts that reveals the undermining of the country’s sovereignty and concomitant failure of relief groups, international aid, and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) with ideas of reconstruction that clashed with actual Haitian need. It also offers insights on where did the money (not) go.
24 I raised this question during a plenary session at the twenty-first annual Haitian Studies Association conference in 2009. I also explored this issue in some detail in the 2011 Ms. blog piece “Why Context Matters: Journalists and Haiti,” which is included in this collection.