Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene 9781478012733

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ISLAND FUTURES

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ISLAND FUTURES

CARIBBEAN SURVIVAL IN THE ANTHROPOCENE MIMI SHELLER

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2020

© 2020 d u k e

u ni v ersit y pr ess

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­f ree paper ∞ Designed by Courtney Leigh Richardson Typeset in SangBleu by Copperline Book Services Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­P ublication Data Names: Sheller, Mimi, [date] author. Title: Island futures : Caribbean survival in the anthropocene / Mimi Sheller. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: l c c n 2020016392 (print) | l c c n 2020016393 (ebook) isbn

9781478010128 (hardcover)

isbn

9781478011187 (paperback)

isbn

9781478012733 (ebook)

Subjects: l c s h : Human ecology—Political aspects—Caribbean Area. | Human ecology—Caribbean Area—Sociological aspects. | Sustainable development—Caribbean Area. | Caribbean Area—Environmental aspects. | Caribbean Area—Climatic factors. Classification: l c c ddc

g f 532.c27

s545 2020 (print) | l c c

g f 532.c27

304.2/09792—dc23

lc

record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016392

lc

ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016393

Cover art: Edouard Duval-Carrié, La Traversée, 2016 (detail). Mixed media on aluminum with artist’s frame, 68 × 68 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Private collection, Miami.

(ebook) |

This book is dedicated to my mother, Stelle Sheller (1940 – 2018)

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CONTENTS



Preface: An Autobiography of My Mother · ix

Acknowledgments · xxvii

Introduction: Im/Mobile Disaster · 1

1

Kinopolitical Power · 29

2

Water Power · 48

3

Aerial Power · 65

4

Digital Power · 83

5

Bordering Power · 104

6

Sexual Power · 129



Conclusion: Surviving the Anthropocene · 144



Afterword: This Is Not a Requiem · 159

Notes · 173 Bibliography · 193 Index · 217

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PREFACE AN AUTOBIOGR APHY OF MY MOTHER

My mother traveled frequently to the Caribbean, but it is only now, when she is no longer here, that I realize how much her interest in the region influenced my pathway. I have been cleaning out her apartment, an archive of her life. Each picture, letter, and object brings back many memories. I pick up a framed Caribbean postcard: a small painting of a tropical rural scene showing a house surrounded by flowering trees and a figure walking up a winding lane. Tucked behind it I find a letter that I wrote to her in 1990, on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday, when I was twenty-­three years old. Among other things, it says: “Our interests and beliefs have converged at so many points that even while we may be separated by space, you always walk together with me in my heart. . . . Your life will always be a guiding light for me, the finest example I can emulate as I make decisions in my own life.” I am thankful that I had the maturity to write such thoughts at that age, and that she saved it in a place where I would find it now; did she know I would keep this picture and discover the letter, when I too am around fifty, just in time to read it at her memorial service? Thinking back to that year, I realize that it was the moment I made the decision to return to graduate school after a gap year living in Hackney, London. I moved back to Brooklyn and enrolled part-­time at the New School in two classes — an economics course on women and development, and a politics course on state terrorism — before deciding to enroll full-­ time in an MA/PhD program there. Why those classes? Surely it was my mother’s guiding light. She had been a political activist throughout her life and in my teenage and college years she was deeply involved in the International Women’s Movement, the Central American Solidarity Movement, the Sanctuary movement helping refugees resettle in Philadelphia, the anti-­Apartheid movement, and the Nuclear Freeze, Antiwar, and Peace movements. For her seventieth birthday she created a display titled “My

Life in T-­Shirts” which consisted of a laundry line hanging all the political T-­shirts that she had collected from dozens of marches and demonstrations over the years, with slogans like these: Stop the War in El Salvador Women Unite! Take Back the Night! Support the Front Line States: Trade Against Apartheid Nicaragua f s l n : Ni Un Paso Atras! Mobilization, Justice & Peace: Central America, Southern Africa Women’s Association for Women’s Alternatives Inc. No Intervention in Central America Listen to Women for a Change The laundry line itself, sagging with shirts hung with clothespins, was a symbolic reminder of women’s work: both in the home doing the washing and in the global sweatshops sewing cheap T-­shirts in the very places that were experiencing political violence and U.S. occupation, and subsequently sending migrants to the United States as refugees from war and violence. Rereading the letter, gathering up Caribbean and Central American artwork from her home, and adopting her autobiographical collection of T-­shirts, I now realize how much I had absorbed her political commitments along with her affinity for Caribbean landscapes. But that was not all that I found. Among her collection of Caribbean and Mexican cookbooks —  full of memories of wonderful meals she cooked — I found other books that I remembered reading when I was a teenager. There was Joseph Owens’s Dread: The Rastafari of Jamaica, introduced by Rex Nettleford (Sangster’s Book Store, 1976), and Leonard Barrett’s The Rastafarians: Sounds of Cultural Dissonance (Beacon Books, 1977). This was where I first learned about Jamaica, in books given to my mother by her friend Simeon, who had signed them and tucked in photographs of his adorable daughters, Ayana and Makadeah. I had forgotten about reading these books in the 1980s (while listening to my mother’s reggae collection). Had these influenced me choosing to study Jamaican and Haitian peasant cultures, religions, and subaltern politics in my PhD research in the 1990s? Still tucked into my mother’s passport holder I find a small note with the address where I lived in Kingston while doing that research: Aunt Cybil’s house on Norwood Avenue. My mother came to visit me that summer, and we hired a driver and traveled together through the Blue Mountains to Port Antonio, and along the north coast, on a beautiful trip into rural Jamaica (before the new highways were built). x  ·  Preface

By the mid-­1990s my mother and I shared a strong interest in Haitian democratization movements and U.S. interference. In her files is a copy of a letter she wrote to a local newspaper in October 1994 about U.S.-­Haiti relations just at the time when I was beginning my PhD on nineteenth-­ century peasant democracy movements in Jamaica and Haiti. Her letter followed a visit from the Haitian activist Carde Metellus, who spoke to the Germantown branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, where my mother was secretary, in a talk excoriating “the use of rape as a state-­sponsored repression tactic against supporters of President Aristide.” Her letter to the editor lays out the facts of U.S. relations with Haiti: Haitian history reveals the following: (1) On July 28, 1915, the U.S. Marines took control of Haiti. Nineteen years later, the U.S. left a legacy of economic exploitation, decimation of thousands of resisting farmers, a weakened civil society, and a solidified proxy army known as the Haitian Armed Forces; (2) The U.S. has consistently used political, economic and military means to suppress Haitian democratic efforts. In the last 80 years, U.S. funding has supported the brutal dictatorships of the Duvaliers and Cedras. Money channeled through the Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy financed projects and candidates that co-­opted progressive, grass roots organizations; (3) Key U.S. economic and political institutions have had an interest in protecting the low wage export platform that Haiti has become. Haiti has long been the site of sweatshops for Western corporations. America baseball manufacturers have made a fortune on the backs of Haitian workers paid 20 cents per hour; (4) When Aristide won the election on a revolutionary platform that preached against exploitation of workers and defied the politically protected drug cartels, he was undermined by Washington. Financial support of the Haitian military and other sectors opposed to Aristide continued, as well as a campaign of character assassination of Aristide. His presenting symptom? Wanting to raise the minimum wage to 37 cents per hour; (5) After the coup of September 30, 1991, U.S. policy failed to remove coup leaders because it was not designed to do so. Restoration of Aristide to the presidency did not coincide with U.S. business interests. The contradiction between the stated policy — to restore the democratically elected president — and the actions taken can be seen An Autobiography of My Mother  ·  xi

in the so-­called embargo, the flagrant oil traffic from the Dominican Republic, and the loophole that allowed over 60 U.S. companies to continue doing business in Haiti. . . . (6) An April 12 U.S. Embassy statement called reports of Human Rights Violations “exaggerated” although there was documentation that over 3,000 Aristide supporters had been killed since the coup. This Embassy statement was in support of a policy that considered fleeing Haitians economic refugees to be sent back immediately. Taken together these were clear signals to the military to continue their abuses with impunity. . . . Intervention [by the United States now] may reduce terror and torture in the short run, but only when U.S. policy and aid support popular organizations of workers, students, farmers, unions, and liberation churches will there be an organic movement for democracy that will succeed.1  — Stelle Sheller, Secretary, w i l p f , Germantown Branch Go Mom! Not only does this serve as a good introduction to recent U.S.-­Haiti relations, but it effectively (and affectively) sets the stage for the questions I will ask in this book, the outcome of my years — and my mother’s years — thinking about U.S. relations with Haiti. Decades of struggle by Haitians, as well as by their supporters in the diaspora and in local women’s groups and peace groups across the Americas, have built alliances of learning, solidarity, and exchange. Yet, as my friend Esther Figueroa pushes me to ask: “What does it mean to have solidarity with somewhere else [and] how does that solidarity go beyond oneself? Is that even possible and if it is how is it “useful” beyond oneself?”2 Whatever idea of “Haiti” or “the Caribbean” I may hold, and however politically engaged it might be, it will always be an outsider’s view and it will never be innocent of the power relations in which we are all entangled. That is, in part, the subject of my inquiry. This book arises first out of concern with contemporary political and social conditions in Haiti but also out of reflections on my relationship, and the U.S. relationship, with the wider Caribbean region, its politics and cultures, over many decades. My mother’s guiding light keeps pulling me back to the Caribbean, even when it seems too distant, or too inconvenient, too dangerous, too corrupt, or even too touristic; these negative stereotypes and media representations always infect my idea of the region, as much as I might try to overcome them or take responsibility for them. Although I have read widely in Haitian history, anthropology, and sociolxii  ·  Preface

ogy, I do not consider myself an “expert” on contemporary Haiti, and I have not spent that much time there (five brief visits: one in 1997 and four in May – June 2010, July – August 2010, March 2013, and June 2016). But having imbibed my mother’s politics, having studied Caribbean history and cultures for two decades, and having been part of the academic community of Caribbean studies, I do claim a self-­reflexive knowledge of my own entanglements with the Caribbean, knowledge of its highly unequal relations with the United States, and of the uneven mobilities of people, capital, and culture linking our worlds. I am acutely aware of the inequalities of travel in and around the region, the power dynamics that infuse every interaction, and the ignorance with which many American travelers enter the Caribbean — and especially Haiti, which has been subjected to so much misrepresentation. 3 I first began learning about Haiti through reading original nineteenth-­ century sources — w riters such as Baron de Vastey, Thomas Madiou, Beaubrun Ardouin, Antonin Firmin, and many others writing in Haiti’s lively newspapers. I learned more about the history of the Haitian Revolution reading C. L. R. James, Carolyn Fick, Laurent Dubois, and Madison Smartt Bell. I delved into books by historians and anthropologists such as MichelRolph Trouillot, Georges Anglade, Patrick Bellegarde-­Smith, David Nicholls, Kate Ramsey, Alfred Métreaux, Harold Courlander, and Melville J. Herskovitz. I was amazed to discover that in the single year of 1936 – 1937 Haiti had been visited not only by the anthropologists Melville Herskovitz and Harold Courlander, but also by the anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, the anthropologist and dancer Katherine Dunham, the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, and the musicologist Alan Lomax. I also read work by the anthropologists Karen McCarthy Brown, Karen Richman, and Gina Athena Ulysse, as well as work from the rich canon of Haitian fiction and visual art. My mother also read some of these books, as part of her women’s book club, and we would discuss them together. She met McCarthy Brown and Edwidge Danticat when they gave book talks in Philadelphia and told them about my work. While my initial interests in understanding Philadelphia’s connection with the Caribbean region were historical, I am increasingly driven toward a sense of futurity. In thinking about the Caribbean future, I seek to understand the ethics of transnational empathy and connection in a world of great inequity, but more than that in a world of duplicitous politics and false narratives that mask the violence of the military domination, corporate extraction, and political corruption that created those inequities An Autobiography of My Mother  ·  xiii

in the first place. How can we reach out to another culture or place, learn from it, and recognize our historical ties without consuming or appropriating it — a nd why is this simple accompaniment an important political act? How can people from different racial, class, national, and cultural backgrounds influence one another, learn from one another, share with one another, and respect one another, all while keeping our separate identities and pathways? What forms of political solidarity and cultural creativity can we learn from the Caribbean, the Caribbean diaspora, and from transnational feminists that might help us build a more just and sustainable world? These questions drive my research and writing, and as I will show throughout the book, as a U.S. foreigner, I always still remain implicated in unequal power relations predicated on colonialism, imperialism, militarism, and ecocide. While the rediscovery of my mother’s archive reminds me that these questions were always present in my life, my thinking about this specific book began in 2010, when a series of unconnected events shook the Caribbean. First, in January 2010, the massive and deadly earthquake in Haiti rocked the country to its foundations, toppling buildings, killing possibly hundreds of thousands of people (the total death toll is still unknown), and destroying the already tenuous urban infrastructure for roadways, water, schools, and healthcare. It also instigated a rapid mobilization of foreign aid, relief supplies, and emergency responders into Port-­au-­Prince, and soon thereafter the regular coming and going of humanitarian workers, international aid groups, missionaries, and researchers (including myself) into and out of the country. Yet the vast majority of Haitians, without visas or passports — not to mention money — were unable to leave the country to seek medical care, temporary shelter, or family reunification, due to U.S. policies of border control, interception at sea, and denial of entry. Three years later, more than half a million people were still living in inadequate temporary shelters, in dismal conditions which I witnessed myself, without potable water, sanitation, or safety. 4 When I first visited Haiti in 1997, shortly after René Preval became president, it was a hopeful time of popular mobilization and of alternative visions for Haiti’s future. Even though the Lavalas movement had faced many obstacles, both internally and externally, including the removal of former President Aristide and disillusionment with some of his actions in office, at the time there was still a sense of progress. I traveled there with the UK-­based Haiti Support Group on a study tour led by Charles Arthur, who had been building contacts with grassroots groups for many years. We xiv  ·  Preface

met with leaders like Chavannes Jean-­Baptiste of the peasant organization Tet Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen, Camille Chalmers of La Plateforme Haïtienne de Plaidoyer pour un Développement Alternatif, known as

pa p da ,

and Roseanne Auguste, a doctor who was running a women’s health clinic. Each group shared with us their ideals and their methods of organizing, their challenges and successes. Members of Tet Kole told us about how they worked with landless peasants who “sell their labor or work as sharecroppers. They have no decent housing, no schools for their children, poor health conditions.” They described a democratic process of election of delegates who served on communal, departmental, and national assemblies for set terms, before rotating back to agricultural work. Above all, they said, “We want a state that is not a puppet of the ‘blancs.’ By this we mean foreign powers. . . . ‘blancs’ means the U.S. government, the World Bank, the i m f , all enforcing their own economic and political plans on the world. We want a state that really welcomes participation of the popular masses in real power. We want democratic participation in its real essence, not demagogy and intimidation.”5 These words echoed what I had been reading in the archives about the democratic demands of the Piquet Rebellion of 1843, but they also remained on people’s lips in 2010, when I returned to a country badly damaged by the 12 January earthquake. Some people we interviewed told us point-­blank, “All the ‘blancs’ should leave; all the foreign n g o s should go.” When I returned to Haiti as part of a research team funded by the National Science Foundation in 2010, Preval was again president but was struggling against a resurgent right-­w ing Duvalierist countermovement, which had tagged Port-­au-­P rince with graffiti calling for the return of Jean-­Claude Duvalier, once known as Baby Doc. I was surprised to see that many of the peasant organizations and left-­w ing political activists from the 1990s were still active in 2010, as were dozens of other local grassroots organizations. In the aftermath of the earthquake, however, there was a huge influx of foreign “aid” once again (a common pattern in Haiti’s political history), and the scales were tipped toward the patterns of “disaster capitalism” and neoliberal restructuring that we have seen again and again, from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to Puerto Rico after Hurricanes Irma and Maria. 6 I also witnessed the containment of Haitians displaced by the earthquake and the implementation of migration policies that prevented their movement, a discriminatory policy that would later become acute once again after Hurricane Dorian devastated Haitian communities in the Bahamas in 2019 yet led to victims being deported back to Haiti. An Autobiography of My Mother  ·  xv

As a visiting researcher in Haiti, I could not help but reflect on my own involvement in practices of power and unequal mobilities, as well as on the power relations involved in the entire postearthquake “recovery” project involving foreign government organizations, nongovernmental humanitarian aid organizations, missionaries, researchers, engineers, building companies, and many kinds of zealous volunteers, whom some call “voluntourists,” many of whom showed up at the airport in flip-­flops and shorts, with baseball caps and T-­shirts emblazoned with logos — and not the kind found in my mother’s T-­shirt collection. Were we, the “blancs,” including the engineers without borders and the academic researcher-­tourists, actually making things worse? Not long after this, faulty sanitation at a un

base housing peacekeepers from Nepal unleashed a virulent strain of

cholera into an unprotected population with little access to clean water. According to the lowest estimates, more than 800,000 people were infected and at least 10,000 died. The u n made no admission of responsibility nor any offer of compensation, despite widespread condemnation, until August 2016 when, finally, its own legal rapporteur suggested its culpability.7 But were we not all culpable in some ways for what was happening in Haiti? It is generally agreed that international relief efforts largely failed in Haiti, with much of the money donated never making it to “on-­t he-­ ground” projects such as housing, sanitation, or water treatment. Now, ten years after the earthquake, questions linger about ecological fragility, political duplicity, failed recovery projects, and the future of Haiti. But these specific local questions are situated within a wider set of crises occurring across the entire Caribbean region (and Central America), and even more widely in relation to the wider ecological crisis of climate change which is hitting this region especially hard. If my initial impetus in writing this book was to reflect on the role of researchers and humanitarian organizations involved in postdisaster recovery processes, the scope has gradually expanded to a more general set of questions about relational ethics, postdisaster reconstruction, and alternative visions of Caribbean futures within what is often referred to as the “Anthropocene” (although other terminologies have also been suggested, such as “Capitalocene,” intended to mark the fact that it is not all humans who have caused global warming but rather the workings of capitalism). Whether we refer to this current condition of crisis as the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene, the Chthulucene, or even the Kinocene (which emphasizes the human and nonhuman mobilities of all xvi  ·  Preface

the living entities, matter, and electrons of the planet), what we call it is less important to me than how we imagine our way beyond it, beyond coloniality, beyond capitalism, beyond extractive and exploitative economies and ontologies. 8 Yet why do we frame research on the Caribbean within a crisis ontology in the first place? As my friend Esther again interrogates me, why is crisis “the reason to know or understand a region? The point here is what is the nature of talking about and imagining futurity which is driven by a notion of crises — that an entire region is in crisis and under threat? Certainly that is a different approach to a futurity that sees existence as existence and not crises?”9 Clearly I am influenced by outside narratives and media representations of the Caribbean, which distort my view. Around the same time that I was in Haiti, the media began to cover other forms of violence in the region. First, there was state violence in May 2010, when the Jamaican police killed seventy people in the Kingston neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens in pursuit of Christopher Dudus, a fugitive “gangster” wanted for extradition to the United States on drug and gun-­trafficking charges. This extreme outbreak of state violence seemed linked to a crisis of state legitimacy and a crisis of economic development amid punishing international debt regimes.10 Second, there was environmental violence, when the

bp

Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform

blew out, spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico in one of the worst environmental catastrophes ever. But there was also slower environmental violence occurring, as the government of Jamaica was striking deals for bauxite mines and refineries to be reopened by the Russian transnational mining company ru s a l and floating plans to build a new coal-­fired power plant to power the alumina refinery. By 2016 a Chinese metals company had bought ru s a l’s assets, and mining started up again amid an outcry by local communities against the environmental decimation that will result from building a coal-­burning power plant, strip-­mining some of Jamaica’s prime agricultural land, and potentially polluting its most important water resources in the Cockpit Country.11 Jamaica seems to be selling out its natural heritage for quick but ephemeral returns as Chinese investors build new highways, plan a canal across Nicaragua, and seek to construct a new “logistics hub” in the Caribbean. Things also seemed to be shifting in the Hispanic Caribbean around the same time, as a regime change in Cuba and the new policies of the Obama administration initiated an opening of the border between the two countries. In 2009, restrictions were eased on travel to Cuba by Cuban Americans. In February 2010, a bill was drafted that would lift the U.S. travel An Autobiography of My Mother  ·  xvii

ban for Americans wishing to visit Cuba; in June 2010, seventy-­four Cuban dissidents signed a letter to the U.S. Congress in support of the bill; and Cuba began to open for travel, first by Cuban Americans and then by other U.S. Americans on cultural or educational tours (including of course my mother, who quickly signed up for a community-­to-­community solidarity tour!). Commentators quickly envisioned an onslaught of capitalist investment remaking the decaying colonial spaces of Havana, and promoters projected fantasies of Cuba into an imagined postcommunist future in which capital investment would flow in and remake Cuba as a vast new market for U.S. American buyers and investors. Many things seemed up in the air in the Caribbean. But then another representation of “crisis” in the region flooded the U.S. media, when the future of Puerto Rico — a so-­called associated free state or commonwealth of the United States, but to many simply a continuing colony — began to unravel in the face of an unsustainable $74 billion debt. Puerto Rico’s inability to declare structured bankruptcy under U.S. law, as well as pressure from creditors (and, more specifically, from aggressive hedge funds who had bought up its debt), threw the local government into crisis and led to massive cuts in wages, pensions, education, healthcare, and other public services.12 When the p ro m e s a law placed the government in the hands of an unelected oversight authority, which attempted massive cuts of the public university system, student strikes ensued, closing down the University of Puerto Rico. The debt crisis triggered a constitutional crisis, with new calls for review of the status of Puerto Rico as a dependency, a U.S. state, or an independent country. And then came the hurricanes, and a sudden swing of media attention to what seemed to be cascading disasters across the Caribbean. While Haiti was struck by Hurricane Matthew in 2016, the year 2017 brought a devastating suite of powerful Category 4 and 5 hurricanes in close succession. As Yarimar Bonilla writes, “Vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.”13 I began this book long before Hurricane Irma barreled through the northeastern Caribbean, devastating Barbuda, French and Dutch Saint Martin, Anguilla, Tortola, and other parts of the British Virgin Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, some of the outer islands of the Bahamas and areas of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti before sweeping across Florida. Then came Hurricane Maria close on her heels, with a devastating blow especially to Dominica, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos, and several other areas. Finally, Hurricane Dorian xviii  ·  Preface

walloped the northern Bahamas with a monstrous, slow-­moving power that razed entire communities in Grand Bahama and the Abacos, especially the “shanty-­towns” of undocumented Haitian migrants. The geography of the differential impacts of earthquakes, hurricanes, and other disasters is not arbitrary but is shaped by colonial and imperial histories that have left behind multiple territorial jurisdictions with differential forms of citizenship and deeply racialized boundaries contributing to vast inequalities in impact and recovery. Academic research is also implicated in these uneven geographies of access and mobility. Today the Caribbean faces new waves of displacement — and new calls for envisioning alternative futures — f rom further climate disasters in which vulnerability, recovery, and so-­called resilience are all highly political processes grounded in deep histories of social inequality and racial capitalism. As I write this, we have yet to know the impact of the c ov i d -­19 pandemic across the region, but cases are growing, especially in the Dominican Republic, which neighbors Haiti. Predictions are that the virus will be devastating if it makes its way into a population with already tenuous access to shelter, clean water, sanitation, and healthcare. Analysts note that Haiti’s “population of 11.3 million has access to 64 ventilators and somewhere between 30 and 123 ICU beds, some malfunctioning. Experts warn that many hundreds of thousands may die from coronavirus.”14 Meanwhile the Haitian government has already reopened the low-­wage textile export factories, putting workers at risk, and the U.S. government is continuing weekly deportations of hundreds of Haitians, Jamaicans, and Central Americans, even though many were likely infected by SARSCoV-2 after being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.15 Each of these developments is linked to the transnational problems of the governance of mobilities across the Caribbean region’s complex and fragmented borders, citizenship regimes, and migration systems, and the constant thwarting of alternative visions of existence. There have also been controversial recent mass deportations of Jamaicans from the United Kingdom and Haitians from the United States, as well as the mass denationalization of people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. It comes as no surprise that a region that has long experienced patterns of extensive and intensive mobilities (such as colonization and migration), coerced mobilities (such as enslavement and deportation), and coerced immobilities (such as detention camps, prisons, and camps for “internally displaced persons”) today suffers egregious examples of the lack of the freeAn Autobiography of My Mother  ·  xix

dom to move where one wishes or the freedom to dwell where one wishes, alongside powerful attempts to hold onto attachments to places that are valued by the indigenous, by the displaced, and by diaspora dwellers. Such violent shudders and unsettled times throughout the region could be understood as a reflection of the uneven state of freedom in the postslavery, neoimperial, neoliberal Americas, but also reflect our distorted prisms of knowledge production. Now, a decade since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, it is time to reflect on the implication of each of us (academics included) in what has happened since then and what the future holds not only for Haiti but for the entire region in the face of both severe climate change and a global pandemic. The stories told here focus on my research travels in Haiti, but in many ways they are about the wider systems of power (capitalist and military, for sure, but also involving n g o s, academic researchers, engineers, and transnational volunteers) in which the Caribbean region as a whole is caught, and in which the United States plays a crucial part. Rather than an ethnographic account of Haiti, I turn my sociological gaze upon my own (problematic) position in this relation, as a U.S. American, as a historical scholar and researcher, as a tourist and academic traveler, and as someone trying to stand in solidarity with Haitians. My mother had a folder full of letters addressed to her from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, dating from 1982 to 2001 and written in response to her letters to her Pennsylvania representatives on topics ranging from the nuclear freeze resolution (1982 – 1983) to U.S. policy toward El Salvador (1983, 1991 – 1992) and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua (1986) and health care reform (1994), among other issues. On 14 September 1994, Senator Harris Wofford wrote to her: Thank you for contacting me with your opposition to United States involvement in Haiti. I appreciate hearing your views. The democratically elected government of Haiti was deposed by a brutal, outlaw military regime which has terrorized opponents and driven thousands of Haitians to seek refuge in the United States. For this reason, the United States and other nations must continue to apply maximum pressure and total economic sanctions to achieve a peaceful return to democratic government in Haiti. Using military force comes only after other means have been exhausted. If the dictators are smart, they will leave now, of their own accord, while they have the chance to do so peacefully. xx  ·  Preface

Please be sure that as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee I will continue to monitor the situation in Haiti very closely. Again, thank you for taking the time to give me the benefit of your thoughts. It is important that I know what you are thinking and I hope you will contact me again on matters of concern to you. Sincerely, Harris Wofford She did indeed write to Wofford on other occasions. (She received less friendly answers on other issues from Senator Rick Santorum and Senator Arlen Spector). It is important to see this kind of international solidarity work that so often goes unlauded. Behind the scenes, everyday American citizens, school teachers, social workers, mothers, and grandmothers chose to get involved in international politics by challenging U.S. policies that hurt the workers, the peasants, and the poor of Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, and many other countries. In November of 1994 my mother also received a very interesting letter, on behalf of w i l p f , sent from the Department of the Treasury and signed by Joseph B. Eichenberger, director of the Office of Multilateral Development Banks. In the letter Eichenberger defends the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and explains their efforts to reduce global poverty. Eichenberger notes, “Economic reform is a very difficult process, as we well know even from our own experience. It also takes time for adjustment progress to translate into social progress. However, for many countries there is simply no viable alternative to economic adjustment. Unfortunately, in most cases the necessary reforms have been delayed for far too long, allowing the underlying problems to deepen and making the solutions that much more difficult.” With these words of harsh medicine, he defends the need for the “elimination of pervasive economic policy distortions” (in other words, social safety nets, price controls, and public funding for healthcare and education) as essential “to achieve the economic growth necessary for social progress and poverty reduction.” Having been through i m f structural adjustments, U.S. occupations, and military coups, as well as earthquakes and hurricanes, where does Haiti stand today? As I finish this book, Haiti is again being rocked by protests, first against rising gas prices in March 2018, then against government corruption in what is known as the PetroCaribe scandal. When governAn Autobiography of My Mother  ·  xxi

ment audits and a 650-­page Haitian Senate investigation could not explain where $2 billion in low-­interest loans from the Venezuelan-­led oil purchasing alliance known as PetroCaribe had gone, people began to demand: Kot Kòb Petwo Karibe a??? (Where is the PetroCaribe money???) The slogan first spread on Twitter in August 2018 and was then picked up by the Haitian rapper K-­Lib, and young Haitians began to organize actions via Twitter and Facebook and took to the streets. It also echoed the question of where all the postearthquake reconstruction money had gone, when at least $10 billion in aid had been pledged — w ith little to show for it.16 In September and October of 2018 thousands of Haitians held large-­ scale demonstrations nationwide, “demanding transparency from the government regarding the alleged misuse of $3.8 billion” U.S. dollars that were due to Haiti under the PetroCaribe oil alliances. The funds, which “had been earmarked for infrastructure and social and economic projects,” had largely disappeared. Cars were burned, streets were blockaded, shops were looted, several policemen were injured, and a number of protestors were shot dead.17 Then, in November, mercenaries wearing government uniforms (and allegedly provided with arms by the governing Tèt Kale Party

[ p h t k ] and Duvalierist gangs), perpetrated a massacre of sixty people who had gathered in front of the ruins of the St. Jean Bosco church in the La Saline neighborhood, a place of popular “Ransamblement” associated with followers of the Fanmi Lavalas, former President Aristide’s party.18 And so the wheel turns, the blood spills, and the political impasse continues in 2020. Haitians often interpret their history and contemporary political events through the rich symbology of Vodou. I am not an initiate in Vodou, but some of my friends and colleagues are, and I have great honor and respect for the archetypal spirits, or loa, they serve. As I learned about the loa over many years, I became attracted to Ezili Danto — a Vodou loa, or spiritual force, who is described as the fierce defender of children, of single women, and of women who love women. I first heard her name in relation to the sacrifice at Bwa Kayiman that initiated the Haitian Revolution; but I also learned more through McCarthy Brown’s descriptions of the work of “Mama Lola,” a Haitian mambo in Brooklyn.19 In my mother’s persona I gradually came to see glimmers of Ezili Danto, who is said to love blue and yellow, silver rings, and who has a daughter named Anaïs who often speaks for her during ceremonies. My mother loved paintings of mothers holding toddlers, she fiercely stood up for women, children, and the oppressed, and was herself a single mother raising two daughters. She also xxii  ·  Preface

had a career, first as a social worker for troubled teens and then teaching autistic children in Philadelphia’s difficult public schools. She always wore several silver rings, with blue stones, and collected hundreds of beaded necklaces. Her favorite colors were deep blue and golden yellow, and she hated red flowers which reminded her of blood. She drank Caribbean rum and her favorite French perfume was Anaïs Anaïs by Cacharel. After my mother’s death, at the very moment I was finishing this book, I had a series of dreams in which I saw with great clarity that each chapter was dedicated to a different loa who had been there all along, invisible to me. In the final dream my mother led a parade to celebrate her life, full of music and joy (stopping at all her favorite bars!) and her spirit seemed released. In her honor, I close each chapter with a song to each loa that she indicated to me. These songs come from the Alan Lomax recordings of 1937, when Zora Neale Hurston helped him meet people in Haiti, as described in the liner notes by the musicologist Gage Averill. In others, I hear the powerful voice of my colleague and friend Gina Athena Ulysse, who has recorded many songs and who holds moving live performances combining her work as an anthropologist and a performer, as did Hurston, Dunham, and Deren.20 And I take inspiration in the work of other academics who have researched Vodou, and those who follow in the related Yoruba tradition, like Yanique Hume and N. Fadeke Castor.21 Around a year after my mother died, and ten years after the anniversary of the 2010 earthquake, Gina gave me a set of calabash gourds, known as kwi, which in Vodou and Yoruba traditions carry spiritual significance, as also found in her artwork An Equitable Human Assertion, “a site-­specific rasanblaj (a gathering) of ideas, things, people and spirits.”22 I placed them near my mother’s Caribbean pictures, lit candles, and sprayed some Anaïs Anaïs perfume. That night I dreamed of a mermaid (known as Lasiren in Vodou) guiding me to an island, which I recognized as the island in the center of the saltwater Lake Enriquillo, originally known to the indigenous Taino as Lake Xaragua, in the center of the island of Ayiti where an ancient ocean used to flow across the island. When I woke up I felt called to place at the center of the kwi the fossil seashell that I had been given when visiting a farm near Lake Xaragua. The shell nestled perfectly into the gourd, echoing its round shape, and magnifying its rasanblaj of spiritual power. These gathered objects and songs open another line of inquiry into the ethics of relationality with other cultures, into the ways in which we might potentially listen to one another. In 1988 I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on a then unrecognized literary genre that I called “autoficAn Autobiography of My Mother  ·  xxiii

tography,” analyzing for example Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This genre became more recognized in 1997 when the Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid published The Autobiography of My Mother. Throughout the process of writing this book whenever I got stuck and it seemed like the book would never move forward, I asked myself what would my mother say? And I tried my best to let her speak through me. For example, my mother had a postcard with a photo of Zora Neale Hurston “taken in 1935 on a collecting trip in Florida with Alan Lomax and Mary E. Barnicle for the music division of the Library of Congress.” Hurston also traveled throughout Haiti and the deep south collecting folklore and stories, ultimately published in her book Tell My Horse. The caption describes her as a “novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist & Adventurer” and notes that she grew up in Eatonville, FL, “surrounded by the Afro-­A merican culture of that self-­governing, all-­black town.” Hurston’s celebrated novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was set in and around Eatonville, and culminates in the Okeechobee Hurricane, said to be one of the deadliest hurricanes to hit the North Atlantic, at least until recent times.23 The postcard reminded me that I had found Hurston’s writing through my mother’s reading. Climate change is driving more hurricanes into the Caribbean and causing other kinds of climate variability. Hurston’s work, and the stories of other radical black women, remind us to look for answers in the deep traditions of African American folk cultures, indigenous small-­scale farming and sustainable gardening, and Haiti’s community-­based peasant democracy with its powerful alternative visions of self-­determination. Within the wider context of Caribbean survival in the Anthropocene, the interventions of the loa are also suggestive of alternative ontologies and ways of being in the world that look toward the deep past and the deep future. In Designs for the Pluriverse, the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar argues that transformative systemic change will require autonomous thinking based in “participatory, bottom-­up, situated design” from the perspective of diverse bodies and multiple places, including Indigenous and Afro-­Colombian ontologies.24 Through recognizing our “radical interdependence” with other humans, natural entities, and spiritual entities, can we attempt to move toward a post-­A nthropocene pluriverse that is not premised on crisis? In these reflections on my own travels within Caribbean culture, I hope to accompany my mother and the many other women who have worked in league to build international solidarity, peace, and freedom across Haiti, the Caribbean and the Americas — but only by uprooting my own assumptions. xxiv  ·  Preface

s on g f o r e z i l i

Ezili bon lwa Neg Defanse mwen Mwen voye pale yo Yo pa we le san koule O Ezili! Bon lwa! O defanse mwen Mwen voye pale nou Yo pa we le san koule We le san koule O Ezili bon lwa, Neg defanse mwen Mwen voye pale yo Yo pa we men san koule Erzulie, good lwa, My defender I come to tell them They don’t see blood is dripping Oh! Erzulie, good lwa! Oh! My defender! I come to tell them Don’t they see blood is dripping See the blood is dripping O Erzulie good lwa, My defender I come to tell them They don’t see blood is dripping25

An Autobiography of My Mother  ·  xxv

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the support of my friends, colleagues, and the wider Caribbean Studies and Haitian Studies communities, who have inspired me every day through their research, writing, performances, conference presentations, and lively social media posts. I am still learning from their work all the time and thank them all for their brilliance, friendship, and generosity. I think back to Charles Arthur, who first led a study tour to Haiti in 1997, where I met Camille Chalmers, Leah Gordon, and the many amazing leaders of peasant organizations and women’s organizations who shared their thoughts with us. Then through the Haitian Studies Association I was encouraged in my interests by brilliant scholars, writers, and activists including Patrick Bellegarde-­Smith, LeGrace Benson, Leonie Hermantin, Robert A. Hill, Régine Jean-­Charles, Kyrah M. Daniels, Laurent Dubois, Claudine Michel, Kate Ramsey, Karen Richman, and especially Gina Athena Ulysse, who inspired the rasanblaj represented here. Across the wider Caribbean and its diaspora I have found friendship or in some cases simply helpful engagement with my project or exemplary models of activist public scholarship, for which I thank Yarimar Bonilla, N. Fadeke Castor, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Carole Boyce Davies, Esther Figueroa, Kaima L. Glover, Yanique Hume, Aaron Kamugisha, Linden Lewis, Natasha Lightfoot, Samuel Martinez, Yolanda Martinez-­San Miguel, April Mayes, Erica Moiah James, Beverley Mullings, Frances Negrón-­Muntaner, Angelique Nixon, Annie Paul, Kevon Rhiney, Patricia Saunders, Mark Schuller, David Scott, Tillah Willah Springer, Michelle Stephens, Tavares Strachan, Deborah Thomas, and Alyssa Trotz. Beyond the Caribbean, I want to thank other colleagues and collaborators who contributed to my work in various ways: Pete Adey, Neil Brenner, Monika Büscher, Tim Cresswell, Mathilde Dissing Christensen, Deborah Cowen,

Diane E. Davis, Gareth Doherty, Pennie Drinkall, Malene Freudendal-­ Pederson, Kevin J. Grove, Kevin Hannam, Julia Hildebrand, Heather Horst, Ole B. Jensen, Caren Kaplan, Sven Kesselring, Lee Lee, Alejandro Manga Tinoco, Jonathan Pugh, David Tyfield, and many other brilliant colleagues in the field of Mobilities studies, including the late John Urry. I also thank my very supportive colleagues in the Sociology Department at Drexel University, especially my department head, Susan Bell. This book owes its existence to two collaborative research projects funded by the National Science Foundation; however, it does not directly pertain to the research carried out for those projects. The narratives presented here are my own and were incidental to our project; all views expressed here are my own. However, traveling with these colleagues enabled me to engage in my own independent reflections, to gather personal photographs, and to reflect on the entire experience of doing research in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In writing this book I have drawn only on my own observations, have not included or drawn on any interview, survey, or other primary data from the research, and have cited the relevant published articles for secondary data. With that said, I nevertheless want to acknowledge the n s f support and thank my collaborators. For the first project,

n s f -­r a p i d :

Supporting Haitian Infrastructure

Reconstruction Decisions with Local Knowledge,

pi

Franco Montalto,

Award No. 1032184, I thank my Drexel University colleagues Franco Montalto, Michael Piasecki, Patrick Gurian, and Jennifer Britton, our collaborators Jean de Vernet, Joseph (Lavaud) Vernet, and Yves Rebecca, and the many students in Philadelphia and Haiti who worked with us, especially Heather Galada, Stephen O’Connor, and Tibebu Ayalew. For the second project,

n s f -­r a p i d :

Understanding Sudden Hydro-­Climatic Changes

and Exploring Sustainable Solutions in the Enriquillo Closed Water Basin SW Hispaniola, p i J. Gonzalez, Award No. 1264466, I especially thank Michael Piasecki, Jorge Gonzalez, Yolanda Leon, Lavaud Vernet, and the many other colleagues and students from City College of New York and from the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo with whom we worked. Working on a book over ten years involves a long collaborative process, and this project grew organically out of this decade of my intellectual life, with many talks and public lectures whose organizers I gratefully thank at the following institutions: the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania; The Haiti Lab at Duke University; the Department of Sociology at u m a s s -­A mherst; the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; El Instituto: xxviii  · Acknowledgments

Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs; and the Agnes Heller Sociology Lecture at Latrobe University, Melbourne, Australia. For providing important intellectual spaces in the final months of completing this project, I especially want to thank Hugh Thomas, Patricia Saunders, and the team at the Humanities Center at the University of Miami, where I served as the Henry King Stanford Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in October 2019; and Kevon Rhiney, Verene Shepherd, and the team at the Centre for Reparation Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, where I was invited to give a keynote address for the Regional Climate Justice Symposium in January 2020. I also want to profusely thank the energetic conference organizers and generous commentators at the following events where I presented and got valuable feedback on aspects of this research: the International Geographical Union’s Island Studies Conference, Isle of Ven, Sweden, 2010; the Haitian Studies Association Annual Conference, Brown University, 2010; the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Conference, New Orleans, 2010; the Association of American Geographers Annual Meetings, Seattle, 2011; the Caribbean Studies Association Annual Conference, Guadeloupe, 2012; the Haitian Studies Association Annual Meeting, York University, Canada, 2012; the Geomedia Conference, Karlstad University, Sweden, 2015; the Society for Caribbean Research, Leiden University, Germany, 2015; the Caribbean Studies Association Annual Meeting, Port-­au-­ Prince, 2016; and the Small Axe Symposium “States of Crisis: Disaster, Recovery, and Possibility in the Caribbean,” at Columbia University, 2019. I also especially want to thank Natalie Oswin for inviting me to give the annual Society & Space lecture at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in April 2018, and Sharlene Mollett, Beverley Mullings, and Marion Werner for their incredibly generous, generative responses to my paper, which was published along with their thoughtful interventions. Thanks to these stimulating and varied audiences and conversations, many elements of this book were worked out in published articles, for which I also must thank the many journal editors for their guidance and anonymous reviewers for their comments. Parts of the Introduction and Conclusion draw on my article “Caribbean Futures in the Offshore Anthropocene” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, for which I thank again Natalie Oswin. Other sections draw on my article “Caribbean Reconstruction and Climate Justice,” in the Journal of Extreme Events, for which I thank the special issue editors Jeff Popke and Kevon Rhiney, as Acknowledgments  ·  xxix

well as Aldon J. Morris who visited our Sociology Colloquium at Drexel to speak about his work on W. E. B. DuBois. Chapter 1 draws in part on my article “The Islanding Effect” in Cultural Geographies, for which I thank the special issue editors Eric Clark and Godfrey Baldaccino. Chapter 2 draws on elements of my co-­authored article on “Participatory Engineering for Recovery in Post-­E arthquake Haiti” in Engineering Studies, for which I thank my co-­authors and editor Scott Knowles. Chapter 3 draws on my article “Air Mobilities on the U.S.-­Caribbean Border” in The Communication Review. Chapter 4 draws on “Connected Mobility in a Disconnected World” in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, for which I thank special issue editor Mei-­Po Kwan, and builds on elements of my book chapters “Media, Materiality, Mobility” in Geomedia: Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds and “Locating technologies on the ground” in Location Technologies in International Context. Chapter 5 draws on my article “Mobility, Mediation and Territoriality on a Haitian-­ Dominican Border Crossing,” in Sociologica, with thanks to editors Javier Caletrio and Giulia Mandich. Elements of this chapter also draw from Mimi Sheller and Yolanda M. León, “Uneven Socio-­ecologies of Hispaniola,” in Geoforum, and I thank Yolanda for her crucial role in this research, and the editors April Baptiste and Kevon Rhiney for organizing the special issue on “Climate Justice & the Caribbean.” Finally, I want to thank my family for living with the decade of travel, research, writing, and revising that has gone into this book, including all my extended family who give me a lifetime anchor here in the Philadelphia area. Dan Schimmel has been an avid partner on this journey, providing intellectual, emotional, and physical sustenance, a delightful home, and a reminder to be vulnerable. Our daughters, my pride and joy, thankfully gave me the space and time for this work. I hope they will read it someday and that by the time they do the world will be a better and more just place. And none of us would be here without my mother, Stelle Sheller, to whom I dedicate this book, because she was the guiding star that led me here and continues to point me in the right direction.

xxx  · Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION IM/MOBILE DISASTER

Natural disasters strike at mobility systems, cutting off roadways, electricity, food access, and communication networks, but — more than that — they necessitate new mobilities and immobilities that always deepen already existing uneven spatialities and exacerbate mobility injustice.1 For this reason there is no “natural” disaster that is not also human-­made: we make our own disasters, but not in conditions of our own choosing. Like many “unnatural” disasters before and since, the 12 January 2010 earthquake in Haiti brought to light the highly uneven interdependence and fragility of the complex mobility systems and infrastructural moorings that create the possibility for people to weave together everyday life. During the earthquake, it is estimated that somewhere between 160,000 and 220,000 people perished in collapsing buildings, another 300,000 people received injuries to various degrees, and a further 1.5 million were made homeless.2 Places suffering catastrophic events reveal how the dynamic intertwining of transportation, communication, provisioning, and scheduling systems can rapidly unravel, and along with them civic order, markets, and everyday life. Yet communities living through disaster are also noted for their “resilience” which so often takes the form of altruism, resourcefulness, generosity, and collective mutual aid, as Rebecca Solnit describes in Haiti. 3 The international humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake, however, also brought to light another underside to disaster, quickly identified by Beverley Mullings, Marion Werner, and Linda Peake: a militarized and carceral response that was “conducted in the name of humanitarian assistance” in ways that dispossessed “the right of Haitians to be treated as people” and thereby revealed “the deep associations between racism, humanitarianism, and ongoing capitalist processes.”4 As we face the ongoing unnatural disasters of the twenty-­first century, these tensions

and dispossessions in disaster recovery become ever more pertinent to what kinds of futures we will create. Natural disasters, moreover, are never contained within state boundaries, because processes of disaster response are always multilayered, mobile, and transnational. Human survival is not simply place-­based and sedentary but always requires many kinds of mobilities. As has become all too evident in the face of the disrupted mobilities associated with the c ov i d -­19

pandemic, no place is an island and we all rely on our connec-

tions with other places. Yet islands like those in the Caribbean experiencing disasters and their problematic humanitarian responses are especially shaped by particular constellations of mobilities and immobilities. Island space is influenced by the mobility regimes governing the surrounding air and sea space. Who can leave the disaster zone, and who can arrive? What forms of humanitarian assistance are delivered, how and by whom? And which kinds of mobilities and which new forms of dwelling are blocked or restricted? The destruction of many buildings as well as key infrastructure within Haiti’s capital, Port-­au-­Prince, and within nearby towns such as Léogâne during the quake, led first to the displacement of more than 1.5 million survivors and then to huge flows of foreign aid, disaster responders, and freight through the country’s main international airport (temporarily placed under U.S. military control), as well as by air into Santo Domingo, and then by road from the Dominican Republic. Yet as Mullings, Werner, and Peake observe, “One of the early functions of the U.S. military was to ensure that Haitian citizens remained on the island, minimizing the possibility of the displaced reaching the shores of the United States.”5 The U.S. aircraft carrier positioned off the coast of Port-­au-­Prince within seventy-­ two hours did not bring aid, but instead broadcast messages and leaflets warning Haitians not to attempt to leave. The vast majority of Haitians were unable to leave the country to seek medical care, to join relatives in the U.S. or Canada, or to find safer shelter, and many found themselves in the hastily constructed camps for “internally displaced people,” who came to be called “i dp s” as if displacement were their identity. The crisis of displacement was contained within Haiti, in part through the deployment of the U.S. military and

un

peacekeepers to the scene,

echoing the dismal record of military intervention and migrant detention on Caribbean islands which has long implicated humanitarianism in racial exclusion. Jenna Loyd and Alison Mountz have shown how Haitians have been caught up for decades in “the transnational productions of remote2  ·  Introduction

ness that cross prison walls and national borders to create transnational carceral spaces.”6 In many ways the i d p camps functioned as part of this circumscription of mobilities. Remoteness and islandness, in other words, are relationally produced through the management of uneven mobilities and transnational power: people are “stuck” in place and “dis-­placed” because humanitarian and military mobilities dominate the infrastructures of mobility including boats, borders, and bases, as well as citizen status, racial boundaries, and migrant reception policies. Mullings, Werner, and Peake likewise note that “powerful states have responded to the dislocations created by natural disasters” through “criminalization, discipline and punishment” which have “become a predictable part of the humanitarian response to black communities in crisis.”7 Further crises in the coordination of military and humanitarian mobility systems continued to produce violent racializations of exclusion, containment, and ongoing displacement, in the months and years after the earthquake. There was the ongoing failure to move displaced people out of temporary shelters into transitional housing; the inability to remove rubble or rebuild housing at a significant rate; and the frictions in moving supplies into and around the country. Powerful and politically connected landholders often also control trucking, road building, gravel digging, and the policing of the spaces of movement, logistics, and borders. Within large-­scale mobility systems failures, we see laid bare the institutional scaffolding of mobility regimes that govern spatial mobility, including all the purposeful gaps and uneven distributions of mobility rights and “network capital” that leave some groups most vulnerable to harm. 8 And in many ways we can see these logistical operations as blueprints for the present building of border walls and mounting flurry of anti-­immigration policies to contain people fleeing the Global South, as well as rehearsals for the future militarized and carceral response to climate migration pressures. Haitian struggles for postearthquake recovery, therefore, should be understood within the wider context of the global economic system, U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean region, and the militarized management of migrant interception and humanitarian projects. These social forces together set the wider nets of racialized migrant detention and deportation, revealing the entwining of mobility regimes and racial boundary drawing. Such processes also reveal the longstanding ways in which “contests over settlement, mobility, and immobility have been used to manage various waves of racial change” in the United States and more widely across the Caribbean and Americas.9 Im/Mobile Disaster  ·  3

Alternatives for Disaster Recovery Haiti’s infrastructures for energy, water, shelter, and sanitation were already inadequate prior to the earthquake, and afterward were in need of urgent rehabilitation — t his combined with the huge challenge of removing rubble and rebuilding buildings and roads. About $2 billion was raised from individual donors immediately after the quake and about $9.9 billion was pledged by nations at the donors’ conference in New York City in late March of 2010 to aid in the emergency recovery and reconstruction effort. However, the funds for reconstruction were slow to be disbursed amid charges of corruption, red tape, title disputes over land, lack of coordination among a plethora of organizations, and the delayed formation of a new government due to disputed elections. With poor progress in rebuilding already visible in the six months immediately following the earthquake, it quickly became appalling that more than a half-­million people remained without adequate shelter, potable water, and sanitation two years after the quake, with up to three hundred thousand people still suffering in camps even three years later.10 The impact of systems failures falls most heavily upon the poor, marginalized, and racialized sectors of society who already lack “mobility capital” and are excluded from many forms of access and “motility,” meaning the potential to self-­determine one’s own movement but also to make claims to dwelling, residence, and place.11 While the politics of mobility often focuses our attention on the disadvantages of the “ ‘mobility poor,” there is an equally troubling and complex politics of mobility in which the postdisaster mobilization of those with network capital produces new infrastructures, mobility systems, and logistical flows that further distort access for the very people they seek to help, especially when those people are held within the borders of an island-­state from which exit is tightly controlled within a racialized transnational carceral politics.12 While the imagery of islands as self-­enclosed, remote, and inaccessible emphasizes such carceral processes, they are equally evident in the more recent incarceration and deportation of Central American refugees intercepted on the U.S. border with Mexico.13 There is an absurdity of the humanitarian project to “save Haiti” and “build back better,” as the global response dubbed its mission, when so often the mobilization of aid not only built on these processes of uneven mobilities but actually undermined the efforts to mobilize everyday life by those it claimed to help and produced further distortions in infrastructure and unequal accessibility.14 Mullings, 4  ·  Introduction

Werner, and Peake identify clearly how the “Non-­Profit Industrial Complex” (as transnational feminist activists echo the idea of the military industrial complex) in Haiti is complicit in “humanitarian dispossession” by taking over the functions of government, skimming off high overheads, and becoming “Trojan horses” for neoliberal policies imposed by international financial institutions.15 In opposition to temporary “cash for work” schemes, or low-­wage, insecure, export assembly factory work as a reconstruction solution, they call instead for a “people-­centered reconstruction approach” that would break “the bonds of structural violence of financial colonialism that continue to exist in the form of debt,” would reject neoliberal economic solutions, and would “address the environmental degradation and vulnerability that three centuries of capitalist development have wreaked on the land.” All of this, moreover, is predicated on “a genuine commitment to enabling and supporting the formation of a democratic and sovereign Haitian state.”16 Haitian civil society organizations were well aware of the challenges they faced immediately after the earthquake, and their arguments remain equally pertinent after the 2017 hurricane season and into the future in the responses yet to come to looming climate disasters. The following statement was issued by the coordinating committee of Haitian progressive organizations on 27 January 2010: Massive humanitarian aid is indispensable today, given the scale of the disaster, but it should be deployed in terms of a different vision of the reconstruction process. It should connect with a break from the paradigms that dominate the traditional circuits of international aid. We would hope to see the emergence of international brigades working together with our organizations in the struggle to carry out agrarian reform and an integrated urban land reform programme, the struggle against illiteracy and for reforestation, and for the construction of new modern, decentralised and universal systems of education and public health. We must also declare our anger and indignation at the exploitation of the situation in Haiti to justify a new invasion by 20,000 U.S. Marines. We condemn what threatens to become a new military occupation by U.S. troops, the third in our history. It is clearly part of a strategy to remilitarise the Caribbean Basin in the context of the imperialist response to the growing rebellion of the peoples of our continent against neo-­liberal globalization. And it exists also within Im/Mobile Disaster  ·  5

a framework of pre-­emptive warfare designed to confront the eventual social explosion of a people crushed by poverty and facing despair. We condemn the model imposed by the U.S. government and the military response to a tragic humanitarian crisis. The occupation of the Toussaint Louverture international airport and other elements of the national infrastructure has deprived the Haitian people of part of the contribution made by Caricom, by Venezuela, and by some European countries. We condemn this conduct, and refuse absolutely to allow our country to become another military base.17 This statement can be understood as part of a wider movement for what is called “just recovery,” which I would also connect to wider principles of mobility justice within recovery and reconstruction. Too often ignored by the “international community,” the participating organizations and groups in this statement included the Institut Culturel Karl Lévêque (ickl); Programme pour une Alternative de Justice (paj); Sosyete Animasyon ak Kominikasyon Sosyal (saks); Institut de Technologie et Centre d’Animation (iteca); Plateforme des Organisations Haïtiennes de Droits Humains (pohdh); the Plateforme Haïtienne de Plaidoyer pour un Développement Alternatif (papda); and Solidarite Fanm Ayisyèn (sofa). The kinds of decentralized initiatives for recovery that they envisioned could have built on urban-­rural and transnational linkages to create a more resilient Haitian economy rather than reinforcing the kinds of “disaster capitalism” that has prevailed.18 This book seeks to stand in solidarity with such Haitian organizations and the many others that have offered alternatives to the official recovery plans foisted on Haiti by the so-­called international community, while acknowledging my own implication in the coloniality of knowledge production and research travel as a form of “dark tourism.”19 It will reflect on the workings of uneven postdisaster recovery from the perspective of a single country, Haiti, although the wider analysis will address geopolitical, economic, and ecological crises in the Caribbean region as a whole and especially the problems of Caribbean survival in the ever-­worsening conditions of climate change driven by neoliberal capitalism that will produce future disasters. It will seek to show the pervasive influence of colonialism, capitalism, military power, economic domination, and racialized mobility control in creating the intertwined catastrophes of coloniality and climate change. It is no coincidence that in 2018 the Global Climate Risk Index ranked Haiti as the nation in the world most vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather events related to climate change.20  6  ·  Introduction

Haiti is usually treated in the Western press and social sciences as an exceptional case, an outlier of extreme poverty, deforestation, and political instability, and it is often used as either an object of pity and missionary zeal or a negative lesson and warning for other Caribbean countries: “Painted as repulsive and attractive, abject and resilient, singular and exemplary, Haiti has long been framed discursively by an extraordinary epistemological ambivalence. This nation has served at once as cautionary tale, model for humanitarian aid and development projects and point of origin for general theorising of the so-­called Third World.”21 At the same time, islands more generally are often treated as canaries in the coalmine, laboratories for experimentation, or indicators for climate vulnerability, as David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh have argued, rather than foregrounding “how islands are part of complex cross-­cutting relations, assemblages, networks, mobilities, spatial fluxes and flows.”22 Along with these and other scholars in island studies, I seek to approach Haiti as an interconnected, relational space of “cross-­currents and connections” that is not singular, but “mobile, multiple and interconnected.”23 Islands, therefore, should not be imagined as “laboratories” for testing climate adaptation. Nor, as Amelia Moore argues, should islands be imagined as singular, vulnerable, and isolated destinations for conducting Anthropocene scientific research and tourism.24 Rather these “Anthropocene islands” offer active sites of cultural creativity and complex evolving socioecologies for the revision and remaking of present social relations. Such futures will involve “contingent regional questions of race, class, subjugation, systematic exploitation, and capital accumulation [which] are now expressed through the material and symbolic politics of global environmental change.”25 Along with many others working in the fields of Caribbean studies and Island studies, I believe it is important to understand how the wider processes of sociopolitical, geo-­ecological, and technonatural transformation that affect Haiti are also prevalent everywhere. The destructive processes occurring across the region (and the world) are not only impacting Haiti, but are part of the making of unsustainable global economies, as much in the Global North as in the Caribbean. Haiti may in some ways “exemplify” one of the prime global locations for analyzing histories of (and resistances against) colonization and plantation slavery, military occupation and neoliberalism, tourism and offshoring, as well as today’s uneven im/mobilities associated with international “peacekeeping,” “humanitarianism,” and international research. Beyond that, though, it is a window upon a dynamic, contested, relational space in which Im/Mobile Disaster  ·  7

the Anthropocene is allegorically produced.26 Haiti is not unique or exceptional, therefore, but is rather a coalescence of deeply coursing currents of neoliberal economic exploitation, military domination, uneven development, and mobility injustice that are producing extreme inequality and environmental pressures around the world. Haiti embodies and allegorizes the coloniality of climate change and points toward what David Scott calls the “eco-­ poetics of catastrophe that constitute our Caribbean worlds” but in ways that also implicate and entangle many other people, places, and powers.27 Questions of mobility justice therefore remain crucial to many key issues facing Haiti today, from migration, deportation, diaspora, and borders to tourism, ecology, and land use planning, to communication infrastructure, digital access, and cultural circulation. Haiti has long been hemmed in by U.S. military power, and the United States has not been shy in using military force in the Caribbean when so disposed. The infrastructural systems and logistical rationalities of military power, built upon colonial legacies and imperial histories, thus shape all mobility regimes in the region. Civilian capabilities for movement, such as in tourism, migration, business, or offering humanitarian aid, all occur within this militarized neocolonial space, including the associated communications infrastructures of undersea cables, mobile phones, aerial visual technologies, and satellites. At different historical junctures in the forming of Caribbean relations, we must continue to ask: how has mobility been deployed as a form of colonization, exercised as a right of citizens, controlled as a privilege of elites, or contested from below for its exclusions? How does this politics of mobility relate to multiple dimensions of justice? And how might the struggle for mobility justice, including by those of us most responsible for global warming, help the Caribbean survive the Anthropocene? What kinds of solidarity might open other futures?

The Coloniality of Climate The Caribbean region faces extreme risks and existential threats in the early twenty-­first century. While there is a long history of immediate disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions that have devastated various places in the Caribbean, there is also a long history of “slow violence” or “slow disaster” that includes colonialism and genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery and plantation systems, exploitative terms of indenture and other abuses of labor, ecological destruction, and resource extraction.28 The racial geographies that linked white settler colonialism, 8  ·  Introduction

AT L A N T I C O C E A N BAHAMAS

Turks & Caicos (U.K.) CUBA Cayman Is. (UK) JAMAICA

HAITI

CARIBBEAN SEA

Sint Maarten/ Anguilla St Martin Virgin Is. Virgin Is. (U.K.) (Neth/Fr.) (U.S.) St Barts (Fr.) (U.K.) Puerto Rico ANTIGUA AND (U.S.) BARBUDA

Montserrat Saba (Neth.) (U.K.) DOMINICAN REPUBLIC St. Eustatius (Neth.) Guadeloupe ST KITTS & NEVIS (Fr.) DOMINICA Martinique (Fr.) ST LUCIA Aruba (Neth.)

CURAÇAO

Bonaire (Neth.)

ST VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES

BARBADOS

GRENADA TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

MAP I.1. The Caribbean: A colonial legacy of fragmented states.

black exclusion, and notions of tropical versus temperate climates also justified what Ikuko Asaka calls “black removal projects.”29 Thus there are deep, ongoing connections between nineteenth-­century projects of Black freedom as radical “reconstruction” — which W. E. B. Du Bois influentially theorized in Black Reconstruction in America as an all-­encompassing project of economic and political democratization — a nd questions of post­ disaster reconstruction today, which are increasingly carried out in the context of climate change. 30 Modern Caribbean spatialities were originally grounded in the political economy of the transatlantic plantation economy and a five-­century system of slavery in the Atlantic world. Struggles over emancipation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries restructured Caribbean geographies, polities, and ecologies, as did later movements for decolonization and independence in the twentieth century, leaving a highly fragmented patchwork of independent and nonindependent territories, often represented as a flattened archipelago of variegated sovereignties, as if these were each equal territorial objects (see map I.1). Today, these fragmented island archipelagos are stitched together by air travel and communication technologies, including undersea cables and Im/Mobile Disaster  ·  9

satellite orbits, with patterns of connection and disconnection that shape the fractal spaces and uneven mobilities of the region. While many people associate the Caribbean with tourism today, it is important to note that the mid to late twentieth century might also be thought of as the age of heavy industry in the Caribbean. There was extensive foreign investment in mining and refining bauxite; in building ports, military bases, and weapons testing ranges; as well as in massive installations for oil drilling and refining in many areas. 31 The Caribbean region became the world’s largest exporter of refined petroleum products, almost all of which went to the United States, from more than a dozen oil refineries built “offshore” by U.S. oil companies, as David Bond has instructively highlighted. 32 Such heavy industry remains in place, along with growing urbanization and “automobilization,” both associated with highway building and increasing energy use. In recent decades, the Caribbean has been further restructured by changing spatial divisions of labor and new capital flows, the expansion of mass tourism and air travel, the promotion of the high-­tech and service industries (such as “back-­office” call centers), and the emergence of new regulatory frameworks and development discourses associated with both postcolonial national independence and neoliberal global governance. 33 On one hand, there is an imagery of “borderless” mobilities associated with neoliberal financialization, the promotion of global tourism, and the influx of transnational capital and corporations into Caribbean free trade zones, tourist enclaves, and offshore financial centers. On the other, there are highly differentiated and controlled mobility regimes in the Caribbean, with a lack of visas, limited work permits, and expensive travel limiting the capabilities of many Caribbean people to move around. The high rates of labor migration within and outside the region, as well as historical patterns of unevenly skewed landholding, mercantile exploitation, and the influence of foreign capital, are all crucial in accounting for the contemporary patterns of spatial restructuring and “reconstruction” that are taking place today. Transformations in mobility regimes and the economic and political governance of “development” and “disaster” as continual “crises” have contributed to the rescaling and respatialization of Caribbean economies and territories in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. Climate change vulnerability, then, is a result both of coloniality in the past and of neocolonial restructuring today. I call this the coloniality of climate. Not only in Haiti, but across the Caribbean, the expansion of the global economy, extractive industries, and fossil-­f ueled capitalism are driving 10  ·  Introduction

structural adjustment and economic austerity policies that have been eroding regional standards of living for several decades. Jamaica’s built environment, for example, is being heavily reshaped by external investments in tourism, highway building, and bauxite mining, which further pressure the natural environment. 34 Elsewhere, in Antigua the Yida Zhang project includes plans for a tax-­f ree manufacturing hub, a steel and ceramic-­ tile factory, seafood harvesting, a shipping port, luxury homes and golf resorts, and the country’s first four-­lane highway to be built across two thousand acres within a pristine marine reserve. 35 Guyana, meanwhile, dreamed of becoming the latest petro-­state, with the prospect of one of the largest deep-­sea oil fields in the world bringing untold

gdp

growth,

at least until the oil market crashed in early 2020. Fragile ecologies must now sustain the onslaught of large-­scale foreign direct investment in infrastructure projects, industrial zones, logistics hubs, and real estate developments that are transforming built environments across the region. Contemporary climate change originates in and exacerbates these conditions, with recent hurricane seasons laying bare the underlying social, political, and economic vulnerability of many Caribbean islands, whose vulnerabilities were already formed by conditions of coloniality and neoliberal capitalism. The Mesoamerican and Caribbean region has been identified as one of the global climate change “hot spots,” one particularly sensitive to the effects of climate change. 36 Sea surface temperatures have been rising, leading to decreases in total rainfall across the region, alongside the intensification of the Atlantic Warm Pool which may accentuate tropical storm activity. When the El Niño – Southern Oscillation effect is added on top of that, as occurred in 2015, historic droughts led to water rationing in most large cities across the Caribbean and to sizable agricultural losses. 37 Climate change and other anthropogenic causes are contributing to distressed coral reefs, loss of seagrass beds, severe beach erosion, saltwater intrusion, and deforestation. According to a study in Nature, Kingston, Jamaica, is predicted to be one of the cities reaching the earliest “climate departure” point, between 2023 and 2028, when the average temperature of its coolest year is projected thereafter to be warmer than the average temperature of its hottest year from 1960 to ­2005. 38 The devastating impacts of Hurricane Matthew in Haiti in 2016, Hurricanes Irma and Maria across the northeastern Caribbean in 2017, and Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas in 2019, wiped out homes and farms, roads and bridges, ports and airports, electricity and communications infrastructure, and water, food, fuel, and medical provisioning systems. They Im/Mobile Disaster  ·  11

have also presented cascading effects of ongoing crisis, and revealed the political fault lines around response and recovery. For those outside the Caribbean region, these powerful hurricanes are not only urgent harbingers that “we” (everywhere) live already in a world of climate disaster and halting recovery, but also that we have made this world out of slow disasters and impossible futures (i.e., through colonial exploitation, resource extraction, fossil fuel consumption, and ecocide). The infrastructural collapse of Puerto Rico in the face of Hurricane Maria was shocking to many Americans because, like Hurricane Katrina before it, it exposed the hollowing out and the fragility of the local state, public utilities, and citizen protection. The communications system and the energy grid collapsed in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria in part due to orchestrated neglect in public investment and the withdrawal of resources for maintenance and upkeep due to the demands of debt. In the wake of this collapse a debate has emerged about rebuilding the traditional centralized and publicly owned grid with its fossil-­f uel powered plants, versus building new microgrids based on renewable energy, including solar and wind power, and supported by battery storage and distributed local systems. Elon Musk brought in hundreds of Tesla battery storage units to help build such a system, and fellow entrepreneur Richard Branson (whose home on the privately owned Necker Island in the

bv i

was affected by

the hurricanes) called on the World Bank to support a renewable energy “Marshall Plan for a greener, resilient Caribbean.”39 Yet such plans will fail in the absence of a recognition of the coloniality of climate change and a critique of the neoliberal assumptions and impositions of dominant recovery plans. The same goes for current calls among Democrats in the United States for a Green New Deal or a Green Marshall Plan: climate change adaptation cannot be achieved within the borders of a colonial, imperialist, nationalist, and racially exclusionary state. The destruction of 90 percent of the housing and the critical infrastructure of entire islands raises the question of responsibility, reparations, and climate justice for the affected places, since we know that the anthropogenic warming of the oceans has intensified hurricanes. In addition to the slow violence of deforestation, coral reef death, bauxite and gold mining, and coastal overdevelopment for tourism, and to the sudden violence of earthquakes and hurricanes, we might also add the ongoing violence of debt extraction, foreign military intervention, and the repeated effects of crises associated with ongoing neocoloniality, racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and structural adjustment policies. 40 The question, then, 12  ·  Introduction

is not just how should the Caribbean region “adapt” to climate change or strengthen its “resilience” to natural disasters, but how should major contributors to the historical coloniality of climate and ongoing catastrophe of ecocide — whether states in the Global North or multinational companies involved in fossil fuel extraction (such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and b p ) — pay for rebuilding, reparations, and restitution? What about the United States, one of the largest global emitters of greenhouse gases, extracting oil from the Caribbean, closing our gates to migrants, fueling the illegal and violent drugs trade, and engaging in military occupations and coups: What responsibility do we bear for more sustainable development and for climate justice in the Caribbean? And what are the implications of the rapid inroads of internationally financed development projects into the region, given their huge impact on fragile Caribbean island environments?41

Just Recovery The principles of just recovery offer an important moment to reflect on what we have learned over the last decade about the uneven processes of compounded disaster and faulty recovery in Haiti that may be applicable to other instances of Caribbean crisis — unsettling the coloniality embedded within how we think of crisis itself. Haiti, of course, stands out for having achieved independence and decolonization through the first successful national overthrow of slavery and colonialism during the Haitian Revolution. Other Caribbean territories experienced far more gradual parliamentary abolition without decolonization, and many remain nonindependent today. Haiti was a beacon of Black freedom in a sea of hostile, slavery-­promoting colonial powers. It was punished for its audacity by a fifty-­eight-­year embargo and the imposition of a regime of debt by the slave-­holding powers, becoming the template for “financial colonialism.”42 One can sense its isolation when standing on the mountaintop Citadel, built by King Henry Christophe in the Northern Kingdom of Haiti that he founded after the Revolution and where he eventually committed suicide rather than face defeat. Still filled with captured French and Spanish cannons from the eighteenth century and piles of cannonballs captured from defeated European forces, tourists (like myself) ride up to the fortress on donkeys led by local guides. But first we are awed by the first Haitian King’s palace, Sans Souci, which stands at the foot of the Citadel in beautiful ruin, with stately arched colonnades and sweeping views of green mountains and lush forest (figure I.1). 43 Where did the wealth of Haiti go? Im/Mobile Disaster  ·  13

FIGURE I.1.

The Sans Souci Palace, Milot, Haiti, 2016. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

Just recovery begins from a critical analysis of the structuring of debt within the global economy of racial capitalism. In 2004, Haiti’s bicentennial year, President Aristide presented a $22 billion bill for reparations to the French government, based on repayment of the 150-­million-­franc “indemnity” they had forced Haiti to pay in return for international recognition, which is calculated to have ultimately extracted $22 to $40 billion from the Haitian National Treasury. The first payment in 1825 involved a high-­interest loan of 24 million francs from French banks, and later installments involved loans from American banks; the indemnity was not paid off until 1893. Meanwhile, in 1862, Texas industrialists organized the American West India Company “to promote mining, land speculation, and the annexation of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic.” By the 1890s the treasury of Haiti was placed under the direct supervision of the French Société Générale and was later literally moved to vaults on Wall Street via the National City Bank (today’s Citibank). Their efforts to ensure collection of $500,000 from Haiti’s national bank led directly to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915, and Haitian debts to American banks were not paid off until 1947.44 More recently the loan mechanisms of the World Bank and 14  ·  Introduction

the International Monetary Fund would entrap Haiti in endless cycles of borrowing and debt payment. Indeed, Sylvia Wynter has argued that this was as much a profoundly metaphysical debt as an financial one; the slave-­holding powers would make the revolutionary Black Republic pay indefinitely an ever-­g rowing debt, until the end of time, creating what Demetrius Eudell calls the Alpha and Omega of revolution and underdevelopment as a perpetual state, against the myth of “development” as a reachable goal within Western-­ dominated global systems. 45 This realization is linked to the demand for the European Union to pay reparations for slavery and write off unsustainable and unfair debts, as has been advanced by the fifteen member states and five associate members of the Caribbean Community (c a r i c o m ) for some time. In the face of the recent devastating hurricanes, Caribbean governments have also begun to make a case for linking European reparations for slavery with climate reparations owed to the region by the Global North. In the aftermath of the hurricanes in Puerto Rico, there has been renewed debate about the threat of “disaster capitalism” and the need for a “just recovery.” Elizabeth Yeampierre, cochair of the Climate Justice Alliance, and bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein describe the politics of just recovery: Under the banner of a “just recovery” for Puerto Rico, thousands have come together to design a bold and holistic plan for the island to be rebuilt as a beacon for a safe, resilient, and thriving society in the era of accelerating climate chaos, spiraling economic inequality, and rising white nationalism. From the earliest days of this emergency and despite enormous communication and logistical challenges, Puerto Ricans in the diaspora have worked with partners on the island to sketch out the core principles and policies of the plan [for a just recovery]. The work is rooted in the belief that the underlying reason behind all of Puerto Rico’s intersecting crises is the fact that the island’s people and land have been treated like a bottomless raw resource for the mainland to mine for over a century, never mind the devastating economic consequences. 46 More specifically, those advocating just recovery, like Resilient Power Puerto Rico, also call for renewable energy microgrids as part of a just energy transition away from fossil fuel dependence. “A just transition would replace that extractive model with a system based on micro-­g rids Im/Mobile Disaster  ·  15

of renewable energy generation, a decentralized network that would be more resilient in the face of inevitable weather shocks, while reducing the pollution making our climate go haywire in the first place.” Advocates of a justice-­based recovery therefore call for replacing “these extractive strategies with relationships based on principles of reciprocity and regeneration”: whenever possible, aid money should go directly to Puerto Rican organizations and communities because it’s not only bankers and shipping companies that extract wealth from poor communities. So, too, can well-­meaning aid organizations, which have transformed far too many disaster zones into playgrounds for the non-­profit industrial complex. It’s a process that siphons vast sums of money into overhead, hotels, and translators; drives up local prices; and casts affected populations as passive supplicants rather than participants in their own recovery. For a just recovery to be possible, this story cannot be allowed to repeat. 47 These are the same problems that plagued post-­earthquake Haiti, as shown for example in Mark Schuller’s analysis of the problems of the n g o system. 48 Sudden disasters such as earthquakes or hurricanes concentrate international attention on immediate processes of recovery and rebuilding rather than on more deeply rooted radical visions of reconstruction. Media attention usually lingers for about a year — long enough to notice the postearthquake death and despair of a cholera epidemic in Haiti (inadvertently introduced by u n peacekeepers from Nepal) — but attention had already waned by the time of the impact of Hurricane Matthew in October 2016. As Westenley Alcenat points out, Hurricane Matthew was the region’s most dangerous Category 4 storm in nearly a decade, killed at least 900 people, destroyed livestock, and wreaked havoc on farmers’ crops. The storm flooded rivers, leveled bridges, and in some towns, 80 to 90 percent of homes were destroyed. In the hurricane-­ravaged south, 500,000 people were stranded and 30,000 homes have been destroyed.

un

officials reported some 800,000

people are facing food insecurity, including 315,000 children. 49 Alcenat describes the storm’s impact as “the cumulative effect of five hundred years of environmental degradation before and after French colonialism. Haitians know — even if the rest of the world forgets — t hat ev-

16  ·  Introduction

ery rainy season brings a potential humanitarian crisis.”50 The everyday drumming of raindrops, the slow rising of the seas, and the slow drip of environmental degradation seldom garner the sustained attention of the global media or the clamor for humanitarian rescue. Why then does the story repeat and how can it be stopped? How can we tell (and in doing so help bring into being) a different story about the Caribbean future by connecting with alternative narratives that arise from those contesting the future from within the region? I believe that this approach to just recovery requires a deeper analysis of the constellations of what I will describe in this book as kinopolitical power, which I will analyze in the chapters that follow in terms of water power, aerial power, digital power, bordering power, and sexual power. This kind of analysis calls for a more intersectional vision of the relational spatialities and syncopated temporalities involved in producing Caribbean vulnerabilities and uneven mobilities, within the wider contexts of global mobility injustice. How do the disjunctures in mobilities and uneven capabilities that we see in postdisaster situations exacerbate and intensify (while also revealing) the underlying dynamics of the coloniality of climate?

Carceral Archipelagos and Im/Mobilities Islands may appear to be contained spaces par excellence, bounded by water on all sides; yet at the same time islanders dwell thanks to many different kinds of coming and going, pausing and waiting, producing a choreography of uneven spatialities and temporalities. 51 Archipelagos, suggests Philip Vannini, “are inventions whose validity and usefulness is contingent on the dynamics of their formations and the particulars of their contexts. Archipelagos, in other words, are not essential properties of space but instead are fluid cultural processes dependent on changing conditions of articulation or connection.”52 We need, therefore, to recognize the changing im/mobilities and infrastructures that connect across islands, as well as divide them, to form uneven transnational spaces. A thorough account of the im/mobilities accompanying the earthquake in Haiti must be placed in the context of the well-­established view of the Caribbean as a historically mobile region that is constantly in flux. 53 Yet it is also a place of many immobilities: enslavement, indenture, the plantation, penal colonies, incarceration, detention, military bases, and camps. What would happen if we paid greater attention to the uneven im/mobilities and power differentials

Im/Mobile Disaster  ·  17

by which islands, colonies, and camps are formed and what if we tried to self-­consciously structure (or deconstruct) their articulations and connections more thoughtfully? When I refer to im/mobilities I mean the intertwined coproduction of mobility for some and immobility for others, as well as the ways in which disempowered groups also experience forced displacements, evictions, deportations, and expulsions. I highlight mobility in/justice in postdisaster situations to focus our attention on who has the capability to exercise rights to mobility and dwelling and who, by contrast, is not capable of the self-­determination of when, where, and how they will move or stay in place. 54 Beyond simple binaries of mobility and immobility, the Caribbean has instead been theorized as a complex space of subterranean flows, of tidalectics, rhizomes, and diaspora existing all over the world. It has also always been a place of subversive mobilities, from Maroons and pirates to undocumented migrants and drug smugglers. What are the contemporary conditions of transnational connection across these scattered relational archipelagos, and how might Caribbean archipelagic thinking contribute to what Yanique Hume and Aaron Kamugisha call “radical anti-­colonial praxis”?55 Caribbean islands have long served as a pivotal space in the overlapping geographies of plantations, military bases, and tourism developments, becoming places for “offshoring” many things with different rhythms of movement. 56 Binary concepts such as local/global, center/margins, developed/ developing, and North/South were never a good fit for the developmental diversity and spatial complexity of the Caribbean region, and are even less so today. 57 The Caribbean remains a crucial global site for multiple complex transnational processes including cross-­border flows of tourists, migrants, diasporas, refugees, remittances, laundered money, smuggled goods, drug and gun trafficking, and sometimes violence and political unrest, not to mention viruses. The new mobilities paradigm — which concerns not only physical movement, but also potential movement, blocked or paused movement, immobilization, and forms of stillness, dwelling, and place-­making — can offer a new approach to thinking about Caribbean development and Haitian postdisaster recovery in relation to these wider transnational mobility systems. 58 I will focus on islanding as an active verb and a performative imaginary. I seek to rethink the geographies of the Caribbean through the interplay of land, air, and sea space, and the infrastructural spaces for im/mobilities that shape human inhabitation, dwelling, and movement in these islands. 18  ·  Introduction

The active concept of islanding (along with offshoring) delineates how mobile spatial processes fold and refold local places into complex uneven infrastructures of both local and global mobility, while often excluding local populations (and even governments) from control over their own territories and access to so-­called global spaces. By focusing on questions of neocolonial development, the governance of im/mobilities, and the spatial inequalities that corrode postearthquake Haiti, I seek to show how the production of crisis there is part of an islanding effect that circumscribes the mobility, accessibility, and future possibilities of Haitian people. The same Caribbean islands often “host” military bases, weapons testing ranges, or migrant detention facilities, as well as plans for, or realities of, gated hotels and residential developments, tourist resorts and privatized beaches, and nature preserves or protected marine areas with limited access. 59 These detached zones operate as what Keller Easterling calls “realms of exemption,” with transient populations, temporary status, and impermanent installations. Island archipelagos enable such “extrastate infrastructure space” to persist, to expand, to mutate, and to metastasize. 60 Ann Stoler extends Foucault’s idea of the “carceral archipelago” to examine the ongoing colonial present and the relation between the colony and the camp. 61 She follows Derek Gregory in tracing a direct line of descent from the internment camps of the Spanish in Cuba in 1898 to the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay as “states of exception.”62 Building on this idea of the use of islands as carceral spaces (such as prisons, plantations, and detention camps), we can see how Haiti has especially suffered from an imposed isolation and the expulsion from the international community, producing a state of exception that left it vulnerable to extrastate projects. We can think of Haiti after the 2010 earthquake as another kind of carceral space, in which most victims were unable to move away from the disaster zone but were instead trapped in

idp

camps, as these places of

physical and spiritual incarceration are euphemistically called, managed by foreign logistical teams of a wide range of extrastate agencies, from nongovernmental organizations and missionaries to Hollywood stars and foreign military forces. Haiti suffers from the imposition of international mobility regimes controlled by foreign military powers — as well as exploited by local elites — leading to limited mobility for the majority and highly controlled migration regimes that cause deaths of refugees at sea. Haiti is also subjected to the recent denationalization and expulsions of people of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic and the precarious status of Haitian migrants in the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos, BraIm/Mobile Disaster  ·  19

zil, and the United States — which notoriously tried to intercept and block Haitian migrants before they touched shore, the so-­called wet-­foot/dry-­ foot policy that began in the 1990s; and more recently has removed Temporary Protected Status (t p s ) from Haitians who sought to move to the United States after the earthquake. Since the time of the transatlantic system of slavery and the plantation complex, Caribbean islands have been lifted out of their local contexts and connected to the infrastructural scapes (both transportational and communicational) of mobile, colonial elites and mobile, colonial capital. Caribbean space is sutured into metropolitan space such that we should not think of these islands as a separate geographical region composed of contained nation-­states and foreign-­flagged territories confined to single islands. If the Caribbean is an archipelagic formation, it is one that extends both geographically and temporally across the extended urban zones of the entire Atlantic, and increasingly the Pacific, worlds. With Michelle Stephens and Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel, we can conceive of the archipelagic “as a set of relations that articulates cultural and political formations (collectivities, communities, societies), modes of interpreting and inhabiting the world (epistemologies), as well as symbolic imaginaries (as a poetic but also as habitus).”63 Haiti, then, is not exceptional but one piece of this fractal puzzle, spiraling out into wider processes that ripple across the entire Caribbean and into the transatlantic and transpacific worlds, where various kinds of mobilities, immobilities, offshores, and carceral archipelagos meet and coconstitute one another. A number of Caribbean islands specialize in the high-­speed financial mobilities associated with “offshore economies” —  tax havens, free trade zones, export-­processing zones, flags of convenience, internet business, shell banks — t hat can be viewed as part of a larger process of what Ronen Palan has called the “radical redrawing of state sovereignty” through new “state fictions.” They form part of the “offshore economy” that “consists of largely unregulated legal spaces, external to but nevertheless supported by the state system.”64 Like islanding, “offshoring” is a process that reproduces inequalities and materializes power in the spatial form of secrecy islands as states of exception, outside the law and lacking in transparency. In some ways, the situation in Haiti can also be understood as an offshoring of disaster — keeping it at arm’s length and safely enclosed. And this particular offshore is closely related to U.S. immigration policy and the offshoring of migrant interception and detention facilities, which continue to curtail access to the United States for racial20  ·  Introduction

ized Caribbean (and Central American) migrants, as well as visitors, tourists, temporary workers, and even naturalized citizens. Moreover, environmental impacts, pollution, waste, and associated ideas of contamination overspill these regional boundaries, seeping across seemingly distant places. As Rivke Jaffe argues in her study of urban pollution in the Caribbean, “the material and social production of urban pollution cannot be seen outside of histories of colonialism and institutionalized racism. Caribbean islands and cities are landscapes that contain traces of the region’s long colonial era,” traces that are today constantly being reworked. 65 My own city of Philadelphia was involved in an infamous pollution incident when it was discovered that a “cargo ship chartered in the United States has dumped about 4,000 tons of garbage from Philadelphia on a Haitian beach, according to Haitian Government officials.” The waste, containing incinerator ash with high levels of dioxin, was dumped in Gonaïves after members of the military government reportedly made “a deal to accept the trash in return for money.”66 Offshoring, corruption, and pollution end in toxic dumps, and often result in land grabs, expulsions, and the displacement of the poor. 67 Equipped with the spatial imaginaries of im/mobilities, islanding, offshoring, and carceral archipelagos we might begin to ask: How do these crosscutting waves of movement and deflection affect one another? How does foreign access relate to limiting local mobility? How does stopping an illegal flow in one place lead to it surfacing somewhere else? In what ways are various mobilities supported or enabled by moorings of various kinds, and how are those moorings or infrastructures also in motion, always being remade? What role do states play in regulating such rights to move or to remain still, as against the extraterritorial powers above or beyond the sovereignty of the individual state? And how do countergeographies arise within the infraterritorial and interstitial powers within the dark economies, offshores, and undergrounds of islanded space? These are some of the questions that have emerged out of my decade of reflection on postearthquake Haiti, including my own non-­innocent role in these processes as a visiting researcher, a tourist, and a conference goer, but always also a producer of toxic waste, greenhouse gases, and fossil fuel pollution, not to mention a beneficiary of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. The mobilities of both humanitarian and academic travel are always implicated in unequal power relations and forms of consumption that affect the outcomes of postdisaster reconstruction and climate adaptation, as well as the unequal production of knowledge. Im/Mobile Disaster  ·  21

Yet I also remain hopeful that islanding and offshoring can be appropriated as part of positive counterpractices of collective self-­protection and recovery, through processes of resistance, indigenization, and liberatory cultural practices sometimes referred to as marronage. Crucially, Haiti is “a talismanic site for Caribbean thought and criticism,” as Caribbean cultural theorists Yanique Hume and Aaron Kamugisha put it, “instrumental to the thought of African diaspora intellectuals” from Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to Alejo Carpentier, C. L. R. James, and Sylvia Wynter. Thus, they argue, “every historical-­cultural movement and political conundrum in the wider region since [the Haitian Revolution] —  neocolonialism, black consciousness, and debt burden and the cultural response to American imperialism — first announced itself there.”68 From Haiti, many thinkers have sought to interrogate the problems of self-­ determination, of local and regional cultural survival, and of how to create and sustain an “independent, non-­alienated subjectivity” that “permits one to stand in certitude against the effects of domination.”69 Through such counterpresences, Caribbean culture-­building has been “instrumental for humanizing the hostile terrain which the once displaced are forced to inhabit.”70

Methodological Reflections Caribbean studies and postcolonial theory have long highlighted the “cartographies of power” at multiple scales that inform all kinds of movement and dwelling.71 Mobilities research draws on traditions in Caribbean studies, which has theorized space from the perspective of a mobile, diasporic region shaped by nonlinear and “rhizomatic” growth, “tidalectic” processes, and fractal geographies.72 These Caribbean experiences and perspectives were crucial to the making of the modern world as “global” and “mobile” in the first place. Not only is the Caribbean central to the making of uneven mobilities, it is central too in the struggle for mobility justice and in the theory and praxis of a politics of mobility. Unlike U.S. studies of Haiti that treat it as a place apart, an unfortunate exception and outlier, as already noted, Caribbean critical theory suggests the need for new narratives of Haiti that can break it out of its “epistemological ambivalence.”73 But I also seek to show my own implication in these narratives: transnational relations — etched into bodies through divergences of race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality — connect me to the Caribbean, to Haiti, and to the island of “Hispaniola” in overdetermined ways. 22  ·  Introduction

In order to get at some of these issues I focus my attention on the unfolding of a moment of disruption, when infrastructures were being remade and mobility regimes were especially apparent: the remaking of space in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake of 2010. Empirically I draw on my involvement in two National Science Foundation – f unded research projects, one in postearthquake Haiti (2010 – 2011), and one in the Dominican Republic and Haiti (2012 – 2013).74 The first related to local community participation in planning water and sanitation infrastructure around Léogâne after the 2010 earthquake; and the second concerned the impacts of climate change on two lakes on the Haitian-­Dominican border, Lake Azuei in Haiti and Lake Enriquillo in the Dominican Republic, the latter being the largest and lowest lying lake in the Greater Antilles. However, this is not a report on the empirical findings of those two studies, which have been reported elsewhere along with my many collaborators in those projects.75 I thank those collaborators, the National Science Foundation, and all the people who contributed to our research for making this book possible. Instead this analysis builds on my previous work on Caribbean mobilities, tourism, infrastructure, and offshoring to think through everything that is left out of mainstream nationally funded applied research after natural disasters, and usually left out of processes of reconstruction.76 My approach is unusual in bringing together cultural geographies of globalization, tourism, development, media and communication, climate change, and disaster recovery within a single framework informed by the interdisciplinary fields of Caribbean studies and mobilities research, which I have been involved in forming over the last decade.77 More specifically, the chapters of this book seek to answer the following questions: How did the postearthquake response in Haiti, as well as wider processes of responding to climate change (including deforestation, drought, and loss of fisheries, mangroves forests, coral reefs, and soil) reflect broader Caribbean processes of coloniality, differential mobilities, uneven infrastructuring, and what I call “the islanding effect?” Beyond that, are there any countergeographies, countermobilities, or alternative ontologies that resist or disrupt such mobility regimes and challenge the genocidal and ecocidal systems on which they are built? And what is the role of academic research as a mobile social practice in either reproducing or disrupting these processes? These questions grow out of a kind of reflexive meta-­analysis of the geographies of im/mobilities and relationality that these research trips entailed and revealed. I consider this to be a reflexive mobile method in which reflection on my own research teams’ im/mobilities and dis/connectivity at mulIm/Mobile Disaster  ·  23

tiple scales can instigate critical analysis of the operation of global mobility regimes and the remaking of uneven capabilities for motility.78 Extensive critiques of the humanitarian project in Haiti have already been published. The role of ngos in postearthquake Haiti has been particularly problematic, often described as compounding the disaster.79 Various commentators have also suggested that philanthropic, nongovernmental, humanitarian aid organizations are “least of all accountable to the locale within which they operate,” and their proliferation after disasters solidifies a neoliberal “shift towards the nonstate sector.”80 Only by making powerful groups and organizations more vulnerable and demanding their non-­intervention can places like Haiti implement reconstruction efforts that are “guided by an ethos of historical restitution, wealth distribution, and regional cooperation, rather than financial colonialism and market-­based development.”81 The emergence of community-­based disaster risk management (c bdr m ) and its participatory work with stakeholders might appear to be one aspect of this shift. However, Kevin J. Grove has offered a powerful rebuke of neoliberal forms of disaster management in Jamaica that mobilize “participation” as a new assemblage of power relations. His studies of disaster resilience in Jamaica show how participatory and mitigation techniques were deterritorialized from marginalized experiences of disaster and reterritorialized into mitigation policies through the confluence of local disaster events and the global emergence of sustainable development and resilience theory. Rather than offering new forms of empowerment and security from unpredictable change, institutionalized disaster mitigation articulates disaster preparedness with sustainability’s calculative foresight and resilience theory’s visions of life as an emergent socioecological system to extend logistical orderings of life to the everyday socioecological metabolisms that make up daily existence. 82 What this means, in other words, is that politics and power are involved not only in the exposure of people to hazards and the social creation of vulnerability but also in the cultures of disaster mitigation, preparedness, and safety associated with hazard risk reduction and resilience. The making of new assemblages of “logistical life,” in part through a militarization of disaster mitigation, is “now a product of participatory approaches that alter everyday activities of each member of the population to immunize socioecological systems against radical adaptive capacity” — thus blocking more radical change. 83 24  ·  Introduction

“The challenge for radical disaster research,” according to Grove, the challenge to which I hope to contribute, “is to unearth and mobilize subjugated knowledges of catastrophe and adaptation silenced by unreflexive participatory initiatives that sustain rather than change unjust socioecological systems.”84 I will focus here on disaster reconstruction discourses, rather than disaster mitigation, although both are tied up with notions of “resilience.” Mainstream narratives of postdisaster reconstructions often take a short-­term perspective, focusing on immediate needs. There is an emphasis on “resilience” in the aftermath of natural disasters (bouncing back to a prior state of functionality) or on assessments of the successes or failures of the responses by local politicians or national leaders, while later there may be critiques of the shortcomings in distribution of aid by humanitarian organizations. But what if we were to further push the notion of “reconstruction” toward a more historically grounded decolonial vision? What if we could use these moments of postdisaster reconstruction to take up the broader project of reconstructing the basis of the global economy and of racial capitalism itself? What would such a decolonial reconstruction look like? There has been a recent turn in the discipline of sociology toward reclaiming a global and transnational perspective grounded in the pioneering work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Such a “Du Boisian” sociology “thinks from the margins of the postcolonial world and puts the understanding of racialization and colonial exclusions at the center of the sociological enterprise.”85 Throughout his work, Du Bois spoke of the worldwide importance of the ending of American slavery, and he went on to work within a pan-­A frican perspective. Indeed, it is not well known that Du Bois’s father was from Haiti, that Du Bois played an important role in the First Pan-­ African Conference organized by West Indian leaders in London in 1900, and that he called for self-­government in Africa and the West Indies and opposed the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Although he is currently being reclaimed as an “American” sociologist, and the first “African ­A merican” sociologist, he was a far more cosmopolitan figure and had an internationalist view of the world economy and of the place of “black folk” in it. So, it is especially fitting to expand the scope of a Du Boisian sociology of “Black Reconstruction in America” to the question of radical Caribbean Reconstruction today. In his study The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology, the sociologist Aldon Morris describes Du Bois’s exclusion from white institutions and from access to funding and the ways in which Im/Mobile Disaster  ·  25

he had to build his own scientific school at Atlanta University (which was ignored and overshadowed by the “Chicago School,” known today as the “founding fathers” of sociology despite Du Bois’s having preceded them and even having influenced the work of Max Weber). Morris argues that, in order to sustain his intellectual enterprise, Du Bois “developed counterhegemonic networks and a counterhegemonic form of capital that have not been identified or analyzed in the literature.”86 Du Bois drew on “liberation capital,” which Morris defines as “a form of capital used by oppressed and resource-­starved scholars to initiate and sustain the research program of a nonhegemonic scientific school.” This is achieved by building “an insurgent intellectual network” which consists of “subaltern intellectuals who — because of empire, race, class, and/or gender discrimination — are denied access to elite intellectual networks.”87 Today there are also insurgent intellectual networks questioning reconstruction in relation to coloniality, climate justice, and the ethics of resilience. Kevon Rhiney, for one, criticizes “the ways in which recovery efforts are being used as strategies for the accumulation of new forms of global capital through dispossession increasingly premised around notions of resilience.”88 In the face of natural disasters and postdisaster reconstruction, there are many dominant institutions that kick in with efforts at “disaster recovery,” “building back better,” and various damage assessments, rebuilding plans, and funding streams. However, the aftermath of these natural disasters (and of climate change more broadly) reveals the contours of a deeper struggle for reconstruction, one that gets at not just the immediate crisis but at the deeper questions of economic security and reconstructing democracy and racial capitalism that Du Bois raised. Today these questions are being raised by insurgent intellectual networks both within and outside the academy, who build on the liberation capital of volunteers, amateurs, activism, and analysis by oppressed groups. “It consists of volunteer or nominally paid labors in research and other scholarly activities that are provided by a self-­conscious group of professionals and amateur intellectual workers for a subaltern school of thought that seeks to challenge the intellectual foundations of oppression.”89 In both Haiti and Puerto Rico, and throughout the Caribbean, critical intellectuals have argued against government-­imposed recovery processes and in favor of more democratic citizen-­led initiatives. In Haiti, Schuller and Hsu call for a climate justice perspective to expand the debate about climate change beyond simply adaptation, and toward more equitable decision making in emergency situations such as these. In Puerto Rico, Cruz-­ 26  ·  Introduction

Martinez and collaborators argue, “Given that the future Puerto Rico envisioned in the revised fiscal plan proposes further austerity measures, privatisations, stagnation, liberalisation and flexibilization of the labour market . . . we must ask ourselves, what type of significant social change would these post-­disaster policies bring to residents? Moreover, how are alternative, citizen-­led initiatives dynamically responding to these long terms and emergent scenarios?”90 Yarimar Bonilla, too, warns of the dangers of embracing an experimental use of Puerto Rican territory as a laboratory for untried speculation by outside entrepreneurs, echoing the island’s use in the past for social and medical testing.91 These decolonial political frames can help us to expand the questions of postdisaster reconstruction beyond the recovery of capital investment and the “opportunities” for new investment emphasized in the mainstream reconstruction and humanitarian complex. It begins to formulate the question of not just how should we “bounce back” from disaster and “adapt” to climate change, but more radically who should decide what is done and the very scope of the issues up for discussion: What is the temporality of the disaster under discussion? Is it five hundred years or last year? How should major contributors to global warming pay for rebuilding, reparations, and restitution? What forms of deliberation, participation, procedural processes, and capabilities are necessary to make these determinations? Should restorative justice be linked to the c a r i c o m demand for the European Union to pay reparations for slavery? What about the United States, one of the largest global emitters of greenhouse gases: What responsibility does the United States, or specific oil companies, bear for funding recovery and more sustainable development in the Caribbean? And finally, what forms of epistemic justice are needed to recognize the work of insurgent intellectual networks and support them transnationally? Theoretically, this consideration of Caribbean futures draws on the long tradition of Caribbean studies of coloniality and mobility (theorized in terms of diaspora, archipelagos, relationality, rhizomes, tidalectics, etc.). The field of Caribbean studies, along with writers, theorists, and artists from the region, has produced a body of work foundational to understanding globalization as a historically situated process unfolding over five hundred years, and generative of complex local negotiations, deflections, and rebounds.92 In the chapters that follow I will use the crisis of rebuilding after the Haitian earthquake of 2010 to call into question our ideas of reconstruction, resilience, and development. I seek to trace the dominant mobility regimes that reinforce what I call the “islanding effect,” Im/Mobile Disaster  ·  27

but I will also seek out the moments of countermobility against coloniality. In tracing the coloniality of climate vulnerability I will seek to identify the visions of “alternative development” and Caribbean “reconstruction” that drive other forms of island futurity, as well as the forms of transnational solidarity that might support such alternatives and open other futures. s on g f o r l e g b a

Papa Legba, ouvri barye-­a Ouvri barye-­a pou mwen pase la Papa Legba, ouvri barye-­a Papa Legba, open the gate Open the gate to let me pass Papa Legba, open the gate

28  ·  Introduction

1

KINOPOLITICAL POWER

Haiti’s postearthquake mobility systems — i ncluding cratered, rubble-­ strewn roads and patched-­up runways, radio transmitters and satellite dishes, airport terminals and docks, oil pipelines and internet connections, motorcycles and Tap-­Tap buses, shipping containers and cellphones —  together allowed those with various degrees of power to perform ongoing rearrangements of place and scale as they were enrolled into making and breaking connections between people and places. This chapter examines how the analysis of postdisaster mobility systems can contribute to our understanding of the devastation and attempted reconstruction of Haiti in 2010 as well as to building a critical perspective on the continuing problems of coloniality, slow violence, and what I call kinopolitical struggle. This theoretical lens allows us to ask how disasters reshape mobility systems, which is also an important question with respect to slower moving processes related to the impacts of, and adaptation to, climate change and natural disaster vulnerability throughout the Caribbean and in other regions sometimes characterized as Small Island Developing States (s i d s ) worldwide.1 Indeed, one of the insights to arise out of this work is that although earthquakes, hurricanes, and viral pandemics have very different disaster profiles, their human impacts are each in their own way outcomes of the same systems of coloniality, racial capitalism, and ecological extractivism; and the corollary to this is that the processes of recovery and reconstruction in each case requires many of the same tools. The very same rhetorical moves by which some international disaster recovery actors claim to connect postearthquake Haiti and the posthurricane Caribbean into repaired mobility and communication infrastructures simultaneously produce the differentiated subjectivities, uneven spatialities, and unequal distributions of network capital that decrease Caribbean freedom of movement. Complex processes of interaction between

classed, raced, gendered, and national rhetorics of freedom of mobility, anxieties over security, and national border protection shape the physical and psychic materializations of island infrastructures and their relation to “mainlands.” Reconstruction after disasters, therefore, is embroiled in the uneven distribution of network capital, reproducing inequalities in the motility of differently located subjects, and it is built upon existing unequal mobility regimes. This implies that we cannot study postearthquake reconstruction processes simply by looking only “inside” Haiti. It is crucial to locate reconstruction within the transnational kinopolitical power relations that inform who and what can move, which powers determine those im/mobilities, and how regimes of mobility create uneven terrains of differential potential for mobility, reconstruction, and recovery. Transnational anthropology as well as mobilities research have for some time critiqued “methodological nationalism” in which there is an “assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world.”2 The anthropologist George Marcus began calls for “multi-­sited ethnography” in the 1990s to track the transnational processes of globalization that set in motion not only neoliberal capitalism, but also set groups of people “on the move.” Around the same time the geographer Doreen Massey called attention to the “power geometries” of differential mobilities. Arguing that control over mobility and immobility reflect and reinforce power, she insisted that “we must examine not only what flows into and across space, but who controls the production, content, and directionality of these flows.”3 In her book For Space, she proposes understanding space as constituted through interaction, as a sphere of multiplicity and heterogeneity, and as always in the process of being made. Space, she argued, is “an open and ongoing production.”4 Mobilities research went on to develop such approaches and mobile methods, highlighting how transnational mobilities were governed by and performed within highly unequal mobility regimes. Nina Glick Schiller and Noel Salazar theorized “regimes of mobility” to describe “the relationships between the privileged movements of some and the codependent but stigmatized and forbidden movement, migration, and interconnection between the poor, powerless, and exploited.”5 The privileged movement of humanitarian actors, international

ng o

staff, aid agencies, and academic researchers in the postearthquake situation in Haiti needs to be located within the broader kinopolitical relations of Caribbean im/mobilities understood as part of such a regime of mobility. While the potential for movement and the capacity for movement are being increased for foreigners who wish to enter the Caribbean as tourists, 30  ·  c h a p t e r

one

time-­share owners, or homeowners (as well as for external capital mobility and financial flows), both the potential and the capacity for movement are arguably being decreased for those Caribbean nationals who wish to move freely within the region, and beyond it, as borders are violently closed and walled off. Even within Caribbean nation-­states and cities, spatial structures and infrastructures are controlled by elites, foreigners, and, in Haiti, military occupiers. There is no “right to the city” in cities like Port-­au-­Prince — only an illicit occupation of its marginal spaces by shanty-­dwellers, the perennial claim to informal commercial space along every street and sidewalk by entrepreneurial market women and freelance transport services, and insurgent occupations of its public spaces during frequent political demonstrations. 6 An excellent analysis of such kinopolitical relations can be found in the anthropologist Jennifer Shoaff’s recent study of Haitian migrant women in the Dominican Republic. Shoaff’s closely grounded ethnography of Haitian migrant women living at a former sugar plantation labor camp, known as Batey Sol, on the outskirts of the Cibao valley, shows “the ways in which an array of bordering practices mapped processes of mobility and containment for those differently positioned within Dominican hierarchies of race, class, and gender.”7 In tracing the “transgressive potential of mobility for black women” as well as “the state practices of containment, control and regulation of public and mobile women” within this “dialectic of mobility and containment,” Shoaff encourages us to ask: “How does it feel to be settled in a place — to call a place ‘home’ — while being denied the rights, entitlements, and protections that belonging guarantees by law, but not in practice?” She shows how Haitian women in Batey Sol “contend with, negotiate and contest the regimes of mobility enacted across borders within borders to limit, constrain, contain, entrap, and discipline them in their daily lives.”8 The concept of “borders within borders” describes the multiple overlapping sociospatial contexts and sites of power that constrain migrant women’s mobilities, including border crossings, customhouses, military checkpoints, and actions such as mass community raids, arrests, and deportations; but it also includes the small-­scale surveillance of everyday public spaces, denial of access to social and state services or to employment opportunities, and the “daily, insidious, and cumulative experiences of harassment, hostility, neglect, and denigration that constitute the quotidian ‘intimacies’ of racism, classism, and sexism.”9 Within such contexts Dominican and Haitian women experience crossing the national border (and other micro-­borders) in very different ways: Kinopolitical Power  ·  31

Pervasive symbolic inspection sites — beginning at the level of the racially marked body (skin color, dress, language) — often violently collide with an array of official and unofficial inspection stations (customhouses, border crossings, military checkpoints, public transportation, places of residence) to construct multiple geographies of power, which Haitian women must contend with both as they move and as they stay in place.10 It is precisely these kinds of geographies of power and regimes of mobility that must be brought to the foreground in analyzing the relational im/mobilities of the postearthquake reconstruction process in Haiti after 2010, as well as the recurring posthurricane reconstruction processes of the Caribbean in recent years, and now the growing impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on regional mobilities ranging from tourism to migration. For it is the reproduction (or disruption) of these power geometries with their unequal regimes of im/mobility that will shape recovery, reconstruction, and climate survival in the future.

Im/Mobility Systems Natural disasters demobilize and remobilize. They strike at mobility systems but also engender their own unique mobilities (and immobilities) as people seek to flee the onset of an impending catastrophe, to resituate themselves in its bewildering aftermath, or to locate their dispersed families, food, water, and shelter. At the same time, emergency responders, relief workers, and armed peacekeepers and soldiers begin to move into the affected area and take control of infrastructures of mobility such as roads, airports, ports, and communication networks. Given the already splintered provision of infrastructure in Caribbean cities, and pervasive informal economies of infrastructuring and dwelling, collapsing mobility systems are likely to have very different effects on the wealthy and the poor, on urban and rural populations, and on elites and subaltern groups. Those with high network capital can appropriate their own potential for mobility, whether to flee disaster or to come to the rescue; those with low network capital are usually caught in a vortex of displacement, temporary shelter, slow violence and containment within the disaster zone. This is one of the legacies of coloniality, even in a revolutionary republic that long since overthrew colonial government: mobility infrastructure persists in structuring unequal urban form and uneven spatial relations. 32  ·  c h a p t e r

one

The complex character of mobility systems at the macro level stems from the multiple fixities or moorings often on a substantial physical scale that enable other things to be fluid; and such systems are culturally shaped and politically governed by mobility regimes.11 We can refer to these systems as affording different degrees of motility, a crucial dimension of unequal power relations across differently positioned individuals, cities, regions, or nations. Motility can be defined as “the manner in which an individual or group appropriates the field of possibilities relative to movement and uses them,” according to Vincent Kaufmann and Bertrand Montulet.12 Who is able to appropriate the potential for mobility is both a political question (what rights to mobility exist in a particular context, and how are they exercised and protected) and an ethical question (what capabilities of mobility are valued, defended, and extended to all involved).13 The mass of the Haitian population clearly exercises lower motility than the Haitian elite, or than foreigners who visit the country, because they have very limited access to a field of possible movement — or to the equally relevant capability to reside in place. Yet the poor, racialized, and marginalized majority are not immobile, because they also embody a powerful informal occupation of the mobility-­space of the streets, which are full of life and activity at every moment; because tens of thousands cross the international border with the Dominican Republic to trade on a weekly basis; and because many others live abroad or reach for the diaspora and maintain transnational connections. Yet these subaltern mobilities occur within highly constrained circumstances — subject to policing, violence, bordering, and insecurity — which are connected to the racialized coloniality of contemporary global capitalism. Neoliberal policies, which promoted the offshore industry sector, mass tourism, austerity policies, and imposed structural adjustment on the Haitian and Dominican economies in the 1990s, exacerbated class and racial inequality and drove Haitian migrants who were already concentrated in the informal sector “toward low-­ paid, conscripted, coerced and/or deregulated labor sectors.”14 This also took the form of pushing women throughout the region to adopt “mobile livelihoods” that paradoxically embodied experiences of constraint and containment, as described by Shoaff.15 The mobility of Afro-­Caribbean market women, ever since their continuous resistance to plantation slavery, placed them outside of normative gender relations that contained women in the private sphere and stigmatized lower-­class and racialized women, rendering them both hypervisible and invisible, at once disposable and dangerous, expendable and deportKinopolitical Power  ·  33

able. “Deportation and ‘deportability,’ ” argues Shoaff, suggests “the possibility of being removed from the space of the nation-­state” and therefore serves “to discipline and regulate the migrant population while assuring dominant groups that the boundaries of national membership are secure.” For Haitian migrant women in the Dominican Republic, such disciplined and constrained “mobility inflects every aspect of their lives — t heir individual and family histories of migration, their transborder travel, their gendered livelihoods, their struggle for social inclusion and recognition, their experiences of racism and poverty, their imaginaries of the past and their uncertain futures.”16 And this is true not only for migrants to the Dominican Republic, but for those traveling to the Bahamas, to Brazil, to the United States, to Canada, and so on. The arrival of white foreigners and diasporic Haitian disaster responders in Haiti in 2010, and the ongoing “humanitarian industrial complex” in Haiti, must be situated within this context. Kinopolitical systems rest on and reproduce differentiated subjectivities, uneven spatialities, and unequal distributions of network capital. In the aftermath of disaster, high network capital increased the capacity of foreigners to move into and around Haiti, and to transmit information into and out of Haiti, at the very moment when Haitian nationals were experiencing decreased mobility capabilities. Especially in the aftermath of disaster, as has also been noted in controversies over rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, recovery decisions may have long-­term impacts on spatial inequalities and mobility rights. While many Haitians called for greater participation in the postearthquake rebuilding process and a just recovery, the very technologies of mobility used to control and coordinate the recovery can end up excluding or marginalizing those whom they are meant to serve.17 A kind of extraterritorial system of informational mobility, logistical mobilization, and mobility of personnel inundated the weakened Haitian state-­space and civil society, remaking the territory to fit the needs of outside mobility regimes. After the earthquake approximately 150,000 Haitians left the country (of a total population of 9 million), yet most of these were either U.S. citizens of Haitian origin or wealthier Haitians who already held passports and visas.18 At least another 500,000 people abandoned damaged urban areas to find shelter in the more rural areas of the country. Yet food and services were already scarce in the countryside and smaller towns. Nine months after the earthquake, about 1.3 million people still lived in tents and informal shelters in the Port-­au-­Prince metro area, indicative of the 34  ·  c h a p t e r

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FIGURE 1.1.

Salvation Army camp shelters in the former soccer stadium, Port-­au-­Prince,

June 2010. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

lack of access to any better options. They lived in highly dangerous and vulnerable conditions due to the lack of bodily security, sanitation, clean water, and hurricane-­proof shelter.19 The affective misery of such living conditions contrasted palpably with the conditions in which humanitarian workers could move about, live in hotels, and return to comfortable homes (see figure 1.1). The flow of money into various postdisaster recovery funds, both governmental and charitable, never made it to the people on the ground.20 Urban spatiality in Port-­au-­Prince, like all cities, is produced through dynamic processes of capital investment that assembles and disassembles various heterogeneous elements that form the layers of the city. Luxury houses are generally hidden behind high walls, up on the hills, and command views, gardens, and privacy; the poor, on the other hand, live in rambling, cobbled together, makeshift shanties, clustered in poorly serviced informal neighborhoods that fill the steep-­sided gullies, spilling across the ravines and flood plains. Much life for the poor is lived in the streets, open to public view. Urban space emerges as a dynamic relation between the corporeal and the technical, the architectural and the infrastructural, Kinopolitical Power  ·  35

the representational and the symbolic, as well as the atmospheric and the affective. Even in the absence of catastrophic collapse, urban spatial form changes (or perseveres) through political contestation over the systems of governance and control through which material resources, capital, labor, and space itself are redistributed. 21 In contemporary Port-­au-­Prince one can observe such political-­spatial struggles taking place all the time, but especially so in the aftermath of disaster when the ligaments of urban form are torn asunder and must be actively renegotiated (or forced back into and out of place).

Islanding Effects during Disaster Why were humanitarians and researchers, like myself, driving around Port-­au-­Prince in a very expensive air-­conditioned sport utility vehicle, while people alongside us in the traffic were crammed into the back of extremely hot, dusty pickup trucks, choking on diesel fumes and constantly at risk of fatal accidents? Why were young white college students wearing shorts and flip-­flops flying into Haiti on missionary trips to build schools when there were Haitians who needed well-­paid jobs such as construction; not enough teachers to staff all those schools; and so many children whose families could not afford to pay the school fees? How had my regimen of vaccinations, typhoid and malaria pills, sunblock and insect spray, disinfectant and medical insurance, made my body seemingly less vulnerable than those around me? Why would I berate Haitian deforestation yet along with my many hungry colleagues accept food that had been cooked on charcoal fires made from locally chopped wood, while running a noisy diesel generator to power up our phones and computers, and drinking water from a filtration system that had been installed for earthquake victims? Our presence here is full of contradictions and hypocrisy. The very same logistical efforts that enact postdisaster recovery simultaneously produce disconnections and diminish capabilities for mobility for the victims. There is an islanding effect in which mobility regimes in postdisaster situations bring highly motile foreign responders and assistance to some of the affected population, while holding the internally displaced in place in an ongoing process of marginalization, serial displacement, and containment —  as if they were marooned on an island of misery, even while surrounded by the coming and going of well-­equipped frequent flyers. This intersects with recent work by Alison Mountz on the mobility of nation-­states as they enforce border exclusion in ways that “fix movement on islands”; 36  ·  c h a p t e r

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nation-­states close, bound, and control flows through new practices of detention, processing, and exclusion, “with the port of entry operating as a mobile island that inhibits others’ mobility.”22 The disaster response itself supported the deepening of mobility inequalities, the remaking of uneven spatialities, and the re-­creation of subjects with differential network capital and mobility capability. In some ways it also empowered the Haitian diaspora, who had more motility than local middle classes. It may be instructive to compare the disaster in Haiti to the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans in 2005, which has also been analyzed in relation to mobilities, power, and securitization.23 The entrapment of people in flooded New Orleans in 2005 painfully instantiated the inequities of access to mobility. It quickly became evident that evacuation plans relied on systems of automobility, and those without cars had no alternative means of evacuation when public transit systems were closed down. The closing of bridges (in some cases by force), the survivors stuck in the Louisiana Superdome, the images of flooded roads and people waving at helicopters from their rooftops, all brought to collective realization the horror of homes, hospitals, neighborhoods, and an entire city cut off from rescue: an island of despair, despite the resources of the United States. In postearthquake Haiti, this islanding effect of the purposeful isolation and containment experienced by the poor due to uneven access to mobility was even more stark. The symbolic and discursive meanings of mobility, crucially, are connected to a related debate over whether victims of Hurricane Katrina in the United States should be called “refugees” or not.24 This debate played upon the American fear of refugees as outsiders “flooding our shores,” an imagery associated especially with so-­called Haitian boat people. 25 The U.S. military prison (known as “Camp X-­Ray”) at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — which is still, controversially, being used to hold suspected terrorist captives (brought there through secret c i a flights classified as “extraordinary rendition”) — was originally controversial for its use to hold thousands of Cuban asylum seekers and Haitian refugees intercepted following the first coup against the Haitian president Jean-­ Bertrand Aristide in the early 1990s.26 This “politics of containment,” the term Hallward uses to refer to broader U.S. policy toward Haiti, was the beginning of the dehumanization of the term refugee in American media and popular culture. Guantánamo operates as an extralegal and offshore state of exception that is specifically connected to state regimes of control over im/mobility, and people held there are treated as nonpersons outKinopolitical Power  ·  37

side of normal international law, persons whose capability for mobility is denied, whether by “damming the flood,” intercepting refugee boats, or building border walls.27 In the face of precarity and statelessness, the embrace of the name The Fugees by Haitian diaspora artists Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill was an effort to counteract the criminalization and dehumanization of Haitian refugees (although it was Jean’s long-­term U.S. residency that disqualified him from his run for the Haitian presidency in 2011). Yet the post-­Katrina rejection of this term by African Americans, especially, indicated the extent to which refugees remained a stigmatized group. The same could be said for the victims of the Haitian earthquake, who came to be known as “internally displaced people,” or

i d p s,

an effort at neutrality that never-

theless was conscripted as a device of dehumanization. Whether as refugees or as i dp s, people without homes, without a place in the world, somehow come to be perceived as less than human, as incapable of helping themselves, and as a problem for others to deal with. So it is not simply that the contained earthquake victims were lacking in mobility, while a kinetic elite was hypermobile; this oversimplifies the situation. Refugees and i dp s are also mobile, but their forms of movement are disrupted, involuntary, subjected to coercive force by others, and punctuated by incarceration, waiting, temporary immobilization, and sudden flights under unsafe conditions. In other words, they live within the carceral archipelago, under an extreme form of what Ann Stoler calls “imperial duress.”28 The mobility poor thus experience risky and dangerous mobilities, ranging from the difficulty of accessing food and water, to the dangerous conditions of road traffic, to the life-­threatening means of escaping their predicament as “boat people” rather than as airline passengers, to the exploitation and deportability that faces them as potential undocumented migrants. In addition to human mobilities being disrupted during disasters, further problems subsequently arise with the piling up of rubble in the streets and the incapacity of waste-­removal systems. In New Orleans this left mountains of ruined refrigerators, household effects, and rotting garbage amid the swirl of toxic waters. In Port-­au-­Prince, the massive engineering failure evident in the collapse of structurally unsound buildings left millions of cubic meters of rubble across the city, a crushing weight upon the survivors and a constant, traumatizing reminder of death. There were neither enough trucks to remove the waste, nor enough landfill sites in which to deposit it. Rebuilding remained a paradox of moving and removing, 38  ·  c h a p t e r

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with a great deal of expertise being vested in engineers, building contractors, and various other technical experts, even though basic needs were not being met even as rebuilding proceeded.29 The more deeply disturbing abandonment of the dying and dead at hospitals and morgues in New Orleans, as well as the abandonment of some bodies simply left out in the streets, was even more shockingly compounded in the massive loss of life in Haiti. 30 The unavoidable breakdown of mortuary processes, last rites, and funerary rituals of death reminds us of how dependent we all are on processes of circulation to maintain basic human dignity, to keep disease away, and to mourn the dead respectfully. In Haiti the living and the dead mingled, and the government brought in bulldozers to dispose of uncounted tens of thousands of bodies in mass graves. Now that the coronavirus pandemic has crossed the world, many more places are experiencing similar overwhelming waves of death and might better understand the despair it causes. In the wake of the Haitian earthquake, mobility systems failures were further compounded by the emergent gaps between scales and temporalities of movement, as tasks of coordination and logistics foundered in the face of complex, intractable barriers. Disaster logistics often produce highly skewed and uneven mobilities, in which the outsider has the power to move, to bring in supplies, to access information, or to come and go at will, while the local victim experiences negative network capital, decreasing access to motility, and high levels of random and turbulent serial displacement. My own observations of nongovernmental organizations working in Léogâne, Haiti, and of meetings of the wa s h cluster (the acronym for the umbrella group of aid groups working on water, sanitation, and hygiene), indicate that many meetings were held on a heavily guarded m i n u s ta h

(United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) military base

and conducted in French or sometimes English, with no provision for Creole translation, thus excluding the majority of Haitians from full participation (see figure 1.2). One of the perversities of postdisaster recovery is that outsiders’ network capital and access to mobility further marginalizes and excludes those whom they seek to help, despite extensive research showing the importance of local inclusion for building resilience and recovery. 31 One of the most wrenching examples of this was plain to see for almost any aid worker who went to Haiti after the earthquake: along one of the major thoroughfares leading out of the city toward Carrefour Feuilles went a parade of the s u v s of the “blancs” (foreigners), the belching heavy goods vehicles, the

un

armored personnel carriers, the overloaded Tap-­ Kinopolitical Power  ·  39

FIGURE 1.2. wa s h

cluster meeting on the heavily guarded m i n u s ta h base outside

of Léogâne, 2010. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

Taps (buses), and the usual traffic of creatively modified pickup trucks. The traffic all passed close to a median strip on which had sprouted a temporary settlement, stretching for close to a mile. Along this narrow median strip there was a long line of tiny shelters cobbled together with tarps and scraps of metal or wood. And in those tiny shelters people were struggling to live — bathing, cooking, feeding babies, sleeping — w ithin feet of the fearful phalanx of huge vehicles full of alleged rescuers, who passed them by with nothing but shocked faces. A pathetic barrier of old tires had been placed in the gutter by some, to afford a few inches of protection from the meter-­high wheels churning past. This is as good an image as any of the paradoxes of disaster im/mobilities. 32 Scenes such as the Salvation Army camp or the highway median shelters, along with the innumerable collapsed buildings and blocked roadways, created an ongoing atmosphere of the jarring failure of the aid efforts. Meanwhile the coming and going of highly equipped outsiders continued to have little impact on improving the day-­to-­day living conditions of the victims of the earthquake. Disasters create situations of mobility restructuring and islanding effects. Beyond the good intentions of humanitarian action, it is in the process 40  ·  c h a p t e r

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of rebuilding that the foundations are laid for new mobility regimes, ones which accrue upon the mobile network capital of the relief effort itself. Local, regional, national, and transnational mobilities are all implicated in the collapse of mobility systems caused by natural disasters, but they have uneven rates of recovery, which bring different groups of actors into play with differing mobility capabilities. Disaster mobilizations also include questions of which actors are mobilized, which flows of capital are conceived, and what kinds of redevelopment processes are envisioned (these ranging from export-­processing factories, tourism, and neoliberal restructuring, all imagined as bridges to the global economy, to plans for decentralization, diversification, and agricultural protection, imagined as foundations for a self-­sustaining local economy). Systems of mobility and their governance are not only spatially uneven and temporally polyrhythmic, being restructured and rescaled at differing tempos; the conflicting temporalities of disaster management, coordination, and governance also have strong political implications for different future development projects. The disorganized arrival of humanitarian aid (and military intervention) produced inadvertent inequalities in mobility, new distortions in infrastructure, and uneven spatial effects, in which the victims of the disaster again lost ground. To even begin to understand the politics of postearthquake mobilities in Haiti, we first need to situate it within a wider Caribbean kinopolitical landscape, which, crucially, also includes resistance to the dominant mobility regimes and their islanding effects. Mobilities cannot be described without attention to the necessary spatial, infrastructural, and institutional moorings that configure and enable movement, not only in the immediate postdisaster setting but also in its wider historical and political contexts. This includes the legal and regulatory frameworks that govern mobilities through the region including monetary flows (e.g., migrant remittances, foreign direct investment, exchange rate mechanisms, debt financing), “offshore” production processes (e.g., free trade zones, export processing zones, back office services), and legal and illegal exchange processes (e.g., agricultural and industrial commodity markets, informal commercial importing, and the underground “narcoeconomy”). 33 But above all, we might ask what kind of development do those persons engaged in “building back better” have in mind? And what other alternative forms of development are possible? Most travelers I met in Haiti (including engineers, humanitarians, doctors, and volunteers) were largely ignorant — I think it is safe to say, after having heard many, talked with many, and read many things they have written — of Haitian history and Kinopolitical Power  ·  41

culture. Above all, though, most people have a very mistaken idea of development and of what they think Haiti needs — or what is needed in the wider Caribbean, for that matter. There is an ongoing connection between development visions and mobility regimes, yet little attention has been given to the implications of different plans for postdisaster reconstruction in relation to the unequal mobility regimes that shape global flows of capital, commodities, and labor. Caribbean islands are economically connected into such mobility regimes of global capitalism and cannot simply escape them. However, it is precisely these mobility regimes (which underpin uneven geographies of capital accumulation) that are generating the extraction of resources and overconsumption of fossil fuels in the Global North, the production of excess greenhouse gases, and the destabilization of the global climate. It is our mobilities that cause the destruction of Caribbean environments, the exploitation of Caribbean workers, and the undermining of social welfare and human rights. Alternative visions of reconstruction, therefore, are crucial not only to halting climate change, but also to reclaiming the universal human emancipation that the Haitian Revolution represented.

Alternative Development Caribbean antislavery, anticolonial, antiplantation survival strategies were crucial to surviving plantation enslavement and undermining colonialism, and they remain crucial to surviving the Anthropocene in the future. As historian Natasha Lightfoot emphasizes, drawing on the work of Stephanie Camp, African-­Caribbean people first used spaces such as provision grounds and open-­air marketplaces to create “a rival geography that defied the spatial confines of enslavement,” which Camp described as “alternative ways of knowing and using plantation . . . space that conflicted with planters’ ideals and demands. . . . Where planters’ mapping of their farms was defined by fixed places for plantation residents, the rival geography was characterized by motion: the movement of bodies, objects, and information within and around plantation space.”34 I have further examined such historical spatial strategies of resistance and subaltern communication in terms of the formation of the “black counterpublics” of peasant democratization and the popular making of “citizenship from below” in nineteenth-­century Haiti and Jamaica. 35 Where might we find such countermoves, subversive mobilities, and rival geographies in the making of the contemporary Caribbean? In sub42  ·  c h a p t e r

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sequent chapters I will consider various kinds of decolonial projects in the Caribbean, including “insurgent intellectual networks,” indigenous ecological movements, and transnational feminist movements. Here I want to begin with the food sovereignty movement and platforms for alternative development, which are very strong across Haiti and are growing throughout the Caribbean region in response to hurricane recovery and the demand for radical reconstruction. Through these alternative ways of knowing and moving within ecological space-­time, alternative geographies are taking shape. In the economic models promoted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other multilateral lending institutions and foreign aid donors, Caribbean development is often assumed to mean infrastructure building — roads, airports, telecommunications — plus perhaps investments in job creation through the building of low-­wage export factories, or industrial-­scale agriculture, or mass tourism in the form of new hotels, marinas, and real estate sales. This is the model pushed on Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, and one which has been deeply resisted by Cuba. This explains why the largest projects to come into being after the earthquake in Haiti were the Caracol industrial park and the new Hilton hotel, alongside plans for “improving” export agriculture by the likes of Monsanto introducing hybrid seeds or Coca-­Cola’s buying up mango plantations — or worse yet, speculators initiating gold and nickel mining in the mountains of the north. Amid such industrial development dreams, sustainable and local agriculture has often taken a back seat. One of the few major projects undertaken by the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (i h r c ) was the expansion of the Caracol industrial park, an offshore export-­processing zone for Korean textile assembly plants. In 2012, President Martelly announced this free trade zone, which was to be accompanied by the construction of a (U.S.-­funded) deep sea port at nearby Fort-­Liberté. This port would especially benefit multi­ national mining companies with interests in gold and copper mines in the nearby Massif du Nord and would have led to the degradation of the Caracol Bay, an area of important biodiversity, mangroves, and corals. 36 In the typical modus operandi of disaster capitalism, the disruption of the earthquake was used as a premise for restructuring an offshore free trade zone and expanding logistical nodes that would benefit companies outside of Haiti and do nothing to reconnect local infrastructures in the earthquake-­affected region. Haitian grassroots movements and bloggers such as Dady Chery mobilized opposition to these extractive projects and Kinopolitical Power  ·  43

continue to track their reverberations (including criticism of the role of the Clinton Foundation in brokering such deals, which became an issue in the U.S. presidential election in 2016, especially among Haitian-­A merican voters in Florida). But what have usually been overlooked are the ways in which this kind of development is not the only model that has been tried in the Caribbean —  there are alternatives. These alternative visions for transnational solidarity within community-­based sustainable agriculture are not part of the international development plan. Ever since the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, foreign advisors and urban-­based elites who stand to benefit from controlling exports have long painted rural independence as a pathway to poverty. However, having written my PhD dissertation on the postemancipation struggles of freed people to own their own land and become small farmers, I have long understood that rural land ownership has been a crucial part of democratic political movements and economic visions in the nineteenth-­century Caribbean and throughout the twentieth century — and that small landholding and food sovereignty remain crucial today. While visiting Haiti in the 1990s, I came to understand that there was a contemporary democratic struggle for land and livelihoods in the Caribbean, and especially in Haiti, that challenged the prevailing ideas of development within the global capitalist system. In the 1990s, when the World Bank forced Haiti to stop subsidizing its farmers and to open its markets to imported rice from the United States (a policy that Bill Clinton eventually apologized for, once he saw its impact), the rural economy started to collapse. The U.S. Agency for International Development (u s a i d ) promoted this policy on the grounds that it was more efficient to grow rice on huge (subsidized) farms in the United States, and for Haitians to move to the cities where they could work in export assembly factories, piecing together Disney clothing or baseballs for extremely low wages. 37 The result was that the market for locally grown rice collapsed, and a country that once provided most of its own food became a net importer of cheap subsidized rice and chicken parts from the United States. When I arrived in the stunningly beautiful Artibonite Valley in 1997 with the Haiti Support Group, we drove deep into the countryside along deeply rutted and washed-­out roadways to find villages emptied of people and malnourished children holding out their hands begging for food. But we also found peasant organizations advocating for new forms of decentralized self-­governance and collective food sovereignty.

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In contrast to the World Bank and i m f policies, Haitian organizations such as the Platform for Alternative Development in Haiti (pa p da ) have long called for building Haiti’s national food self-­sufficiency, local employment creation, and ecologically friendly production practices. They have contested the introduction of Monsanto hybrid seeds, and advocated for food sovereignty. These ideas were not simply about alternative economic development but about shifting entire systems for the circulation of seeds, plants, crops, trade, and ultimately people — who would be able to remain on the land; in effect, challenging many aspects of the dominant im/mobility regime. Rather than development as a project of creating low-­wage export factories, expanding tourism, and driving migration, it is a vision for the Caribbean to build local, sustainable economies that would allow people to live and thrive on their own land. Following the earthquake, the self-­appointed “international community” was pressing for the same old ideas of (mal)development. pa p da , still led by Camille Chalmers, was now leading the opposition to the plans of the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Rural Development (m a r n d r ) for the creation of an emergency food production assistance program. pa p da argued that the m a r n dr plan’s emphasis on importing motorized tractors, fertilizers, pesticides, and hybrid seeds would perpetuate the displacement of small farmers and the destruction of peasant agriculture, just like the plans implemented in the 1990s. As an analysis by Mervyn Claxton summarizes pa pda’s position on such a policy, both in the past and today: “It has the consequence of the elimination of peasant farmers from the domestic food market to the benefit of multinational agroindustrial companies, whose cheaper products were allowed to flood the market under trade liberalization policies. The resultant destruction of peasant livelihoods had provoked a massive population exodus from rural to urban areas, which led to mushrooming city slums and widespread unemployment among rural migrants.”38 Around the world Indigenous and peasant social movements are calling for alternative forms of development that are more resistant to climate disruption, and this includes keeping alive multiple strains of robust heirloom seeds that they have cultivated over thousands of years. Sustainable agriculture by small-­scale farmers using agroecological approaches has been found to be “equal or better than most conventional systems and more likely to be sustainable in the longer term”; this includes “conserving and improving soils, harvesting and managing water, regenerating forests, im-

Kinopolitical Power  ·  45

proving local access, production and control of quality seed varieties, sustainable livestock management and diversifying production.”39 The concept of food sovereignty emerged out of transnational peasant movements in a coalition led by La Vía Campesina in the mid-­1990s, in reaction to the World Trade Organization’s neoliberal approach to agricultural commodity markets controlled by huge global corporations. Food Sovereignty has emerged from peasant organizations organized at the transnational level as a proposal for humanity to rethink how we organize food and agricultural production, distribution and trade, how we make use of land and aquatic resources and how we interact, exchange and organize with one another. Food Sovereignty is not a simple set of technical solutions or a formula which can be applied — it is instead a “process in action” — a n invitation to citizens to exercise our capacity to organize ourselves and improve our conditions and societies together. 40 In postearthquake Haiti, the Partenariat pour le Développement Local, along with Groundswell International, promoted agroecological approaches, food sovereignty, and strengthening local markets along with “knowledge sharing” that can be “accomplished through farmer-­to-­farmer networks, cross visits, documentation, web-­based platforms, radio and other media.”41 They call for building human capital, natural capital, and built capital in rural areas. In the face of growing climate change effects in the Caribbean region, such forms of conservation agriculture may become increasingly necessary. Rather than an emergency plan that would make Haitian farmers dependent on external industrial inputs, subject to high price fluctuations, placing farmers at risk of drought, debt, and loss of land, the alternative development vision calls for conservation agriculture, including “no till” systems, organic soil cover, diversified crop rotations, and mixed intercropping techniques that are founded upon traditional conuco gardens of the indigenous Arawak and Taino people of the islands. Such thinking is very much in line with global alternative food movements, which have critiqued the dependence of the agroindustrial food system on fossil fuels, a dependence which leads to overproduction, ecological harm, and practices that contribute to both obesity and hunger. 42 Rejecting industrial-­agricultural systems means rejecting fossil fuels and high energy consumption, and it means rebuilding more locally rooted systems, both of which imply a radical kinopolitics: who moves, how we move, what we eat, where it comes from, and how we energize our societies —  all must change. Yet Caribbean-­generated ideas for healthier socioecolo46  ·  c h a p t e r

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gies and food systems have largely been marginalized or crushed by the machinery of slavery, colonialism, debt, and neoliberalism. Alternative ontologies of agriculture are represented in Haitian Vodou by the loa Kouzin Azaka, who appears as a peasant and loves to eat. I believe that Caribbean peasant movements for agroecology still offer hope and a possible guide to alternative futures for humanity. What if we appreciated, protected, and put into practice these ideas for other ways of being, growing, and developing? How can we grow and nourish these alternative spaces of culture building and cultivation, to salvage a living world after the damage of manmade capitalism’s climate disruption? And how can transnational solidarity networks help support and grow these seeds of change? s on g f o r a z a k a

Chorus: A! Azaka Gweliye! A! Minis Zaka Gweliye mwen A! Papa Zaka Gweliye mwen A! Azaka Gweliyen mwen [repeated many times] Ya! Mwen prale manje. M pa genyen ounsi kanzo. A! Jodi ya m pral manje kay ounsi kanzo mwen yo. Azaka Gweli Azaka Gwelito M anvi manje. Fo mwen jwenn manje pou mwen maje M anvi manje, nan pwen manje pou mwen manje. Chorus: Ah! Azaka Gweliye! Ah! Oh! My Minister Zaka Gweliye Ah! Oh! Papa Zaka Gweliye Ah! My Azaka Gweliyen [repeated many times] Ya! I am going to eat. I don’t have any ounsi kanzo. Ah! Today I am going to eat at my ounsi kanzo’s home. Azaka Gweli Azaka Gwelito I feel like eating. I have to find food to eat I feel like eating, there is no food to eat.43

Kinopolitical Power  ·  47

2

WATER POWER

In Haiti, as in all Caribbean ecologies, heat and rain bring mixed blessings, and water is a powerful substance to be dealt with carefully. Haiti is a land of many springs, with vast underground aquifers rising to the surface at the base of mountains, forming small rivulets that gather into great rivers such as the Artibonite. But its urban areas are some of the most water-­ poor in the world. Haiti is the only country in which access to improved sanitation significantly decreased in the first decade of the millennium.1 The percentage of the urban population with access to sanitation fell from 44 percent in 1990 to only 24 percent in 2008, and in rural areas from 19 percent to only 10 percent. Until 2009, there was no governmental organization with the responsibility to improve sanitation.2 Rather than turning on a tap with running water, as the upper class and tourists can do, many working-­class and rural people have to expend greater efforts to locate potable water: they must pump water at local taps and carry it home, or purchase water in small sachets, or treat contaminated water at home with Aquatabs or drops of Clorox bleach. There are plentiful springs in some places, but many of those springs have been polluted or have had their formerly improved access points destroyed by frequent flooding. Droughts have become more frequent, as have sudden flash floods (known as lavalas, like the political party) in which rubble-­filled sheets of liquefied stone crash down from the denuded hillsides. This chapter is concerned with power over water: who controls it, who has access to it, and how it is distributed. Access to clean water (and sanitation) is recognized as a human right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is also protected as part of the guiding principles on internal displacement issued by the

un

office for the coordination of

humanitarian affairs, which oversaw the earthquake response in Haiti. 3 While the circulation of water can produce energy in the form of hydro-

electric power, wave power, or the wind power generated by the hydrological cycle, it is also often the case that energy is needed to fuel the production and distribution of potable water: water must be moved to the right place at the right time so thirsty people can drink it. Despite being a very well-­watered country, with numerous rivers, natural springs, and underground aquifers, the distribution of water in Haiti is very unequal. When communal systems for pumping, treating, and transporting water are disrupted by a hurricane or an earthquake, tens of thousands of people can quickly lose access to potable water. Water moves both too quickly and too slowly. Access to water requires overcoming many problems of transportation, distribution, storage, and purification. Recent approaches to the geography of disasters and postdisaster recovery emphasize how prior distributions of advantage and disadvantage lead to uneven reconstruction and redevelopment, often exacerbating preexisting inequalities and reinforcing their spatial forms through the recovery process itself.4 Not only do economically disadvantaged communities bear a disproportionate burden of destruction, suggests Kanchana Ruwanpura, but they also “bear the concomitant repercussions of who gets what, when, and how much in the emergency relief and reconstruction process.”5 As emergency responders, armed forces, relief workers, and even researchers move into and out of affected areas, they may inadvertently “deepen and erode the ruts of social difference,” as Neil Smith puts it, reproducing and exacerbating uneven access to shelter, water, food, transport, and communication. 6 This produces new social conflicts over infrastructure. This chapter will recount two conflicts over water in postearthquake Haiti, one concerning access to a water filtration system provided by a foreign humanitarian organization and the second concerning the repurposing of a solar-­powered water kiosk, also built by a foreign humanitarian organization. At the heart of these two stories are the forces that make water, move water, and claim water, along with the conflicts and frictions this generates. In some ways this is about the meeting point of water and earth, hydrology and bodies. But water is also the origin of life and the source of strong spiritual power in all African-­Caribbean religions, including in Haitian Vodou, in Trinidadian Ifá/Orisha, in Cuban Santería, and in Brazilian Candomblé. I will also follow the relevant spirits of water to ask: What alternative ontologies might such belief-­systems generate in the face of the crisis of the current climates of coloniality? How might Haiti help us decolonize climate adaptation, disaster recovery, and the meaning of resilience? Water Power  ·  49

Good Samaritans A vignette from postearthquake Haiti exemplifies the process of conflict over water in a situation of humanitarian aid. After the January 2010 earthquake, the international charitable organization Samaritan’s Purse installed a water filtration system at a privately owned community center. The center had long hosted a school, botanical garden, and community activities, but now housed several hundred internally displaced people in a tent camp on an agricultural field outside of the city of Léogâne. Portions of the city of Léogâne were at one time supplied with drinking water by a centralized gravity-­driven distribution system, built with international aid money in the early 1980s. The system was fed by an artesian spring on the eastern side of the Momance River but was rendered inoperable during the 2008 hurricane season when floods washed out the river bed and destroyed the piping. With this system still in disrepair when the earthquake hit, the people of Léogâne coped by using an informal, decentralized infrastructure for water provision, consisting of home wells, bottled and bagged water sold by private companies, communal wells, and water distribution points set up by n g o s after the earthquake. By way of some context, the city of Léogâne is situated on a coastal plain approximately 30 km west of Port-­au-­P rince, with the commune of Léogâne extending into the surrounding rural areas, including nearby mountains and the approximately 114 km 2 coastal plain. Two rivers bisect the commune and are accompanied by a multitude of smaller tributaries, irrigation canals, and drainage ditches. Approximately one third of the commune’s 300,000 people live in the city’s urban center, but those in the surrounding countryside and villages have generally had to supply their own water and sanitation systems. Wealthier properties usually have deep wells that are drilled into the underground aquifer, providing private supplies of fresh water. In the absence of centralized public water provision, however, many people had to purchase treated drinking water, such as the small plastic sachets available from a local factory that purified water using reverse osmosis (see figure 2.1). Next to the i dp camp, an adjacent guesthouse housed international visitors (including my own research team), who paid for rooms, food, electricity, WiFi, and use of the same water. A noisy diesel generator powered the high-­tech filtration system, which made potable water via reverse osmosis (see figure 2.2). After five months, however, the landowner (who had lived in New York for thirty years as a member of the Haitian diaspora) decided 50  ·  c h a p t e r

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FIGURE 2.1.

The water treatment company in Léogâne producing plastic sachets of drinking

water using reverse osmosis, 2010. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

that it was time to evict the camp because she was seeking international funding to build a women’s center on the same land. Serial displacement from temporary shelters was typical throughout postearthquake Haiti, as anthropologist Mark Schuller has carefully documented. 7 After a tense confrontation, the displaced people were forced to leave the site. However, a “mob” returned and seized the Samaritan’s Purse water equipment, dismantling it and carrying it down the road to a new location. It was unlikely that they would be able to get it working again, yet its seizure served symbolic purposes. So too did the delivery to the field, shortly thereafter, of two empty steel shipping containers that were planned to serve as the basis for the imminent women’s center. 8 The landowner’s eviction of the

idp

camp was a reminder that she

had access to financial capital and legal power, but also to extensive “network capital” that made the land valuable in ways beyond its agricultural use value or as a simple field to place tents. Elliott and Urry define “network capital” as access to instruments for mobility such as legal documents (driver’s licenses, passports, and residency rights), private vehicles and premium infrastructure, location-­free information and connection to Water Power  ·  51

FIGURE 2.2.

A girl carrying water from the Samaritan’s Purse water filtration system installed

at an internally displaced persons’ camp outside of Léogâne, 2010. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

networks at a distance, and the time for and means of complex coordination.9 The landowner’s capacity to communicate from afar, plan deliveries, arrange meetings, have things moved, and generally to stay connected serves to extend her mobility power in the form of network capital, but it had the inadvertent effect of also serially demobilizing and remobilizing the recipients of aid. The group who seized the water filter had little network capital, but they enacted their own sense of rightful ownership of the water. It is also significant that this event occurred during ongoing discussions within the

u n wa s h

cluster regarding an “exit from water

trucking strategy,” as they sought to bring to an end the free delivery of water to

idp

camps, which also would have forced people to begin pur-

chasing water again. Lack of access to water can be a life-­and-­death issue in Haiti. Reports cited a lack of potable water and sanitation as one of the main factors in determining the spread of the cholera epidemic that occurred after the introduction of the virus into the country by u n peacekeepers from Nepal.10 Access to potable water in Léogâne depended either on free distribution at temporary camps or on purchase by the bucket or sachet, entailing a whole 52  ·  c h a p t e r

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logistics for the transportation of water, much of it carried by women and children. Disruptions to the water supply system posed special burdens for women, including the problem of waiting in long queues to get water, being unable to access clean drinking water, and having to deal with the cost and responsibility of home treatment of water. These are the same problems that make the SARS-CoV-2 virus extremely threatening to the population of Haiti in 2020. Schuller has also reported his findings that, in July and August of 2010, a random sample of i d p camps in Port-­au-­Prince found that 40.5 percent did not provide water, while 30.3 percent of camps did not have a single toilet. Overall, “toilets were on average shared by 273 people,” a number far exceeding the parameters set out in the Humanitarian Charter “Sphere Minimum Standards,” which call for one toilet per 50 people in the short term, with a 3:1 ratio of female to male toilets, a standard which in the longer term should shift to one toilet per 20 people.11 In our own study of the gendered impacts of weak sanitation infrastructures, my collaborators and I found that the lack of improved sanitation in many parts of Léogâne, including the frequent use of open defecation in peripheral urban areas, increased risks of exposure to cholera, failed to address the hygiene needs of women and children, potentially left women vulnerable to physical insecurity and rape, and burdened women with unpaid cleaning duties.12 The evicted i d p community who tried to take control of “their” water filtration system enacted a struggle over water infrastructure that brought into view both the local gaps in water supply and the wider transnational and informational networks that imbued foreign and diaspora actors with greater financial and network capital. The eviction conflict and the seizure of the water filter entailed several different im/mobilities, both physical and digital, which extended beyond the local realm and into the wider networks of unequal mobility regimes. The arrival of international responders —  including humanitarians, international researchers, and the United Nations peacekeeping forces stationed just down the road — mobilized airplanes, armored trucks, rented sport utility vehicles, shipping containers, and an improvised logistics system for the delivery of food, water, satellite communications, and electricity. In contrast to the local population, foreigners also generally had access to the vaccinations, malaria pills, insect repellents, special clothing, and first aid kits necessary to secure the traveler’s body; as well as access to rental cars and places to stay with clean water and toilets; and usually an international cellphone, which also functions as a camera and wireless internet device, loaded with apps to ease Water Power  ·  53

their mobility. Furthermore, the Haitian diaspora who sought to help their country in distress, also usually had greater access to phone and internet services, including via social media, websites, and mobile phone services to exchange information, news, and money, while also having greater access to international funding and resources through overseas contacts. One of the great absences in the postearthquake rebuilding process was the lacking implementation of participatory processes and knowledge sharing. Participatory approaches to engineering for sustainable development suggest that a social learning process can take place in which various stakeholders within Haitian society participate in the project at every stage.13 There are examples of the successful formation of community-­ based water committees in parts of Port-­au-­Prince that have extended water services to many poor communities.14 They draw on a more robust participatory process, known in French as accompagnement (accompaniment). Implementing such a process could have helped to support experiential learning about the issues at hand, about solutions to technical problems, and about the other stakeholders involved, and it might have supported collective learning or organizational learning.15 However, without any acknowledgment of the power differentials or uneven network capital at play in the planning and building of water infrastructure, this was not likely to happen. In the following section I turn to another example of infrastructural conflict and appropriation, which again highlights gaps between foreign intentions, local actions, and local needs.

Remaking a Solar-­Powered Water Kiosk As Lisa Parks argues in a case study of water, energy, and access in rural Zambia, it is important to recognize that the “integration of Internet and mobile-­phone infrastructures within daily lives depends on the conversion of water, sun, fossil fuels, and other materials into electricity”; and, moreover, that in such rural places, operating personal electronics also relies on “the manual labor of people who take time and energy each day to devise ways of powering their devices and [of] local autodidacts who have figured out how to repair and maintain them.” 16 This was equally true in Haiti, where expensive and noisy diesel generators were often relied upon to provide electricity, repair men in electronics shops tinkered with equipment to keep it working, and manual labor is the backbone of many forms of provisioning, transport, and production. Whereas Parks found an overlap between water, energy, and internet infrastructures in 54  ·  c h a p t e r

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the town of Macha, Zambia, that was in practice difficult to maintain, the case of rural water access that I examine in Haiti involves another kind of maintenance issue involving the substitution of water, energy, and communications infrastructures. Theorists of mobility refer to “constellations of mobility,” including not just flows and connections, but also turbulence and disruptions, slowness and waiting (differential speeds), and friction.17 There was certainly a great deal of slowness and waiting in the process for getting water to people in Haiti. There is always an ongoing struggle not only over just who has access to infrastructure but also over what shapes and modes that infrastructure will take. Some people accessed water from pipes directly into their homes, but this was rare. Many other people used communal water pumps to access water from an unconfined aquifer near the ground surface, meaning it was often contaminated with bacteria, or worse yet virus microbes. Other people had to purchase water either in small plastic sachets for drinking or in larger buckets for cooking, five-­gallon buckets that were either carried on their heads or delivered by motorbike. Constellations of people, devices, networks, laws, regulations, and everyday practices together enable any infrastructure to work, but in ways that require much work, and are unevenly produced, distributed, and consumed. All infrastructures that we rely on every day, whether for water, communication, or transportation, represent “a dynamic process that is simultaneously made and unmade.”18 Let us turn to another exemplary instance, summed up by a pair of photographs taken in a village on the outskirts of Léogâne in March 2013. Figure 2.3 shows a very well-­built and carefully designed public water kiosk, with the words Komite Dlo (Water Committee) written on the front. On the roof of the building is a large black plastic water tank and a set of solar panels which are designed to power a filtering station inside the locked building that includes two biofilters and a

uv

filter that decontaminate

water and then direct it to three nearby public taps marked “potable water.” There are also adjacent areas for washing clothes, public showers, and well-­constructed drainage channels surrounding the site. On first impression, this looks like a very successful postearthquake project to bring a decentralized and sustainable potable water system to a rural area. Many ng o s have been working in Haiti to develop such projects because in many regions there is no piped water system and no centralized water treatment facilities. Using solar power to purify water seems like a good idea, especially given the threat from the introduction of the water-­ Water Power  ·  55

FIGURE 2.3.

A water kiosk with solar-­powered water filtration system, with public taps and

wash station, installed by an international ng o near Léogâne, 2013. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

borne disease of cholera. However, on approaching the taps our research team found that they were not working. When we inquired why they were not working we were told that the tank on the roof had silted up and it had not worked for some time. The local “Komite Dlo” had apparently not leapt into action to fix it. The local political representative, known as the Azec, was sitting with a group of men under some shade trees just opposite on this very day, so we inquired whether we might take a look at the water filtration system, with the hope that one of our engineering experts could perhaps identify the problem and help fix it. Was this a case of technological mismatch, in which no one had been trained in how to keep the complex system functioning? Technologies travel as assemblages, which may or may not work on arrival elsewhere. Many humanitarian interventions arrive via distant networks which import staff, equipment, new technical systems, and new ideas, which they believe might solve a local problem. Indeed, one of the classic studies in the field of science and technology studies highlights how a water pump used in Zimbabwe became a fluid “mutable mobile” that changed form as it traveled and was locally modified.19 Often such new technologies are im56  ·  c h a p t e r

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ported at great expense, with air tickets to be bought, salaries to be paid, su vs

to be rented, tools and parts to be trucked in, and so on. While vul-

nerable to breakdown, such assemblages may also mobilize communities and might have an unsuspected adaptability or fluidity which entangles them in many different social and material relations with other mobile objects and networks of action, making them “fluid technologies.”20 Perhaps the local community, inundated with foreign solutions, interventions, and equipment, had not been able to fit this particular assemblage into their working world, or perhaps they had modified it in some way. So when we asked to look inside the water kiosk, I was not surprised that what we found seemed to suggest not an engineering problem, but an entirely different sociotechnical assemblage problem: there were more than a dozen cellphone chargers, several cellphones and several laptop computers charging off of the solar panel (figure 2.4). The water filters may not have been working as designed, yet something else evidently was at work here, and it too involved technological know-­how, imported equipment, and the lashing together of various networks in a make-­do fashion. My interpretation of this is that an international aid organization had assumed that what this village needed was potable water (and had imported some relatively high-­tech equipment to “solve” this problem); instead the local people — at least some of them with power to reconfigure this assemblage —  found the solar panels to be more useful for charging electronic communications equipment than for purifying water. Presumably villagers continue to purify their water the normal way in the area, which is generally with Aquatabs, drops of Clorox, or the purchase of small sachets of water purified using reverse osmosis. The cellphones and laptops themselves may be used for many things, but they are certainly needed for coordinating business, for arranging rides and transport, and for making possible meetings of all kinds, while the computers potentially allow for internet access and distant communication: they represent network capital. Thus, this improvised communication infrastructure might solve many problems, including possibly how to get clean water delivered by another means. One could speculate further about what kinds of business might use this amount of communications technology, hidden in a locked room: in a more sinister interpretation, the grandans (big men) who appropriated this water kiosk may be involved in other circuits of illicit mobility. I have no evidence of this, but just as a matter of speculation, I had heard that the nice, straight, flat stretch of National Highway 3 not far from there had been used in the past to land small planes transporting drugs. Haiti is Water Power  ·  57

FIGURE 2.4.

More than a dozen cell phone chargers, several cell phones,

and several laptop computers charging inside the public water kiosk near Léogâne, 2013. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

a known stopping point between Colombia and the United States within the underground narcoeconomy. Surely such operations required a great deal of communicational and transportational coordination, involving a number of men to coordinate such transshipments. But this was not an inquiry I was in a position to pursue, just a flickering curiosity about who this equipment belonged to and what its purpose might have been. What power is more important than water and who is able to assemble a more powerful network? This is just a small parable about the im/mobility of “humanitarian” relief efforts, funding, and policies; the circulation of bacteria, viruses, wa58  ·  c h a p t e r

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ter, and electricity; the market for new technologies and the latest devices; and the need for mobile communication even (indeed, especially) in remote locations. This is not so much a question of a failed technology, then, as of a misconstrued engineering solution to the wrong problem. Such was the case throughout postearthquake Haiti, and, as my own research attests, such ironies can often be attributed to the failure of aid groups to communicate with and consult local people to find out what they want and need, and a failure to mobilize the right combination of governmental actors and community groups to make things work.21 But we can also understand this as a failure to take into account the diverse and crosscutting systems of mobile network capital that informed the situation, including the mobility of local people and their need to access and use mobile communication systems reaching beyond the locality. This story alerts us to several things: a) if local people do not make decisions about infrastructure, it may well fail, at least in its stated aims, such that decisions about infrastructure should always be done in consultation with local power holders, as well as with those over whom they wield power; b) communications infrastructure may be more essential in the medium term after a disaster than even water, and it is crucial to understand the social, political, and spiritual dynamics involved in control over access to both water and communications infrastructure; and c) even small rural villages may have at hand sophisticated mobile communications technologies which can serve many important purposes, including perhaps organizing financial remittances from abroad which can be done in Haiti through the innovation of “mobile money” but also perhaps the illicit coordination of other kinds of underground economies. Mobile money is itself an important appropriation of cellphone networks for remote banking and person-­to-­person wire transfer purposes.22 Access to cellphones suggests conduits for pouring information, resources, and money back into where it is needed most — among the disaster-­affected population — which ultimately may be more effective than depending on foreigners’ network capital to bring aid. We need to ask how local network capital can be built upon and integrated into disaster response as more than just a source of data for others outside Haiti to use, and we need to recognize that collective struggles over infrastructure in postdisaster situations can help reveal the fault lines of uneven mobilities and unequal network capital. These fluid dynamics — of water, of mobile money, of solar energy, and of communication technologies — all carry further valences if we shift from the material into the spiritual realm, in which so many HaiWater Power  ·  59

tians work. It is fascinating to further explore the possible meanings of this episode within local cultural and spiritual ontologies. The loa of fresh water and springs in Haitian Vodou is known as Simbi Dlo (Simbi of the Water) or Simbi Andezo (Simbi of Two Waters) and is represented by a serpent that traverses the land of the living and the dead, a carrier of souls from place to place. Yet in recent times Simbi is also said to have “become a god for the modern world, shedding its skin from the past and unveiling a new and improved, digital persona that allows it to communicate through the internet.”23 How fitting, then, that the water kiosk should shed its purpose, and be unveiled as a charging station for communications equipment! Simbi, moreover, is usually served in secret societies that are associated with sorcerers who specialize in dark magic and have expertise in plants and poisons. It is dangerous to interfere with them. The power of water is not to be taken lightly, as it is the conduit between the living and the dead, the very substance of life. Michelle Stephens refers to Caribbean cultures of resistance as “terraqueous” formations that might open up “the possibility for new spatial configurations of Caribbean contemporaneity” with their own trajectories of “criss-­crossing, decentralized motion.”24 The disruptions brought about by natural disasters, climate change, and foreign aid projects all suggest that the coloniality of climate has broken not only the hydrological cycle, but also the spiritual connection to the loa of fresh water. Resistance may take subtle terraqueous forms.

Community Water Sovereignty Disaster reconstruction reinforces and spatially etches elements of uneven network capital, generating complex “processes and connections which demand that transnational, national, urban and bodily scales be kept in view at the same time.”25 Water infrastructures, especially, are entangled not only at the scale of the body and its very survival but also span larger systems of urban and rural infrastructural movement — and ultimately the hydroclimatological systems that produce water in the first place. The disruption of water systems at the planetary scale will require far greater engagement with the remaking of workable infrastructures at the regional scale and far more work on sociotechnical assemblages at the human scale of the body and community. Insofar as “urban crises lay bare the underlying power structures, long-­ neglected injustices, and unacknowledged inequalities of contemporary 60  ·  c h a p t e r

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cities,” then uneven mobilities are a prime example of the social mechanisms by which such inequalities are reproduced in the wake (and in the name) of such crises.26 In examining the role of postdisaster humanitarian and nongovernmental activity in responding to disaster as a form of uneven mobility, I have sought to show the role of im/mobilities in reshaping space and delimiting forms of access. These two stories build on existing literature on the violence and coloniality of uneven postdisaster reconstruction in two ways. The seizure of the Samaritan’s Purse water system alerts us to the contestation over these uneven infrastructures, which pitted immediate physical needs at the scale of the body (for water and shelter) and of the locality against a landowner’s desire to mobilize financial opportunities at a larger scale. She was drawing on her international network capital, reinforced by the presence of a foreign research team at her guest house, who were also drawing on and building their own global network capital. The repurposing of the rural water kiosk also pits the assumption of immediate needs for water against a different need for the solar-­powered recharging of communication devices. It shows the mobilization of local network capital and know-­how to appropriate and repurpose an assemblage that has been provided by a foreign aid group. In that regard it has a kind of counter - mobility regime effect: an action that connects the small village to the wider world rather than disconnecting it. If more efforts had been made to reconnect Haitian networks and build Haitian network capital after their disruption by the earthquake, instead of making people dependent on outsiders’ networked mobilities, I believe that far more would have been achieved in the rebuilding process. Many Haitian community-­based organizations, such as

inured

( In-

teruniversity Institute for Research and Development) , g r e t ( Groupe de recherche et d’échange technologique) , and the Lambi Fund, have long

been calling for greater solidarity with civil society, participation by local stakeholders in the rebuilding and planning processes, and the self-­ management of community assets via committees. The Lambi Fund calls for a “policy advocacy program to express the voice of the Haitian people in rebuilding Haiti. As foreign corporations and governments jockey for rebuilding contracts, the Haitian voice has been neglected. Haitians must be involved in all facets of rebuilding.”27 A statement from i n u r e d concludes that “international efforts to ‘save’ Haiti, have largely failed because of the fundamental lack of people’s voices, resiliency, and solidarity. . . . Failure to connect with and capitalize on people’s solidarity and ability to Water Power  ·  61

organize will result in the failure to connect the nation to the larger rebuilding process; a process not simply of rebuilding infrastructure but of rebuilding Haitian society.”28 In June 2010, just five months after the earthquake, my own research team assembled a workshop of 76 people representing more than 40 community-­based organizations (c b o s) from both the urban and rural sections of Léogâne to deliberate on their most pressing needs around water and sanitation. They brainstormed in small groups, listed their priorities, shared them in an assembly, and voted on their top ranked ideas. The top priority that emerged from the vote was “to protect the environment from the mountaintops down to the valleys.”29 In other words, rather than jumping to immediate needs to build this or that engineered infrastructure, the community’s top priority was to embed any actions in a deeper appreciation of the entire hydrological cycle, which connected reforestation and the capture of rainwater in the mountains with the rivers that flowed from the mountains, the irrigation of farmland, and the needs of people for potable water that would flow from a healthy, natural, water system. This holistic and sustainable perspective was outside the purview of the foreign aid agencies, which were each acting on their own initiative, in short-­term time frames, addressing immediate needs in ways that were ultimately unsustainable. As we concluded in our article on participatory engineering, “ n g o strategies, while helpful during the immediate phase of post-­disaster response are often criticized for creating dependencies that cannot be supported in the long term. Even more importantly, however, in their ignorance of local histories of participation and community organization, they may actually be undermining local social organization and ‘social capital’ that exists amongst c b o s as well as bypassing existing national legal frameworks and policy directives.”30 We argued that participatory engineering could have helped to mediate between, on one hand, the needs of government organizations and foreign

ng os

to be seen to be making

decisions and taking immediate actions within each u n cluster area and, on the other, the need of community-­based organizations and earthquake-­ affected people to have both greater input into the process and the opportunity to articulate and reflect on the interdependencies among different systems. Between the temporary measures being implemented by

ng os

and the longer-­range plans being developed by government agencies such

as di n e pa ( Direction Nationale d’Eau Potable et d’Assainissement) , there

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should have been time and space for a middle-­range participatory planning process to build community water sovereignty. 31 We also interviewed members of g r e t, a French n g o with a long-­term Haitian staff working specifically in the water sector, and they too concluded that “civil society must be in a position to be involved in the reconstruction of the country. In each neighborhood, there should be support for legitimate grassroots organizations and for the water committees [komite dlo] so that they can have a say in the matter both around current debates and future actions; and there should be assistance for this local civil society to think and act through [their involvement in] local development projects.”32 Working with c a m e p (Centrale Autonome Metropolitaine d’Eau Potable; the public water authority in Port-­au-­Prince),

gr et

had partnered in developing community-­r un water distribution systems and gradually expanded them over two decades: Since the Port-­au-­Prince project began in the mid-­1990s, the public utility has had remarkable success in bringing water to the shanty towns. Within the first 14 communities involved in the project, over 20 km of pipes were installed, providing over 50,000 inhabitants with their principle water supply. (For a further 150,000 this constituted an additional water source, along with other sources such as informal vendors or streams). Customers in these poor areas pay much less for their water than they used to when they had to pay informal vendors, while the utility, c a m e p, earns valuable income from the water sales. The success of the Haitian approach owes much to its strong focus on community participation, something made possible by a close partnership between c a m e p, the French n g o

gr et

and consumer associations. This has allowed the project to overcome enormous social challenges within fractured communities, ensured that bills are affordable and get paid, and local communities are empowered along the way. 33 In other words, there are very successful projects for community-­based water management already existing in Haiti, and there is much that other Caribbean islands could learn from them. Above all, they make investments back into the community and build social infrastructure along with physical infrastructure. The komite dlo “constituted themselves by integrating the leaders of all primary organizations in the community (i.e., political parties, churches, youth groups, women’s associations, networks

Water Power  ·  63

of notables, and so on). They manage the finances of the water sales and smooth occasional conflicts.” Thus they helped build social trust and representation within the community. Moreover, “with a margin obtained from selling water, they finance small collective infrastructure projects (playgrounds, meeting rooms, footbridges, wastewater channels, bathing facilities, etc.), enhancing and reinforcing their legitimacy. They usually also receive training in financial and accounting techniques.”34 The principles of just recovery suggest that there are better ways to go about reconstruction after un/natural disasters, whether caused by earthquakes, by hurricanes, by climate change, or ultimately by the slow violence of coloniality and neoliberal austerity. These are the same kinds of social infrastructure building that were being demanded in relation to rebuilding the physical infrastructure of post-­Katrina New Orleans and post-­ Maria Puerto Rico: self-­governed, decentralized, resilient, community-­led infrastructuring processes that can integrate water, energy, food, health, education, and social protection. Despite the failures of the rebuilding process led by international

n g o s,

then, there is some good evidence of

other ways of rebuilding. Whether it is in opposition to the coloniality of disaster capitalism or to the misguided acts of good samaritans, including academic researchers, Haitian culture has its own ways of turning such power back upon itself and leveraging it for the people’s purposes. In the aftermath of disasters, but also before them, communities must be able to determine for themselves: What should we do? s on g f o r s i m b i

Simbi Andezo, sa yo di moun? Simbi Andezo, sa y a fe mwen? Sa ya di m? Simbi of Two Waters, what do people say? Simbi of Two Waters, what shall I do? What shall I say?35

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3

AERIAL POWER

Ever since the Haitian Revolution, foreign militaries have eyed the Môle-­ Saint-­Nicolas as a strategic military site due to its deep harbor and control over a key channel, which the United States attempted to forcibly lease in 1889. Failing to get their hands on it, the United States nevertheless has continued to maintain 99-­year leases on the Panama Canal and the surrounding Canal Zone for decades; the Roosevelt Roads Naval Base (heart of

l a n tcom,

the Navy’s unified command for the entire West-

ern hemisphere) and the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Testing Training Facility on Vieques Island, Puerto Rico; the crucial Waller Army Airfield Base at Chaguaramas in Trinidad, considered “the southern hinge on which hemispheric security rested,” crucial for the defense of the Panama Canal and integral to the defense of Central America; and, perhaps most well-­known, the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, the oldest U.S. overseas naval base, first leased in 1903 and later infamously used as a detention camp, first for intercepted refugees from Cuba and Haiti and then again after 2001 for captured “unlawful combatants” in the War on Terror.1 Military mobilities, commercial logistics, and transnational flows of capital have determined the existing spatiality of the Caribbean region and its highly uneven relations to the U.S. border, ranging from Puerto Rico’s incorporation into the domestic space of the United States, to Haiti’s repeatedly perforated sovereignty, to Cuba’s total exclusion from access to U.S. territory and trade. Deborah Cowen’s work on logistics rationalities shows how the spatial organization of “logistics” became a driving force of military strategy and tactics, as well as in corporate practices for the global organization of trade. 2 Logistics, or “the management of the movement of stuff,” is one core system of mobility that connects transnational infrastructures for the global movement of ships, minerals, fossil fuel, commodities, and communication signals, but also the imaginaries and sym-

bolic meanings that drive such organizations of space and time. With the rise of the shipping container, the computer, and satellite communications to manage logistics, new forms of systems thinking came to the fore in the late twentieth century, reshaping global labor relations, agricultural landscapes, and forms of security, including in the Caribbean region. President Trump said of the Puerto Rico hurricane relief effort in September 2017, “It’s on an island in the middle of the ocean. You can’t just drive your trucks there from other states.”3 In underlining this apparent logistical fact of island-­ness he was responding to the vehement criticisms of the

fema

response by justifying the slow arrival of aid in terms of a

simplistic problem of transport. As usual, he was lying. It is easy to get to Puerto Rico, by air. Trump’s image of oceanic isolation was a way to deflect attention from the deep political and social realities of second-­class citizenship and an inherently racist, colonial lack of concern for Puerto Ricans. Similarly, in Haiti, the islanding effect made victims of the earthquake appear to be isolated by island geography, when in fact humanitarian responders had vast capabilities for aeromobility and were soon coming and going on a regular basis. While islands are traditionally conceived of as surrounded by water, airports and air travel serve as the most important sites of contemporary human and nonhuman mobilities across the Caribbean region, a vast archipelago of politically fragmented island-­states and extended statehood systems. The sea connects it all, but so too does the air. In Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects, Peter Adey suggests that “air space” has a shape and a geography — a nd it is one shaped by coloniality. There has been far more attention paid to the space of the sea in Caribbean arts and letters, but “aerial life” and the geographies of the air are arguably just as important to contemporary island futures as is the maritime realm. 4 In her book Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the African Diaspora, Chandra Bhimull has shown how airline travel across the British Empire “retained the racialist ideas and practices that were embedded in British imperialism,” and how “these ideas shaped every aspect of how commercial aviation developed, from how airline routes were set, to who could travel easily and who could not.” Thinking with technologies of mobility — from the slave ship to the Underground Railroad to the Black Star Line of Marcus Garvey — she suggests how “historical racism [is still] enmeshed in the banalities of contemporary flight” through what she calls the “empire in the air.”5 These colonial aerial geographies remain central to uneven Caribbean geographies today. 66  ·  c h a p t e r

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Airports and air travel serve as one of the most important sites of contemporary human and nonhuman mobilities across the Caribbean region. Although research on the sociocultural dimensions of air travel and airports has garnered new attention in the field of aeromobilities research, most of that research focuses on the privileged air travelers of the Global North and on the airports of the developed world. 6 Although there have been several ethnographies of life in the air, significant cultural histories of the airport itself, and new approaches to airport security, Bhimull’s Empire in the Air is one of the few to address the full array of complicated, intersecting, racialized, and imperial mobilities that take place in Caribbean air space, as well as the experiences of Black air travelers. 7 Airports, this literature crucially shows, produce not just spatial concentration and connectivity but also spatial distantiation and barriers to access, forming splintered infrastructures. 8 A 2018 exhibition of French Caribbean and Haitian sculpture at the Hunter East Harlem Gallery tellingly noted that, when French president Charles de Gaulle flew over the Caribbean in 1964, he looked down from the airplane window and “described the [French West Indies] islands as ‘dust specks on the sea.’ His quote evokes an otherworldly aerial view of the Caribbean archipelago, while also revealing a deep-­seated hierarchical perspective of the region, stemming from France’s history as a powerful colonizing force in the Caribbean.”9 In contrast, Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite in his poem Guanahani (the indigenous name for some of the Bahamas) refers to “flying over the Bahamas 12 Oct 1492 on AJ 016” and describes viewing “the clouds coming right down on the water like ice-­floes.” He imagines a Caribbean Afrofuturist perspective on “the ice-­ floes drifting over the Arctic’s infidelity” and the “clouds soon crowding again/strato-­cumulus of beginnings of the moon from 39,000 feet of the spacecraft.”10 In this chapter I want to suggest how international humanitarian travelers have adopted de Gaulle’s colonialist aerial perspective on Haiti as a dust speck rather than Brathwaite’s telescopic planetary Afrofuturism. What does an aerial view of Port-­au-­P rince, one that I shot from the window of an American Airlines plane as I arrived in Haiti in 2010, tell us about the differential empowerment of foreigners and displaced people living in temporary encampments (see figure 3.1)? Although many travelers take this aerial view for granted, it is one that few Haitians will ever have of their own city. Yet Haitian painting offers a rich imaginary of other kinds of aerial views of the island, full of people, Aerial Power  ·  67

FIGURE 3.1.

View of Haiti from the window of an American Airlines plane, 2010.

Photo: Mimi Sheller.

villages, hills, and greenery. The foreign “blanc” aerial views afforded by the mobile technology of the airplane and the mobility regimes of international flight are further assisted by the information technologies of Google Maps and other locational devices that many travelers carry with them, allowing access to satellite mapping technologies. What visual tropes of coloniality and island-­ness does the aerial photograph, or the satellite image, reproduce? Geographer Lucy Budd argues that the view from the air is a new form of vision and a powerful one to which not all people have access.11 It suggests a kind of distance and a technological supremacy. After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, for example, it was reported of President Trump that, “wrapping up his nearly eight-­hour visit with an aerial tour, the president flew by helicopter to a Navy ship offshore, the Kearsarge, where he shook hands with service members and met with the governor of the neighboring U.S. Virgin Islands, Kenneth Mapp, before boarding Air Force One for the return flight.”12 These presidential flights, whether French or American, are indicative of the military underpinnings of Caribbean air space. Caren Kaplan points out that, 68  ·  c h a p t e r

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historically, contemporary airports developed from military airfields and that the drive for air power afforded huge military advantages to those who controlled the “cosmic view” from aerial vision technologies.13 Forms of vision, design, communication, and cultural circulation are all caught up in the production of what is broadly called “aeromobility.” Landscape urbanists have also picked up on the camouflaged military infrastructures of the military-­logistical landscape, with its “ecologies of power” embedded in the ocean, the atmosphere, the highway, the desert, and, I would add, the Caribbean island.14 Aeromobility, in other words, interacts with and shapes both island space and ocean space in the Caribbean through its military-­logistical power. Moving through the air, furthermore, is an embodied affective practice and is performative of a logic of space that arose out of aerial surveillance, military mapping, and frontier conquest. We can think of aeromobility as “a complex enfolding of the social and technical” and as “a space whose embodied, emotional and practiced geographies remain to be adequately charted.” 15 As a site “imbued with power and control,” Adey suggests, “the airport [and the airplane itself] is now a surveillance machine — an assemblage where webs of technology and information combine.”16 Different bodies (raced, classed, gendered, and nationally identified) have very different degrees of access to that surveillance technology and its powerful aerial views, and have very different experiences of movement through the controlled geographies of air space, including passing through airports, being a passenger on airplanes, waiting on the outskirts of the airport, working at the airport, driving other passengers to and from the airport, or watching planes fly overhead. This produces not only an islanding effect, in which people are isolated on islands, but also an islanding affect — that is, a feeling of being “cut off,” “isolated,” or hard to reach.

Aerial Islands While many Americans only paid attention to Haiti in response to the shocking devastation caused by the 2010 earthquake, the U.S. government has played an important role in Haiti for many decades. Haiti was subject to a U.S. military occupation (1915 – 1934) and, more recently, has had to cope with U.S. support for several coups.17 In the 1980s the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted so-­called Haitian boat people and detained them at the U.S. Guantánamo Bay military base. The U.S. War on Drugs was also cruAerial Power  ·  69

cial to this history, especially the signing of the 1997 Préval-­A lbright accord, an agreement which permitted the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to enter Haitian territory — “sky, earth, and sea” — in pursuit of drug traffickers but which also effectively bolstered the interception of refugees at sea. Many Haitians consider the presence of u n peacekeeping forces to be another kind of occupation, and the arrival of the U.S. military in the days after the 2010 earthquake allowed for another kind of U.S. military intervention that was only retroactively authorized. The release of secret U.S. diplomatic cables by the organization WikiLeaks revealed that 150 U.S. troops from the 82nd Airborne Division had already landed in Haiti on 16 January 2010 and that President Préval was pressed into signing a “joint communiqué” requesting the assistance of U.S. troops the following day. Despite the presence of m i n u s ta h forces in the country, and no evidence of violence or political instability, almost immediately after the earthquake the U.S. government “had already initiated the deployment of considerable military assets to Haiti.” According to the secret State Department cables, “the U.S. military response included 22,000 soldiers — 7,000 based on land and the remainder operating aboard 58 aircraft and 15 nearby vessels, according to the Pentagon. The U.S. Coast Guard was also flying spotter aircraft along Haiti’s coast to intercept any refugees from the disaster.”18 The first postearthquake boatload of Haitians fleeing their earthquake-­stricken home was intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard and more than three hundred people were returned to their devastated country. Independent news organizations including Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera were soon reporting that the United States had taken over the slightly damaged Toussaint Louverture International Airport (see figure 3.2) and were not allowing crucial aid flights to land, instead giving priority to military cargos containing armed troops and cargo such as body armor. “The enormous influx of U.S. military personnel, weapons and equipment into the airport prompted a chorus of protest from mid-­level French, Italian, and Brazilian officials, as well as the aid group Doctors Without Borders. They were outraged that planes carrying vital humanitarian supplies were prevented from landing, or delayed, sometimes for days.”19 Diverted humanitarian assistance flights had to land in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, where they took what they could fit into buses on a ten-­hour journey back across the mountains into Haiti. With U.S. troops and

m i n u s ta h

forces still in Haiti when I traveled

there in March and June of 2010, and with the latter still there in 2012, the 70  ·  c h a p t e r

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FIGURE 3.2.

Toussaint Louverture International Airport, Port-­au-­Prince, with visible cracks in

the exterior walls, 2010. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

airport remained semimilitarized, and the rubble-­fi lled streets were patrolled by armed peacekeepers in armored personnel carriers. Meanwhile, on the traffic-­clogged streets of Port-­au-­P rince, air travel significantly continues to embody popular dreams of mobility and success: one of the common themes seen on the heavily decorated Tap-­Tap buses, embellished with brightly-­painted wooden panels along their sides, is the cut-­out shape of a jumbo airliner perched along the roof. Spanning the length of the bus, with baggage and passengers piled atop, accompanied by written messages of good fortune and foreign travel along their sides, this virtual vernacular version of flight is the closest many Haitians will get to air travel. Mobility capital, or “network capital,” is the combination of competences, skills, equipment, and social capital that allows for relatively high motility.20 I observed that foreign nationals had no difficulties carrying large amounts of personal luggage across the border (such as one foreign white family with eighteen bags), while Haitian nationals were stopped and searched, especially those who looked like informal commercial importers (i c i s) bringing goods into the country.21 For many of those waiting outside the gates of Toussaint Louverture International Airport, by Aerial Power  ·  71

contrast, their embodiment as Black, Creole-­speaking persons not part of the elite is enough to bar their access from passports, visas, and ease of passing through a border checkpoint. Ironically l’ouverture (meaning “the opening”), is not so much an opening as a closing, and the only way off the island for many is by rickety boat, often requiring hefty fees paid to human traffickers and risks to their lives. Islands, in other words, may be hemmed in as much by the air as by the sea, perhaps even more so. While illicit movements may take place by sea, the aerial island is much harder to escape. Even once they get off the island, many refugees live as undocumented migrants, their children born effectively stateless, while others are returned to Haiti as deportees. Haiti is the least developed country of the insular Caribbean; there are thus especially stark contrasts between the luxury kinetic elite, the transnational diaspora who travel back and forth regularly, the relatively marooned island citizen who has little access to travel, and the undocumented migrant who travels under extreme duress. But we should not forget the large number of undocumented migrants who do cross international borders, the drug traders who evade border security, the

icis

who make the most of cheap air travel to buy and resell goods,

and the illicit flows of goods and money that link together the Caribbean transnational diaspora and their home. Into this context of deeply uneven motility (including huge deficits in the capability for mobility among much of the Haitian population, exacerbated by the earthquake’s destruction of infrastructure) the earthquake injected a new dynamic situation. Who controls Haitian air space, and who or what flows through it, or does not? After the earthquake other controversies soon erupted over the transporting of orphaned children out of the country, the frenzy of missionaries arriving in the country, and the lack of mobility for many who needed medical assistance. There was a conspicuous absence of any large-­ scale airlift of injured and homeless people to safety or any relaxation of migration controls. Indeed, those who were evacuated for medical treatment were brought to the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, rather than to the U.S. mainland. This apparent immobility and spatial isolation — what I call the “islanding” of the disaster-­affected population — coincided with a huge influx of highly mobile international responders along with implementation of aerial surveys of damage and g p s -­enabled satellite data collection systems. These kinds of relative immobilities — alongside the rhetorics of travel, tourism, and easy accessibility that surround the “sun, sand, and sea” 72  ·  c h a p t e r

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Caribbean — a re crucial to mapping critical geographies of mobility. In such emergency situations, rather than suspend the right to mobility of victims of the disaster for the alleged purpose of ensuring smooth logistical operations, the ethical humanitarian response should instead be working to ensure the capability of all involved to access mobility in order to meet their own basic needs. This would ensure mobility justice and in doing so would help to reduce vulnerability to disasters. In a future shaped by increasing climate disruption, the self-­determination of mobility will become increasingly important to survival. With the growing militarization of borders, the virulent calls for building border walls, and the deaths of thousands of migrants at borders, it is incumbent upon us to support the right to mobility of those with the least network capital.22 The border closures and urban lockdowns imposed in response to the global c ov i d -­19 pandemic have only underlined these already existing inequalities, which are intensifying the uneven racial geographies of im/mobility.

U.S. Imperialism as Aerial Power Airports are a key part of the differential spaces that are made up not only of physical barriers and architectural divides but also of software-­ sorting and virtual forms of digital division. Viewed as adjoining the United States’ “third border” under President George W. Bush’s Third Border Initiative of 2001, the Caribbean region was subject to U.S. Homeland Security legislation in the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001, which led to the tightening up of screening for all airline passengers, baggage, and cargo, including new airport architectures, vehicle and cargo inspection system X-­ray machines for container ports, and new “smart” border technologies such as the region’s early implementation of electronic passport checks against the Interpol database.23 In the Caribbean today, as in airports across the world, there are new forms of intensive surveillance and software-­supported sorting of people, luggage, and freight at borders, and at places far from actual border crossings.24 In 2007, the United States for the first time required passports for all travel to international destinations in the Caribbean. Expanding the infrastructures of arrival, departure, and security is crucial to a new rhetoric of “opening” Caribbean mobilities through “Open Skies” agreements, as promoted in a World Bank Report, titled A Time to Choose: Caribbean Development in the 21st Century, which called for “rapid liberAerial Power  ·  73

alization of air services and cessation of government support for national regional carriers” in the Caribbean.25 Yet the “opening” of the skies was also closely linked to the policing of the sea and air. The drug trade and illegal immigration were key factors in U.S. policy toward the Caribbean region, with Coast Guard patrols increasingly blurring the distinction between criminal interdiction and migrant interception at sea.26 The disparities between dreams of air travel and most people’s inability to leave Haiti throw into striking relief what is otherwise a more subtle set of distinctions. Louise Amoore has analyzed the biopolitics of border security in terms of expert practices of border making and securing through the routinization (almost automation) of judgments about who (and what) can pass or is stopped.27 Jeremy Packer has described this in terms of the shift from a Foucauldian disciplinary state to a Deleuzian control state, in which information, tracking, and algorithmic prediction are crucial.28 Haitian air, ocean, and island space exist within these contested physical and virtual mobility regimes along the U.S. – Caribbean border, envisioned as an uneven and multifaceted space of connectivity and barriers that is currently undergoing complex transformations, both material and rhetorical. The militarization of humanitarian aid is closely linked to the capabilities of air power as a form of dominant mobility. As already noted, U.S. aerial power has been central to the military geopolitics of the Caribbean region. New architectures of aerial security — such as the U.S. Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001 and the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (t s a ) — are not only associated with the “wars” against terrorism and drug trafficking but are also tightly coupled with biopolitical governmentalities of bodies (passports, biometric data, digital photography, backscatter X-­rays). Peter Adey shows how these technologies have their roots in colonial power relations, including histories of population management, spatial differentiation, and biopolitics, linking together early twentieth-­century aerial survey methods (developed in Northern Rhodesia, Palestine, British Guiana, and Borneo) and today’s airport biometrics as two instances of the same “aerial gaze.”29 Such an imperial-­aerial gaze enables neocolonial racial governance not only through the mapping of territories and the regulation of mobilities across borders, but also through the biopolitical management of racialized bodies enrolled in self-­disclosure at the disciplined border checkpoint. The ease with which foreign humanitarian responders and researchers like my own team were able to mobilize passports, vaccinations, air tick74  ·  c h a p t e r

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ets, and other network capital to arrive in Port-­au-­Prince stood in stark contrast to the vast array of insurmountable hurdles that made it nearly impossible for most of the earthquake-­affected population to leave. Meanwhile, approximately 200,000 undocumented Haitians in the United States were given “temporary protected status” for only eighteen months, after which deportations quickly resumed. Control of Haitian air and sea space (under the guise of humanitarian assistance) effectively became a means to prevent the mass movement of refugees off the island, just as elements of the New Orleans population were cordoned off and forcibly contained after Hurricane Katrina. An interesting contrast is provided by Puerto Rico after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, where people could move to the mainland as U.S. citizens, yet many were reluctant to see outsiders take advantage of their absence to buy up Puerto Rican property. The emergency mobilities associated with the disaster response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake need to be understood within this wider aerial geography of the Caribbean. While the Trump administration has focused much attention upon the U.S.-­Mexico border and the arrival of the Central American “caravans” of migrants, the United States also has extensive sea borders and aerial borders that are often naturalized and ignored within this political rhetoric of “the wall.” New understandings of U.S.-­Caribbean “third border” security infrastructures, and the threats and risks presented along that multilocational and irregular border, must address the ethics of differentiated mobility, the mechanisms that foster and impede mobility rights, the militarization of air and sea mobility, and the varied forms of identification, detainment, detention, and deportation that are used to police international borders. 30

Controlling Caribbean Aeromobility The convergence of intensive human mobilities, financial flows, economic instability, and a heightened securitization of borders make this a crucial period in which to study not only the effect of new mobility regimes, transnational modes of governance, and smart borders (those using new information technologies), but also new rhetorics of mobility and their divergent impacts. Climate catastrophes and the fear of climate refugees will only intensify these rhetorical battles. There is an emerging view of the airport as a site of both complex materialities and complex flows of information, communication, and rhetorics concerning mobility, security, and borders. I am interested in not just the Aerial Power  ·  75

material aspect of border crossing, but also the rhetorical and informational practices by which those borders and their logistics are constructed. We need to pay more attention to the intersection of neoliberalizing discourses of capital mobility and tourism mobility, such as the so-­called Open Skies agreements which allow U.S. airlines greater access to other countries’ airports alongside the simultaneous increase in border surveillance and software control in producing the intricately choreographed mobilities of Caribbean nationals through regional and U.S. airports. 31 As Josiah Heyman argued with regard to the U.S.-­Mexico border, at issue under heightened security regimes “is how emerging systems of regulation intensify existing practices of unequal social categorization, risk, and mobility,” leading to the differential allocation of mobilities. 32 The militarization of supply chain logistics becomes especially important during disaster recovery. Humanitarian response during disasters is a crucial instance of logistics operations on a global scale that are deeply enmeshed in the infrastructures for the flow of people, goods, and information that increasingly blur civilian and military roles. In what Deborah Cowen calls the “blurred seamspace” between military and civilian logistics operations, the differential network capital of different actors in postearthquake Haiti was compounded by the islanding effect in which the borders of Haiti came to serve as a proxy for containment. Mobility systems allowed for porous borders that could enable outsiders easy access, along with a limited flow of goods into Haiti, even as the islanding effect created a hard fortress for those within. The point is that such effects are not inevitable but are produced by postdisaster decision making and infrastructural repair that are built on social exclusion and uneven mobility capabilities. Caribbean citizens face many barriers in leaving and reentering their national territories, even as their “offshore” (imagined) economies are opened to external flows of foreign capital, property ownership, banking services, internet-­based business, and cryptocurrency. The networked systems influencing aeromobility include not only passports, visas, and border surveillance systems that allow for (or prevent) tourism, migration, and transmigration, but also the licit and illicit movements of freight and goods; transnational flows of money, capital, and financial services; new technologies of mobile information, communication, and social media; and the unpredictable travels of global risks and threats to security (e.g., drugs, diseases, criminals, guns, or hurricanes). 33 Airports are spaces where these systems converge and di76  ·  c h a p t e r

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verge, spaces around which narratives of mobility are produced, such as stories about facilitating business mobility, securing tourist mobility, bringing emergency aid, or blocking illegal mobility. Expanding the infrastructures of arrival, departure, and security is crucial to neoliberal rhetorics of opening Caribbean mobilities through the spatial restructuring of tourism development across the region. The World Bank encouraged the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and other Caribbean community countries to negotiate Open Skies agreements with the United States, which it claims will reduce fares and increase the volume of flights. Open Skies agreements include free market competition with no government restrictions on pricing, route rights, capacity, frequency, type of aircraft, or marketing competition. This is to be distinguished from the 1992 Helsinki “Treaty on Open Skies,” which instigated the multinational sacrifice of air sovereignty to allow for military observational flights to take place over national territories by aircraft fitted with optical panoramic and framing cameras, video cameras with real-­time display, and thermal infrared imaging sensors and imaging radar. Of course, the simultaneity of these two kinds of open skies is not coincidental according to the view taken here, but instead represents parallel civil and military aspects of the new surveillance assemblage. Key recommendations of the World Bank for the Caribbean region have included the privatization of airlines, telecommunications, and other public services (e.g., electricity, water, ports) and an implementation of regional regulatory approaches that open these sectors to external private financing and investment. It has emphasized that Caribbean countries must improve their performance in the areas of infrastructure, policy and legal environment, and taxation and customs to attract foreign investment; and there has been an especially strong emphasis on liberalizing the information and telecommunications sector, privatizing airports and ports, and diversifying tourism. 34 Caribbean airports were accordingly privatized, modernized, and reconstructed at the very moment that law and sovereignty were being remade at the airport threshold. 35 In Haiti, Port-­au-­P rince International Airport (known in Haiti as Aeroport International Toussaint Louverture) underwent modernization with the technical assistance of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, under contract with the Autorité Aéroportuaire Nationale d’Haiti. The U.S. Trade and Development Agency recommended the Aerial Power  ·  77

formation of a public-­private partnership prior to the 2010 earthquake, an outcome that became even more likely afterward given the need for huge capital investment to rebuild the airport. The airport itself, built during the regime of François Duvalier, was a representation of Haitian modernization that was rhetorically deployed to bolster the Duvalierist project of Black middle-­class advancement. Now it has become a site of frequent political protests and kidnapping, as arriving passengers have become targets of blackmail during a period of deep political instability. Such attacks leverage the symbolic power of the international airport as much as the fragility of Port-­au-­P rince security infrastructures. The control of air space became a crucial tool of aerial power in the postearthquake situation that goes beyond the airport to involve other aspects of “unmanned” aerial power. While there has been some critical discussion of the breaching of international borders and especially the weaponization of unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs) in sites of war such as Afghanistan and Iraq, there has generally been consensus that

uavs

and satellite imagery

can be used for the good in responding effectively to large-­scale disasters. Aerial remote vision technologies help experts to assess the territorial extent of the disaster’s direct impact and the whereabouts of the injured and isolated populations, and, as the response unfolds, they play a crucial part in mapping where humanitarian assistance has been provided and where it is still needed. But what kinds of accidental, covert, and stubborn forms of power, as Easterling put it, are hiding in its folds? Aerial surveillance and information gathering by external institutions such as the World Bank was often lauded in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. A New York Times article from July 2011 begins: The Piper pa -­31 Navajo took off into the sultry Miami morning and streaked southward toward the Caribbean. High over Haiti, the cameras inside began to snap. Behind this reconnaissance mission was, of all things, a financial institution: the World Bank, symbol of globalization and, to many, the hubris of wealthy nations. But this was hardly some clandestine operation. On the contrary, the aerial photographs taken that January morning in 2010, shortly after a powerful earthquake leveled much of Port-­au-­Prince, were soon uploaded to the Web for all to see, along with an invitation to help World Bank specialists assess the damage and figure out how to aid Haiti. 36 78  ·  c h a p t e r

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It is notable that the aerial reconnaissance described here is controlled by a global financial institution with access to Haitian air space; that the data will be open “for all to see,” meaning those with the network capital for internet access and ability to read aerial photos; and that it will be analyzed by their own “specialists,” rather than by Haitians themselves. The article continues, “More than 600 engineers in 21 countries analyzed the data collected over Haiti, and their conclusions — essentially what to rebuild and where — have since been used by the Haitian government, relief organizations, companies and myriad others.”37 Yet assessments of the engineers and social scientists working in Haiti have called for much stronger local participation in decision-­making and planning processes, and my own participant observation suggests that such participation was generally not taking place at any level. 38 The World Bank’s alleged opening up of data for benevolent purposes instead appears to wrest control over Haitian air space, territorial data, and decision making away from Haitians, giving power instead to “myriad others.”

Beyond the Islanding Effect Practices of air travel, border security, and the movement of goods and people are reconfigured through the virtual and augmented aerial gazes and emergent forms of aerial power during disasters. Humanitarian mobilities, as much as military mobilities, have the power to circumscribe islands through the unmaking and remaking of mobility regimes. These im/mobilities were directly implicated in the uneven network capital that was evident in the postearthquake situation. I have argued that the militarization of air space and the “blurred seamspace” of the airport suggest that we need to develop better understandings of the aerial mobility regimes that are transforming neocolonial sovereignties and reconfiguring Caribbean aerial subjects. 39 Airspace, mobility regimes, and borders are performed, transformed, reformed, and deformed after an emergency or disaster. Chapter 4 will give further attention to the remaking of digital space and telecommunications after the earthquake, while chapter 5 will give further attention to the located practices by which Haitian nationals and foreign visitors pass between states, navigate border crossings, and coordinate transnational connections. This critical analysis of postdisaster im/mobilities and aerial power from the perspective of mobility ethics suggests that ensuring mobility justice will entail moving beyond simply a politics of the de jure right Aerial Power  ·  79

to mobility, to instead ensuring that the de facto capability of mobility —  both within countries and between them — is protected and extended as a common basis for social justice. The very same logistical efforts and rhetorical moves by which some well-­meaning international actors — including foreign governments, aid agencies, financial institutions, n g o s working on relief and recovery efforts, and even academic researchers — claim to connect Haiti into new mobility regimes and communication infrastructures may simultaneously be producing disconnections and islanding effects, even if inadvertently. 40 New understandings of postdisaster im/mobilities must address the ethics of differentiated mobility, the mechanisms that foster and impede mobility rights, and the ways in which the militarization of aerial mobility reduces the flourishing of mobility capabilities. Only then will all people be able to participate in radical reconstruction rather than being co-­opted by neoliberal discourses of self-­responsibilization without real power. Island geographies perhaps contribute to this islanding effect, affording remote control of airspace and sea space in ways that enable a racial biopolitics based on highly controlled routes of ingress, egress, and access. At the same time, island inhabitants circumvent or short-­circuit these islanding processes (by escaping detection, sending remittances, smuggling goods, using the internet to build transnational connections, or using mobile phone connectivity to facilitate local networking and movement). We may also find that it is ultimately the actions of drug smugglers, informal commercial importers, visiting friends and family, diaspora return migration, and myriad illegal and legal migrations which shape the living “seamspace” of the border by seeping through its permeable boundaries. People toting packages and suitcases, cellphones and baseball caps, cameras and postcards, messages and money, and those who sell goods informally across those borders, make a difference in reshaping mobilities. Haiti, of course, shares its island territory (Hispaniola) with the Dominican Republic, along a border that at times has been open and at other times violently closed. It is also a border that has been visualized in the aerial gaze, marked by aerial viewers as the line along which deforestation on the Haitian side is visible to the aerial eye. While many Dominicans reached out to help Haiti after the earthquake, and while its airport in Santo Domingo remained one of the main access points onto and off the island, the emergence of a cholera epidemic led to the closure of the border, reminding us (long before the novel coronavirus pandemic) that dis80  ·  c h a p t e r

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eases too make use of vectors of mobility with no respect for the borders of states or islands, bodies or cells. In chapter 5 I will examine the Haitian-­ Dominican border more closely, while keeping in mind that the land border stands in relation to the air borders of Haiti, and that both are part of larger transnational mobility regimes. Border crossings are often the pretext for conflicts, warfare, and massacres. They are sites of violence, border walls, metallic fences and gates, airport security technologies, and military control. Yet people still continue to cross them. In this symbolic mix of warfare, technology, metal, and movement, many Haitians will sense the presence of the loa known as Ogou, who takes several forms. Drawn from Yoruba tradition, Ogou is associated with blacksmiths, fire, and war, and in Haiti is represented by a lithograph of Saint James the Greater brandishing a sword, riding upon a white horse, vanquishing the Moors. But this figure is also deeply linked with Jean-­Jacques Dessalines, the key leader of the Haitian Revolution who declared the country’s independence in 1803. In the face of aerial power, Haiti has a strong warrior tradition upon which it draws. Ogou has expanded his realm from the metallurgy of weapons to the metallic glint of airplanes, satellites, and cell phones. How will people ready themselves to cross violent borders in the future? Will aerial power be able to stop migration in a future of climate catastrophe? s on g f o r o g o u b a di g r i

Jodiya se jou pa mwen Monkompe, map sele chwal anmwen Jodiya se jou pa mwen Jodiya se jou pa mwen Ogou Badagri map sele chwal anmwen Jodiya se jou pa mwen Kanno tire nou pa pe yo Zekle file nou pa pe yo Jodiya se jou pa mwen Monkompe map sele chwal anmwen Jodiya se jou pa mwen Ogou Badagri map sele chwal anmwen Kanno tire nou pa pe yo Zekle file nou pa pe yo Jodiya se jou pa mwen Aerial Power  ·  81

Today is my day My comrade I’m saddling my horse Today is my day Today is my day Ogou Badagri, I’m saddling my horse Today is my day Cannons fire, we’re not scared of them Lighting flashes, we’re not scared of it Today is my day My comrade I’m saddling my horse Today is my day Ogou Badagri, I’m saddling my horse Cannons fire, we’re not scared of them Lighting flashes, we’re not scared of it Today is my day 41

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4

DIGITAL POWER

The local and international response to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti was an important turning point in consolidating the civil, governmental, and nongovernmental organizational use of locational technologies for postdisaster recovery. In postearthquake Haiti, immediate local recovery efforts depended on cellphone communication to locate friends, family, and aid. The initial international disaster response also involved a huge mobilization of locational technologies to track affected buildings, to construct basic road maps, and later in the recovery phase to map key locations such as camps for internally displaced people and temporary hospitals and to visualize the distribution of aid, the actors involved, and the actions taken. Humanitarian responders, researchers, engineers, and armed forces arrived equipped with various kinds of mobile informational technologies for communicating as well as gathering, geotagging, and mapping information. In addition, the United Nations peacekeeping force, known as m i n u s ta h , had bases with very strong communications infrastructure, including satellite dishes and radio or cell towers. The humanitarian responders were themselves organized into clusters such as “shelter” and “water, sanitation, and hygiene” (wa s h ), which in Léogâne held meetings on the u n base and used mobile phones and laptop computers with internet connections to communicate and share information. This linked them to an entire field known as “crisis informatics” involving “digital humanitarian organizations,” crowdsourced information, open-­source mapping, and the emergence of “collective intelligence.”1 The Haiti earthquake response became a turning point for the use of OpenStreetMap for humanitarian response, and it was also one of the first times aerial imaging and satellite imagery were widely released with public licenses for shared use.2

This chapter draws on theories of “infrastructuring” as an active practice, along with materialist approaches to media that emphasize the material geographies and dispositions of power embedded within communication infrastructures. 3 I understand communication infrastructure, following Heather Horst, as “a dynamic process that is simultaneously made and unmade.”4 Communication systems — such as the undersea cable network, satellite transmission, and more generally the mobile internet —  form what Keller Easterling calls infrastructure space. Easterling describes the “political character of infrastructure space,” which is determined by the “accidental, covert, or stubborn forms of power” that hide in its folds. 5 Infrastructure space is not mere background but takes active forms, she argues, through the organization of components into dynamic mechanisms. Infrastructure space is an organized set of multipliers, switches, wiring, topology, and governing devices that organize how communication is channeled and what “dispositions” it has toward shaping worlds. Locational technologies have significant dispositions in terms of how they enable access to various kinds of locational information which is then used to organize people, space, and action. Of course, there are people with power and economic interests behind these organizational dispositions of technologies and infrastructure. Additionally, I seek to show how the overlap between humanitarian and military operations was crucial in shaping the emergency digital communications infrastructure in postearthquake Haiti. Deborah Cowen argues that “humanitarian affect is a powerful feature of contemporary military missions” and that both share a deep concern with “supply chain logistics.”6 The intermixing of U.S. military troops,

m i n u s ta h

peace-

keeping forces, and foreign n g o responders in Haiti produced a particular kind of security apparatus. Military logics of command and control, securitization, and seamless sea-­land-­air connectivity divided the humanitarian operation from the local civilian population. There was highly differential access to certain digital technologies and infrastructures, as well as physical walls, fences, and gates and more symbolic divides of language, culture, and mutual incomprehension. Cowen argues that the “new models of security prioritize flow,” but “are organized through new forms of containment — new kinds of borders and security zones.”7 The same can be said for humanitarian flows, which also entail new kinds of borders, security, and containment. With the rise of “supply chain security,” which reshapes “politics, space, and citizenship,” we can reflect on how the global humanitarian supply chain mobilizes for 84  ·  c h a p t e r

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disaster in ways that demobilize and contain local recipients of aid, both spatially and politically, thus creating another kind of digital islanding effect — some are connected while others are not, as we saw in the previous chapter. Here I focus on the disaster responders’ use of mobile communication, remote data collection, and high-­tech visualization technologies assisted by satellites and aerial photography to explore how disaster logistics and emergency infrastructures contribute to uneven mobility via highly skewed communication systems. Such emergency assemblages often contribute to the exclusion of local participants (including governmental and civil society actors) in key recovery and rebuilding activities and thus extend and remake uneven geographies of digital power. I also consider how we might bridge these uneven topologies of postdisaster network capital by building open connectivity and by patching together more democratic processes across diverse communication platforms. By bringing into view the contested material grounding and spatial frictions of infrastructures (including those supporting academic research), I seek to show how digital information flows are not simply smooth and seamless but how, through their bumpy viscosity, they actually shape space, states, and subjects in highly uneven and unequal ways. As Helga Tawil-­Souri argues in a case study of cellular communication systems in Israel and Palestine, “Telecommunications infrastructures demonstrate the ongoing importance of territoriality. . . . Territoriality, and concomitant aspects such as bordering mechanisms, flows, and (im)mobilities, are products of social material practices, themselves marked by uneven (re-­) developments.”8 The repair, rebuilding, and lashing together of temporarily rigged communication systems after disruptions such as earthquakes or hurricanes brings to the surface of perception the materiality of the social network capital that goes into making such technologies work. Moreover, there is always an ongoing struggle between control “from above” (e.g., for government and military purposes, or serving wealthy elites) and efforts to make public, appropriate, hack, or game the system “from below.”9 Through various appropriations of technology that redirect infrastructure into everyday social practices, users may create fissures and new possibilities for connection, which may in turn have important effects on national space, on scalar relations, and on governance and control.10 Ultimately, I propose that there are ways to democratize digital access that are crucial to supporting more just postdisaster recovery and reconstruction. We should be thinking about and implementing ways to strengthen Digital Power  ·  85

such “infrastructuring from below” now, if we want to reduce vulnerability due to future climate change disruptions.

Infrastructuring after Disasters Advocates of new, “global” forms of connectivity and mobility (including business organizations, individual entrepreneurs, foreign investors, governments, and multilateral lending agencies) began fostering the restructuring of Caribbean digital spaces in the 1990s. An early example of this trend is provided by Ewart Skinner’s study of Jamaica Digiport International (j d i ) in the mid-­1990s, which called attention to the new role of customized urban space and cheap information labor in the Caribbean.11 Caribbean governments, in association with the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development (u s a i d ), and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (e c l ac ) dedicated their development strategies to fostering and promoting remote information processing zones that were heavily subsidized by public money, tax breaks, and infrastructural support. According to Stephen Graham, j di “is a classic example of the new urban spaces that are emerging far away from the centralizing and high value-­added heartlands of global, second-­tier, and high-­tech cities.” And in many cases it was Caribbean women who were mobilized to work in such “high tech” service industries, since they spoke English and were willing to work at relatively low wages.12 In the Caribbean there are constantly changing yet always differential infrastructures for channeling mobility capital that allow greater ease of movement and communication to corporations and to foreign visitors and investors, while limiting or slowing the motility of local inhabitants and citizens. The globalization of such infrastructures produced new kinds of integration and division, as Graham observes: “i c t s [information and communication technologies] are now used to string together production, management and distribution sites located in dozens of countries and cities across the world in real (or near real) time. Transnational i c t and logistics systems support a deepening, extending and lengthening division of labour and more and more complex choreographies of flow in data, products and assembled parts which integrate a myriad of urban spaces and times across the world.”13 These choreographies of flow include the ability to decamp quickly if the business climate becomes less favorable. They also call for constant adaptability and growth geared toward the demands of foreign investors. 86  ·  c h a p t e r

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In May 2010 in the midst of earthquake rebuilding, Haiti’s nationally owned telephone company, Téléco, was hastily sold to the Vietnamese company Viettel, a subsidiary of the Vietnamese Army, which bought a 60 percent stake in the newly renamed Natcom, for which they paid what some described as a “fire-­sale price” of $59 million.14 This was seen as the “culmination of a long process” of privatizations that began in 1996 – 1997, when the first administration of President Préval sold off Haiti’s state-­owned flour mill and state cement company, both of which closed soon after.15 The Téléco sale, however, led to a massive transformation in Haiti’s telecommunications system, as it decimated existing union power and spurred competition between Digicel and Natcom: Before 2010, Haiti’s fixed-­line penetration was only 1.8 percent —  t he lowest in Latin America and the Caribbean, while Internet penetration remained below 1 percent. The opening of a third private cellular phone company allowed Haiti to reach a mobile density of approximately 350 telephones per 1000 people. . . . In May 2010, Vietnam’s largest mobile operator, Viettel, acquired 60 percent of the state-­owned telecoms company Téléco with an initial investment of $59 million. This company became Natcom, one of Haiti’s two largest telecommunication companies. Natcom has built a 6,500 km fiber backbone to expand fixed-­line broadband services in major cities. The World Bank reported that, to date, 65 percent of the population has access to a mobile phone.16  The source of this information, interestingly, is not a Haitian one but Export.gov, an agency that bills itself as “Helping U.S. Companies Export.” It goes on to note, “In 2016, U.S. exports of telephone sets to Haiti reached $13.51 million, an increase of 37.29 percent over $9.84 million in 2015.” But that is not the only business opportunity. The report also notes that “most Haitians use internet based applications such as Google Voice, Skype, Viber, and WhatsApp on their mobile phones.” Most significantly, though, it alludes to another emerging business opportunity: Recent efforts to improve telecommunication infrastructure and the installation of two undersea fiber cables have significantly enhanced the country’s attractiveness for business processing outsourcing (b p o ) service investments. In free-­zones, investors have access to locations that offer abundant bandwidth connectivity Digital Power  ·  87

suitable for the establishment of

it

services and call centers and

other b p o . This includes the Lafito Global Business Park, the Caracol Industrial Park, and the Triangular Business Park. As a result, then, the telecom sector has been privatized and “opened” to competition (removing it as a base for powerful union organizing that had incidentally supported the Aristide government-­in-­exile against the military coup leaders in the 1990s). Yet at the same time this opened it to foreign control and business interests that may not have the best interests of the Haitian public in mind — but rather the use of Haiti’s growing bandwidth to facilitate the exploitation of non-unionized, low-­wage workers in tax-­free zones for foreign investors. Virtual mobilities and physical mobilities therefore intersect with institutional and spatial flexibility to tie the Caribbean into the global neoliberal economy in new ways. Software plays an increasingly important part in managing, regulating, and representing the licit and illicit mobilities of goods, capital, and people, into, out of, and around the region.17 With increasing levels of exchange, movement, and transaction across distance, “the new hybrid interchanges of mobility and flow, as i c t s fuse with, and reconfigure, the other mobility spaces and systems of urban life, become critical and strategic sites at which the very political organization of space and society becomes continually remade.”18 If new forms of virtual territoriality are contributing to the bifurcation of spaces of mobility and dwelling into the realms of the enfranchised citizen of the world and the marginalized excluded other, then each is mobile in differentially organized ways afforded by the uneven dispositions of this emerging infrastructure space. Insofar as the flows of cruise ships, airplanes, and tourists around the world are interstitial to other ongoing mobilities of laborers, migrants, refugees, and deportees, elite travel is increasingly securitized into segregated corridors of transport, special channels for communication, spatial enclaves, and cyberspatial properties that are cut off from the perceived dangers of these other transnational fluidities. Such “spaces of seduction” and safety, argue Graham and Marvin, are “being ‘bundled’ together with advanced and highly capable premium networked infrastructure (toll highways, broadband communications, enclosed ‘quasi-­private’ streets, malls, and skywalks, and customized energy and water services)” while the spaces left behind become “network ghettoes”: “home to the people who are being marginalized by the reconfiguration of contemporary 88  ·  c h a p t e r

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cities.”19 Software is helping to produce a virtual Caribbean designed for the management of mobilities, the exploitation of cheap labor, and the sociospatial exclusion of the mobility-­poor.

Locatability and Open Street Maps What were the implications of all of this in postearthquake Haiti? There was a massive disjuncture between the premium spaces of connectivity and disconnectivity, leading to what I call connected mobility in a disconnected world. Locatability, the nexus between physical and digital infrastructures for mobility, is a challenge in the aftermath of any natural disaster. Normal roadways and communication infrastructures are disrupted. Buildings have disappeared. Phone networks are knocked out. So identifying one’s location becomes a sudden challenge, as does finding the location of others. In cases of disaster, in which one group’s mobilities have been severely disrupted while others seek to bring aid from outside the affected area, strange effects can arise from the uneven physical and communicational connectivity and disconnectivity, which in some cases may enact and make especially visible the existing forms of uneven connectivity and infrastructural conflict. Because Haiti’s national mapping agency building collapsed in the earthquake, there were few official maps available to arriving foreign disaster responders. OpenStreetMap (o s m ) quickly became the most up-­ to-­date map of Port-­au-­Prince. Kate Chapman, who was one of the early organizers of the o s m effort for postearthquake Haiti, notes in an interview that at first “it was primarily just used as a base map for having road information.” About 600 people contributed over the first month, with about 40 people who were already experienced with o s m making the majority of edits.20 Sean Gorman notes that it was primarily used by foreign responders: You also had an influx of a huge number of non-­residents. The number of ng o s that deployed into Haiti, the number of U.S. government support personnel that came, United Nations folks that came was enormous. None of these people knew where anything was and there weren’t any street maps. Plus, the landscape was fluid and changing. They needed a baseline and they also needed change sets on top of that baseline. OpenStreetMap was explicitly built to do that, so it was just a really great fit.21 Digital Power  ·  89

OpenStreetMap quickly created digital crowdsourced maps that became crucial to the emergency response and that were integrated into official channels. Locational technology, however, is not evenly distributed or accessed, and local practices may differ from those of highly mobile and connected humanitarian responders. Doctors, engineers, armed forces, and eventually humanitarian mappers and researchers arrived equipped with powerful mobile informational technologies for communicating as well as gathering, geotagging, and mapping information. For example, while I was able to navigate the back roads of Léogâne by downloading highly detailed local maps using a free iPhone app called Gaia Earth (coupled with a relatively costly at & t international data plan), very few Haitians had broadband access, “smart” phones, or easy access to disrupted electricity. These tools were far more available to a connected “kinetic elite” of foreign travelers than to local communities and actors.22 While the materiality of infrastructure is often backgrounded, the relation between informational and physical mobilities moves to the foreground during disasters — when it breaks down. Science and technology studies (s t s ) and communications scholars have developed an extensive body of work on “infrastructuring” as an ongoing process of assembling, maintaining and repairing.23 Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski emphasize, “As infrastructures emerge in relation to conditions of difference and unevenness, they are fraught within relationships of power. The organization and use of infrastructures have the potential to reinforce or reverse unjust social relations.” Thus, they argue, the “question of who has access to digital technologies arguably remains one of the most pressing issues of our times, and an entire field called Information and Communications Technology for Development (i c t d ) has emerged to try and tackle it.”24 There are always political questions surrounding contested infrastructuring processes, the inequalities of humanitarian logistics and use of digital technologies, and the role of uneven (re)development of communications technologies in exacerbating social injustice in postdisaster situations. How might digital humanitarianism (as well as longer-­term development projects and climate change adaptation) be improved by recognizing the uneven topologies of postdisaster communication infrastructures; investigating what kinds of locational technology are also being used “on the ground”; and reflecting on building connectivity and more accessible “performative participation” processes across diverse communication platforms?25 Cultural knowledges and social relations, furthermore, also 90  ·  c h a p t e r

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inform human infrastructures of connection, as Brian Larkin suggests in his study of Nigeria: “soft infrastructures,” such as language and religious practices, become as crucial to maintaining connectivity as any specific communication technology.26 Assemblages of people, devices, networks, laws, regulations, and everyday practices together enable any communication to take place, but always in ways that perform and reproduce uneven spatialities and unequal social relations. Democratizing the hybrid spaces of locational technology, especially in the Global South, therefore requires paying closer attention to the capabilities that people already have, protecting these, and asking how local appropriations of technology might be built upon in ways that strengthen local actors and modes of located action.

Digital Humanitarians and Geomapping The routinization of the operation of transnational aerial vision technologies is crucial for understanding further aspects of the uneven mobilities and islanding effects (and affects) of postdisaster response. Beyond the securing of the airport and military control of airspace, disaster response in Haiti also depended on forms of securitization, data collection, and high-­ tech visualizations assisted by satellites and aerial photography, which in other ways highlight key questions of immobility, turbulence, and aerial friction.27 Alison Mountz has explored the “stateless zones” both within airports and “beyond sovereign territory,” where a kind of “transnational panopticism” is exercised through technologies of vision and knowledge.28 Such panopticism also exists in the use of aerial photography, satellite imagery, remote sensing, and drone surveillance to establish knowledge of a particular territory. Humanitarian aid appears to be about the arrival of a flow of assistance into a disaster zone, but is equally about immobility and fixity: the staging of a series of camps, fenced warehouses, containment areas, secured ports, and secure servers. The logistical flow of aid during humanitarian relief operations simultaneously concerns a logistics of immobility, securitization, and privileged mobility within insecure zones of action. When armed forces (and accompanying nongovernmental organizations) mobilize to secure roads, airports, ports, and warehouses, they also have access to different infrastructures of Hertzian space (cellphones, radio waves, satellite communications, mobile g i s platforms, Google Earth maps, etc.). Hertzian space refers to the interface for the physical interactivity between Digital Power  ·  91

electronic devices and people.29 Postdisaster processes of im/mobilization and in/securitization leverage and recombine these uneven socio-­technical spaces into hybrid landscapes, or atmospheres, of techno-­affective inclusion and exclusion. Imagine, for example, the feeling of those students whose schools have shifted to online platforms, yet they are without computers that can connect to their teachers and classmates. Aerial surveillance and information gathering were rapidly deployed immediately after the earthquake. Global media was awash in satellite images of the damage, many of which drew on the GeoEye satellite. 30 Satellite technology coupled with Google Earth now adds an entirely new dimension to aerial vision, allowing the technologically-­empowered a virtual mobility to zoom in and out of topographical satellite maps of Haiti geotagged with information, photographs, and other g i s data, including data as humble as the placement of latrines. The imagery from GeoEye and DigitalGlobe drew on data from organizations including the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmosperic Administration and the U.S. Navy, as well as commercial satellites — a powerful array of earth-­observing low-­space orbital optics often used by defense and intelligence agencies. These externally controlled modes of surveillance, visioning technologies, and g i s integration into real-­time mapping arguably reinforce the very technologies for border control and infrastructure management that work together to reinforce social inequalities, remake uneven spatialities, and re-­create subjects with differential mobility capital. The capacity to “zero in” and access communication networks or aerial vision is unevenly distributed.

The combined use of aerial views, mobile g i s , and data visualization technologies reproduces uneven spaces and differential network capital, which becomes especially problematic in the process of postdisaster decision making, planning, and rebuilding. After the earthquake, a community known as the Global Earth Obser-

vation Catastrophe Assessment Network (g e o - ­c a n ) formed in order to use crowdsourcing techniques to have engineers and scientists around the world compare before and after satellite images and later aerial photographs

of building damage. Sources of imagery included World Bank aerial missions, aerial missions flown by Google, Pictometry, and n oa a , “  ‘as well as large volumes of high-­resolution satellite imagery being transferred into the public domain by DigitalGlobe and GeoEye.” This variety of high

and very high resolution imagery was complemented by “l ida r data (w b -­

i c -­r i t

aerial mission) and later by oblique aerial imagery (Pictometry

data) and in-­field survey photos.” In other words, very sophisticated aerial 92  ·  c h a p t e r

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mobility and informational mobility were brought into play to support a global network of experts with high network capital. All of these applications of virtual mobility and informational mobility are directly related to the operationalization of the mobility regimes that enable foreign travel into Haiti and foreign control of logistics, while largely preventing poorer Haitians from leaving the country, marginalizing their own self-­representations, and interfering with their self-­determination in the rebuilding processes. Only some groups have access to surveillance technology and its powerful aerial views, informational databases, and related mobility and communication technologies. This enabled outsiders to channel information controlled via disaster management organizations, technologies, and infrastructures based outside of Haiti, whether connected to foreign n g o s or to the Haitian diaspora. Secured flows of mobile communication and associated virtual fences are dependent on integrated information and communication systems, and technological infrastructures for tracking, surveillance, and visual detection. 31 These infrastructural dispositions make such nominally “open” projects closed in many ways, especially to local actors. One crucial aspect of the topology of this infrastructure space is its direct connection to U.S. military power in the Caribbean region. The satellite systems and undersea cables do not only enable the operation of locational technologies that depend on military research and the deployment of communication technologies; they also connect directly into military logistical command structures. Chapman, from o s m , notes that about three weeks after the earthquake she was “sent to Miami, to the Southern Command — one of the command centers for the U.S. Military. And the reason we were sent there is partially because of OpenStreetMap but it was also partially the spontaneous volunteering of thousands of people around the world, both doing stuff with data but also writing software to try to help with the response.”32 Ultimately, Southern Command is the political infrastructure space in which o s m topologies are organized. We can understand this as yet another kind of locational technology: securing locations. Locational technologies became crucial to organizing and securing remote humanitarian locations, moving personnel and supplies in and out, and connecting the humanitarian networks. This was part of what contributed to the feeling that the aid itself “left behind a disaster” because it functioned as a “big truck that went by,” driven by outsiders and exacerbating what anthropologist Mark Schuller has called “humanitarian aftershocks” without actually helping many people. 33 Digital Power  ·  93

This is not to say we should stop all humanitarian data collection in Haiti, but that we must consider more carefully the ethics of data collection, data sharing, visualization technologies, and the uses to which they are put in restructuring spatial relations and mobility systems that were already grounded in (neo)colonial and militarized relations of power. Nor is it simply a claim that technologies such as Google Earth, or g i s systems in general, are by default cultural representations of powerholders that (like earlier forms of colonial cartography) reinforce empire via the disembodied master gaze. 34 Rather, through the lens of critical mobilities theory, I have sought to show how the specific use of such visualization technologies in the expansion of network capital has direct effects on the reproduction of (neo)colonial spatial relations and differential mobility regimes,. Just as with the uneven access to air space, only some groups have access to this infrastructure space and its digital aerial views, informational databases, and related mobility and communication technologies. 35 This enables outsiders to create “centers of calculation” in which information is channeled and controlled via disaster management organizations, technologies, and infrastructures based outside of Haiti. 36 Open information platforms such as Ushahidi did at least give more Haitians access to remotely input reports into mobile information systems and opened up access to these reports through open-­source platforms. 37 Based in part on their model, the crowdsourcing of information has become a crucial element of current recommendations for disaster management which assists in enhancing more ethical mobility capability.

Democratizing Informational Access via Patching Some “digital humanitarians” attempted to connect their data collection with communities on the ground, using open-­source maps, crowdsourced information, and shared verification processes to comb through localized reports from various sources. Groups like Ushahidi worked to aggregate, verify, and curate situation reports into open-­source

gis

mapping plat-

forms. Ushahidi was celebrated at the time of its deployment in Haiti. This kind of open mapping project potentially makes microlevel disaster news and information accessible and searchable by location, so that interested parties can zero in on specific sites or types of information. Such networking tools are now considered crucial for crisis mapping and global humanitarian organization in response to disasters, and indeed have been 94  ·  c h a p t e r

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described as a kind of bottom-­up “social collective intelligence” that can complement more top-­down orchestration. 38 Humanitarian crisis responses such as

osm

had noble aims to make

maps and data freely available, but many exclusionary mechanisms prevented this. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (h o t ) is a nonprofit incorporated in Washington, DC, that used a nomination process and vote to screen new members; it had $1 million of annual revenue in this period, which had to be carefully managed and reported on; and it was constrained by 501(c) rules for tax-­exempt organizations that prohibit political lobbying of any kind. Its offshoot in Haiti, Communautaire OpenStreetMap Haiti (c o s m a ) also required people “to become a member to vote for the board of directors” and, according to Kate Chapman, “you somehow had to be invited in. . . . One of the difficulties is they were making it very difficult for any new people to join the association.”39 Thus there were political limits on who could join these organizations and what kinds of political activities or lobbying they could engage in. The short time frames of project-­based interventions and the limitations on political lobbying preempted more critical engagements with locational technologies and excluded local activists. In contrast, the use of cellphones for international text messaging and money transfers was one crucial way of bypassing low network capital and appropriating infrastructural capabilities. After the earthquake, phones were used especially for crowdsourcing and sharing emergency information; and eventually some Haitians began to use phones to directly receive “virtual vouchers” from aid agencies and international remittances via “mobile money.”40 Thus people could work around constraints and build network capital, even in the midst of disaster. As already noted in chapter 2, monetary remittances from the Haitian diaspora were already crucial to the well-­being of many families in Haiti (constituting from one quarter to one half of national income), but they became perhaps the key means of survival following the breakdown of local economies after the earthquake. According to the World Bank economist Dilip Ratha, a 20 percent surge in remittances was expected for 2010, bringing in an extra $360

million above normal remittances levels of $1.5 billion. 41 What if the

direct donations that many foreigners had sent in using text messages had been directly distributed using such means, putting money directly into the phones and hands of the victims of the earthquake? Wouldn’t that have advanced the recovery and reconstruction far more rapidly, from the ground up, and within local economic, social, and cultural systems? Digital Power  ·  95

In June of 2010, Chapman went to Haiti for two weeks, and a small group of

osm

staff held workshops teaching people how to do mapping.

They taught workshops with up to “20 to 30 people who had really varying technical knowledge,” showing them “how to use a

gps

and how to

do a survey, to write information down on paper and then how to enter it into OpenStreetMap.” The

hot

team even developed a mobile mapping

kit including “a waterproof case with a laptop, a printer, cameras, mobile phones and

gps

and all the bits to put it together,” although these were

only available on a project-­specific basis under particular contracts and could not be distributed more widely to local communities. 42 The

osm

team also began to create maps to place on bulletin boards in i d p camps “so people in these displaced person camps could see what the resources were, know more about their space. And also, work with the mappers we were working with, engage with them and map things that were important to them . . . and that’s also the point where OpenStreetMap Haiti began to form.”43 Here it emerges that local needs and perspectives on what is important are crucial to making maps work. OpenStreetMap is not just a technical infrastructure but a social and cultural one. As wireless broadband becomes more accessible and affordable, growing numbers of people across the world have access to location-­based mobile interfaces; and increasingly, the internet is being accessed by mobile smartphone, not by computer. Being able to consistently and persistently locate ourselves and be located (or perhaps to cloak one’s location) within this mobile digital network through location-­aware technologies fundamentally changes how we understand both the internet and the physical space around us. 44 Yet we need more research on how such “hybrid” locational technologies are leveraged by people in the Global South. How, for example, do low-­income communities in the favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, creatively appropriate cell phones, as Adriana de Souza e Silva and collaborators have asked?45 How might locational technology remediate the entrepreneurial practices that Clapperton Mavhunga has described in the African context as “transient workspaces?”46 Mavhunga shows how forms of everyday innovation in Zimbabwe deepen our idea of technologies of mobility and communication. How can locational technology be patched together out of existing practices, involving not only cellphones but also word of mouth, transient workspaces, and shared modes of transport? Likewise, Lisa Parks describes the “walking phone workers” who provide access to mobile communication in Mon96  ·  c h a p t e r

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golia. 47 The use of cellular communication technology may require new organizations of service work that allow small-­scale customers to access phones a few minutes at a time or find charging locations accessible from the streets where they work. How are new technologies such as cellphones or mobile money being creatively incorporated into the existing cultural practices of such transient workspaces and urban infrastructural improvisation? And what can we learn from this about the potential disposition of locational mapping as an open resource? This analysis is suggestive of a crucial kind of “patching,” not only between digital and analog media, but also between different representational and cultural systems. Most Haitians were still using basic phones in 2010 – 2013, often charged at small shops. Figure 4.1, for example, shows a tiny barber shop that offers to recharge telephones for 15 gourdes, while figure 4.2 shows another typical “shop electronique” that repairs inverters and televisions, sells dv d s and c d s, and likely also offers phone charging. The wooden gingerbread building next to it suggests the patching together of old and new technologies, the ways things are repaired and kept functioning. On the road beside it are two typical forms of small-­scale affordable transportation: a motorcycle for carrying people and a wheelbarrow for moving goods. Technology is downscaled, in a sense, to fit the location and the small circuits of current and currency in the local economy. Digicel umbrellas were ubiquitous throughout Haitian outdoor markets, shading sellers while advertising the main cellphone service provider in Haiti in 2010 (figure 4.3).48 Digicel is a major presence in Haiti — and in many other small island developing nations — and was noted for its contributions to recovery efforts after the 2010 earthquake. It also serves as a locational technology because it allows users in other countries to send “top ups” of prepaid minutes to particular phone numbers in Haiti, a form of remote location-­to-­location money transfer. Top-­up methods include online, fingertip (entered via personal code numbers), and automatic scheduled payments. The fact that the Digicel umbrella appears here behind a large pile of bagged charcoal, used for cooking, underlines the lack of “clean” power in Haiti and the ways in which the energy system is very underdeveloped even as the communication system leaps into the mobile era. This is another kind of patching together of functioning systems from pieces of different technologies, some high-­tech and some rather low-­tech. Using communication technology to respond to disasters or to build grassroots development networks only works if there are communities organized to appropriate technology and adapt it to their needs, rather than Digital Power  ·  97

FIGURE 4.1.

The Di-­m Sa-­w we (Tell Me What You Want) barber shop, with painted sign

offering “recharge

FIGURE 4.2.

téléphone

 – 15

g o u r d e s ,”

Léogâne, 2013. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

Boss Toto Shop Electronique, Léogâne, 2013. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

FIGURE 4.3.

Digicel umbrella next to sacks of charcoal sold for cooking, Léogâne, 2013.

Photo: Mimi Sheller.

have imported high-­tech solutions imposed on them from outside. Democratizing digital access is not simply about creating open maps and crowdsourced data; it requires joining up connected social infrastructures where people can learn how to appropriate the capacities of mobile phones to serve their everyday needs such as access to energy, transportation, goods, and information — not to mention mobile money. It requires the creation of new assemblages that can evade depoliticization and generate new forms of community-­based power. Locational technologies must be emplaced within material locations to become localized, and such localization may also be networked in other ways, such as through diasporas. Digital networks were also mobilized for solidarity work across the diaspora, as they continue to be in the aftermath of other disasters such as the recent hurricanes that struck the Caribbean. Schuller and Hsu argue that, in the forgotten aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Matthew of 2016, “It is no coincidence that higher climate vulnerability communities are largely communities of color and disenfranchised communities within the Global South. To achieve climate justice requires making sure that communities most directly affected are directly involved in discusDigital Power  ·  99

sions, as well as solutions.”49 There is a lively scene of Haitian social media users, in which those located in the Haitian diaspora communicate with those in Haiti, patching together the resources of the diaspora with the problems and solutions identified by Haitians. 50 Physical and virtual locational practices in such networks becomes a kind of currency for establishing authenticity, or at least showing a presence in Haiti by sharing local information, photographs, and news. Social media itself can function as a kind of locational technology, establishing a virtual presence for Haiti in the digital world. From this virtual map, constituting a digital archipelago, we can begin to imagine alternative Haitian futures.

Caribbean Digital Futures This chapter has sought to depict some of the “on-­t he-­g round” technological practices involved in the everyday appropriation of locational communication technologies in Haiti. They are quite far removed from the kinds of high-­tech access found at u n bases or among international nongovernmental organizations. However, Haitians’ everyday socio-­technical practices also begin to hint at the potential for local appropriations that are outside of, or exceed, the neoliberal infrastructure space of ta h ,

minus-

the Southern Command, and the World Bank. Insofar as digital hu-

manitarians believe that they are widening participation and promoting progressive cultures of inclusion, they may be missing the point of such materialized power relations that course through local infrastructural patchworks. The extension of virtual mobility via communication technologies, satellite technologies, and informational mobility are not innocent but enmeshed in power relations and mobility regimes. As we have seen, digital tools that are promoted as being “open” may in fact be experienced as closed. Or they may be disconnected from local technological practices and forms of “appropriate technology.” The participants may be the already-­connected foreigners who fly from disaster to disaster rather than those actually experiencing the disaster on the ground. Local actors are more likely to become sources of data for outside users than to control the production of and access to such data. There is a longstanding movement promoting participatory approaches to disaster preparedness and risk reduction that holds up their emancipatory potential. By contrast, however, such participatory logics have also been heavily criticized for their implicit individualism, biopolitical governance, 100  ·  c h a p t e r

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and neoliberal governmentalities. 51 Kevin Grove’s work on community-­ based disaster risk management in Jamaica, for example, makes the point that such an approach “dehumanizes and depoliticizes vulnerability” to disaster by drawing attention away from power relations and structural inequality. “The empowerment offered by participatory techniques,” he suggests, “becomes the empowerment to defend neoliberal order against socioecological emergence.”52 Thus we still need to recognize the power relations and politics hidden within the folds of infrastructural dispositions, even those that seek to bring disaster aid. We can see the problems with digital humanitarianism not only through its practical failings in reaching the communities it seeks to serve but more deeply in its structural implications and epistemological assumptions as an “adaptation machine.”53 Grove and John Pugh argue that “participation involves a variety of techniques that bring people, things, and knowledge together in ways that can consolidate existing ways of life, or create entirely new possibilities.” Yet there are alternatives to “modernist participation” with its “will to truth” and objectification — which underlies crowdsourced technological solutions and open data idealism. Instead, Grove and Pugh try to imagine forms of “performative participation” as a practice that “recognizes that participatory activities, while still entangled in power relations, may develop in ways that might challenge existing power relations, and [even] the designs of the project organizer.”54 The challenge they propose for researchers and humanitarian responders is to “become resources” within a participatory assemblage that can perform other possibilities. What if Haitians envisioned and operationalized other ways of using mapping technologies, outside of the project-­ driven timetables and initiatives of nonprofit crisis mapping or, for that matter, of military logistical delivery? This is especially pertinent to rethinking digital projects and the uses of locational data, open mapping, and gis.

How can the makers of such communication infrastructures become

sources of and resources for more performative modes of participation? Overall, rather than simply celebrating humanitarian uses of locational technologies in disaster response and recovery, we need to offer more serious critiques of the kinds of social and material practices that allow some to remain highly connected even in the midst of general disconnection —  moving through the same physical topographies but connected to different Hertzian topologies. We need to pay more attention both to the kinds of participation that such locational technologies make possible and to whom they exclude. Finally, if subaltern publics have already appropriated Digital Power  ·  101

infrastructural possibilities, then there is hope that such practices might be built upon to strengthen and democratize existing modes of postdisaster social and political action via new performative practices of locational technology. These are the questions that are being raised in digital diasporas scattered around the world, connected by the World Wide Web, with flows of knowledge, information, and creativity being shared from island to island. The guiding loa for this chapter are Danbala Wedo and his wife Ayida Wedo, who are represented as two snakes and are sometimes referred to as the Serpent and the Rainbow, with origins in the spiritual capital of Ouidah in Benin, West Africa. Living in springs and rivers, they are intermediaries between the physical and the spiritual world, and they “embody a life spirit and principle of regeneration.”55 Yet we might also think of them as representing the powerful flow of communication and knowledge between virtual and physical spaces. Digital power is carried under water through suboceanic cables and across the air by satellite communications: it slithers under the radar, below the water, and through the clouds, like the serpent and the rainbow. Will digital technologies solve our problems and bring peace, or get us into more trouble and bring war? It will depend which powers we serve. s on g f o r da n b a l a w e d o

Danbala-­mwen se koulev o Danbala-­m se koulev o Danbala-­m se koulev o Danbala-­mwen se koulev o Danbala-­mwen se koulev o Danbala-­m se koulev o Danbala-­m se koulev o Ou pa we Ogou mele? Danbala-­mwen se koulev o Danbala-­mwen se koulev o Ayida-­m se koulev o Ayida-­m se koulev o Ou pa we Ogou mele? Papa m se koulev o Danbala-­mwen se koulev o

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Ayida-­m se koulev o Danbala-­m se koulev o Ou pa we Ogou mele? My Danbala is a snake My Danbala is a snake My Danbala is a snake My Danbala is a snake My Danbala is a snake My Danbala is a snake My Danbala is a snake Don’t you see Ogou is in trouble? My Danbala is a snake My Danbala is a snake My Ayida is a snake My Ayida is a snake Don’t you see Ogou is in trouble? Papa I am a snake Danbala I am a snake Ayida I am a snake Danbala I am a snake Don’t you see Ogou is in trouble?56

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5

BORDERING POWER

The Republic of Haiti and the Dominican Republic share an entangled and fraught history.1 This chapter considers mobility regimes at a specific border crossing between the two countries as a material and performative site of mobility, bordering, and debordering through which mobilities and territoriality are practiced, mediated, and contested. However, rather than focus on the experience of Haitian border crossers, or relations between Haitians and Dominicans, on which there have been many excellent studies, I will instead turn the sociological lens on myself and my research team of “blancs” and diaspora Haitians. 2 Through an autoethnography of the border crossing, situated within a history of (post)colonial mobility regimes that have formed and transformed the island of Hispaniola, also known in the Taino language as Ayiti (“land of high mountains”) or Quisqueya (“mother of all lands”), this chapter seeks to extend relational and decolonial approaches to mobility justice and climate justice. It also seeks to add an environmental dimension to understanding the impacts of climate change on this complex kinopolitical conjuncture of bordering and debordering within contested scales of sovereignty. My own almost trivial case of border crossing, I suggest, can reveal important elements of the mediation of territoriality and mobility regimes in what I call compromised states, meaning not simply weak states but those subject to complex negotiations and cooptation of power across different scales. In studying the production of bordering and mobility regimes at the Haitian-­Dominican border, I want to pay attention not just to the dichotomy between mobility (as power, privilege, right, freedom) and immobility (as powerless, coerced, colonized) but also to the tactics of resistance that circumvent the border, the state strategies for indulging certain kinds of border crossing, and the “fuzzy” bordering practices that may destabilize state territory even as they reinforce a relational territoriality that benefits

some social actors. Examining the ways in which friction, turbulence, borders, and gates are central to producing contemporary im/mobilities, the thick description of multiple jurisdictions and social actors at this border crossing will demonstrate how ambiguous mobility regimes produce the fiction of state territory within competing territorialities; reproduce the privileges of race, class, gender, and nationality; yet also simultaneously enable subversive forms of contestation from below. Malini Sur argues that borders that are formally closed (which are often lethal sites of sovereign violence) may at the same time entail a “sovereign indulgence” of various kinds of material circulation in which commodity flows are entangled with border crossings in complex, ambiguous, and “fuzzy” ways. 3 Jennifer Shoaff’s study of the northern Haitian-­Dominican border crossing at the río Masacre, used to get to the weekly Dajabón market, similarly shows how Haitian women market traders negotiate this unstable border even as they are confronted by gates, barriers, and a panoply of “uniformed and plainclothes state agents [who] multiply at various sites” to interrupt border crossers, as well as plainclothes civilian men who join in apprehensions. 4 At an even deeper level, Kate Ramsey’s important study of Vodou and power in Haiti identified nineteenth-­century state efforts “to contain and control a potential parallel political power in Haiti,” one that was grounded in the “magico-­religious practices, organizations, and leadership” of Vodou practitioners that had originally unified various popular groups and propelled the Haitian Revolution. This negotiation of power, she argues, led to an “ambivalent relationship of the Haitian state to practices it officially prohibited, yet, on political grounds. necessarily tolerated or sought to co-­opt.”5 State territoriality, in other words, may depend on and even thrive on compromise with and co-­optation of nonstate actors. These mediators of state sovereignty use their own instruments, codes, and languages, reinforcing state power to control the border even as it appears to be undermined by rival jurisdictions, structural holes, and ambiguous semiotic spaces. The border plays tricks, people on borders become tricksters, and sovereignty itself is a virtual illusion. Through this autoethnography of my own border crossing in each direction, I want to bring attention to a privileged kind of mobile assemblage: a group of American, Haitian, and German researchers traveling from Haiti to the Dominican Republic and back again in a truck laden with scientific equipment, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. 6 While such an assemblage might normally be considered to occupy a privileged position in crossing borders, instead this account examines Bordering Power  ·  105

Map 5.1. Hispaniola/Ayiti/Quisqueya topographical map, 2010. Map Courtesy of n a sa .

how it gets caught up in bordering processes that hinge on competing territorialities in the midst of compromised sovereignty, extensive illegality, and the sovereign indulgence of legal and illegal flows of commodities, capital, vehicles, and bodies. Beyond that, though, I also want to consider how the border dividing this single island into two republics is itself a subject of natural processes, atmospheric disturbances, and a fickle climate, contributing to its own materialized agency in causing massive flooding of two lakes that straddle the border. The human conceit of a border is itself under threat of inundation, just as the novel coronavirus shows no respect to borders. This power that I call the “jurisdiction of the lakes” suggests the ways in which climate change interrupts the projects of state sovereignty, even while being enmeshed in human and natural power relations that have etched deep socionatural inequalities into the divided island of Hispaniola/Ayiti/Quisqueya (see map 5.1).

Climates of Coloniality Tropical woodland was one of the primary objects of European colonization in the Caribbean, especially in Hispaniola. By the seventeenth century it was understood that deforestation was connected to decreased cloud formation and less rainfall, leading to the earliest forest conservation laws in the world.7 Changes in land cover and land use for the purposes of plantation economies left many Caribbean islands especially vulnerable to contemporary anthropogenic climate change, but these vulnerabilities 106  ·  c h a p t e r

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are not evenly distributed. When the Republic of Haiti emerged in 1804 out of a slave uprising and a revolution against French colonial power, it unified the entire island under the name “Ayiti” during the presidency of Jean-­Pierre Boyer (1818 – 1843). The Dominican Republic finally declared its own independence from Haiti in 1844, and its historians describe the preceding period as an occupation. Both states, however, were later subject to outside occupation and control: the U.S. Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, and the United States continued to control their national banks and debt financing for decades afterward. The contrasting economies of nineteenth-­century Haiti (focused on exports of sugar, lumber, and coffee) versus the Dominican Republic (with more cattle ranching and small landholding) set up different social relations with the land at the beginning of the twentieth century, which were later reworked during the U.S. occupations of each country when the U.S. government controlled the economy of both countries and U.S. corporations controlled much of the land. 8 By the end of the occupation, a full 25 percent of Dominican land belonged to sugar companies, and an even greater percentage was controlled by the lumber industry.9 Haiti’s government gave 790,000 acres of land to the Haitian American Society for Agricultural Development (s h a da ), which proceeded to deforest thousands of acres for sisal and rubber plantations.10 The major differences in forest cover seen today are linked to these historical path dependencies. The American-­owned sugar industry expanded by displacing Haitian peasants from their land and then importing them as low-­paid laborers into the Dominican Republic to work on sugar plantations for 20 – 30 cents a day.11 Between 1916 and 1925 it is thought that around 150,000 Haitians crossed the border, undocu­ mented, in what one historian describes as a kind of “virtual osmosis.”12 After the U.S. withdrawal from both countries, the government of Dominican dictator Raphael Trujillo (1930 – 1961) decided to “clear” the border region of Haitians and to reinstate a national border to more firmly separate the two populations. In an event known as the “Parsley Massacre” in 1937, he encouraged Dominican peasants using machetes and clubs to kill anyone who could not pronounce the Spanish word perejil (parsley), which was difficult for Creole speakers. It is thought that between 15,000 and 25,000 Haitians were killed, a trauma that still scars relations between the two countries. Today, with up to one million undocumented Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, where they still form the backbone of manual laBordering Power  ·  107

bor work from agriculture to construction, the two countries continue to struggle over issues of border control, citizenship, and nationality. The denationalization of Dominican-­Haitians began with the Ley de Migración (2004), subsequent rulings of the central electoral board, and continued through a constitutional change in 2010 and a tribunal court ruling in 2013. In September of 2013 the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 0168-­13 stripped nationality from “foreign” citizens resident in the Republic since 1929 and their descendants, affecting an estimated 210,000 Dominican-­born people of Haitian descent. This has led to deportations (and up to 40,000 “voluntary” departures), a huge international outcry, outbreaks of vigilante violence, and ongoing protest surrounding this induced “statelessness.”13 Today the island faces common ecological crises connected to global warming, deforestation, soil loss, depleted coral reefs and mangrove forests, growing intensity of hurricanes due to sea surface warming, and threats to biodiversity. These issues are likely only to worsen as climate change continues to affect the entire Caribbean region.14 However, with less rainfall and higher population density on the western side of the island, extensive deforestation, extreme erosion and soil loss, and high income inequality, Haiti’s population is especially vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change. This was exacerbated by the collapse of Haiti’s agricultural sector in the context of the neoliberal dismantling of trade barriers and opening of food imports imposed by international financial institutions as a condition for loans in the 1980s – 1990s. This, in addition to the building of an export-­assembly industry around Port-­au-­Prince, led the urban population to grow “from 150,000 inhabitants in 1950 to 732,000 in the early 1980s, and to about 3 million in 2008, or almost one-­ third of Haiti’s population of 9.8 million.”15 Rather than explaining these complex histories of coloniality and climate vulnerability, many accounts of deforestation in Haiti contrast it against the Dominican Republic by placing blame on Haitian peasant culture, while ignoring how forests and arable land use are shaped by (post) colonial political-­ecological histories of conflict. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, for example, Jared Diamond argues that the reduction of Haitian forest cover to less than two percent today was largely due to weak governance and unconstrained small farming and charcoal making, which relies on burning wood often cut from steep mountain slopes. 16 The Dominican Republic, in contrast, has far more extensive remaining forest cover and a “comprehensive legal and 108  ·  c h a p t e r

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institutional framework for disaster risk management,” building upon its unusually strong forest protection policies enforced first under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo and later under the presidencies of Joaquín Balaguer (1966 – 1978, 1986 – 1996).17 This top-­down environmental management was at times achieved by armed force, but it was also reinforced by locally based environmental protection movements. According to Diamond, Dominican history exemplifies how a developing country can maintain its environment even as its economy expands, modernizes, and industrializes. Yet he fails to address the authoritarian nature of such environmental management or the influence of global agricultural policies that disrupted Haitian peasant economies, triggering rural migration into Port-­au-­Prince and inducing extreme vulnerability such as that seen in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. With large tracts of forest given to military generals to manage, Dominican elites could later bene­ fit from illicit charcoal making and smuggling, while blaming Haitians. Such processes produced not only the pressure to cut wood for charcoal in Haiti but also the extensive labor migration to cut sugarcane on Dominican bateyes, leading to the social precarity of Haitian migrants and their Dominican children today. It is this unstable political and social climate that drives “(un)natural” disasters and pushes climate change to become what Haitians call krize konjonkti, or conjunctural crises.18 Rather than blame Haiti for “choosing to fail” while praising the “success” of authoritarian Dominican presidents in protecting the environment, as Diamond does, it is crucial that we recognize the coloniality of climate vulnerability and the importance of decolonial climate adaptation. In a compelling study of uneven development in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, feminist geographer Marion Werner also offers a searing critique of Diamond’s account in Collapse and calls for a “relational geography” rather than a comparative one: The comparative framework relies on the notion of these two countries as territorial containers and interprets their differences as evidence of national success or failure in a world of sequential development. In contrast . . . [her argument] is for a relational geography of capitalist uneven development that foregrounds the ways in which places are iteratively forged in relation to one another.19 As Mullings, Werner and Peake further observe, “in the relational logics of race and accumulation that function on the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic serves as the example of capitalist success and as Bordering Power  ·  109

evidence of the failure of the ‘black’ nation of Haiti.”20 Thus simple observations of deforestation become rhetorically attached to racial hierarchies and judgements of human worth. Building her approach to uneven development on world-­systems theory and commodity chain analysis, complemented by more recent theoretical approaches to the coloniality of power and its articulation with racialized and gendered hierarchies of labor, Werner advances feminist approaches to uneven development. She resituates earlier Marxist notions of uneven development in terms of more dynamic sets of relations, mobilizing “heterogenous” political struggles and “multiple trajectories” within historically patterned and “contingent geographies.” Specifically, she traces the deep transformations and impacts on workers involved in the movement of the low-­wage, export-­oriented garment industry — an industry enmeshed in commercial relations to U.S. apparel multinationals — from the Dominican Republic to Haiti and the subsequent turn to the “global factory” again in postearthquake reconstruction plans. As she notes, though, her own “mobile positioning” in the field revealed to her “how the mobility between research sites and social locations can make the relationship of unequal power inherent in ‘participant observation’ of any kind more acute.”21 My project is not as empirically ambitious as hers, which was grounded in deep place-­based fieldwork over many years; and there is still much debate between regional approaches to uneven development focusing on the complex geography of industrial and deindustrial processes, versus the mobilities approach that I take here. 22 Nevertheless, the questions of mobile positioning and various kinds of displacement and power are crucial to both of us, and I will pursue them here through a much more limited yet still revealing account of my own crossing of the Haitian-­Dominican border.

Territoriality, Mobility, and Debordering The relation between mobility, space, and power is an important theme in critical mobilities research that has especially important implications when applied to contemporary Caribbean bordering processes.23 Recent analytical approaches to borders understand them not simply as the spatial or jurisdictional edge between two adjacent territories but rather as “dispersed sets of power relations that are mobilized for various purposes.”24 Friction, turbulence, borders, and gates are all central to the contemporary im/mobilities described within mobilities research and border studies. 25 110  ·  c h a p t e r

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Borders are not simply edges, limits, or barriers for controlling mobility in and out of adjacent territories, nor does territory preexist the border; instead, the relation between the two terms can be understood as “bordering practices.”26 In contrast to theories that distinguish between fixed territorial logics of state power and the mobility of capital accumulation, relational theorists emphasize that it is through acts of bordering and debordering that a territory is at once produced, stabilized, and sometimes deterritorialized. The “state border is not simply a borderline,” Sassen writes. “It is a mix of regimes with variable contents and geographic and institutional locations,” including different flows of capital, information, professionals, undocumented migrants, smuggled goods, and so on.27 Furthermore, despite the current emphasis on state surveillance and the massive powers of data collection by new border security regimes, borders are contingent and sometimes even fragile territorial practices that in many ways exceed the control of a single state, overflowing its edges, tunneling beneath its ground, and stretching beyond its institutional capacities to form state space and govern populations. Governance of mobility is a key feature of state-­making, one which produces and is produced by a dynamic relation between territory (i.e., the spatial limits of the state and the extent of its coercive power, typically marked as a line on a map) and territoriality (i.e., the crosscutting legal jurisdictions, instruments, codes, and mediations of territory). Sassen theorizes territory itself as “a complex capability with embedded logics of power/empowerment and of claim-­making,” which “cannot be reduced to either national territory or state territory.”28 She emphasizes two types of formations that suggest structural rearrangements of territory: first, there is the extension of nonnational jurisdictions inside the state territorial jurisdiction; and second, there are new types of bordered spaces that cut across traditional interstate borders. Examples of the first kind include the territorial jurisdictions of the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, or the United Nations humanitarian system, all of which are strongly present in the Caribbean region. Examples of the second kind include what she calls “structural holes, deep inside the tissue of national territory,” including informal, underground, and illegal practices.29 Peter J. Hudson describes how the rise of offshore institutions has “weakened the national sovereignty of Caribbean nations, creating a ‘holographic’ sovereignty — a sovereignty that exists in name only as territory is ceded, taxation is relinquished, and domestic economic policy is deterBordering Power  ·  111

mined by conditionalities imposed by foreign governments and lending institutions.”30 In many cases major decision-­making processes exceed the national scale and involve regional and transnational actors. Coordination among these different regulatory and governance institutions is complex and often not harmonious. Offshoring became a crucial strategy for negotiating these proliferating territorialities, beyond and below the national. Thus Hudson argues that the traditional view of Caribbean societies as shaped by the plantation complex must now be understood as having shifted into a “post-­Plantation era in which the plantation as hegemonic form has receded, replaced not only by tourism and the service industry but also by banking and finance and the growth of the Caribbean as the heterotopic geography denoted by the term offshore.”31 In this offshore heterotopia a virtual realm of finance capital rules and tax evasion flourishes, along with bribery and corruption instigated by kickbacks from financial deals that lack public transparency. In the Caribbean these structural holes in sovereign territoriality thus involve: the extensive hidden narcoeconomy; the “offshore” jurisdictions of banking, tax havens, and special tax-­free economic zones; the spaces of exception such as foreign military bases or detention camps; and, coursing through it all, the electronic financial transactions of global capital flows escaping into unregulated “secrecy jurisdictions.”32 The day-­to-­day tactics of undocumented migrants, human smugglers, and traffickers who populate border crossings also cocreate territoriality not only through concrete spatial practices but also through abstract mediations. 33 The border crossing is a key site for struggle between state powers, transnational powers, illicit and illegal agents, and various kinds of local agents, all seeking to assert different codes, rules, rhythms, and durations of competing territorialities. 34 In examining local practices and forms of agency at international border crossings one must keep in mind both how state power is exercised and formed in relation to mobility and vis-­à-­v is “escape” from the state. 35 Border crossings are also implicated as a site of “biopolitical management” for the regulation of populations, their movement, health, and the reproduction of who is and is not part of the nation. 36 Emergent forms of national and transnational territoriality are always in tension with the efforts of local agency. 37 Moreover, nonstate performances of the border may intersect with state practices of border governance to mutually constitute border regions that are outside state control, yet still implicated in reproducing state power. For example, as Rebecca Galemba has argued of the Mexico-­Guatemala border, “local control is 112  ·  c h a p t e r

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formed in constantly shifting negotiations with state agents, formal businesses, and high-­profile smugglers. . . . Spaces like this border region do not necessarily constitute ‘gaps’ in state power but are integral to processes of evolving state formation and capital accumulation that often further marginalize border residents.”38 Jørgen Bærenholdt likewise theorizes “governmobility” as a form of governmentality in which the self-­ regulation of mobility becomes internalized within mobile subjects but may also serve as a point of resistance. He emphasizes that “borders must be studied along with the practices of resistance, with people’s tactics and strategies in coping with, transcending, ignoring, overcoming, using and not least building borders. As such borders are made not the least by way of the various passages crossing them.”39 Hence I now turn to the making of the Haitian-­Dominican border in the performance of my own passages across it.

Crossing the Haitian-­Dominican Border Pinched between Lake Azuei in Haiti and Lake Enriquillo in the Dominican Republic, the Haitian-­Dominican border crossing near Malpasse-­ Jimaní lies at a fraught gathering point on a single highway. Pinned between these two low-­lying saltwater lakes whose waters can no longer be contained and the surrounding high sierras whose runoff and rubble often tumbles down steep hillsides in flash floods, the border zone takes shape as an unpaved strip of highway clinging to the edge of the lake. Moving usually at a slower pace than the frantic coming and going of humans, yet sometimes relentlessly rising due to some sudden forces of nature, the two lakes are gradually swallowing the border. They have taken all the surrounding low-­lying farmland, killed all the lakeside trees, and now the waters of Lake Azuei are literally moving over and under the border, gravitating downhill toward the lower Lake Enriquillo (figure 5.1). 40 Climatological forces are driving the growth of the lakes. In the Dominican Republic it was estimated that about 80 km 2 of crop and pasture land had been flooded by the lake by 2011. 41 In Haiti, serious flooding of the western part of Lake Azuei occurred between September 2007 and February 2008. One shoreline reportedly advanced 70 m in June 2009, inundating a hotel and fifteen houses. The region was also affected by Hurricane Dean (August 2007), Hurricane Noel (October 2007), and Tropical Storm Olga (December 2007), three weeks of heavy rains in the summer of 2008, and Tropical Storm Isaac in August 2012, all of which contributed Bordering Power  ·  113

FIGURE 5.1.

Lake Azuei in Haiti overflows its shores, swallowing up trees, freshwater springs,

houses, and farmland near the town of La Source, 2013. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

to the flooding of roads, homes, and farmland alongside the two lakes. 42 Roads on both sides of the border have been closed several times due to major flooding. The international border crossing at Malpasse-­Jimaní lies along a major trade route connecting Port-­au-­P rince with the southern Dominican Republic; this important route was severely flooded in late 2007, affecting the border trading area and customs and immigration offices. Constant filling of the connecting road with heavy machinery became necessary to maintain trading activities. By 2011 the road connecting Boca de Cachón and Jimaní, at the western edge of Lake Enriquillo, was completely cut off and had to be rebuilt on higher ground. Between 2005 and 2008 there was also much flooding of springs and rivers around Lake Enriquillo. 43 The surfeit of water overwhelming this deforested borderland over the course of the decade hints at something about the instability of territory and the vastly different scales of mobility and temporality that are reshaping state jurisdictions and debordering their imagined territoriality. Haiti’s National Highway 3 leads out of Port-­au-­Prince through Croix-­des-­ Bouquets, where it escapes the choke of congested traffic and heads east 114  ·  c h a p t e r

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into a long valley at the bottom of which sits the brackish waters of Lake Azuei. Going through the small towns of Fonds-­Parisien and La Source, the two-­lane, and in places unpaved, roadway (unadorned with any lane markings, shoulders, or safety fences) finally turns into a temporary gravel track clinging to the edge of the lake for the last few kilometers leading up to the Dominican border. On the other side of the border, past a major Dominican military camp, the town of Jimaní sits next to the lower-­lying, larger, and far saltier Lake Enriquillo. Six thousand years ago, these two lakes were connected by a sea passage, which crossed the entire island of Hispaniola, dividing it in two. I saw baskets of ancient fossilized seashells of extinct mollusks that must be thousands of years old yet still turn up in farm fields around Jimaní, a treasure from the ancient sea. Now, it seems, the divided lakes are trying to rejoin their bodies, with increased rainfall in the sierras driving their extensive growth. This sense of hydrologic instability is strengthened by the unseen force of subterranean springs and the sudden flash floods of mountain runoff, ignoring and absorbing the state territory on either side. Both regions have been affected by the flash flooding of rivers coming down from the (heavily deforested) nearby mountains. In May 2004, heavy rainfall caused the sudden flooding of the Blanco River, which rushed into the town of Jimaní and resulted in 500 deaths and 1,600 people left homeless. 44 Similarly, Haiti’s Lastic River, usually a dry riverbed, has on occasion brought a deluge of rubble down from the Massif de la Selle onto the upper areas of Fonds-­ Parisien and Fonds-­Verrettes in 2004. Social forces also overflow the border. The border crossing lies at the edge of two states, but there is great ambiguity in its legal jurisdiction, including the assertions of the national immigration authorities, national customs authorities, and the national police on both sides of the border, as well as of m i n u s ta h and other u n agencies. There are various kinds of self-­serving state actors, diplomatic immunities of foreign powers, a vast array of “global humanitarian” operators with various degrees of power — plus the undertow of smuggling, “fiscal disobedience,” human trafficking, and undocumented migration, which all challenge the territoriality of the state and its powers of regulation. 45 Mediators are everywhere, displaying signs, badges, identity cards, uniforms, and signs of power, but as we drive across the border, at no point is it clear where or with whom national authority rests. Subject to a number of infranational actors, formal and informal, legitimate and illegitimate, the challenge for anyone seeking to cross the border is to determine which authorities are Bordering Power  ·  115

actually empowered to control one’s progress across the border and which are merely “vultures” operating illegally in the conditions of uncertainty produced by the territorial instability of the border. While a chain of movement involving the ground transportation of goods may require inspection, certification, and customs payment at the border, capital flows move through the adjacent states unimpeded. While international passport holders such as ng o workers, humanitarians, missionaries, or academic researchers may feel entitled, as “blancs,” to pass through the airport border unimpeded, we find ourselves caught up in stickier bordering regimes at this watery border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It is at this point of passage that one becomes most aware of the asymmetry and frictions between territory and territoriality, between bodies and nationalities, as particular mobile assemblages are slowed by differing jurisdictional conditions and mediations governing territoriality.

Border Reconnaissance Part of our research team began its journey from Santo Domingo and traveled to Jimaní, while some of us landed in Port-­au-­Prince and began interviews on the Haitian side of the border near Fonds-­Parisien, planning to cross the border later in the week. Two days before we are meant to cross the border from Haiti into the Dominican Republic we set out on a kind of reconnaissance mission, traveling to its edge to pick up some equipment passed to us from research colleagues on the other side. We drive our imposing white Ford F-­250 through several blue metal gates, past immigration control, past the Haitian national police checkpoint, and park it in the “no man’s land,” with no one stopping us or asking any questions. The road is unpaved, dusty, and hot. With Mack trucks, moto-­taxis, brightly painted Tap-­Taps (converted pickup trucks or minibuses used for informal transport), and pedestrians weaving in and out, there are no discernible lanes, no certain check points, and no informational signage except occasional large stop signs where no one seems to stop. Small market stalls line certain portions, selling duty-­f ree alcohol, cooked food, lottery tickets, phone minutes, and other odds and ends (figure 5.2). Tap-­Taps drop off passengers, who then negotiate with Dominican motorbike drivers to transport them (and their luggage, balanced on the handlebars) across the border. There is an odd syncopation between those who are hurrying through and those who are loitering along the edges, buying, selling, or just sitting and talking. 116  ·  c h a p t e r

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FIGURE 5.2.

Woman selling at a market stall at the Malpasse-­Jimaní border, 2013.

Photo: Mimi Sheller.

We park by the roadside and proceed on foot, squeezing between slowly inching trucks and overly hasty motorbikes. Our group of four approaches the last gate, the one leading into the Dominican Republic, still with no one stopping us or questioning us. We do not want to pass through it yet, because we have no passport stamps and no desire to hand money over to the guards, as we will be staying one more night in Haiti. We simply observe the armed Dominican soldiers who open and close the large gates for trucks, the man with a badge around his neck who seems to collect a cash payment from each truck driver, and the cluster of edgy young men wearing dark sunglasses who seem to informally control the pedestrian gate, one holding a menacing steel rod. There are no instructions, and we are not sure who is in charge or why some vehicles and people are stopped while others are let through. We hear Creole and Spanish, and someone starts speaking to us in German. Languages are frayed at the border, and translators present themselves as informal brokers. Money changers sit by the gate, waiting for business. For now we merely pick up our sonar bathymetry equipment, which a Dominican colleague passes to us across the gate; there do not Bordering Power  ·  117

FIGURE 5.3.

Sailboat and charcoal next to Lake Azuei, 2013. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

seem to be any officials interested in what we are doing, and no one questions our Dominican colleagues who walk through the gate to give us the equipment. We retreat back the way we came quickly, passing through all the blue metal gates without stopping and without questioning. The atmosphere of the border is thick with tension, produced in part by the narrowing physical infrastructure, the tight traffic of trucks and motorbikes, the passage through the series of guarded gates, and the armed men in sunglasses. It is permeated by a kind of static electricity in which it feels that conflict could be sparked at any moment. This is not a smooth bureaucratic space of lines and rules but an unruly transit through social uncertainty and a state of limbo. Trucks come and go, mostly carrying goods from Santo Domingo into Port-­au-­Prince: rolls of iron rebar for construction; second-­hand clothing; bottled water; plastic furniture; canvas bags of charcoal burned from the little scrub remaining on the mountainsides. Stacks of charcoal are piled by the side of the road, and we see occasional wooden sailboats by the lakeside (see figure 5.3). We are told that Haitian trucks and drivers can no longer enter the Dominican Republic, a new law of some kind — though promulgated by whom

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FIGURE 5.4.

Gravel and sand mining eating away at the mountainsides as the lake water rises,

threatening the road next to National Highway 3, 2013. Photo: Mimi Sheller.

we are unsure. As Galemba describes a similar situation on the Mexico-­ Guatemala border: Residents’ practices illustrate the need to understand borders beyond dividing lines as larger regions of social interaction and crossings where multiple logics of territoriality, membership, and authority intertwine. Local interpretations reveal the principle of territorial sovereignty as a contested sociopolitical construction with internal inconsistencies and multivalent interpretations rather than a universal truism. 46 The road itself has a temporary quality — it clings to the edge of the lake, but the lake eats away at its crumbling edges. On the other side of the road are great white gashes in the mountainsides, where men with shovels gnaw away at the flanks, shoveling gravel and sand into waiting trucks, the land itself being hauled off to build more roads (see figure 5.4). As the trucks pass, the gritty road surface blows up into the air mixed with a choking haze of diesel and lead fumes. Rock. Water. Sand. Metal. Who

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will win? People say that the road will probably have to be moved up into the mountains, crossing the border elsewhere, shifting entire markets and passages of trade. All around us we are acutely aware that the lake is creeping upward. The territory of the state is literally disappearing under the waters, and the roadway itself is under threat, like an umbilical cord about to be cut. No state engineering projects seem capable of stopping the impassive lakes, moving, unmoved. The bordering and debordering taking place around this frontier are indicative of the asymmetries between territory and territoriality, in which the latter is a form of multiple legal jurisdictions and mediations: it speaks to both the “emerging instability of traditional versions of territoriality, partly as a consequence of globalization,” yet also partly as a consequence of global climate change and its roots in coloniality. 47 All these forces are strongly at play in the Caribbean, and there are therefore clashing legal jurisdictions contesting claims to power over this territory, as well as diverse tactics of resistance, even as the environmental forces of climate change, fault lines, and sheer gravity slowly reshape the very ground beneath our feet.

Border Mediations On the day of our crossing we are a complex assemblage moving toward the border: two Haitian Americans with Haitian passports, one German with an EU passport, one German with a U.S. passport, and one American with a U.S. passport. We are in an (imported) American-­made truck, with Haitian license plates and some private rental documents but no insurance or customs duty papers. We have an official-­looking City College of New York magnet affixed to the side (which everyone seems to look at as we pass) and matching blue baseball caps, trying to look like a team with a purpose. The truck bed is full of boxes of expensive imported equipment for measuring rainfall, wind, solar radiation, soil humidity, lake levels, and so on. We have the phone number for someone in the Haitian Ministry of the Environment who is supposed to help us if we have any problems. We take the decision to stop at the very first immigration office to get exit stamps in our passports; otherwise we believe it may be difficult to reenter the country. This is perhaps our first mistake. Should we just have continued to drive and hand cash to men by the gates? Now we are surrounded by men offering to guide us. One civilian, who looks the most official, although we are uncertain of his status, tells us that we need to get 120  ·  c h a p t e r

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papers for our truck from an office back in Port-­au-­Prince. He says he is an official and offers to get us the papers here for $50. He discusses this with our Haitian colleague, who serves as a translator. We call the Ministry of the Environment, and our advisor there tells us we should pay. An arrangement is struck and the man offers to advance us all the way to the Dominican border. We go inside the immigration office, hand in our landing cards and get our passports stamped. We are informed that this costs 200 gourdes per person, according to a sign taped on the window by the “Ministry of the Interior and of Territorial Collectivities,” the only official information we can find. Then the guide gets on a motorcycle, carrying our passports in one hand, and leads our vehicle through the first blue gate, where we are immediately stopped at the National Police checkpoint. Now several armed and uniformed police officers inspect our truck and after a certain amount of negotiation demand that we hand over another $40 before we are allowed to proceed. It becomes increasingly clear to us that, as Galemba puts it, “the gaps in state power that locals seek to exploit result not necessarily from the absence of the state but from its selective presence, silence, and collusion with legal and illegal entrepreneurs and emergent local and transnational forms of governance.”48 Indeed, the very fact of our transnationality makes us subject to myriad social mediators, especially since the rules governing our mobility are unclear. Another blue gate opens, and we pass into and through some kind of no-­man’s-­land, where empty trucks are parked for no apparent reason. We now come to what appears to be the first Dominican gate, although the exact border line is not obvious to us. We pass through, easily led by the Haitian guide, and are immediately flagged down and turned off to the side where we see the Dominican immigration and customs office. Here our Haitian guide takes leave of us, his authority at its end. Now a young man who has followed us from the first stop in Haiti, where we thought he was Haitian, presents himself as a Dominican (speaking Creole and Spanish) and says he will explain what needs to be done. We cannot shake him, and he and his associates grab our passports and entry cards, filling them in for us, unbidden. We have advanced through the border gates as if entering a giant metal grater, with arrays of serrated edges scraping monetary payments off our multinational transterritorial assemblage. We are caught in its machinery, which is operated by both state actors and nonstate actors, legal and illegal mechanisms, at many different scales. We inch forward, hemorrhaging Bordering Power  ·  121

cash, dollars, gourdes, and pesos at every gate. In exchange we garner passport stamps ($10), customs stamps ($20), car permits ($50), insurance documents (5000 pesos), tax receipts, landing cards, and above all: open gates. At each point tensions rise, men stand toe to toe. We feel duped and powerless. At the border, the fiction of the state’s legal construct of territoriality as exclusive jurisdiction is evident as a multitude of quasi-­authorities, illegal actors, breakdowns of trust, and communicative confusion. A kind of informal jurisdiction abounds that is loosely allied with the state but also exceeds or escapes state control. Although we operate at a kind of international scale, a multinational team doing National Science Foundation – funded work on a cross-­border project in two different countries with support from various national ministries in each country, here on the border we cannot even identify national authorities to communicate with. We are reduced to dealing with local actors, translators, money changers, and guides who seem to have their own agendas and little regulation. They have taken advantage of the structural holes of the absent state to catch a large fish in their net. As Anssi Paasi observes, “Borders are relational in the sense that they are produced, reproduced, and transformed in diverging social relations and networks. . . . Territorial jurisdictions are sites of complex relational juxtapositions, and fold different scales in, around, and in-­between each other.”49 We are caught in the folds of the border. Several days later we complete our work in the Dominican Republic and now need to return for a flight out of Port-­au-­Prince. At our hotel in Jimaní we meet a retired commander of the Dominican national police whom everyone calls “the General.” He offers to send someone with us to help us cross the border; he also introduces us to some Haitian immigration officers who happen to be there. They look at our passports and point out that we are missing Dominican customs stamps, a small triangle that should have been stamped over the corner of the entry stamp (although we thought we had paid for these). So we accept the General’s offer of assistance, and we head toward the border with a new guide. This time it takes only forty minutes, but it still costs $50 for the car, plus 200 pesos per person, just to leave. The guide tells us he will report back to the General which border guards have been taking payoffs; apparently even in retirement he still wields some degree of power. We get exit stamps, and a customs inspector looks over our truck. The gates open. We pass through the no-­man’s-­land, traffic is light; but back on the Haitian side we are stopped again. We see someone we know, from some in122  ·  c h a p t e r

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terviews we had done the previous week, who works for the truck drivers union. He puts in a word with a knot of police and customs officers who have gathered around us — saying what, we do not know — and finally we are allowed to pass. We stop at the immigration office and fill in landing cards. The desk officer, as close as we have seen to an actual government employee sitting at an actual desk, behind a window, lingers over my passport, looking at the picture, paging through all the stamps in my passport, seemingly imagining my life of travel. Then he stamps it, signs it with a flourish, and very slowly hands it back to me, faintly smiling. Now we are “free” to continue our travels. His smile also seems to confirm what we already know, “that extralegal activities may be conducive to state power,” as Roitman argues in the context of the Chad Basin in Africa: “while the enabling of unregulated activities has the potential to undermine state authority it may also ‘contribute to the viability of the state through the production of new rents and possibilities for redistribution among strategic military, political, and commercial personalities.’ ”50 Our double transit across the Haiti – Dominican Republic border seems to have contributed to the sociocultural practices that reproduce that border dividing the island into two state territories. Where was the border during our three approaches up to and over it? Paasi argues for abandoning the view of borders “as mere lines and the notion of their location solely at the ‘edges’ of spaces,” noting that “the key issues are not the ‘lines’ or ‘edges’ themselves, or not even the events and processes occurring in these contexts, but nonmobile and mobile social practices and discourses where borders — as processes, sets of sociocultural practices, symbols, institutions, and networks — are produced, reproduced, and transcended.”51 For both the Haitian state and the Dominican state, the border is fuzzy. Both states experience the rival power of “jurisdictions that deborder territoriality” (such as the free trade zone that straddles the two countries with nontaxed export factories) and “non-­state jurisdictions that escape the grip of national-­state territoriality” (such as the u n humanitarian apparatus). 52 Yet they nevertheless adamantly maintain the friction (and the fiction) of the border. It is in fact one of the few places where the state can assert its dominion over foreigners when it is otherwise so compromised by extraterritorial jurisdictions and structural holes in its territoriality. If there is one thing both states (and the various groups of men who operate the border apparatus on behalf of those states) can agree on, it is the need to maintain this profitable border between them, through thick and Bordering Power  ·  123

thin. Together they collude with nonstate, extrastate, and infrastate actors to produce an illusion of sovereign territoriality.

The Jurisdiction of the Lakes Human and nonhuman actors shape territories, their mediations both challenging and forming layered territorialities. As I have shown, various jurisdictions and extrajuridical networks control the border crossing between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, catching, slowing, or stopping border-­ crossing assemblages in complex ways that operate across many scales and with various gradations and rhythms. While the border may appear to be an edge of visible deforestation between two states, or a line on the map, in practice it represents many other crosscutting scales, ambiguous meanings, and intermixed territorialities. The border is itself an assemblage, with roads, passengers, vehicles, passports, gates, guards, goods, money, water, and dust all part of its materiality. Despite the tens of thousands of Haitians who live in the Dominican Republic, many working in menial jobs, many undocumented, many stateless and now subject to deportation since the passage of the new citizenship law, it sometimes seems that neither nation can imagine a time when this border will not divide them, when Hispaniola/ Ayiti/Quisqueya will be one again. Too many corporate actors benefit from exploiting the existence of the border, from the police and military to the sugar plantations and charcoal dealers to the truckers and mototaxi drivers. And yet there are also many activist networks that are trying to bridge this conflicted borderland. Civil society groups from both countries met in the aftermath of the earthquake to try to develop recovery plans in unity. There are workshops being held in New York under the rubric “Decolonizing Hispaniola,” with events such as “Sancocho and Soup Joumou Edition,” that seek to help diaspora participants gain “unbiased information and an understanding of historical narratives that have promoted identities and world views that have led to tensions” between the two countries who share a single island. 53 There is a Transnational Hispaniola Working Group within the Caribbean Studies Association, organizing academic networks and conference panels to reflect on the connections across the divided island and sharing stories across social media. All of this gives hope for reconciliation, to which I return in the conclusion. Ultimately, though, any human social bordering processes are dependent upon their relation to the seemingly unavoidable expansion of the twin lakes, which know no law. Their flooding may elicit further transna124  ·  c h a p t e r

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tional jurisdictions to manage a looming environmental catastrophe, and specifically to govern its im/mobilities. If a state cannot contain water within the bounds of its territory, nor keep the water from submerging its roads, farms, and towns, it may lose exclusive claim to govern that territory. Outside agencies will be brought in to fund and build alternative highways, to move towns, to control moving populations, and eventually to reconstitute the border in a new physical location. The Dominican government was already building a large roadway connecting Jimaní to Boca de Cachón on a route that runs between the two lakes near where an older road had been flooded out. The height and size of this engineering project suggests that it will also function as a kind of barrier to control the overflow of Lake Azuei. Some Haitians suspect that this structure is contributing to flooding on their side by not allowing the water to drain out. Others blame the state for not cleaning out canals that they believe would drain the lake to the sea, via Trou Caïman to the west. Still others think that international organizations could and should help them lower the level of the lakes, perhaps by draining Lake Azuei into the Dominican Republic and then cleaning a canal system that will drain Lake Enriquillo out toward the sea to the southeast. Everyone holds the president responsible for controlling the flooding, in both countries, even though there is little the national state can do given a lack of understanding of the causes of the flooding. The road holds for now, but only by a thread (figure 5.5). It is a temporary construction, a semiotic handle of state sovereignty as temporary as the border itself. For now, the trucks and people, motorbikes and goods, continue a stuttering but steady flow between the two countries along this tenuous route, but all are aware they are ultimately subject to the “natural” jurisdiction of the lakes. In this chapter I have tried to show how the process of border crossing is caught up in the production of Haitian and Dominican territoriality, even as both states’ territory is juridically and symbolically being eaten away by extrastate and infrastate actors wielding whatever bordering power they can, while literally being eaten away by the rising lakes and changing climate. In giving this thick descriptive account, my aim was to demonstrate the many different scales of action governing mobility: from the most immediate interactional scale of riding in a large motorized vehicle down a dusty highway to the unstoppable power of water embodied in the lakes and in the global forces of climate change that are reshaping the Caribbean bioregion. In between these extremes are a whole range of mediators, both Bordering Power  ·  125

FIGURE 5.5.

Lake Azuei overtaking the national highway and the land around it, 2013.

Photo: Mimi Sheller.

physical and symbolic: the social negotiation with state-­empowered and nonstate actors to open various gates; the state-­level processing of passports, visas, and customs officers; the potential interventions of “higher­up” state actors, ministries, and foreign powers; the transnational jurisdictions such as those of the u n or World Bank that interfere in state borders; and last but certainly not least, the underground economies and illicit trafficking that find tactics to cross the border and mediate its flows. The contemporary bordering and debordering of Haiti and the Dominican Republic are deeply embedded in longer-­term historical relationships that entrench both divisions and connections across the border. Historical memory informs the very different cultural practices, languages, and customs on both sides of the border, even as historical forces drive Haitian laborers, migrants, and small traders into the Dominican Republic, and Dominican trucks, commodities, and businesses into Haiti. These bidirectional mobility regimes are the very forces that produce the territory of each country at the same time that they produce structural holes of circumvention and illicit networks of trade, traffic, and contraband. And at the same time the entire island is caught in the net of the globalizing 126  ·  c h a p t e r

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mobilities that first brought Christopher Columbus here to found a sugar colony with his sons, then French and Spanish colonists and armies, then German and American financiers, and U.S. invading forces, United Nations stabilization forces, global humanitarian organizations, and last, and perhaps least, academic researchers. But there are still larger forces who hold sway over these lakes and this island. With their salty waters, great depths, once plentiful fish, hidden seashells, and small sailing boats, these lakes resemble oceans more than freshwater bodies. Some even believe their mysterious depths are still connected to the sea, which once coursed through this valley between the high sierras. The loa Met Agwe, protector of the sea, is closely associated with all who make their livelihood from the sea — navy sailors, fishermen, yachtsmen. With Lasiren, the mermaid, he is said to inhabit a palace under the sea and is also considered the Master of Earthquakes. In this liquid place between saltwater and land, the margins are dangerous and the borders are fluid. There are fewer fish in the lakes and the fishermen have lost their livelihood. The fields have been flooded and the ranchers have lost their cattle. The rains are failing and the farmers have lost their crops. The climate is changing and no one really knows why. The president cannot fix the climate. The United States cannot fix the climate. The u n cannot fix the climate. Perhaps we must ask Met Agwe and Lasiren where the fish have gone. We are lost without them. s on g f o r ag w e tawoyo

Se peche ma prale peche Agweta Woyo, m pedi zaviwon lwa Se peche [ma prale peche] Agewta Woyo, m pedi zaviwon lwa Annarivan lakay Sa ma soupe? Sa ma soupe Koki Lanme? Sa ma soupe Rasin San Bout Sa ma soupe o! O! Se peche ma prale peche Agweta Woyo, m pedi zaviwon lwa Annarivon m bo lakay Sa ma soupe? E! Sa ma soupe Katawoulo? Bordering Power  ·  127

Sa m a soupe? Sa pou m soupe Rasin San Bout Sa ma soupe? Annarivan m lakay, sa ma soupe? E! E! E! Se peche m a prale peche Se peche m ta prale peche Agwe Tawoyo, m-­pedi zaviwon lwa Annarivan m lakay Sa ma soupe? Abobobo! (M-­fini!) Going Fishing, I was going fishing Agwe Tawoyo, I lost my lwa’s oars While going fishing Agwe Tawoyo, I lost my lwa’s oars When I get home What will I have for supper? Shellfish, what will I have for supper? Roots Without End, what will I have for supper? What will I have for supper oh! Oh! Going fishing Agwe Tawoyo, I lost my lwa’s oars When I get home What will I have for supper? Eh, Katawoulo, what will I have for supper? What will I have for supper? Roots Without End, what will I have for supper? What will I have for supper? When I get home, what will I have for supper? E! E! E! Going fishing, I was going fishing Going fishing, I was going fishing Agwe Tawoyo, I lost my lwa’s oars When I get home What will I have for supper? I am done!54 128  ·  c h a p t e r

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6

SEXUAL POWER

Unequal sexual economies are common not only in Caribbean tourism zones and around military bases but also in the realms of humanitarian adventure and missionary work. The recently disclosed abuse of prostitutes by Oxfam and other humanitarian organizations in postearthquake Haiti exemplifies a disturbing facet of the more general offshoring of racialized sex tourism to island locations and the sexual exploitation of poverty. In February 2018, it came to light that the British wing of the charity Oxfam had covered up an investigation into the hiring of sex workers for so-­called orgies by staff working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. The hiring of prostitutes in such a group context, where they likely have little choice in what activities to engage in or not, might be better characterized as the commercialization of gang rape. According to an internal 2011 report that was kept secret until revealed by the media in 2018, the charity allowed three men, including the country director Roland van Hauwermeiren, to resign quietly, and sacked four others for gross misconduct. When additional, earlier allegations against Hauwermeiren for sexual misconduct in Chad emerged, the charity came under fire and lost celebrity supporters and approximately seven thousand donors. Further allegations of sexual harassment by staff in Haiti emerged, and eventually Mark Goldring, chief executive of Oxfam

gb

had to resign. In June 2018, the government of

Haiti finally announced it was withdrawing the charity’s right to operate in the country “for violation of Haitian law and serious violation of the principle of the dignity of human beings.”1 Racialized tropical locations, especially in the Caribbean, have long been produced as states of sexual exception, offshore zones of “pornotroping,” as Hortense Spillers theorized it, where violent access to gendered and racialized subaltern bodies continues the technologies of slave exploitation of “the flesh.” Spillers’s work on this topic has also been taken

up and further contextualized by Alexander Weheliye — in a searing critique of Agamben’s “bare life” for its lack of racial specificity — t hrough the concept of habeas viscus. 2 Pornotroping, explains Weheliye, “names the becoming-­flesh of the (Black) body and forms a primary component in the processes by which human beings are converted into bare life.” Thus, he argues, “Spillers adds to and recasts the concept of bare life by forcefully showing how, within the context of racial slavery, it gives birth to a cluster of classifying assemblages that stands at the center of modernity.”3 With Sylvia Wynter, we can then follow this assemblage as it unfolds today, when “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth’s resources . . .  — these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.”4 This is why racialized sexual violence is not a separate issue, relegated to the sidelines, while “we” — the serious, the international, the academic, the engineer, the international agencies — deal with climate change or disaster recovery. No, pornotroping is at the heart of the matter, where flesh and atmosphere meet. Not long before the Oxfam scandal, a United Nations internal investigation found that so-­called transactional sex and rape were common in Haiti during the thirteen-­year occupation by the peacekeeping force known as

m i n u s ta h ,

with 480 total allegations of sexual exploitation

and abuse made between 2008 and 2013, and one third of these cases involving children. “In 2007, a group of Haitian children identified 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers in a child sex ring that went on for three years.” According to u n investigators: “Nine children told u n investigators of being lured into having sex in exchange for food and then being passed from soldier to soldier. . . . Over the course of three years, another child said he had sex with more than 100 Sri Lankan peacekeepers, averaging about four a day.”5 Sri Lanka repatriated 114 of the peacekeepers, but none were ever prosecuted or jailed, according to the Associated Press. And when the rape and sodomy of a Haitian teenager again occurred in 2013, the investigator chosen by the u n was Maj. Gen. Jagath Dias, who had been accused of atrocities in his own country’s vicious civil war, and who did nothing in response to the Haitian case. These events contributed to the decision to end the u n peacekeeping mission in Haiti, although a police force remained. None of this should have been surprising to anyone who was working in postearthquake Haiti, where commercial sex work and more informal transactional sex between “blancs” and young Haitians were open and ob130  ·  c h a p t e r

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vious; where women were known to be highly vulnerable to gender-­based violence and rape in the i dp camps; and where there was already an existing pattern of migration (and trafficking) of women to work in the infamous sex trade in the Dominican Republic. The Haiti Gender Shadow Report, released in 2010 by a coalition of women’s organizations as a “Shadow Report of the 2010 Haiti Post-­Disaster Needs Assessment (p d n a )” report, called attention to the urgent need “to address violence, domestic violence, labor and sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, elder abuse and other gender-­based human rights violations” in the postearthquake reconstruction process. 6 Underlining the lack of women’s voices in the reconstruction planning, the exclusion of women’s organizations from the p dn a , and the complete lack of gender content in the p d n a blueprint for postdisaster reconstruction (prepared by the World Bank and major donors), this coalition of women’s organizations prepared a parallel report to provide the “missing gender content.” Observing that years of “systemic gender discrimination have exposed women of Haiti to higher rates of poverty and violence,” they argued that a “post-­disaster strategy that ignores the gendered effects of disaster will inevitably fail to secure the majority of its population,” and they called on the country to implement a more far-­ reaching “reconstruction” through “a more gender equitable process.”7 Among the evidence they present concerning gender-­based violence was that “multiple unofficial reports exist across Haitian i dp camps showing members of the National Haitian Police (p n h ) and m i n u s ta h perpetuating human rights abuses including sexual and gender-­based violence (s g b v ) against women and children.” Women and girls also suffered from a lack of legal recourse and access to the justice system, including the fact that “the crime of rape was only integrated into the Penal Code of Haiti in 2005, due to the efforts of the late Magalie Marcelin, a Haitian women’s rights lawyer who perished in the earthquake.”8 The shadow report’s key recommendations call for the reconstruction plan to: 1 Methodically require consultation with women and women’s groups in every post-­disaster reconstruction project and all disaster preparedness planning. 2 Immediately strengthen i dp camp security, shelters and services by targeting gender-­based violence, malnutrition and disease. 3 Implement and enforce gender equity and anti-­d iscrimination laws, particularly against sexual violence, sexual harassment and human trafficking.9 Sexual Power  ·  131

It then develops further comprehensive, systematic, and detailed recommendations for the full inclusion of women and gender equality in the reconstruction process. Reconstruction is meaningless if it does not address these fundamental abuses of power, for they are the same abuses that produce extreme vulnerability, political corruption, and impunity, whether perpetrated against women, children, minority groups, or the natural world. Eight years on from their report, it is not evident that any of its recommendations have been implemented. But this is not the place to conduct a full review. For the purposes of this chapter, I want to reflect on the ways in which foreign volunteers, humanitarian workers, and even academic researchers are implicated in gender-­based inequality and racialized and sexualized power relations in Haiti. This is a crucial aspect of transnational solidarity work, yet one which is often ignored by foreign participants who keep such aspects in a kind of hidden backstage, while they get on with the public, front-­of-­stage work of “helping” Haiti. My own experience revealed troubling situations, first in Léogâne and later in and around Jimaní in the Dominican Republic, situations which were minor but indicative of deeper problems. These kinds of vignettes do not usually make it into empirical research that has been commissioned to study issues such as postearthquake reconstruction or climate change adaptation. It is urgent that we place racialized sexual exploitation of poor women and children at the forefront of disaster recovery and climate change research, where it is so often sidelined and silenced, because it is in fact a prime indicator of the “coloniality of disaster” and the workings of neoliberal processes of reconstruction through forms of climate adaptation that assiduously seek not to disturb existing power structures.10

Hands On, Hands Off When my research team arrived in Léogâne in March 2010, one of the larger humanitarian organizations already well ensconced in the town was known as Hands On Disaster Relief (h o d r ). They had taken over an unfinished construction site for a large multistory discotheque because it afforded very high concrete walls and a secure metal entry gate with which they could control who entered, keeping their young volunteers and their belongings safe. They checked identities at the gate and did not allow local people to enter the facility, where volunteers pitched tents and stowed their gear around the courtyard of the large concrete shell. Local people 132  ·  c h a p t e r

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sometimes hung around outside the gate, waiting for the paying work that was sometimes offered by charity aid donors — work such as removing rubble from collapsed buildings, and so on. But there was not enough paying work to go around, and many people just waited by the side of the road in the heat of the afternoon. Just outside the gate there was also a popular bar with an outdoor dance floor and tables where foreign volunteers and locals could drink and mingle after dark. Volunteers at h o d r had little experience in Haiti, did not speak the language, and often did short stints of only a week or two, although some stayed longer. Some had traveled to disaster zones around the world and regularly did this kind of volunteering, but most had never been in Haiti. After hot, dusty days of work, the bar offered a welcome break and a chance for relaxation, listening to compa music and drinking Haiti’s well-­liked Prestige beer. One night my own research team decided to go there, as our work was coming to an end and we wanted to check out the local scene at a place where we knew there would be both Haitians and other international workers from the many foreign n g o s in town. Upon arrival, I immediately noticed that it wasn’t only foreigners dancing with one another; there were also “blancs” dancing with Haitian women and a few white women dancing with Haitian men. Some of the people on the dance floor looked very young, indeed what I would call “under age” to be at a bar. As I eyeballed the scene with dismay, one of our translators indicated to me that some of the young Haitians sought to get food, drinks, or earn money by interacting with these foreigners, and possibly by making sexual exchanges with them. This was common knowledge. It did not seem to bother my male colleagues. These are the kinds of details that do not make it into the official research publications funded by the National Science Foundation. These are the kinds of field notes that are traditionally suppressed by white male anthropologists but which Black feminist anthropologists have increasingly revealed. I was sensitive to the fact that transactional sex was certainly not something I would ever consider purchasing — but would any of my male colleagues or the other foreign n g o workers? At the same time, I tried to calibrate this information with a very different sexual story that I had learned of that week. In the i dp camp next to where we were staying — the very one with the Samaritan’s Purse water filtration system discussed in chapter 2 — we learned that there was a young mother who had just given birth but who was staying with her newborn baby in one of the tents, surrounded by mud and outdoor latrines. In most Sexual Power  ·  133

idp

camps there would have been little unusual about this; it was an un-

fortunate circumstance that happened when entire families had lost their homes in the earthquake and hospitals were overfilled. This case, however, was different, because this was a middle-­class woman reduced to this situation as a form of punishment for having gotten pregnant out of wedlock with an unapproved young man. Like the Broadway musical Once on This Island — a kind of Romeo and Juliet story set in Haiti — she had fallen in love with a boy from a neighboring family (although in this case he too was middle-­class) and her accidental pregnancy had led the parents to split up the star-­crossed lovers, who were supposed to be finishing their educations. He was sent to the United States; she was left behind, unrepentant, until the earthquake struck. Under the circumstances, her relatives might have shown her some sympathy and helped her find a place to deliver her baby and stay in safety. But instead she was left in the

idp

camp and re-

mained in a distressingly hot, muddy, flimsy tent with her newborn. I found this story shocking at the time, given that we were staying next door in perfectly functional rooms with fans and showers and mosquito nets, the least a new mother might hope for. Her purposeful degradation stood for all the sexual inequities, the casual cruelties, and the hypocrisies that surrounded us. White men could get away with sexual exploitation of children, but a teenaged mother was punished mercilessly. Likewise, Haitian women who had been raped by

un

peacekeepers and impreg-

nated had to sue for child support when the soldiers abandoned their children. I saw other heavily pregnant women waiting in lines for water in the 110-­degree heat and young girls carrying heavy loads of water on their heads. Gender, youth, and pregnancy provided no absolution, no protection, but rather the opposite: less power, more work, more exploitation.11 At the same time, such harsh inequalities were par for the course. I could also see that some small children were attending school, in pretty uniforms, with hair ribbons and shiny shoes, while others in the same place were left outside: barefoot, neglected, malnourished, and unschooled. Somehow our presence as foreign researchers just seemed to exacerbate all of this, since we were powerless to do anything about it. The neglected children latched onto us and held our hands, yet there was nothing we could do to get those particular children into school. Later I would send money to a friend who was supporting a rural child to attend school, keeping an eye on his attendance and report cards. But that seemed like a drop in the bucket of need. We were all implicated in unequal power relations, related to unequal mobility regimes, unequal processes of reconstruction, 134  ·  c h a p t e r

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and the remaking of transnational, racialized, classed, and gendered spatial and bodily relations that ultimately perpetuated the conditions of sexual exploitation. This is why it is crucial when doing any transnational work for foreign organizations and researchers to partner with women’s groups and grassroots feminist organizations like those involved in The Haiti Gender Shadow Report, for they are most aware of the risks and vulnerabilities of the populations in their region. The Haitian organization Poto Fanm + Fi (Women and Girls’ Pillar), for example, released an important report in 2012 called Beyond Shock: Charting the Landscape of Sexual Violence in Post-­quake Haiti; Progress, Challenges and Emerging Trends 2010 – 2012. Based on interviews with sixty agencies, field providers, and international groups, as well as on a survey of two thousand pregnant adolescents and their families, the report “suggests that adolescent girls are disproportionately suffering social and violent aftershocks of the earthquake,” including “unwanted and early pregnancies, illegal abortions, and child abandonment” —  which have all increased — while “reports link cases to sexual violence and increased ‘survival sex’ in teenage girls.”12 They also found high rates of domestic violence and a “boom” in pregnancies resulting from rapes. In the absence of building connections with women’s groups, international responses to disasters will continue to contribute to sexual exploitation of the most vulnerable.

Dominican Sex Tourism and Trafficking In many ways, foreign researchers,

un

soldiers, aid agency workers, hu-

manitarian volunteers, and academics attending conferences are all part of the wider economy of Caribbean tourism in which sex tourism undeniably plays an important part. Tourism, the largest economic sector in the Caribbean region, depends on a geography of mobility and interconnectivity that not only brings foreign visitors into a destination, but also brings local populations and internal regional migrants to work in tourism industries. In creating “places to play” it also puts “places in play” — driving relational geographies of uneven development as much as those driven by the multinational garment industry described by Marion Werner.13 Tourism (like earlier forms of colonization) also depends on discourses and imaginaries of geographical and social mobility alongside actual transportation infrastructures for movement by land, sea, and air. Those who participate in work in the tourism sector, including sex tourism, are often exercising Sexual Power  ·  135

dreams of mobility toward a better life, even as tourists imagine their own social mobilities and dreams of access to young black and brown “flesh.” There is a significant body of work on Caribbean tourism, yet few studies address the combined im/mobilities of people, objects, texts, and technologies that perform tourism in relation to different forms of “moorings” and movement.14 Places are not fixed but are implicated within complex networks by which hosts, guests, buildings, objects and machines, as well as researchers, humanitarian workers, sex workers, finance capital, regulatory agencies, police forces, and software systems are contingently brought together to produce certain performances and spatialities in certain places at certain times, demobilizing and remobilizing bodies, capital, and labor as needed.15 While the Haitian earthquake was mobilizing foreign visitors, rental cars, hotel rooms, food services, banking, and various other kinds of services, it was also mobilizing Haitian moto-­taxis, drivers, translators, cooks, charcoal makers, cleaners, and, yes, certainly, sex workers, pimps, and possibly traffickers. This leads me to a second troubling vignette, one that took place on the Dominican side of the border, near Jimaní. The Dominican Republic is infamous as one of the primary destinations for sex tourism in the Caribbean, and it contributes one of the largest migrant labor forces of sex workers who travel throughout the region.16 The anthropologist Denise Brennan has studied one city, Sosúa, where with the “constant influx of Dominican and Haitian migrants for work in the sex and tourist trades and of European tourists for play, as well as a large foreign-­resident community living there year round, Sosúa has became a transnational sexual meeting ground.” She describes this city on the north coast as a “sexscape,” where international travel, consumption of paid sex, and “differences in power between the buyers (sex tourists) and the sellers (sex workers)” operate according to “globalized hierarchies of race, class, gender, citizenship, and mobility [that] create undeniable power differentials among the actors in these geographic spaces, which in turn give them unequal opportunities.”17 Among those inequalities are the limited resources and legal constraints on migration off the island and the unequal citizenship of Haitians within the Dominican Republic. Many Haitian women also work in the sex industry in the Dominican Republic, but there is a longstanding anxiety around the travel of Haitian women back and forth across the border, not only as sex workers but more commonly as “Madan Sara” as small-­scale informal traders are known.18 Unequal citizenship status makes Haitians especially vulnerable to exploitation and violence in the Dominican Republic, and 136  ·  c h a p t e r

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it is such constrained forms of mobility — both within the island and with regard to moving off the island — that place people in situations of sexual vulnerability. But I did not go to Sosúa; I was not studying sex tourism; and I was at the southern border crossing, where few foreigners travel. Yet here too the reverberations of the transnational sex trade could be found. Sexscapes such as Sosúa depend on a constant flow of not only arriving tourists but also young, healthy sex workers, including children, who often are brought in from other regions or from Haiti. Economic and social disruptions such as those caused by the flooding of the lakes and, more widely, climate change, often uproot rural people and leave children vulnerable to exploitation. Among the social problems caused by the flooding of Lake Enriquillo, World Vision’s project manager at their clinic in Jimaní observed: “Unemployment, commercial sexual exploitation of minors, child labor, illness and violence are visible consequences of the loss of livelihood among the affected families.”19 Human trafficking of Haitian minors (and women) across Lake Azuei into the Dominican Republic was also cited as a problem by Father Antoine Lissaint, director of the Jesuit Refugee and Migrant organization, at a 2012 workshop in Fonds-­Parisien which brought together Haitian and Dominican reporters. Undocumented migrant women and children are at high risk of ending up in Sosúa, where their bodies are made available to foreign men at cheap prices. I was only vaguely aware of this at the time of our research trip, but in the course of conducting the research I took note that there were children in the area who were very willing to approach and talk with foreigners like myself. In fact, I have made a conscious decision not to include close-­up photographs of children in this book, since they were so unguarded and unable to give consent for the use of their photos. Christina Sharpe writes poignantly about an injured Haitian girl photographed after the earthquake, lying on a stretcher, with the word “Ship” taped onto her forehead: “Where is she looking? Who and what is she looking for? Who can look back? Does she know that there is a piece of tape on her forehead? Does she know what the piece of tape says? Does she know that she is destined for a ship?”20 Sharpe provokes us to see that this word evokes and invokes the violent and painful histories of the Middle Passage, the Haitian “boat people,” and the refugee shipwrecks unfolding around the world. Despite the presumed good intentions of humanitarian aiders to mark this child, presumably for evacuation to safety on a hospital ship, there is nonetheless a violence in marking her body: “how does one mark someone for a space — the ship — who is already marked by it?”21 Sexual Power  ·  137

Meanwhile, in Jimaní, there were “blancs” working with charitable organizations in the community who also had access to these children. Our own research team had been offered informal help by a foreign white man who knew the area and said he was available to drive us to remote locations where we could conduct interviews. This was very helpful, since we had limited vehicles and many dispersed places for our various researchers to get to. Yet in accepting such a ride, I became aware that we — as a small group of American and Dominican female researchers — were interviewing people in their homes and attracting the attention of children who were thereby socially introduced to this foreign man who had a car. Later, I saw such rural children being given rides into town without their parents. I saw young women hanging out at corner shops and waiting for rides, since it was mainly men who had motorcycles or other vehicles. It seemed clear to me that there were sexual power inequalities which made young women and children highly susceptible to sexual exploitation, and this was linked in part to their reliance on men for mobility — whether getting a ride into town, getting a ride across the border, getting to places like Sosúa that offered economic opportunities not available at home through having sex with foreigners, and ultimately dreaming of getting off the island. Trafficking literally begins in traffic. It is important to pause here and reflect on what we have learned from Black feminist anthropologists who have worked in transnational solidarity with Black women’s neighborhood associations and community-­based movements to protect Black lives. In a study of Black women’s struggles for racial justice in the Brazilian city of Salvador, for example, Keisha-­K han Y. Perry cites the work of Carole Boyce Davies, Faye Harrison, Gina A. Ulysse, and Gloria Wekker in arguing that an “analysis of the political economy of Black diaspora communities is crucial for understanding the urgency of Black women’s political struggle and their demands for the improvement of Black communities’ everyday material existence.”22 Spatialized racial restructuring of cities like Salvador is effected through processes of so-­called modernization that “clean up” the city through “land grabs,” expulsions, and the demolition of Black neighborhoods. Much like postdisaster reconstruction in Haiti, this reproduces the racialization and feminization of poverty, which puts Black women and children in highly vulnerable conditions. Black women’s community-­based organizations are vehemently fighting these processes, trying to hold onto rights to residence, land, and children.

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Against such land grabs, which underwrite white reconstruction (to call it what it is), Black women’s neighborhood associations have mobilized activism to claim land rights, rights to clean water, rights to the city, and rights to protection against police and state violence. Just as Perry calls for “international solidarity with grassroots movements throughout the Black diaspora,” those working in postdisaster contexts where women, children, the elderly, and the poor are highly vulnerable to violent abuse also need to work in solidarity with women’s grassroots movements.23 Reconstruction planning, decision making, and implementation carried out from the top down — by male agents of the state, protected by masculine military forces and police, and with the guidance of elite male-­dominated foreign governments and international financial institutions — w ill by its very nature reproduce unequal power structures, including those based in sexual exploitation of the racialized and gendered poor, as well as those based in environmental exploitation, resource extraction, and pollution with impunity. Instead, as seems clear both from experience and from critical analysis, neighborhood-­based, community-­directed, grassroots women’s organizations, possibly supported by international accompaniment that can provide skills and resources, should take the lead in reconstruction. In Resisting Paradise, a study of tourism, diaspora, and sexuality, Angelique V. Nixon argues that Caribbean writers and artists have been able to dismantle the silences of globalization by “engaging in and representing movement, migration, and mobility/immobility in the face of tourism and neocolonialism.”24 Increasingly, the project of Caribbean decolonization and freedom is to build more positive imaginings of just futures, “reimagining sites of resistance,” and “resisting paradise.”25 Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick (following Wynter) calls this the imagining and making of “more humanly workable geographies” and “new modes of humanness” imagined as “interhuman geographies.”26 I remain hopeful that Caribbean arts, letters, philosophy, and theory can provide some insights into other possible futures, reworking the traces that Caribbean survival up until now has bequeathed to future generations. This suggests very different pathways for Caribbean reconstruction.

Sexual Power  ·  139

Mobility Justice, Sexual Justice, Spiritual Justice As I have argued throughout this book, Haiti does more than “exemplify” one of the prime global locations for analyzing the complexes of mobility injustice, from colonization and plantation slavery to isolation and military occupation, debt and neoliberalism, tourism and offshoring. Today’s uneven mobilities are also associated with international “peacekeeping,” “humanitarianism,” and international research. The islanding effect, I have argued, isolates or marginalizes vulnerable populations in the postdisaster situation via deeply limited rights to mobility and reduces capabilities for mobility, access, and communication. Islanding is a kind of active redistribution of access which enables the mobility of some (those with “network capital”) while limiting the mobility of others (the “mobility poor”). In other words, these are relational geographies, and we are all part of these regimes of mobility, regimes that produce both climate change and poverty, sexual violence and pollution. Recent infrastructural development in the Caribbean, including those associated with postdisaster reconstruction, must be understood in relation to the making of such transnational spaces of im/mobilities and their basis in emergent forms of supranational, subnational, and extranational sovereignty. By “extranational” I refer to both the exceptional spaces of the offshore economy and the extraterritorial spaces of military jurisdictions. Offshoring is a strategy for leveraging uneven infrastructure space and for managing differential im/mobilities, and in so doing it reproduces racialized/gendered sexscapes as well. The islanding effect is the power to keep people in place and to bypass places. It is a topological movement related to patterns of dis/connection, rather than a purely topographic one. Questions of mobility justice therefore remain crucial to many key issues facing Caribbean societies today, ranging from migration, deportation, diaspora, and borders to tourism, ecology, and land use planning to communication infrastructure, digital access, and cultural circulation. At different historical conjunctures in the forming of Caribbean relations, we must continue to ask: How has mobility been deployed as a form of colonization, exercised as a right of citizens, controlled as a privilege of elites, or contested from below for its exclusions? How does the macropolitics of mobility relate to the micropolitics of sexual exploitation and injustice in racialized and gendered interbodily relations? As I argue further in Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes, a full theory of mobility justice would need to address a) in140  ·  c h a p t e r

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justices relating to race, gender, age, disability, sexuality, and class, which inform uneven freedom of movement and unequal rights to the city and to national space; b) injustices relating to borders, migration, and other kinds of transnational mobility — slavery, human trafficking, deportation, refugees, and so on; and ultimately also c) injustices relating to the circulation of goods, resources, and energy in a global capitalist system that lacks procedural justice in the deliberation over the distribution of planetary matter and the local impacts of the logistics infrastructures that move that stuff. The result of unjust mobility regimes, from colonialism to neoliberalism, is the destruction of environments through extractive economies, the attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples around the world, the enslavement and exploitation of racialized populations, the sexual exploitation of women and children, and the excessive use of energy that has produced global warming and jeopardized the planetary climate. The struggle for climate justice and climate adaptation, therefore, is not simply a technical matter of better engineering or of bringing in outside expertise. Instead, climate justice fundamentally rests on the creation of mobility justice and sexual justice. In Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom, I argued for the importance of sexual citizenship and erotic agency as important groundings for Caribbean freedom. Erotic agency refers not simply to sexual acts, but to creative, spiritual, and embodied freedom, knowledge, and political empowerment. Within Afro-­ Caribbean religions these aspects of life are not separated or opposed to one another. For Afro-­Caribbean women especially the embrace of such embodied knowledge and spiritual agency is crucial to overcoming the violent negation of their humanity within systems of coloniality. I also believe that mobility justice and sexual justice will be crucial to surviving the Anthropocene, for they are necessary for creating more positive forms of existence that do not depend on extractive economies, labor exploitation, human degradation, and environmental destruction. Women’s sexual empowerment is not simply about sexual “liberation,” but about self-­determination and control over one’s own body, redress against those who violate the bodies of others, protection of children, the right to form and keep together various kinds of families, and the ability to express oneself and create. There are multiple spiritual forces on whom Caribbean people call, whether at home or in the diaspora, and these take many forms. From the Haitian practice of Vodou to Santería in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, or the Ifá/Orisha religions of Trinidad, the performance of what N. Fadeke Sexual Power  ·  141

Castor astutely calls “spiritual citizenship” has proliferated and trans­ nationalized across the Caribbean, Latin America, North America, and parts of Africa.27 There are powerful South-­South as well as South-­North networks, reconnecting these and other Afro-­Caribbean religious practices into new global assemblages and mobilizing spiritual power and identity in new ways. Whether taking the form of Ogun or Oshun, Dambala or Obatala, Legba or Asewele, there are many distinct spiritual forces guiding and rescaling the innovative cocreations of place and ancestry that form their own kinds of archipelagic connections, linking place to place, connecting past to present, mobilizing the immaterial and the material. Transnational strategies must include these forms of spiritual citizenship as well as the powerful global networks being built across Indigenous people’s political organizations across the world and the global coalitions forming between Black, Indigenous, and peoples of color. Let me call on Ezili one more time to lament our children on a sinking planet. l a men t for e z ili

Ezili o, Ezili o Ezili ye Ezili lwa mwen Yon sel tiptit mwen genyen Konnot chavire ave-­l Kannot chavire ave-­l On sel tiptit mwen genyen Kannot chavire ave-­l Ay! On sel tiptit mwen genyen Kannot chavire ave-­l On sel tizanfan mwen genyen Kannot chavire ave-­l Adye! Erzulie, oh, Erzulie oh Erzulie ye Erzulie, my lwa The only child that I have A boat sinks with him aboard A boat sinks with him aboard 142  ·  c h a p t e r

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The only child that I have A boat sinks with him aboard Ay! the only child that I have A boat sinks with him aboard The only child I have A boat sinks with him aboard Adye! [cry of sadness]28

Sexual Power  ·  143

CONCLUSION SURVIVING THE ANTHROPOCENE

This book joins a growing body of work in the field of disaster studies, which each year seems to respond to new catastrophic events that uncover more existing inequities in the coloniality of the climate crisis and its failures of social protection. During the period that I wrote this book the disaster of the earthquake in Haiti was overtaken by the disasters of coral reef bleaching and oil spills, more extreme hurricane seasons throughout the Caribbean, then earthquakes coming in “swarms” to Puerto Rico, and now the global disaster of the coronavirus pandemic that is poised to overcome the region as well as hitting Caribbean diaspora populations especially hard. Central to the field of disaster studies are questions of the temporality of disaster, including various concepts of “slow disaster,” “slow emergencies,” and “slow structural violence,” which each seek to address the deeper temporalities of disasters in relation to coloniality, racial capitalism, and vulnerability to the impacts of toxic pollution and climate change.1 While considering the temporality of contemporary disasters from the perspective of Puerto Rico, for example, Yarimar Bonilla reflects on the ways in which some catastrophic events do not follow the eventful script in which disaster strikes suddenly as a kind of emergency, followed by a suspended period of waiting for relief and reconstruction, then finishing and moving toward recovery. Instead they come in “swarms of disaster.”2 Like the swarms of earthquakes still being felt in Puerto Rico, or the predicted ongoing waves of c ov i d -­19 infection moving around the world, or the compounding catastrophes of the ongoing climate crisis, there is no end in sight. As Ben Anderson asks in response to Bonilla’s work, “Why are catastrophe and disaster the best genre for understanding ongoing harm and damage that materialize through a range of fast and slow temporalities?” Why are these concepts of disaster and catastrophe “all we have

to name, make sense of and generate urgencies around event-­conditions [such as lingering colonialism] that are so woven into the fabric of life that they so often lack a recognizable scene of impact?”3 I would reply that these concepts are not all we have, and we must move beyond them. And it is the study of Caribbean radical philosophy, social movements, and insurgent intellectual networks that gives us other tools for addressing the contemporary moment. As Nelson Maldonado-­Torres tells us, “Decolonial thinking requires counter-­catastrophic explorations of time and the formations of space, within, against, and outside the modern/colonial world. It also entails the investigation of the various forms of subjectivity, subjection, and liberation that have taken place under the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality.”4 My own work was already grounded in the longer history of the aftermaths of New World colonization, transatlantic slavery, centuries of colonialism, and neoliberal globalization, which already made it clear not only that disaster in Haiti was always already embedded in a deeper catastrophic time horizon, but also that any meaningful reconstruction would require a decolonial break with modernity/coloniality. Therefore, I came to the study of disaster through the lens of Caribbean radical philosophy with its longstanding reflections on political temporalities and alternative futurities. 5 Caribbean thinkers, writers, poets, philosophers, prophets, activists, and artists have long lived with, dwelt upon, and offered answers to the problem of “being human after Man,” as Sylvia Wynter puts it; that is, being at the leading edge of resistance against the global capitalist exploitation of nature and other living beings in a world-­spanning system of vast inequity and injustice. 6 The editor of a special issue of p r e e , a Caribbean literary and arts journal, on “Ecocide,” which came out just as the c ov i d ­19 pandemic began to encroach on the region, points out that “the Caribbean thinkers and creators in this issue successfully render the long durée of ecocide in the region, the complexity of its experience, and the ways things might be otherwise.” They have long experience with the “extractionist and ecocidal practices that have been happening in the region from European colonialism to the present — crimes against all life — [and how they] have fueled repeating conditions of environmental, social, political, and economic disaster in the region.”7 So any effort to speak of “crisis” in the Caribbean must transcend the immediate moment, and even transcend the genre of crisis thinking.   Again and again, thinkers in the genre of “disaster studies” return to Haiti to reflect on the most despairing depths of ongoing swarms of caSurviving the Anthropocene  ·  145

tastrophe and crisis. Bonilla is “struck by the fact that the Puerto Rico earthquakes began precisely as the tenth anniversary of the 2010 Haitian earthquake drew near. Sadly,” she writes the Haitian context which has been so central to thinking about political imaginaries in the Caribbean, is also an essential reference point for thinking about our post-­disaster futures. Haiti continues to serve as a vanguard — not in an idealized or romantic sense, but in the very literal sense of charging first into the fires of the environmental, political, and economic crisis that threatens the region as a whole. 8 True, but why should this be sad? Only if one thought one had escaped the condition of Haiti — “one of those islands” of trauma and poverty that the rest of the Caribbean compares itself against favorably — would this be a sad turn of events. Only if one still believed in the colonial dream of enlightenment, social progress, and scientific conquest of nature, would this be a sad demise. Only if one believed in sovereignty, nation-­building, and the triumph of the individual over adversity would Haiti be a sad vanguard of struggle. Caribbean radical philosophy (and lived experience) has taught us instead that there is no such temporality of progress; there is no such sovereign nation-­state; there is no such triumphant Man.9 Decolonial thinking demands that we step outside the temporality of disaster as something that we will transcend by more of the same: more modernization, better infrastructure, imported outside experts, more “development.” This is why I turned instead to the affective register of the Vodou songs that infuse each chapter, to remind us that there are indeed other ways of affectively registering the ongoing disaster of human existence. Outside the genres of academic social science, beyond the conventions of individualistic thinking and linear narrative, without the closure of monotheistic biblical time horizons where redemption awaits us, the Vodou loa interrupt the scene of human hubris. They laugh at us, they berate us, they ride us, they chide us, they plead with us like children, then smite us into the grave. But they also offer us an alternative temporality, and remind us of alternative futures; futures that are not available within Western, colonial ways of thinking and narrating temporality. In 2010, the Indian writer Arundhati Roy asked what it would take to imagine a different future from a decolonial philosophical space. In a quote that Jamaican filmmaker Esther Figueroa also adopts in summing up 146  ·  Conclusion

her own reflections on Caribbean futures in her film Fly Me to The Moon, Roy says: The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination —  an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfilment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers, the trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain?10 Out of the global experience of modernity/coloniality, which in many ways began here in these island archipelagos, the Caribbean has bequeathed to us powerful reconstruction strategies that can guide us all as we face an uncertain future. Caribbean people have had to survive neoliberal economies of exploitation that have destroyed self-­sufficient agriculture, broken local markets, undermined sovereignty, and forced people into low-­waged work or migration abroad. Many have also reflected on the way forward for Caribbean societies, proposing alternative forms of development and forms of collective recovery that will be necessary to move forward toward a survivable future. By concentrating on building local community with global awareness, and offering resistance in the face of global economies of exploitation, the Caribbean has generated multiple visions of alternative development. The people of the Caribbean have been surviving genocide, colonial violence, labor exploitation, cultural suppression, natural resource extraction, and environmental destruction for more than five hundred years. Out of colonization, Indigenous survivors and their descendants created modes of resistance that melded into Maroon communities, conuco agriculture, plant knowledge, and bush warfare. Out of enslavement, African survivors and their descendants created the living praxis of freedom. Out of violent cultural repression and suppression, Black and Indigenous people of the Caribbean, joined by other peoples who moved there from around the world, created dynamic culture building practices — spiritual, linguistic, musical, culinary, artistic, literary, and philosophical. Out of imperialism, Caribbean nations created anticolonial revolutions, postcolonial social movements, new forms of democratic socialism, and decolonial thinking. Surviving the Anthropocene  ·  147

In the face of the Anthropocene and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, I remain hopeful that the Caribbean has generated visions of alternative development — ideas for local economies that respect human dignity, protect natural ecosystems, ensure justice in labor conditions, and promote human and environmental health. In recent times (and against much government policy and global financial institutions) this has meant struggles for the protection of local markets, supporting small-­scale, organic, holistic agriculture whether based on traditional conuco gardens or newer forms of sustainable organic farming, bringing an end to large-­scale mass tourism and coastal overdevelopment, rejecting inappropriate infrastructure that does not serve local needs, limiting mining and other destructive extractive industries, repairing the environment through reforestation and coastal protection, protecting biodiversity and clean water, and asserting embodied freedoms and radical rights to exist, including emerging ideas of “the rights of nature.” In Puerto Rico, for example, “Mining was a central part of Plan 2020, a strategic master plan from c. 1974 to turn vast regions of Puerto Rico into an extractive project of military bases, industrial parks, mining pits, and road and water-­pipeline infrastructures to supply these industries.” But it was successfully rejected by environmental justice activists who “charged that this plan would amount to a genocide which would produce a ‘Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans.’ ”11 Gonzalo García López describes how events since Hurricane Maria opened people’s eyes “not only about the disasters generated by the corrupt necropolitics of colonial-­capitalism, but also the power of self-­assembly and autogestion as part of a politics of life: in the “mutual aid” groups flourishing post-­Maria, and in the creation of people’s assemblies (asambleas de pueblo).”12  This informed an efflorescence of solar energy projects, agroecological farms, solidarity housing reconstruction, and urban food gardens, “real utopias” enacted within a philosophy of self-­assembly, autogestion, and principles of transparency within public governance. García López sums up these movements as “decolonization from below” in which communities create “sovereignties from below” (similar to what I previously called “citizenship from below”): decolonizing concretely through actions that transform the socioecological relations of (re)production of the colony, particularly those tied to the basic needs of life: food, energy, water. Agroecology and community garden initiatives, community energy projects, 148  ·  Conclusion

and related solidarity economies can enact sovereignty in its multiple dimensions beyond national independence, and against the corrupt national electoral politics, by delinking from those material bonds. This is not only a material struggle but also a decolonization of discourses and imaginaries, a breaking of what activists call the “colonial blackmail”: the idea that we are too small, resource-­poor and inept to govern and develop ourselves.13 This approach is exactly what Haitian activists have also been calling for, for decades, though under conditions of deep repression and state violence. If we, humanity, are to survive the Anthropocene and its devastating events, from hurricanes to the coronavirus pandemic, we need to learn from the revolutionary, decolonial, culture building of the Caribbean. “Moving ahead,” concludes García López, will require “deeper intersecting and expanding the scope, scale and pace of this archipelago of alternatives” to transcend “the exterminating system we face.”14

Archipelagoes of Radical Reconstruction By locating a theorization of the islanding effect and mobility justice in Haiti, I have sought to demonstrate the multiple scales, dimensions, and intersections of struggles for global mobility justice, climate justice, and social justice. The reworking of coloniality’s traces in the contemporary Caribbean remains a matter of mobile and immobile relations across extensive transoceanic and archipelagic socioecological spaces and sociotechnical systems. In imagining Caribbean survival in the Anthropocene, one can see in prismatic form all the dimensions and scales of the politics of mobility that we are called upon to address today: the legacies of colonialism and imperialism; the tensions around national borders and migration rights; the urban crises around poverty, violence, eviction, and incarceration; the global crisis of environmental sustainability and its relation to transportation, energy, and resource exploitation; and the crises of gender violence and sexual exploitation. Throughout this book I have suggested that Caribbean constellations of radical thought and political praxis will help to produce greater mobility justice in the world, as well as ecological survival. Caribbean decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter presciently refers to colonial spatializations of difference as “archipelagos of poverty.” Her concept links embodied struggles over race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity with ecological struggles over the environment, global warmSurviving the Anthropocene  ·  149

ing, severe climate change, and the “sharply unequal distribution of the earth’s resources.” 15 These geographies, she writes, are “defined at the global level by refugees/economic migrants stranded outside the gates of the rich countries, as the post-­colonial variant of Fanon’s category of les damnées,” a group in which she includes not only “the criminalized majority of Black and dark-­skinned Latino inner-­city males now made to man the rapidly expanding prison-­industrial complex,” but also “a global archipelago constituted by the Third and Fourth-­World peoples of the so-­ called ‘underdeveloped’ areas of the world,” including Africa, the Black diaspora, and Haiti.16 But these are also archipelagoes of resistance and radical reconstruction. The Caribbean’s survival in the future will rest on the remaking not only of ecological and technological systems, but, as Sylvia Wynter teaches us, of the human within them. In an insightful reading of C. L. R. James’s and Wynter’s visions “for human freedom beyond coloniality,” Aaron Kamugisha points toward the importance of their “radical cosmopolitan humanist tradition” for thinking Caribbean island futures. James, he says, “offers us a compelling critique of coloniality, a hope of a different future to come, and a charting of the space that future would have to occupy to create a new Caribbean, and world.”17 Wynter, continuing this project of fundamental critique and rebuilding, “proffers some of the most daring speculations on the possibilities of the human after ‘man’ in African diasporic letters, and an urgent awareness of the need to move beyond global neoliberalism for the sake of the survival of human life on this planet.”18 By reading the works of C. L. R. James together with those of Sylvia Wynter, Kamugisha seeks to connect intellectual histories in the Marxist tradition of Caribbean leftist thought with those that have more centrally addressed women, gender, and sexuality. Thus, the book solves a kind of knot or impasse in Caribbean political-­cultural thought, and re-­lays a productive way forward for the entire political project of Caribbean freedom. It is these kinds of transits through past and present, across generations of Caribbean social thought, that give me hope for the Caribbean future, and for all our futures. In the aftermath of Hurricanes Dorian, Irma, Maria, Michael, and Matthew and the constant threat of more to come, it would be easy to give up on Caribbean futures, to resign ourselves to disaster capitalism and the impossibility of progress, justice, or freedom. Although the Caribbean may be at the forefront of the climate emergency, the only conclusion must be that it is also at the forefront of solutions to ending the coloniality of climate, demanding reparations, reinstating care 150  ·  Conclusion

for the world and one another, and thereby giving the world back its future. This is the precious legacy of the Caribbean intellectual tradition that we must carry on beyond the ruins of coloniality. Despite these dystopian times, Caribbean theory offers us a more hopeful vision of “Alter-­Native” modernities, counterspaces, and other-­times for imagining the past, present, and future, beyond what Michel-­Rolph Trouillot named the “chronological amnesia” of the North Atlantic. 19 I remain hopeful that Caribbean arts, letters, spirituality, philosophy, and theory can provide some insights into other possible futures, reworking the radical traces, common tools, and relations that Caribbean survival up until now has bequeathed to future generations. The fast-­moving and slow-­moving disasters of the twenty-­first-­century Caribbean demand that each one of us asks: How do we move across these archipelagoes in ways that will reconnect humans with each other, with the world around us, and with our immanent human-nature connection, such as it is? Against the coloniality of climate disaster, Caribbean theory offers a critique of the dynamics of the colonial necropolitics that produce vulnerability, suffering, and death, but also rejects those modalities of emergency response “through which economies, populations, and disaster events and the ‘recovery’ from them, are managed, usually to ‘fast-­t rack’ the ‘efficient’ implementation of ‘development’ and neoliberal austerity initiatives that further inflict violence and deepen vulnerabilities.”20 García López argues that these “dynamics of governing life-­death are part of the structural conditions that make (non)natural disaster events such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes, much more damaging to those colonized-­ racialized subjects.”21 He links these emergencies to the “slow violence of colonial extractive logics,” as well as “the coloniality of development as a material and ideological force destroying different forms of (non-­ capitalist) living-­being” through toxic “sacrifice zones.”22 Environmental activists in Puerto Rico reject “development projects” such as “fossil fuel infrastructure, transgenic seed camps, waste incinerators, and large-­ scale tourist-­residential complexes” as what they call “projects of death.”23 Puerto Rican activists hold out hope for “a yes to decolonization, to energy sovereignty, to agroecology, to a just recovery, to autogestion” and to “an insurrectionary politics of freedom and sovereignty” built through movements for “being-­in-­common” that “seek to de-­commodify and reproduce in-­common basic conditions of life.”24 The mobility regimes I have described throughout this book in terms of kinopolitical power, water power, aerial power, digital power, bordering Surviving the Anthropocene  ·  151

power, and sexual power all have the effect of reproducing colonial domination and global inequality, thereby revealing how archipelagos of poverty are achieved, performed, and extended. Despite this, the Caribbean and the New World remains an imaginative and lived space in which other worlds might be envisioned and brought into being. Each of these forms of power, I have argued, has the potential to be appropriated from below, by subaltern assemblages or rasanblaj. Islanding might also be conceived as a form of counterpower, in which a group uses isolation to its own advantage as a protected space from which to gather force and promote collective empowerment. Islanding may become an active praxis that builds toward collective protection and environmental healing. Consider the Maroon spaces of flight and escape that also shape the Caribbean and the entire African diaspora. Joy Mahabir writes, “Maroon journeys evoke the sense of unfolding frontiers, the crossing of boundaries where movement occurs from the known and exterior into the interior and the unknown.”25 She cites Antonio Benítez-­Rojo to describe the expansive geographical imaginations we need to comprehend the Maroons of Jamaica who were transported to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone; the Maroons from the three Guianas (Suriname, Cayenne, and Guyana) who fled to the forest and mixed with Indigenous people, the runaway enslaved Africans who mixed with the Seminoles in Florida and spread out across the United States, or those who filled out the crews of pirate ships, privateers and smugglers, and sailed around the world. These countermovements suggest an alternative geography of subaltern mobilities across the African diaspora. Kamau Brathwaite, moreover, developed the notion of “psychic marronage,” in which Caribbean people maintain alternative patterns, symbols and practices, including “modes of walking, eating, working, inter-­ relating, musical, artistic, and other [cultural] practices” through which they can construct “an alternative space, refuge and being.”26 Today these subversive movements, both physical and cultural refuges, remain just as important to Caribbean survival in the spaces of modernity/coloniality. The endurance of Amerindian survival, Maroon escape, democratic socialist experiments, subaltern cultural survival, and diaspora solidarity that have shaped the Caribbean region all lead me to ask: What kinds of human, nonhuman, and interhuman futures can exist here? Caribbean lived experience — and perhaps all human and nonhuman life on earth —  exists somewhere between the constant violent legacies of New World coloniality and the imperative of reaching for some space-­t ime-­being 152  ·  Conclusion

“beyond” Western man. These instigations of alternative futures imply that the “plantation archipelago,” as Wynter calls New World modernity, is the world we all are condemned to live in — but we are also tasked to decolonize. The project of understanding the present Caribbean condition and imagining other, more survivable island futures, is not just a local concern, therefore, but is necessary to the future of all life on Earth. In a 1967 speech given in Detroit, C. L. R. James reflected poignantly upon Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth — which he preferred to translate as The Condemned of the World: “If the condemned of the earth do not understand their pasts and know the responsibilities that lie upon them in the future, all on the earth will be condemned. That is the kind of world we live in.”27 We are condemned to the future that we make today. Islands facing climate disaster are some of the first sites for meeting that future — but continental spaces are just as much islands floating on the Earth’s seas and just as susceptible to the vagaries of climate change. We could turn to Pacific island theorists for some pertinent thoughts on this subject. Pacific Island Indigenous scholars argue that understanding Indigenous im/mobilities in the Anthropocene might offer “other ways of moving through a warming world.”28 The late poet and theorist Teresia Teaiwa, of I-­K iribati and African American heritage, left us these beautiful words on the subject of islanding: Shall we make “island” a verb? As a noun, it’s so vulnerable to impinging forces. Let us turn the energy of the island inside out. Let us “island” the world! Let us teach the inhabitants of Planet Earth how to behave as if we were living on islands! For what is Earth but an island in our own solar system? An island of precious ecosystems and finite resources. Finite resources. Limited space. . . . Once islanded humans are awakened from the stupor of continental fantasies. The islanded can choose to understand there is nothing but more islands to look forward to.29 Teaiwa presciently moves toward a new horizon for thinking through “islanding” as a positive healing practice that holds out hope not just for Haiti, the Caribbean, or the Pacific, but for humanity as a global archipelago. If we can all be islanded, become islanders, and do islanding, then we can perhaps learn to reject the forms of violence and ecocide that we have been inculcated in, and to better cooperate in making a more just Island Earth. Surviving the Anthropocene  ·  153

Liberation Capital With that in mind, I hear the voice of my mother and of her transnational feminist peace movements calling me to interrogate my own complicity yet still work to bring forward the insurgent intellectual networks and forms of liberation capital that emerged in postearthquake Haiti for guidance on a way forward in the Anthropocene. In March of 2010, a binational meeting of more than twenty-­six Haitian organizations and social movements, seventeen Dominican NGOs, and several international organizations met in the Dominican Republic to offer an alternative vision for reconstruction and critique of the “Donors’ Conference on Haitian Reconstruction,” held in Santo Domingo by the major international lenders who had dominated the reconstruction planning. They decried their total exclusion from this conference, and the lack of a broad process of consultation with Haitian civil society. Like W. E. B. Du Bois’s more comprehensive vision for Black Reconstruction in America, they offered an alternative vision of Haitian Reconstruction “aimed at defining a new national project.” I quote this important document at length here, because it is indicative of the construction of liberation capital aiming to build alternative Caribbean futures: 1. Break with exclusion. Breaking this dynamic is an essential condition for true integration, based on social justice and for the strengthening of national cohesion. This involves the participation and mobilization of social forces traditionally excluded such as women, peasants, youth, artisans and so on. It also means targeted investment on the part of official institutions associated with current exclusion, and the reinvention of the Haitian state, whose practice should be geared towards transparency, institutional integrity, social justice, respect for diversity, and human rights. 2. Break with economic dependence. Build an economic model that encourages domestic production, with emphasis on agriculture and agro-­industry turned first to the satisfaction of our food needs (cereals, tubers, milk, fruits and fish, meat etc.). This new model should not be dominated by the logic of excessive accumulation of wealth or speculation, but oriented toward the welfare of the people, appreciation of national culture and the recovery of our national forests. It should also reduce dependence on fossil fuels by promoting a shift towards the use of the vast reserves of renewable energy available in our country. 154  ·  Conclusion

3. Break with the excessive centralization of power and utilities. Develop a governance plan based on decentralization of decisions, services and resources and strengthening the capacities of local governments and the establishment of mechanisms to ensure the direct participation of actors of civil society in Haiti. 4. Break with the current destructive land ownership policies. Implement a process of reorganizing the physical space in rural areas and cities, allowing the development of public spaces and social institutions and resources, such as public schools, public parks, housing, etc. This involves conducting comprehensive agrarian reform and urban reform which would enable solutions for the hundreds of thousands of people who are homeless. To meet these challenges it is necessary to redefine the role of the state and its functioning. Building a new model of development requires a comprehensive, consistent and widespread mobilization of popular sectors with an interest in decentralization and greater access to public resources and services (health, education, clean water, sanitation, communication, power and housing). Those who were traditionally exploited and excluded should be the main protagonists in this process. This national project that we foresee for the sustainable development of Haiti, must allow a new system of public education that facilitates access to quality education for all children, without discrimination, valuing the Creole language spoken by all people, raising awareness in favor of strong environmental protection, focusing on the preventing further vulnerability to natural disasters. It is necessary to reorganize the health system with hospitals in various departments, valuation of traditional medicine, and particular attention to women’s health. Reorganization of the justice system will facilitate access to justice for all and will fight against corruption. We want a state that has the ability to manage and direct the country, a state capable of taking the lead and coordinating international aid efforts. In terms of international relations, the country must develop new relationships with friendly countries, strengthening our ability to defend our interests and fostering friendship among states and peoples. With the Dominican Republic we must formalize relationships around various issues, including trade, binational markets, and migrants rights. Surviving the Anthropocene  ·  155

We request the cancellation of all of Haiti’s debts. The tragedy of the earthquake should not cause Haiti to spiral into greater indebtedness. The social institutions and n g o s that have signed this statement call for mobilization and soon will undertake to organize an Assembly for the Haitian People to address the challenges and to define strategies for the alternative and sustainable reconstruction of our country. Signed: pa p d a , j u r i s h a , e n f o f a n m , g a a r , a sda ,

Gammit Timoun,

gidh

Fondation

Group entevansyon,

k s i l , ko n a r e pa , pa da d , m o r e p l a , s o fa ,

t oya , a f -

m p p, c r o s e ,

Mouvement scolaire

Foi et Joie, Media Alternative, Comission Episcopale Nationale Justice et Paix, c h a n d e l , i c p j l d h , r e b a , t k l , Cellule Réflexions et

d’Actions Sj, Confédération des Haïtiens pour la Réconciliation, v e de k , c o dh a . 30

This is a comprehensive and far-­reaching plan for alternative reconstruction, and one that could be applicable across many Caribbean contexts in the face of the ongoing coloniality of climate disasters. Not only were Haitian civil society organizations involved in this meeting, but so too were Dominican organizations, showing the significance of transnational cooperation. 31 Other kinds of organizations are emerging across the Caribbean, promoting both alternative forms of development, transnational and diasporic digital connectivity, and important dimensions of racial and sexual justice. The Caribbean-­i r n network, for example, has launched a new Caribbean Sexualities Knowledge E-­Portal as part of “A Sexual Culture of Justice” project in Trinidad and Tobago. 32 This community-­university collaboration is part of another insurgent intellectual network helping to build liberation capital across the Caribbean by fighting gender-­based violence and promoting l g b t qi rights. The lively use of digital networks and social media platforms helps connect grassroots organizations and university programs such as the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies with wider diasporic networks around the world. This is not a time for despair. As Sylvia Wynter foresaw, the challenge lays before us to unsettle “the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom” if we hope to survive the Anthropocene. The question remains whether 156  ·  Conclusion

we in the Global North can support such forms of Caribbean development by transitioning our own economies toward more just agroecological, decolonial, nonextractive, and nonviolent principles. Unlike Haiti, this will call for a huge reduction in the amount of energy we consume, along with a massive reconstruction of our urban infrastructures and military structures, our mobility regimes and colonial legacies, our forms of neoliberal capitalism and political systems grounded in racial, class, and gender oppression. Island futures demand that we connect localities together in new ways. Transnational Black and indigenous feminists across the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and their diasporas, as well as their allies in the Global North like my mother and the many grassroots women’s organizations working in solidarity with the Global South, have been working on such projects for a long time. It is time that we “listen to women for a change,” as one of my mother’s favorite T-­shirts urges, but that will require those of us in white settler societies to first unsettle ourselves, to fight against the military industrial complexes and question the humanitarian industrial complexes in which we are embedded, and to question the costs of our own freedom of mobility and secured borders. s on g f o r b o s o u b wa n a n b wa

Mwen di Bwa Nan Bwa manman-­ou rele! Ou pa we nan mize-­a m tonbe? O! Bosou Bwa Nan Bwa manman-­ou rele Ou pa we nan mize-­a m tonbe? Rwziye-­w! Reziye o! Adye! Ou pa we nan mize-­a m tonbe? Mwen di Bwa Nan Bwa manman-­ou rele Gade nan mize-­a m tonbe Reziye-­w! Reziye O! Wayo! Gade nan mize-­a m tonbe! I say your mother has called upon Bwa Nan Bwa! Don’t you see the misery I’m going through? Oh! My mother has called upon Bosou Bwa Nan Bwa Don’t you see the misery I’m going though? Resign yourself! Oh! Resign yourself! Adye! Don’t you see the misery I’ve fallen into I say your mother has called upon Bwa Nan Bwa!

Surviving the Anthropocene  ·  157

Look at the misery I’m going through I say your mother has called upon Bwa Nan Bwa! Look at the misery I’m going through. Resign yourself! Oh! Resign yourself! Wayo! Look at the misery I’ve fallen into 33

158  ·  Conclusion

AFTERWORD THIS IS NOT A REQUIEM

In his beautiful, fugue-­like book on the collapse of the Haitian dream, There Is No More Haiti — a title taken from his Port-­au-­Prince informants — the anthropologist Greg Beckett writes of the loss of hope in Haiti over recent years, of the sense that there is no future. Beckett gives personal experiential depth to the self-­employed urban men who are “looking for life,” or chache lavi, “amid the ruins of ecological devastation, economic collapse, political upheaval, violence, and humanitarian disaster.” He writes about “what it feels like to live in the aftermath of a disaster that has not really ended and what it feels like to face a future in which the only certainty seems to be that there will be yet more disaster.”1 Ten years after the Haitian earthquake, Haitians seem just as entrenched in ongoing existential disaster. Now, this feeling of existential catastrophe may be spreading around the world as we absorb the unimaginable losses of the coronavirus pandemic. Other media reports also describe the Haitian populace as without hope, nihilistic, and stuck in perpetual crisis. John Lee Anderson, writing in The New Yorker in October 2019, describes the Republic of Haiti as “suffering a meltdown” and questions whether it will ever “move forward.” In typical fashion, he repeats the bad press that has historically been ascribed to Haiti — that is, that it “has been plagued by despotic rule and political instability for much of its tenure as an independent state” and that it has “formally been a democracy, but one fractured by bouts of social disorder, military coups, and gang violence.”2 I hasten to add that this is not actually true, despite its frequent repetition, as knowledge of nineteenth-­century Haitian political history would reveal. 3 And so we hear the refrain: the middle class have largely fled to the diaspora; there are no legitimate political leaders; the benighted people lack education and are mired in poverty; and there seems to be no way out. When the coronavirus pandemic

spreads into this context, as it inevitably will — especially when the United States is unconscionably deporting people who have tested positive for the virus — it will ravage a population still lacking access to shelter, water, and sanitation, with an extremely weak health system. Haiti has perished. Yet, despite this swarm of disasters and the recent outbreak of anarchic violence, some might have felt a flicker of hope in 2019 when we heard of the revolt against the corrupt government in a huge wave of national protests and the mobilization of a new political opposition calling itself Nou Pap Domi (We Will Not Sleep). For over a year now, major protests have swept Haiti calling for the resignation of President Jovenel Moïse, who came to power in a “fraud plagued, two-­round election cycle in which only eighteen percent of eligible voters participated,” as Edwidge Danticat sums it up. 4 Coinciding with mass protests against governments in Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, and Ecuador, it once again seemed imaginable that the Haitian people might overthrow a corrupt president (just as the people of Puerto Rico, equally stuck in a kind of political impasse, surprisingly did with the mass protests forcing the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rossello in August 2019). The eruption of Haitian protests was awakened by the naked government corruption associated with the disappearance of an estimated $1.3 billion dollars from the PetroCaribe Fund that Venezuela had set up to help Haiti with affordable petrol and development funds. 5 The development projects never materialized and the debt ballooned. Then the U.S. embargo blocked Venezuelan fuel shipments, and the government has been unable to pay for ongoing fuel deliveries, causing severe fuel shortages, price inflation, and currency devaluations which have crippled Haiti’s economy. As the longtime observer of Haiti Amy Wilentz describes in her usual punchy prose, “When there is no gas, hospitals can’t provide medical care, bodies can’t get transported for burial and morgues begin to stink, transit stops, markets languish, schools shut, all industry collapses, and the gas-­fueled generators that small businesses and better-­off homeowners use for electricity during the long daily power outages shut down.”6 The last straw came in July 2018, when the Moïse government, under pressure from an International Monetary Fund austerity plan, tried to cut fuel subsidies, announcing that “it was raising the price of gasoline, diesel, and kerosene between thirty-­eight and fifty-­one per cent, in order to qualify for low-­interest loans from the International Monetary Fund.”7 The country erupted. People took to the streets, set up burning barricades, burned and looted businesses, and generally rioted. The young protestors 160  ·  Afterword

were described as Petrochallengers, calling not only for a lowering of the cost of life, but also for accountability for the lost PetroCaribe funds. The people thrust themselves back onto the stage of history, like a Greek chorus, implacable, immovable, and calling to account the major players. Unsurprisingly, the repression was violent; the historical stage has been left covered in blood. In November 2018, top government officials were accused of involvement in a massacre of civilians in which “seventy-­three men, women, and children were wounded, tortured, hacked with machetes, and set on fire in La Saline, an impoverished neighborhood of Port-­au-­Prince where residents had participated in Petrocaribe protests.”8 As Danticat reports, “Among them, fifty-­nine were reportedly killed. Seven women were raped, and many houses were ransacked or burned,” according to the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights (yes, such a network still exists).9 Known by its Kreyol acronym, the r n d d h report notes in its findings that “since 1986, after the departure into exile of the dictator and former President for Life Jean Claude du va l i e r , the bloody events in La Saline constitute the second most criminal massacre recorded, with the Jean-­Rabel massacre, which caused the death of one hundred thirty nine (139) peasants.”10 Still, though, people continued to protest. In February 2019, on the second anniversary of Moïse’s inauguration and the thirty-­third anniversary of the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, street protests with burning blockades closed schools and businesses for ten days, in what was referred to as peyi lòk, or Operation Lockdown. The protestors returned again in September 2019, with a month of sustained large demonstrations almost every day, not only in Port-­au-­Prince but throughout the country. In October the protestors tried to lock down the airport, a great jab in the face of the bourgeoisie, the elite, and the international visitors who use the airport. Police continue to tear-­gas and shoot protestors, and at least twenty have been killed. Does the younger generation still have a vision of futurity for Haiti, despite the apparent sense of nihilism? Can the resignation of the middle-­ aged, and the middle and upper classes’ fear of the popular uprising overcome the elite stranglehold, the corrupt gangsters in government, and the parasitic state? Danticat describes the impetus behind the protests: The young men and women demonstrators, when speaking to both local and foreign journalists, sometimes speak of their desire for a This Is Not a Requiem  ·  161

tabula rasa. They want a more egalitarian, inclusive, and just society, where the rights of every citizen will be respected. Not just the wealthy and well-­connected but the urban and rural poor, too. They want the international community to stop meddling and pushing elections as a vehicle for change, only to rig them and saddle the country with leaders like Martelly and Moïse. They want Haitian-­ led solutions. They want institutions that work. They want an end to impunity. They want freedom from government and privately funded gangs, who routinely rape women and girls. They ultimately want accountability not just from Moïse but from everyone who has stolen or squandered the Petrocaribe money, which their children, grandchildren, and great-­g randchildren will still have to repay.11 In other words, they want many of the things Haitians have always wanted, ever since the Haitian Revolution (1791 – 1804), ever since the Piquet Rebellion (1844), ever since the Caco uprising against U.S. occupation (1915 – 1934), ever since the overthrow of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986. Haiti has not perished. This uprising foreshadows the ongoing Movement for Black Lives that would later sweep the world. But others simply feed this latest political convulsion into the perpetual cycle of disasters. With the usual condescension of foreign reporting, Anderson judges the Haitian people’s aspirations for accountability and freedom as futile: “Unless something truly radical occurs, such aspirations will remain out of reach for the foreseeable future, which seems certain to remain unstable.” Most grimly, he notes that “just hours after Danticat’s piece was published, Néhémie Joseph, a prominent Haitian radio journalist who was critical of the government’s handling of the crisis, was found dead in his car, murdered execution-­style, with several bullets to his head.”12 After this even Haiti’s normally apolitical Catholic clergy joined in a peaceful march “calling for a change of government in order to end the crisis.” For insights Anderson turns to Pamela White, a former U.S. ambassador to Haiti (2012 – 2015), who shows the typically biased ignorance of the history of democracy in Haiti — a country, we must remember, which far outstripped the United States in actually implementing universal human rights through the abolition of slavery, the creation of a parliamentary republic with a Black electorate and officeholders, the enfranchisement of liberated slaves, and far more extensive legal rights for women in the nineteenth century. Without a scintilla of recognition of the ways in which unjust debt and U.S. interference have repeatedly derailed Haitian popular democracy, 162  ·  Afterword

White shares her opinion of Haitian democracy, which echoes the antipopular feelings of elite Haitians (and returning Duvalierists) as well: “The Western solution to immediately hold elections in countries that have been controlled for decades by dictators and ruthless militias has never worked and never will,” White said. “We need some creative thinking about how a country with low education and high poverty levels can function in order to provide basic services to its citizens. Elections are so corrupt and the people running so inexperienced that they cannot possibly be considered a good solution.”13 Her proposed solution is a council of “well-­educated and experienced Haitians” to form a (presumably unelected) “coalition government” (perhaps like the

prom e sa

“junta” running Puerto Rico under tight debt-­

imposed austerity?), along with a “strong police presence” to presumably run a benevolent dictatorship of the elite. She concludes, “If anyone thinks another election is going to solve all of Haiti’s woes, they are sadly mistaken.” This cavalierly elitist judgement is grounded in racist views of Black and other colonized populations as not ready for full citizenship. If only Haiti were given a real chance to actually hold popular elections, if only grassroots social movements were given access to the resources that have been squandered on international n g o s , if only the insurgent intellectual networks were able to deploy liberation capital, if only the United States would step back from its constant interference, then its democracy might flourish once again. Opinions like White’s and the wider narrative of Haitian “disaster” mask the structural violence of racial capitalism, enforced austerity, neocolonial financial institutions, and the rise of authoritarianism that have severely undermined democratic governance not only in Haiti, but throughout the world. If nothing else, I hope this book has helped to dispel such harmful ideas by showing exactly how we in the Global North are complicit in producing disaster in Haiti. In contrast to such foreign views of the prospects for Haitian democracy and reconstruction, the more reasonable and informed position is that of Maryse Pénette-­Kedar, founder of the educational organization p ro de v

and the only Haitian whose opinion Anderson seeks. Like many

Haitians who lead civil society organizations, she calls for the international community “to support the transition that Haitians from all walks of life are requesting” and for “a new class of political leaders who are committed to respecting the oath of office and operating within the frame-

This Is Not a Requiem  ·  163

work of the rule of law.” This requires the resignation of Moïse, an end to corruption, a strengthening of the judiciary, and ultimately reforms of the constitution and “a re-­foundation of the Haitian state.”14 This would be perfectly achievable, should the international community choose to support it — but it never has. Instead the United States has undermined Haitian democracy at every step, interfered in elections, tried to preselect winning candidates, and invariably supported business elites against the interests of the people. Let’s be clear about why democracy has “failed” in Haiti, and why the country feels stuck in perpetual crisis. And yet the question of ecological collapse gnaws at me. What future is there in a world without rainfall, a world without coral reefs, an ocean denuded of fish? In a world with rampant viruses proliferating? In a world with regular hurricanes even stronger than a Category 5, like the ferocious Hurricane Dorian that stalled in all its fury for more than twenty-­four hours over Grand Bahama? It is not coincidental that the highest number of fatalities in Hurricane Dorian hit the Haitian migrants who lived in shanty towns known as The Mudd and Pigeon Peas, working in the lowest rungs of the Bahamian economy. Reports have shown that the survivors of these places were stigmatized when they made it to Nassau, and refused entry to the United States. As Angelique Nixon reminds us in an article titled “When the Apocalypse Is Now”: Haitian migrants and Haitian Bahamians are one of the most vulnerable and marginalised communities in The Bahamas, too often ignored and treated inhumanely by the state and Bahamians generally. It is likely that many undocumented Haitian migrants in this community in Abaco might have been fearful to seek shelter in the storm even with the mandatory evacuation. It is likely that we may never know for sure how many in this community lost their lives. . . . Haitian activists in Miami have called upon the Prime Minister of The Bahamas to stop deportations so that Haitian migrants can access relief and help without fear.15 Haitians have long been intercepted at sea, denied entry to the United States as refugees, and put into detention centers such as those first used at Guantánamo Bay in the 1980s. As Yarimar Bonilla says in her book coedited with Marisol LeBron, Aftershocks of Disaster, the distinction between the treatment of citizens and noncitizens after these hurricanes “is really problematic at a moment when noncitizens are under attack. Moreover, it

164  ·  Afterword

shifts the discourse away from a model of recovery that takes into account colonial histories and the search for regional solutions.”16 What would a regional solution look like? How can the Caribbean overcome existing models of fragmented sovereignty and incomplete citizenship? It is notable that both Puerto Rico and Haiti can trace their political crises of nonsovereignty (or in Haiti’s case, incredibly compromised weak sovereignty) to the problem of “unpayable debt.” Puerto Rico’s massive and unjust debt “was caused primarily by its colonial relationship with the United States,” argues Ed Morales, following “a pattern of indebting or speculating on the debt of several Caribbean island nations, including Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic,” setting up relationships whereby “U.S. corporations could set up shop without being taxed.”17 With the collapse of these offshore untaxed export zones and low-­wage factories, Puerto Ricans have departed in large numbers for the United States, where they hold citizenship, while Haitians have been thrown upon the shoals of dangerous undocumented migration to the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, the United States, and South and Central America. When hurricanes add to their misery, destroying their communities, there is no place to go. Where can Haitians go in the face of ecological collapse? And can any government save the country from the growing climate emergency? Where, for that matter, can anyone go? All of us must ask these questions of Caribbean (and human) survival in the Anthropocene: Who will be let into safe zones? Who will be left to die? Who will be forced out? As Nixon writes further: In our Caribbean, this is the latest instantiation of what it means to be on the frontline of climate change and small island disasters. . . . So we must plan for this new future and figure out how to best prepare, support each other. . . . We should be thinking about what will happen when climate crisis reaches critical mass. Will this be the new norm? What happens when we all become climate refugees? What do we need to do, across our region, to challenge an ongoing logic of development that turns our spaces of living into death zones?18 My answer is that, to understand contemporary climate change and respond appropriately to it, we first need to appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of planta-

This Is Not a Requiem  ·  165

tion slavery; in the present global uneven development, anti-­Blackness, and border regimes that pattern human vulnerability; and in the futurity of ideologies of exclusion and exceptionalism that continue to influence who has access to resources, to safety, and to preferable ecologies — i n short who can survive the climate emergency — and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagos” (as Sylvia Wynter called it) of high-­r isk shantytowns, blighted ecosystems, decimated islands, and unbridled pandemics. The devastation of all the recent unnatural disasters in the Caribbean is the outcome of the coloniality of climate, the deadly logics of racial capitalism, and the persistence of anti-­Black racism globally as a denial and foreshortening of Black life, as Ruth Gilmore has theorized the operation of racism. Recognizing the coloniality of climate can help us see that no amount of solar panels, electric vehicles, green capitalism, low-­carbon growth, or even the Green New Deal will end the climate crisis unless we address and repair the “racially uneven vulnerability and death” of the modern world. Achille Mbembe put it succinctly in a 2018 interview: There is an explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation, and contemporary forms of resource extraction and appropriation. In each of these instances there is a constitutive denial of the fact that we, the humans, coevolve with the biosphere, depend on it, are defined with and through it, and owe each other a debt of responsibility and care.19 The coloniality of climate calls for attention to repair, care, and reparations. We need to ask: Who is responsible, who is harmed, and who should be accountable? Can we still call on the radical Caribbean traditions of sustainable agriculture, Maroon resistance, dynamic culture building, anticolonial revolution, decolonial thinking, and alternative economies? What can those of us in the United States, in the diaspora, and the Caribbean itself do to reimagine the Caribbean climate crisis as a call to enact transformation on a far larger regional scale? That transformation is not a Marshall Plan; it is not an elite-­led junta; it is not disaster capitalism profiting on the misery of others. Rather, to survive the Anthropocene, also known as the Plantationocene, the Caribbean must draw again on the “counterplantation” project: Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir locates these practices of land and labor struggle within an enduring “counterplantation” sys166  ·  Afterword

tem. Forms of counterplantation life have included not only the maroon settlements of colonial and revolutionary Saint-­Domingue, but also the guerrilla soldiers, called Cacos, who fought against the U.S. Occupation of the early 20th century, and the peasants’ movements that continue to flourish in Haiti today. . . . those who dwell in Haiti’s hinterland have cultivated forms of counterplantation life that continue to resonate across the Afro-­A mericas today.20 Just as the people of Puerto Rico have mobilized people’s assemblies to gather communities, aid each other, and address their crisis, so too have the people of Haiti been developing their own solutions to the crisis. As the manifesto of JunteGente puts it: Before the first hurricane gusts were felt, the people in this archipelago were already dragging a decade of economic depression and austerity, feeling our hands were tied before the shameless looting and decimation of the key institutions that guaranteed our well­ being. The gigantic crisis we are facing is not Hurricane Maria’s doing, but the result of decades of erroneous public policies and the acts of corrupt politicians who, instead of using the powers delegated upon them to protect the public’s wellbeing, have opted to line their pockets — a ll the while benefitting their friends and other major financial interests. This history has been characterized by plunder, impunity, and the privatization, abandonment, and mismanagement of the country’s public assets and essential services.21 Only the people can reinvent their freedom, their sovereignty, and their own sustainable ways of life, in the sense that Naomi Klein refers to as “not only political sovereignty but also energy sovereignty, food sovereignty, and water sovereignty.”22 This leads me to the following conclusions. First, rather than simply request humanitarian assistance, military rescue, or temporary protection of those privileged passport holders with visas to the United States, or citizenship, we must continue the political demand (as already begun by c a r ic om ) for the immediate payment by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union of combined slavery reparations and climate reparations to the entire region. The figures for who has contributed most to c o 2 emissions and other greenhouse

gases are well known. Recent investigations have revealed the extent to

which companies like ExxonMobil covered up their own scientific studies of the causes of climate change.23 Big Oil must be held accountable for This Is Not a Requiem  ·  167

the covering up of the facts. The future of the entire Caribbean region will depend on this accounting and accountability. The figures for slavery reparations are likewise traceable, quantifiable, and justified, as Hilary Beckles has shown, for example, in Britain’s Black Debt, and such figures have been placed before European parliaments.24 The demand for slavery reparations and restitution were highlighted during Haiti’s bicentennial celebrations in 2004, when President Aristide called on France to pay close to $22 billion to offset the “indemnity” it had demanded of Haiti. As Greg Beckett observes, the only foreign leader to attend Haiti’s bicentennial was President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. Just as the Haitian Revolution was “unthinkable” in its time — and silenced historically as Haitian anthropologist Michel-­Rolph Trouillot famously argued — the call for French reparations to Haiti received no recognition from the international community. “The full extent of this silencing became clear two months later,” writes Beckett, “when Aristide was forced out of power and out of the country — k idnapped and sent into exile just as Toussaint Louverture had been. Only this time there was no Dessalines and no Indigenous Army, no war of independence. There was only the coup followed by an international military intervention.”25 Second, there must be international recognition of the protection that we owe to climate refugees. We must reject the depiction of climate refugees as some kind of growing danger who will “flood” and overwhelm our borders when in fact it is our way of life that has put these people in harm’s way and simultaneously excluded them from social protection. Nor can we allow the highest per capita energy consumers to blame others for so-­called overpopulation causing a strain on global resources. All people have a right to life and a right to mobility, and those seeking asylum due to climate emergencies should have protection under international law as much as those with a well-­founded fear of political persecution. Rather than the scaremongering around so-­called climate refugees, we should be asserting the legal protection of climate asylum and the right to movement and self-­determination, along with restoration of Indigenous land rights. Third, we must also reject the colonist’s logic that jumps to relegate certain islands to extinction and depopulation — t hat is, those who ask why we should rebuild there as they did in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, or in posthurricane Puerto Rico, and in Barbuda, and in the Bahamas — even as they eye these very places for valuable luxury real estate development. We must call for debt cancellation and reject imposed aus168  ·  Afterword

terity like that which has destroyed the Haitian and Puerto Rican public sectors. We also need to create flexible relations of mobility that allow us greater latitude to move out of harm’s way when needed, to partner with sister communities elsewhere for temporary evacuation and assistance, and to rebuild sustainable infrastructure in more resilient ways, using reparations funding. Fourth, when Caribbean islands affected by recent hurricanes undertake the rebuilding process, we must help break the cycle of extractive economies, fossil fuel and tourism dependence, labor exploitation, and unsustainability. We must reject the Caribbean as a logistics hub where nature becomes global infrastructure, as in some of the megaprojects being proposed with Chinese financing. We must imagine alternative, postdevelopment, and, yes, postcapitalist futures for the entire region that will be more resilient and flexible, allowing for movement in the hurricane season, food sovereignty and security, protection of water sources, protection of coastal areas and fisheries, mangroves and coral reefs, as well as huge programs of replanting and reseeding both. Many call this a “Marshall Plan” for the Caribbean, but it is better thought of as a Counterplantation Plan, or better yet a Maroon Plan. Fifth, we can learn from agroecological projects how to plant and expand Caribbean food sovereignty through agricultural practices such as regenerative low-­till and no-­till conservation agriculture, multistrata agroforestry, silvopasture, tree intercropping, use of tropical staple trees, and the multicrop gardening systems known as conuco, an Arawak term. We can explore new efforts to harness solar energy, and expand prolific traditional root crops such as cassava, which can survive hurricanes, and fast-­growing multipurpose trees such as Moringa Oleifera (also known as benzolive), which can be used to stabilize degraded hillsides and create shade for other plants, and which grow highly nutritious medicinal leaves and whose crushed seeds can be used to purify water.26 Only the return of such indigenous knowledge and horticultural practice will make the Caribbean more resilient in the face of climate emergencies. Sixth, Haitians can harness communication technology to connect people across the Caribbean and in the diaspora, to allow for easier movement between places by reducing the cost of travel and opening borders. We need to develop a “mobile commons” that enables all people to mobilize energy, resources, and human labor in ways that are more respectful of limits, respectful of each other, respectful of plants, animals, water, and other-­than-­human entities. And in this there is much to learn from IndigThis Is Not a Requiem  ·  169

enous ontologies and Afro-­Caribbean spirituality, which have persisted despite the violence of coloniality. Seventh, Haitians can build on the Caribbean traditions of grassroots democracy, collectives, cooperatives, and people’s assemblies, like those that have emerged in posthurricane Puerto Rico and which are working to envision a more sustainable and just future. Rather than give up on Haitian democracy, sovereignty, and freedom, we need to double down on it, to recover its roots, to consult the ancestors, and to find fresh springs of action. This is true not only in Haiti but across the Caribbean. In the face of disaster capitalism and what Bonilla and Klein call the “Trauma Doctrine,” the Caribbean region must demand repayment of the debts of slavery, colonialism, and climate damage and rebuild communal, national, and regional forms of natural and social resilience that are grounded in grassroots practices, experience, and knowledge. This radical Caribbean politics, bridging the hidden sea of ancestral solidarity that unites these archipelagoes, is the only one possible at this crossroads in history. s on g f o r pa pa g e de , l a n m è   k ac h e , r a s i n s a n b o u t

Lanmè kache se la m sèvi lwa mwen, ago ago Lanmè kache, Papa Gede, lanmè kache Lanmè kache, Rasin san Bout, lanmè kache Lanmè kache se la mwen sèvi lwa mwen, go ago Lanmè kache se la m sèvi lwa mwen Lanmè kache se la m sèvi lwa, ye, ago ago Lanmè kache, Papa Gede, lanmè kache Lanmè kache, Rasin san Bout, lanmè kache Lanmè kache, Kinsou Lavalas, lanmè kache Lanmè kache se la m sèvi lwa-­m, ye, ago ago Lanmè kache se la m sèvi lwa mwen, ago ago Hidden sea, Papa Gede, that’s where I serve my lwa Hidden Sea, Papa Gede, Hidden Sea, Hidden Sea, Roots Without End, hidden sea Hidden Sea, that’s where I serve my lwa Hidden Sea, that’s where I serve my lwa, ago ago Hidden Sea, Papa Gede, that’s where I serve my lwa Hidden Sea, Papa Gede, that’s where I serve my lwa Hidden Sea, Papa Gede, Hidden Sea, 170  ·  Afterword

Hidden Sea, Roots Without End, hidden sea Hidden Sea, Kinpou Downpour, hidden sea Hidden Sea, that’s where I serve my lwa, ye ago ago Hidden Sea, that’s where I serve my lwa, ago ago 27

This Is Not a Requiem  ·  171

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NOTES

Preface 1 Stelle Sheller, letter to the editor, Mt. Airy Express, October 1994. 2 Esther Figueroa, personal communication, 20 April 2020. 3 See Ulysse, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives. 4 For firsthand descriptions see Schuller, Killing with Kindness; and Katz, The Big Truck That Went By. 5 This interview is based on my own handwritten notes for the Haiti Support Group, later published in Arthur and Dash, eds., Libète, 162 – 63. 6 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. 7 Schuller and Morales, eds., Tectonic Shifts. 8 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble; Nail, “Forum 1.” 9 Esther Figueroa, personal communication, 20 April 2020. 10 Thomas, Exceptional Violence. 11 Figueroa, Fly Me to the Moon. 12 See “Puerto Rico Syllabus,” an online resource created by Yarimar Bonilla, Marisol Le Brón, and Sarah Molinari, with the Unpayable Debt Working Group convened by Frances Negrón-­Muntaner and Sarah Muir at Columbia University, https://puertoricosyllabus.com. See also “Caribbean Syllabus: Life and Debt in the Caribbean,” led by Frances Negrón-­Muntaner and Mimi Sheller, with the Unpayable Debt Working Group, at http://carribbeansyllabus .wordpress.com. 13 Bonilla, “Why Would Anyone in Puerto Rico Want a Hurricane?” 14 Sprague and St. Fort, “Haiti on the Precipice of Coronavirus.” 15 Macdonald, “ ‘Irresponsible and Dangerous’: U.S. Deports Haitians Despite Coronavirus Risk.” 16 Johnston, “Is Haiti Awakening to Change?” 17 Sandra Lemaire, Matiado Vilme, and Renan Toussaint, “Haiti’s President Launches PetroCaribe Investigation,” voa News, 19 October 2018, https:// www.voanews.com/a/haiti-­s-­president-­launches-­petrocaribe-­investigation -­/4620196.html. 18 Randall White, “ ‘Haiti Government Complicit in La Saline Massacre,’ Claims

Human Rights n g o , ” Haitiaction.net, 4 December 2018, http://www .haitiaction.net/News/RAW/12_4_18/12_4_18.html. 19 McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola. 20 See www.ginaathenaulysse.com for Gina A. Ulysse’s performance pieces and writing. 21 Yanique Hume has published on religious and popular cultures of the Caribbean, and she is also a dancer, choreographer, and priestess of Yemaya. N. Fadeke Castor is the author of Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad; see also http://nfadekecastor.com /spiritual_citizenship/. Other work on Vodou includes Deren, Divine Horsemen; Dunham, Island Possessed; Largey, Vodou Nation; McAlister, Rara!; and Michel and Bellegarde-­Smith, Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture. 22 Gina Athena Ulysse, Biennial of Sydney, Artists, https://www.biennaleof sydney.art/artists/gina-­athena-­ulysse/. 23 Hurston, Tell My Horse; and Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. 24 Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. 25 Averill, liner notes, Alan Lomax’s Recordings in Haiti: 1936 – 1937, 103.

Introduction Parts of the Introduction draw on my article “Caribbean Futures in the Offshore Anthropocene: Debt, Disaster, and Duration,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36, no. 6 (2018): 971 – 86. 1 For related approaches to disaster and (im)mobilities see Cresswell, “Understanding Mobility Holistically”; Graham, ed., Disrupted Cities; Cook and Butz, eds., Mobilities, Mobility Justice, and Social Justice. 2 The actual number of fatalities and injuries is not known exactly, with estimates ranging from 160,000 in Port-­au-­Prince in the most reliable academic study to the 316,000 total fatalities claimed by Haitian prime minister Jean-­ Max Bellerive one year after the earthquake. See Kolbe, et al., “Mortality, Crime and Access to Basic Needs.” 3 Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell. 4 Mullings, Werner, and Peake, “Fear and Loathing in Haiti,” 283. 5 Mullings, Werner, and Peake, “Fear and Loathing in Haiti,” 290. 6 Loyd and Mountz, Boats, Borders, and Bases, 16. 7 Mullings, Werner, and Peake, “Fear and Loathing in Haiti,” 285. 8 Elliott and Urry, Mobile Lives, 10 – 11. Elliott and Urry describe network capital as a combination of capacities to be mobile, including appropriate documents, money, and qualifications; access to networks at a distance; physical capacities for movement; location-­f ree information and contact points; access to communication devices and secure meeting places; access to vehicles and infrastructures; and time and other resources for coordination. 9 Carpio, Collisions at the Crossroads, 220. 10 International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Haiti

174  ·  Notes to Preface

Earthquake: Five-­Year Progress Report; Schuller, “Cholera and the Camps”; Katz, The Big Truck That Went By. 11 Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye, “Motility.” 12 Cresswell, “Understanding Mobility Holistically,” 133 – 36. 13 In Boats, Borders and Bases, Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz show how the U.S. Cold War response to Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers “established the legal and institutional basis for today’s migration-­detention and border-­ deterrence regime” and how “anti-­Black racism has worked together with anti-­A sian and anti-­Latinx racism to obscure the violence and geographic scope of the United States’s migration policing, carceral, and deportation apparatus” (4). 14 Sheller, “Uneven Mobility Futures.” 15 Mullings, Werner, and Peake, “Fear and Loathing in Haiti,” 288. 16 Mullings, Werner, and Peake, “Fear and Loathing in Haiti,” 294-­295. 17 Haitian Led Reconstruction and Development, 7. 18 Klein, The Shock Doctrine. 19 Sheller and Urry, Tourism Mobilities. 20 See the Global Climate Risk Index, https://germanwatch.org/de/14638. 21 Benedicty-­Kokken, Glover, Schuller, and Byron, eds., The Haiti Exception, 3; and see Ulysse, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives. 22 Chandler and Pugh, “Islands of Relationality and Resilience,” 1. 23 Chandler and Pugh, “Islands of Relationality and Resilience,” 1; see, e.g., Stratford, “Flows and Boundaries”; Stratford et al., “Envisioning the Archipelago”; Pugh, “Relationality and Island Studies in the Anthropocene.” 24 Amelia Moore, Destination Anthropocene. 25 Amelia Moore, Destination Anthropocene , 143. 26 On the use of the figure of the island as allegory of the Anthropocene, see DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene. 27 David Scott and the Small Axe Project Team, “A Statement on Hurricane Irma,” 6 September 2017. http://smallaxe.net/sxlive/statement-­hurricane-­irma. 28 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence; Bonilla, “The Coloniality of Disaster.” 29 Asaka, Tropical Freedom. 30 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 – 1880. See Sheller, “Caribbean Reconstruction and Climate Justice.” 31 Sheller, Aluminum Dreams; Bond, “Oil in the Caribbean.” 32 Bond, “Oil in the Caribbean.” 33 Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy. 34 See Figueroa, dir., Jamaica for Sale, and Figueroa, dir., Fly Me to the Moon. 35 Handy, “Antigua.” 36 Giorgi, “Climate Change Hot-­Spots.” 37 González et al., “Climate Change’s Pulse Is in Central America and the Caribbean.” 38 Max Fisher, “These Are the Cities That Climate Change Will Hit First,” Washington Post, 9 October 2013. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news

Notes to Introduction  ·  175

/worldviews/wp/2013/10/09/map-­these-­are-­the-­cities-­t hat-­climate-­change -­w ill-­hit-­first/. 39 Niland, “Richard Branson Developing Caribbean ‘Marshall Plan.’ ” 40 Polyné, ed., The Idea of Haiti. 41 See, e.g., Handy, “Antigua.” 42 Mullings, Werner, and Peake, “Fear and Loathing in Haiti,” 286; Klein, The Shock Doctrine. 43 On the story of Sans Souci, see Trouillot, Silencing the Past. 4 4 Alcenat, “The Case for Haitian Reparations”; and see Renda, Taking Haiti; Hudson, Bankers and Empire. 45 Wynter, “Is ‘Development’ a Purely Empirical Concept or Also Teoleological?” Cited in Eudell, “Haiti.” 46 Yeampierre and Klein, “Imagine a Puerto Rico Recovery Designed by Puerto Ricans.” 47 Yeampierre and Klein, “Imagine a Puerto Rico Recovery Designed by Puerto Ricans”; on the #JustRecovery movement, see The Climate Justice Alliance: Communities United for a Just Transition, https://climatejusticealliance.org /about/. 48 Schuller, Killing with Kindness. 49 Alcenat, “The Case for Haitian Reparations.” 50 Alcenat, “The Case for Haitian Reparations.” 51 Vannini, ed., The Cultures of Alternative Mobilities; Vannini, “Mind the Gap.” 52 Vannini et al., “Recontinentalizing Canada,” 124. 53 Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean; Mains, “Island Village, Tourist World”; Skelton and Mains, “Intersections of Neoliberalism, Mobilities and Development in the Caribbean.” 54 For a broader theoretical elaboration of this concept, see Sheller, Mobility Justice. 55 See “Introduction: Caribbean Cultural Thought in Pursuit of Freedom,” in Hume and Kamugisha, eds., Caribbean Cultural Thought. On relational archipelagos, see Stephens and Martínez-­San Miguel, eds., Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking. 56 Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean; Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases; Urry, Offshoring. 57 Sheller, “The New Caribbean Complexity.” 58 Sheller and Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm”; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry, “Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings”; Sheller, “Mobility.” 59 Loyd and Mountz, Boats, Borders, and Bases. 60 Easterling, Extrastatecraft. 61 Stoler, Duress. 62 Gregory, “The Black Flag.” 63 “Introduction,” in Stephens and Martínez-­San Miguel, eds., Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking, in press. 64 Cameron and Palan, The Imagined Economies of Globalization, 17; and see Pa-

176  ·  Notes to Introduction

lan, “Trying to Have Your Cake and Eating It”; Roberts, “Fictitious Capital, Fictitious Spaces.” 65 Jaffe, Concrete Jungles, 160. 66 “Haiti Says Philadelphia Garbage Was Dumped by Ship on Its Beach,” New York Times, 8 February 1988, a 11. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/08/us /haiti-­says-­philadelphia-­garbage-­was-­dumped-­by-­ship-­on-­its-­beach.html. 67 See, e.g., Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab. 68 Hume and Kamugisha, eds., Caribbean Cultural Thought, xx – x xi. 69 Hume and Kamugisha, eds., Caribbean Cultural Thought, xxiii. 70 Hume and Kamugisha, eds., Caribbean Cultural Thought, xxiv. 71 Hall, “Globalization”; see also Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora. 72 For example, Benítez-­Rojo, The Repeating Island; DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots. 73 Benedicty-­Kokken, Glover, Schuller, and Byron, The Haiti Exception; Ulysse, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives. 74 See specifics in the acknowledgments. 75 For publications with which I was most directly involved, see Sheller et al., “Gender, Disaster and Resilience”; Sheller et al., “Participatory Engineering for Recovery”; Galada et al., “Attitudes toward Post-­Earthquake Water and Sanitation Management”; Galada et al., “Assessing Preferences”; and Sheller and León, “Uneven Socio-­ecologies of Hispaniola.” 76 Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean; Sheller, “Demobilising and Remobilising the Caribbean”; Sheller, “Natural Hedonism”; Sheller, “Re-­Touching the ‘Untouched Island’ ”; Sheller, “Virtual Islands”; Sheller, “The New Caribbean Complexity”; and Sheller, “Infrastructures of the Imagined Island.” 77 In addition to the foundational article by Sheller and Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm,” see also Sheller, “The New Mobilities Paradigm for a Live Sociology”; Sheller and Urry, “Mobilising the New Mobilities Paradigm”; and Sheller, “From Spatial Turn to Mobilities Turn.” 78 On the development of “mobile methods,” see Sheller and Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm”; Büscher and Urry, “Mobile Methods and the Empirical”; Büscher, Urry, and Witchger, eds., Mobile Methods. 79 Schuller, Killing with Kindness; Schuller and Morales, eds., Tectonic Shifts; Polyné, The Idea of Haiti; Katz, The Big Truck That Went By. 80 Ruwanpura, “Squandered Resources?,” 260. 81 Mullings, Werner and Peake, “Fear and Loathing in Haiti,” 297. 82 Kevin J. Grove, “From Emergency Management to Managing Emergence,” quotation taken from the abstract; and see also Kevin J. Grove, “Hidden Transcripts of Resilience”; Kevin J. Grove, “Adaptation Machines”; Kevin J. Grove, “Biopolitics and Adaptation.” 83 Kevin J. Grove, “From Emergency Management to Managing Emergence,” 572. And see Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror. 84 Kevin J. Grove, “From Emergency Management to Managing Emergence,” 585.

Notes to Introduction  ·  177

85 Quotation from the special session on “Race, Coloniality, and the Sociological Imagination,” organized by Jose Itzigsohn, with the panelists Zine Magubane, Moon-­K ie Jung, Ricarda Hammer, and Karida Brown, and the discussant Julian Go (American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, 13 August 2018). 86 Morris, The Scholar Denied, 187. 87 Morris, The Scholar Denied, 188, 193. 88 Rhiney, “Dispossession, Disaster Capitalism”; Rhiney, “Rethinking Resilience”; Baptiste and Rhiney, “Climate Justice and the Caribbean”; Klein, The Battle for Paradise; Moulton and Machado, “Bouncing Forward after Irma and Maria”; and Beckles, “Irma-­Maria.” 89 Morris, The Scholar Denied, 188. 90 Cruz-­Martinez, Fernandéz Arrigoitia, Ortiz Camacho, and Román-­Velazquez, eds., “The Making of Caribbean Not-­So-­Natural Disasters.” 91 Bonilla, The Nation. 92 The literature is too vast to review, but exemplary influences include Glissant, The Poetics of Relation; Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern”; Trouillot, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot”; Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals”; and David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity.

1. Kinopolitical Power Chapter 1 draws in part on my article “The Islanding Effect: Post-­disaster Mobility Systems and Humanitarian Logistics in Haiti,” Cultural Geographies 20, no. 2 (2013): 185 – 204. 1 Kelman, “Hearing Local Voices”; Kelman and West, “Climate Change and Small Island Developing States.” 2 Wimmer and Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond,” 302; Sheller and Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” 3 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 154; Massey, “Power-­Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place”; Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System.” 4 Massey, For Space, 55. 5 Schiller and Salazar, “Regimes of Mobility,” 188. 6 Mitchell, The Right to the City; Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice. 7 Shoaff, Borders of Visibility, 15. 8 Shoaff, Borders of Visibility, 17, 12, 16. 9 Shoaff, Borders of Visibility, 10. 10 Shoaff, Borders of Visibility, 47 – 48. 11 Urry, Mobilities; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry, Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings. 12 Kaufmann and Montulet, “Between Social and Spatial Mobilities,” 45. 13 Sheller, Mobility Justice; Cresswell, On the Move; Bergmann and Sager, eds., The Ethics of Mobilities; Uteng and Cresswell, eds., Gendered Mobilities. 14 Shoaff, Borders of Visibility, 7 – 8. 15 Ulysse, Downtown Ladies.

178  ·  Notes to Introduction

16 Shoaff, Borders of Visibility, 10 – 11. 17 See, e.g., Haitian Led Reconstruction and Development. 18 Esnard and Sapat, “Disasters, Diasporas and Host Communities.” 19 Insecurity also included high levels of sexual violence and gender-­based violence, as well as the use of “transactional sex” to access basic needs. See “Sexual Violence in Haiti’s i d p Camps: Results of a Household Survey,” Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, n y u School of Law (New York, March 2011), accessed 29 December 2011, http://www.chrgj.org/publications/reports.html; and Global Justice Clinic/Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, “Yon Je Louvri: Reducing Vulnerability to Sexual Violence in Haiti’s i d p Camps,” (New York: n y u School of Law, 2012). 20 For details of the failures of aid money distribution two years after the earthquake, see Quigley and Ramanauskas, “Haiti after the Quake”; Schuller and Morales, Tectonic Shifts. 21 On Caribbean urbanization processes see Jaffe, ed., The Caribbean City. A powerful fictionalized historical account of Caribbean urbanization can be found in Patrick Chamoiseau’s epic novel Texaco, named for a shantytown built on the grounds of an old oil refinery on the outskirts of Fort-­de-­France, Martinique. 22 Mountz, “Specters at the Port of Entry,” 317, 318. 23 Mimi Sheller, “Mobility Systems, Urban Disasters, and the Rescaling of New Orleans,” unpublished paper presented at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting (Chicago, March 2006); Cresswell, “Understanding Mobility Holistically”; Graham, “ ‘Homeland’ Insecurities?”; “Understanding Katrina,” Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, 11 June 2006, http:// understandingkatrina.ssrc.org. 24 Cresswell, “Understanding Mobility Holistically.” 25 For a more humanizing Haitian counter-­imagery of the “botpippel,” see Paravisini-­Gebert and Kelehan “The ‘Children of the Sea.’ ” 26 Hallward, Damming the Flood, 50, 230.  27 Agamben, State of Exception; Mountz, Seeking Asylum.  28 Stoler, Duress. 29 Eberhard et al., “The 12 January 2010 Haiti Earthquake,” 1; Schuller, Unstable Foundations.” 30 The number of deaths in the January 2010 Haiti earthquake remains uncertain, with proposed figures ranging from as low as 65,000 in a controversial June 2011 report commissioned by the United States Agency for International Development to the 316,000 total casualties claimed by the prime minister of Haiti. A more accurate figure appears to be the estimate of just under 159,000 as counted in a randomized household survey before and after the earthquake; see Kolbe et al., “Mortality, Crime and Access to Basic Needs.” 31 On the importance of local participation in disaster risk reduction and postdisaster recovery processes, see Mercer et al., “The Potential for Combining Indigenous and Western Knowledge”; Mercer et al., “Reflections on Use of Participatory Research”; Mercer et al., “Integrating Indigenous and Scientific

Notes to Chapter One  ·  179

Knowledge Bases”; Sheller et al., “Participatory Engineering for Recovery in Post-­Earthquake Haiti.” 32 Sontag, “In Haiti the Displaced Are Left,” New York Times, 10 July 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/world/americas/11haiti.html. 33 See McElroy, “The Growth of the Caribbean Narcoeconomy.” On the (im)mobilities that structure Caribbean space more generally, see Sheller, “The New Caribbean Complexity.” 34 Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom, 47, citing Camp, Closer to Freedom, 7. 35 Sheller, Democracy After Slavery; Sheller, Citizenship from Below. 36 Chery, “Haiti’s Gold Rush.” 37 Leonard, The Story of Stuff, 136 – 39. 38 Claxton, “Emergency Food Production in Haiti,” 3. 39 “Sustaining African Agriculture: Organic Production,” Policy Brief No. 6, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (u n c ta d ), Geneva, February 2009, 1. 40 European Coordination Via Campesina, Food Sovereignty NOW! A guide to food sovereignty, 2018, Brussels, Belgium, 2. https://viacampesina.org/en/food -­sovereignty-­now-­depth-­g uide/. For a history of the movement see Desmarais, La Via Campesina. 41 “A Vision and Principles for Rebuilding Rural Haiti,” 22 January 2010, in Haitian Led Reconstruction and Development, 32 – 33. 42 Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Patel, Stuffed and Starved. 43 Averill, liner notes, Alan Lomax’s Recordings in Haiti, 146.

2. Water Power Chapter 2 draws on elements of a co-­authored article: M. Sheller, S. O’Connor, H. C. Galada, F. A. Montalto, P. L. Gurian, and M. Piasecki, “Participatory Engineering for Recovery in Post-­earthquake Haiti,” Engineering Studies 6, no. 3 (2015): 159 – 90. 1 Progress in Drinking Water and Sanitation: Special Focus on Sanitation, World Health Organization (w h o )/u n i c e f Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, 2008, http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health /monitoring/jmp2008.pdf; Progress in Drinking Water and Sanitation: Special Focus on Sanitation, w h o /u n i c e f Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, 2012, http://www.unicef.org/media/files/JMPreport 2012.pdf. 2 Varma et al., “Wòch nan Soley.” 3 Schuller, “Haiti’s Disaster after the Disaster”; for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see https://www.un.org/en/universal-­declaration-­human -­r ights/. 4 Gotham and Greenberg, Crisis Cities, ix; Johnson, ed., The Neoliberal Deluge; Neil Smith, “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster”; Schipper and Pelling, “Disaster Risk, Climate Change, and International Development.”

180  ·  Notes to Chapter One

5 Ruwanpura, “Squandered Resources?,” 246. 6 Neil Smith, “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster.” 7 Schuller, “Haiti’s Disaster after the Disaster.” 8 The shipping containers were donated by u s a i d , and the organization began raising funds to build a Women’s Center whose mission statement emphasizes self-­organization, microcredit and savings enterprises, and English, computer, sewing, and cooking classes. 9 Elliot and Urry, Mobile Lives. 10 The government of Haiti sought $2 billion for a ten-­year plan to improve water and sanitation in response to generally accepted evidence that the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (m i n u s ta h ) forces accidentally introduced cholera into the country: Jonathan Watts, “Haiti Seeks $2bn,” The Guardian, 29 November 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/29 /haiti-­appeal-­cholera-­nepal-­peacekeepers. 11 Schuller, Killing with Kindness, 173; Schuller, “Unstable Foundations”; “Chapter 2: Minimum Standards in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Promotion,” from Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response, The Sphere Project, 3rd ed., Rugby, U.K.: Practical Action Publishing, 2011, http://www.sphereproject.org. 12 Sheller et al., “Gender, Disaster and Resilience.” 13 Sheller et al., “Participatory Engineering for Recovery.” 14

camep

and Komite dlo dans le cadre du projet Rezodlo.

15 Etienne, ed., La modélisation d’accompagnement; Etienne, Du Toit, and Pollard, “a r d i ,” 44. 16 Parks, “Water, Energy, Access,” 121 – 22. 17 Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility.” 18 Horst, “The Infrastructures of Mobile Media,” 151. 19 de Laet and Mol, “The Zimbabwe Bush Pump.” 20 de Laet and Mol, “The Zimbabwe Bush Pump.” 21 Montalto et al., Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction. 22 Baptiste, Horst, and Taylor, “Earthquake Aftermath in Haiti.” 23 “Simbi in Haitian Voodoo, Between the Living and the Dead,” Haiti Observer, 23 February 2014, http://www.haitiobserver.com/blog/simbi-­in-­haitian -­voodoo-­between-­the-­living-­and-­t he-­dead.html. 24 Stephens, “What Is an Island?,” 25. 25 Graham, Cities Under Siege, xxvi; Michael P. Smith, Transnational Urbanism. 26 Gotham and Greenberg, Crisis Cities, 223; see also Graham, ed., Disrupted Cities. 27 “Six Months Later.” 28 “Voices from the Shanties.” 29 For a full description of the workshop, see Sheller et al., “Participatory Engineering for Recovery”; and Montalto et al., Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction Decisions. 30 Sheller et al., “Participatory Engineering for Recovery,” 21.

Notes to Chapter Two  ·  181

31 Sheller et al., “Participatory Engineering for Recovery,” 21. 32

camep

and Komite dlo dans le cadre du projet Rezodlo, 11. For similar argu-

ments, see also Schuller, “Unstable Foundations.” 33 Jones, “Community-­Managed Standpipes,” 12. 34 Jones, “Community-­Managed Standpipes,” 13. 35 From Hebblethwaite, Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English.

3. Aerial Power Chapter 3 draws on my article “Air Mobilities on the U.S. – Caribbean Border: Open Skies and Closed Gates,” The Communication Review 13, no. 4 (2011): 269 – 88. 1 Quotation from Mawby, “Uncle Sam We Want Back We Land,” 120; see also Muñoz and Beruff, “U.S. Military Policy Toward the Caribbean in the 1990’s”; on Vieques, see also McCaffrey, Military Power and Popular Power; and McCaffrey, “Social Struggle against the U.S. Navy.” 2 Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics. 3 Landler, “Trump Rates His Hurricane Relief.” 4 Adey, Aerial Life. 5 Bhimull, Empire in the Air, book blurb and 28. On non-­Western aeromobilities, see also Lin, “Re-­assembling (Aero)mobilities.” 6 Adey, “Surveillance at the Airport”; Adey, “Secured and Sorted mobilities”; Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport; Adey, “Facing Airport Security”; Cwerner, Kesselring, and Urry, eds., Aeromobilities; Urry, Mobilities. 7 On life in the air, see Codourey, “Mobile Identities”; Fuller, “Life in Transit”; Gottdiener, Life in the Air; Kellerman, “International Airports”; and Lassen, “Aeromobility and Work.” For cultural histories of airports, see Aaltola, “The International Airport”; Adey, “Airports and Air-­ Mindedness”; Fuller and Harley, Aviopolis; and Gordon, Naked Airport. On airport security, see Amoore, “Biometric Borders”; Amoore and Hall, “Taking Bodies Apart”; Salter, “The Global Visa Regime”; and Salter, Politics at the Airport. 8 Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism. 9 “Dust Specks on the Sea: Contemporary Sculpture from the French Caribbean & Haiti,” Hunter East Harlem Gallery, 7 November 2018. https://www .huntereastharlemgallery.org/dust-­specks/. 10 Brathwaite, Born to Slow Horses, 7–9. 11 Budd, “The View from the Air.” 12 Hennessy-­Fiske and King, “Trump Praises Hurricane Relief Efforts in Puerto Rico,” Los Angeles Times, 3 October 2017, http://www.latimes.com/nation /la-­na-­puerto-­r ico-­trump-­20171003-­story.html. 13 Kaplan, “Mobility and War.” 14 Bélanger and Arroyo, Ecologies of Power. 15 Adey, Budd, and Hubbard, “Flying Lessons,” 774.

182  ·  Notes to Chapter Two

16 Adey, “Surveillance at the Airport,” 1375. 17 Renda, Taking Haiti; Hallward, Damming the Flood. 18 Herz, “WikiLeaked Cables Reveal.” 19 Herz, “WikiLeaked Cables Reveal.” 20 Elliott and Urry, Mobile Lives, 9. 21 On Jamaican informal commercial importers who fly back and forth to Miami, see Ulysse, Downtown Ladies. 22 For an elaboration of this argument see Sheller, Mobility Justice. 23 Bryan and Flynn, “Free Trade, Smart Borders, and Homeland Security.” 24 Adey, “Secured and Sorted Mobilities”; Adey, “Facing Airport Security”; Salter, “The Global Visa Regime”; Sparke, “A Neoliberal Nexus”; Wood and Graham, “Permeable Boundaries.” 25 Kathuria et al., “A Time to Choose,” 183. 26 Haughton, “The U.S.-­Caribbean Border”; Haughton, “The Jamaica-­Britain Border”; Stasiulis and Ross, “Security, Flexible Sovereignty.” 27 Amoore, Biometric Borders; Amoore and Hall, “Taking Bodies Apart”; and see also Salter, Politics at the Airport. 28 Packer, Mobility Without Mayhem. 29 Adey, Aerial Life, 86. 30 Collier and Lakoff, “How Infrastructure Became a Security Problem.” 31 Adey and Bevan, “Between the Physical and the Virtual”; Dodge and Kitchin, “Flying through Code/Space.” 32 Heyman, “Ports of Entry,” 327; and see Cunningham and Heyman, “Introduction: Mobilities and Enclosures at Borders.” 33 On passports, tourism, and border surveillance, see Salter, “The Global Visa Regime.” 34 World Bank Caribbean Country Management Unit, A Time to Choose. 35 Feldman, “Terminal Exceptions”; Sheller, “Air Mobilities on the U.S.-­ Caribbean Border.” 36 Strom, “Cracking Open the World Bank,” 1. 37 Strom, “Cracking Open the World Bank,” 6. 38 Eberhard, Sheller, DesRoches and Greene, “The 12 January 2010 Haiti Earthquake”; Sheller et al., “Participatory Engineering for Recovery.” 39 Cowen, “A Geography of Logistics,” 616. 40 See also Sheller, “Air Mobilities on the U.S.-­Caribbean Border.” 41 Averill, liner notes, Alan Lomax’s Recordings in Haiti, 149. Lomax recorded this song in Carrefour Dufort, southwest of Léogâne, in 1937.

4. Digital Power Chapter 4 draws on my article “Connected Mobility in a Disconnected World: Contested Infrastructure in Post-­disaster Contexts,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 106, no. 1 (2016): 330 – 39; and builds on elements of my book chapters “Media, Materiality, Mobility: Uneven Topologies of Geo-

Notes to Chapter Four  ·  183

media in Post-­Disaster Worlds,” in Geomedia: Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds, ed. Karin Fast, André Jansson, Johan Lindell, Linda R. Bengtsson, and Mekonnen Tesfahuney (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), and “Locating Technologies on the Ground in Post-­earthquake Haiti,” in Location Technologies in International Context, ed. Ronan Wilken, Gerard Goggin, and Heather Horst (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). 1 Büscher, Liegl, and Thomas, “Collective Intelligence in Crises”; Sheller, “The Islanding Effect.” 2 Interview with Kate Chapman, in Coast, ed., The Book of o s m , 45 – 46. 3 Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”; Packer and Wiley, eds, Communication Matters; Parks, “Walking Phone Workers”; Parks and Schwoch, eds., Down to Earth; Parks and Starosielski, eds., Signal Traffic. 4 Horst, “The Infrastructures of Mobile Media,” 151. 5 Easterling, Extrastatecraft, 73; Starosielski, The Undersea Network; Parks and Starosielski, Signal Traffic. 6 Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, 134 – 35. 7 Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, 55 – 56. 8 Tawil-Souri, “Cellular Borders,” 174. 9 Horst, “The Infrastructures of Mobile Media.” 10 McFarlane, Desai, and Graham, “Informal Urban Sanitation”; Horst and Miller, The Cell Phone; Baptiste, Horst, and Taylor, “Earthquake Aftermath in Haiti.” 11 Skinner, “The Caribbean Data Processors.” 12 Graham, ed., The Cybercities Reader, 218; on other such gendered dimensions, see Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy. 13 Graham, ed., The Cybercities Reader, 48. 14 Hervé, “La Téléco liquideé a la Viettel!,” 9. 15 Hervé, “Haiti’s State Phone Company Finally Privatized.” 16 U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration, “Haiti: Telecommunications Industry,” Washington, DC, accessed June 2016, https:// www.export.gov/article?id=Haiti-Telecommunications-Industry. 17 Wood and Graham, “Permeable Boundaries.” 18 Wood and Graham, “Permeable Boundaries,” 155. 19 Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, 220. 20 Interview with Kate Chapman, in Coast, ed., The Book of o s m , 45. 21 Interview with Steve Coast, in Coast, ed., The Book of o s m , 161. 22 Sheller, “The Islanding Effect”; Sheller, “Connected Mobility in a Disconnected World”; see also Cook and Butz, “Mobility Justice in the Context of Disaster.” 23 Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”; Star and Ruhleder, “Steps toward an Ecology of Infrastructure.” 24 Parks and Starosielski, Signal Traffic, 11. 25 Grove and Pugh, “Assemblage Thinking and Participatory Development.” 26 Larkin, Signal and Noise, 6.

184  ·  Notes to Chapter Four

27 Cresswell, “On Turbulence.” 28 Mountz, Seeking Asylum, 138 – 40, 152 – 53. 29 Dunne, Hertzian Tales. 30 The images were made available as a public k l m file by Google on the afternoon of 13 January, 2010, and described as “a powerful glimpse into the destruction in Haiti”: Michael Rubinstein, Christiaan Adams, and Pete Giencke, “Haiti Imagery Now Available,” Maps: Official Blog, 13 January 2010, http:// google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/01/haiti-imagery-layer-now-available.html. See also the New York Times for the before and after GeoEye satellite images of Port-au-Prince, viewed using a special slider application at http://www .nytimes.com/interactive/2010/01/14/world/20100114-haiti-imagery.html; or The Wall Street Journal at http://s.wsj.net/media/HAITI1001_fullimage _damage.jpg. 31 Adey, Aerial Life; Parks, “Points of Departure”; Vukov and Sheller, “Border Work.” 32 Interview with Kate Chapman, in Coast, ed., The Book of o s m , 44. 33 Katz, The Big Truck That Went By; Schuller, Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti; and see Sheller, “Connected Mobility in a Disconnected World.” 34 Farman, “Mapping the Digital Empire”; Kwan, “Feminist Visualization”; Edney, Mapping an Empire; Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power”; Harley, “Deconstructing the Map.” 35 Wood and Graham, “Permeable Boundaries”; Salter, “The Global Visa Regime”; Adey, “Surveillance at the Airport”; Adey, “Facing Airport Security”; Sparke, “A Neoliberal Nexus.” 36 Latour, Science in Action. 37 Ushahidi’s “Crisis Map of Haiti” was described in 2011 as “the most comprehensive and up-to-date crisis map available to the humanitarian community. The information here is mapped in near real time and gathered from reports coming from inside Haiti via: sms, Web, Email, Radio, Phone, Twitter, Facebook, Television, List-serves, Live streams, Situation Reports. Volunteers at Ushahidi’s Situation Room at the Fletcher School in Washington DC, Geneva, London and Portland are mapping the majority of the reports submitted to Ushahidi in near real-time. The volunteers then identify gps coordinates for the reports and geo-tag the reports on the Ushahidi map” using OpenStreetMap, available under a Creative Commons License: accessed 29 December 2011, http://haiti.ushahidi.com/page/index/1. 38 Büscher, Liegl, and Thomas, “Collective Intelligence in Crises.” 39 Interview with Kate Chapman, in Coast, ed., The Book of o s m , 49. 40 Beaubien, “In Haiti Cell Phones Serve as Debit Cards.” 41 “Haitian Remittances Key to Earthquake Recovery,” Acorn International, 13 December 2010, https://acorninternational.org/index.php/2010/12/13/haiti -remittances-key-to-earthquake-recovery/. However, on the limits and unpredictability of remittances and microfinance for longterm recovery, see “Money, Money, Money: Remittances and Microbanking in Haiti,” Council

Notes to Chapter Four  ·  185

on Hemispheric Affairs, 18 July 2011, http://www.coha.org/money-money -money-remittances-and-microbanking-in-haiti/. 42 Interview with Kate Chapman, in Coast, ed., The Book of o s m , 46, 57. 43 Interview with Kate Chapman, in Coast, ed., The Book of o s m , 46. 4 4 Gordon and De Souza e Silva, Net-Locality; De Souza e Silva and Sheller, eds., Mobilities and Locative Media. 45 De Souza e Silva et al., “Mobile phone appropriation in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” 46 Mavhunga, Transient Workspaces. 47 Parks, “Walking Phone Workers.” 48 According to their website, “Digicel Group is a leading global communications provider with operations in 31 markets in the Caribbean, Central America and Asia Pacific. After 14 years of operation, total investment to date stands at over US$5 billion worldwide”: https://online-top-up.digicelgroup.com/en -HT/. 49 Hsu and Schuller, “Dumb and Dumber.” 50 Zacair, Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora in the Wider Caribbean. In order to track and contribute to social media conversations, I created a Twitter account called HaitiWater, which had more than 1370 followers, some of whom were in Haiti but a much larger percentage of which were in the diaspora or working in Haiti temporarily. 51 Cooke and Kothari, eds., Participation; Sharma, Logics of Empowerment; Pugh, “Speaking without Voice.” 52 Grove, “From Emergency Management to Managing Emergence,” 584 – 85. 53 Grove, “Adaptation Machines.” 54 Grove and Pugh, “Assemblage Thinking,” 1 – 2. 55 Averill, liner notes, Alan Lomax’s Recordings in Haiti, 100. 56 Averill, liner notes, Alan Lomax’s Recordings in Haiti, 100 – 1.

5. Bordering Power Chapter 5 draws on my article “Mobility, Mediation and Territoriality on a Haitian-­Dominican Border Crossing,” Sociologica, Special Issue on Moving Boundaries of Mobilities Research, 1, no. 23 (2014): 1 – 30. Elements of this chapter also draw from Mimi Sheller and Yolanda M. León, “Uneven Socio-­ecologies of Hispaniola: Asymmetric Capabilities for Climate Adaptation in Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” Geoforum 73 (July 2016): 32 – 46. 1 On early Haitian-­Dominican relations, see Moreno Fraginals, Moya Pons, and Engerman, eds., Between Slavery and Free Labor; Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic; and Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier. And on their more recent relations linked to the transnational sugar and garment industries, see Martínez, Peripheral Migrants; Martínez, Decency and Excess; Werner, Global Displacements; and Shoaff, Borders of Visibility.

186  ·  Notes to Chapter Four

2 On Haitian-­Dominican relations with regard to race, ethnicity, and nation, see Howard, Coloring the Nation; Howard, “Development, Racism and Discrimination”; Howard, “Race and Modernity in Hispaniola”; Torres-­Saillant, “The Tribulations of Blackness”; Torres-­Saillant, Introduction to Dominican Blackness; Shoaff, Borders of Visibility; and García Peña, The Borders of Dominicanidad. 3 Sur, “Through Metal Fences,” 70 – 71. 4 Shoaff, Borders of Visibility, 48. 5 Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 3–­4 . 6 This account is based on a research trip that took place 19 – 28 March 2013. 7 Cronon, Changes in the Land; Grove, Green Imperialism. 8 Logan, Diplomatic Relations. 9 Castor and Garafola, “The American Occupation of Haiti,” 266. 10 Diamond, Collapse, 340. 11 Richman, Migration and Vodou, 53. 12 Lundahl, The Haitian Economy, 119. 13 For more details see Miller, “Wait”; Howard, “Race and Modernity in Hispaniola”; Keating, “Haitian Devil”; Charles, “U.S. Expressed ‘Deep Concern’ ”; Danticat, “Haitian ‘Dreamers’ ”; and Shoaff, Borders of Visibility. 14 Bender et al., “Modeled Impact of Anthropogenic Warming.” 15 Dupuy, “The Neoliberal Legacy in Haiti,” 26. 16 Diamond, Collapse, 340 – 41. 17 Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction (g f d r r ). “Disaster Risk Management,” 130. 18 Schuller and Morales, eds., Tectonic Shifts, 12. 19 Werner, Global Displacements, 8. 20 Mullings, Werner and Peake, “Fear and Loathing in Haiti,” 292. 21 Werner, Global Displacements, 20. 22 I thank Marion Werner for her critical engagement with my work, presented in the form of a commentary delivered at my a ag Society and Space lecture in 2018 and published in Society and Space along with my response. Werner, “The Archipelago and Politics of Possibility.” 23 Sheller and Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm”; Jensen, “Mobility, Space and Power”; Bærenholdt, “Governmobility.” 24 Paasi, “Border Studies Reanimated,” 2304. 25 Hannam, Sheller, and Urry, “Mobilities, Immobilities, and Moorings”; Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility”; Sheller, “Air Mobilities on the U.S.-­ Caribbean Border.” 26 Sassen, “The Many Scales of the Global.” 27 Sassen, “When Territory Deborders Territoriality,” 30. 28 Sassen, “When Territory Deborders Territoriality,” 21. 29 Sassen, “When Territory Deborders Territoriality,” 23. 30 Hudson, “On the History and Historiography of Banking in the Caribbean,” 34; see also Maurer, “Cyberspatial Properties.”

Notes to Chapter Five  ·  187

31 Hudson, “On the History and Historiography of Banking in the Caribbean,” 25 – 26. 32 Urry, Offshoring. 33 Territory is not about spatial formation alone; it begins from an analysis of the instruments, codes, and “mediators” of semiotic space through which social actors relate to one another on different social, spatial, and temporal scales. See Klauser, “Thinking through Territoriality”; Raffestin, ”Paysage et territorialité”; Raffestin, Pour une géographie du pouvoir. 34 Space, in other words, is socially appropriated or “territorialized” as an object and outcome of social practices and knowledge (connaissances). Thus Raffestin draws our attention to sociospatial power relations that are instantiated in everyday practices, and following Michel Foucault he asks us “to follow what seems trivial in order to reveal the relationships of power which are established within our society”: Raffestin, Pour une géographie du pouvoir, 245. 35 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed. 36 Walters, “Mapping Schengenland.” 37 Das and Poole, eds., Anthropology in the Margins of the State. 38 Galemba, “Remapping the Border,” 826, citing Joseph and Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation. 39 Bærenholdt, “Governmobility,” 31. 40 Lake Enriquillo is both the largest lake and the lowest point in the Antilles. The lake has grown and receded in the past, with a previous high rate of growth in the late 1960s, when it went from ˗45 msl (meters below sea level) in 1950 up to ˗30 msl in 1966. In 2003, the surface area of the lake reached a low of 160 km 2 , with an elevation of ˗45.5 msl, then started increasing each year after 2004 until by March 2013 it had reached a surface area of 347 km 2 and an elevation of ˗34 msl. Lake Azuéi, a slightly smaller, less saline, and somewhat higher lake located mainly in Haiti (but also extending over the border), has also expanded considerably, growing from 126 km 2 , with an elevation of 19.5 msl, in November 2003 to 154 km 2 with an elevation of 24 msl in June 2013, according to satellite images and measurements. See Comarazamy et al., “On the Hydrometeorological Changes.” 41 Schubert, Lagos Enriquillo y Azuéi, 74. 42 Pierre and Gisèle, Evaluation des besoins et propositions; Daniel and Abiu Lopez, “Villages Slowly Vanish.” 43 Schubert, Lagos Enriquillo y Azuéi, 72. 4 4

Sean Breslin, “Scientists Stunned by Two Rising Lakes in Haiti and Dominican Republic,” The Weather Channel, 4 March 2016, https://weather.com/science /environment/news/caribbean-­r ising-­lakes.

45 Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience; Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed. 46 Galemba, “Remapping the Border,” 832. 47 Sassen, “When Territory Deborders Territoriality,” 24. 48 Galemba, “Remapping the Border,” 834. 49 Paasi, “Border Studies Reanimated,” 2305.

188  ·  Notes to Chapter Five

50 Roitman, “Productivity in the Margins,” 216, cited in Galemba, “Remapping the Border,” 836. 51 Paasi, “Border Studies Reanimated,” 2304. 52 Sassen, “When Territory Deborders Territoriality,” 28. 53 Janel Martinez, “These Workshops Aim to Heal Haitian-­Dominican Divides,” Remezcla, 21 December 2018, http://remezcla.com/features/culture /decolonizing-­hispaniola-­workshop-­series/. 54 Averill, liner notes, Alan Lomax’s Recordings in Haiti, 101 – 2.

6. Sexual Power 1 Gayle, “Timeline.” 2 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus. 3 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 90 – 91, 50. 4 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 260 – 61, cited in Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 28 – 29. 5 Daigle and Dodds, “u n Peacekeepers.” 6 The Haiti Gender Shadow Report, 3 – 4 . 7 The Haiti Gender Shadow Report, 2. 8 The Haiti Gender Shadow Report, 3 – 4 . 9 The Haiti Gender Shadow Report, v. 10 Bonilla, “The Coloniality of Disaster.” 11 See Sheller et al., “Gender, Disaster and Resilience.” 12 d’Adesky with PotoFanm+Fi, Beyond Shock. 13 Sheller and Urry, Tourism Mobilities; Werner, Global Displacements. 14 Sheller and Urry, Tourism Mobilities. For works on Caribbean tourism more generally, see Pattullo, Last Resorts; Duval, Tourism in the Caribbean; and Klein, Paradise Lost at Sea. 15 Bærenholdt et al., Performing Tourist Places; Sheller, “Demobilising and Remobilising the Caribbean.” 16 Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do With It?; Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean; Kempadoo, ed., Sun, Sex and Gold. 17 Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do With It?, 16. 18 Derby, “Haitians, Magic and Money.” 19 Grogg, “Rapidly Rising Lake Levels”; Milfort, “Haitian-­Dominican Republic.” 20

Sharpe, In the Wake, 45.

21 Sharpe, In the Wake, 48. 22 Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab, xvii. 23 Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab, xx. 24 Nixon, Resisting Paradise, 17. 25 Nixon, Resisting Paradise, 25, 32. 26 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 130, 133. 27 Castor, Spiritual Citizenship. 28 Averill, liner notes, Alan Lomax’s Recordings in Haiti, 55 – 56.

Notes to Chapter Six  ·  189

Conclusion 1 Anderson, “Emergency Futures”; Anderson, “Governing Emergencies”; Bonilla, “The Coloniality of Disaster”; Carrigan, “Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies”; Davies, “Toxic Space and Time”; Knowles, “Learning from Disaster;” Kwate and Threadcraft, “Dying Fast and Dying Slow in Black Space”; Nixon, Slow Violence. 2 Bonilla, “The Swarm of Disaster.” 3 Anderson, “The Affects of the Disaster,” 2. 4 Maldonado-­Torres, “Afterword: Critique and Decoloniality.” 5 See, for example, Scott, Omens of Adversity; Sharpe, In the Wake; Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation; Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals;” Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern.” 6 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” cited in McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 131 – 33; and see Kamugisha, Beyond Coloniality. 7 Editorial Introduction by Leniqueca Welcome, p r e e , Issue 5: Ecocide, accessed 22 April 2020 at https://preelit.com/2020/04/20/ecocide/. 8 Bonilla, “The Swarm of Disaster,” 2. 9 Kamugisha, Beyond Coloniality. 10 Arundhati Roy, “The Trickledown Revolution,” Outlook India, 20 September 2010. Accessed 20 June 2020, https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine /story/the-­trickledown-­revolution/267040. And see Figueroa, dir., Fly Me to the Moon; and Francis, “Urgent Media and Nontheatrical Ecologies.” 11 García López, “Environmental Justice Movements in Puerto Rico,” n.p.; and see Massol González, Casa Pueblo Cultiva Esperanzas, 31 – 32. 12 García López, “Environmental Justice Movements in Puerto Rico.” 13 García López, “Environmental Justice Movements in Puerto Rico;” and see Berman Santana, Kicking off the Bootstraps. 14 García López, “Environmental Justice Movements in Puerto Rico.” 15 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” cited in McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 131 – 33. 16 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” cited in McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 132. 17 Kamugisha, “On the Idea,” 56 – 57. 18 Kamugisha, “On the Idea,” 57. 19 Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals,” 855. 20 García López, “Reflections on Disaster Colonialism,” 1. 21 García López, “Reflections on Disaster Colonialism,” 1, italics in original. 22 García López, “Reflections on Disaster Colonialism,” 2; and see Lerner, Sacrifice Zones. 23 García López, “Reflections on Disaster Colonialism,” 2; and see García López, “Environmental Justice Movements in Puerto Rico.” 24 García López, “Reflections on Disaster Colonialism,” 3. 25 Mahabir, Miraculous Weapons, 40. 26 Hume and Kamugisha, eds., Caribbean Cultural Thought, xxvi. 27 C. L. R. James cited in Kamugisha, “The Black Experience,” 139.

190  ·  Notes to Conclusion

28 Suliman et al., “Indigenous (Im)Mobilities in the Anthropocene.” 29 Teaiwa, “To Island.” Thanks to Jorgen Rasmussen for sharing this quote on Facebook in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and to Esther Figueroa for bringing her to my attention. 30

Haitian Led Reconstruction and Development, 11 – 13.

31 Dominican participants included the Centro Cultural Poveda, Red Ciudadana, p ro g r e s s i o ,

Plataforma Ayuda Haití, s j r m , Universidad Autónoma de Santo

Domingo, c i pa f , Cuidad Alternativa, Comité Dominicano d d h h , Red Urbana Popular, Confederación Nacional de Unidad Sindical, Redesol – i d e ac , c o o p h a b i tat ,

Cooperativa Unión Integral, c o pa d e b a , Foro Social Alternativo,

Articulación Campesina. 32 Explore the variety of resources at this “Caribbean Sexualities Knowledge E-­Portal” at http://portal.caribbeansexualities.org. 33 Averill, liner notes, Alan Lomax’s Recordings in Haiti, 104.

Afterword 1 Beckett, There Is No More Haiti, cover copy, 17. 2 Anderson, “As Protests Again Sweep Haiti.” 3 For accounts of the democratic and republican governments of Haiti after its independence, which at the time were far ahead of most countries’ in terms of inclusive citizenship and women’s rights, see Sheller, Democracy After Slavery; and Sheller, Citizenship from Below. 4 Based on the accounts of Danticat, “Demonstrators in Haiti,” The New Yorker, 10 October 2019, accessed 20 April 2020 at https://www.newyorker.com/news /news-­desk/demonstrators-­in-­haiti-­are-­fighting-­for-­an-­uncertain-­f uture; Wilentz, “Haiti Is in the Streets”; and Anderson, “As Protests Again Sweep Haiti.” 5 Under the Petrocaribe agreement, the Haitian government bought oil from Venezuela, paid 60 percent of the purchase price within ninety days, and then deferred the rest of the debt, at a 1 percent interest rate, over twenty-­five years. The government sale of the oil was supposed to benefit development projects, and the debt grew to almost $2 billion over a decade. 6 Wilentz, “Haiti Is in the Streets.” 7 Danticat, “Demonstrators in Haiti.” 8 Danticat, “Demonstrators in Haiti.” 9 Danticat, “Demonstrators in Haiti”; and see Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (r n d d h ), “The Events in La Saline.” 10

r n ddh,

16.

11 Danticat, “Demonstrators in Haiti.” 12 Anderson, “As Protests Again Sweep Haiti.” 13 Anderson, “As Protests Again Sweep Haiti.” 14 Anderson, “As Protests Again Sweep Haiti.” 15 Nixon, “When the Apocalypse Is Now.” 16 Bonilla and Klein, “The Trauma Doctrine,” 35.

Notes to Afterword  ·  191

17 Morales, “Puerto Rico’s Unjust Debt,” 212 – 13. 18 Nixon, “What Does It Mean to Survive after Dorian?” 19 Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary.” 20 Moore, Allewaert, Gómez, and Mitman, “Plantation Legacies.” 21 For the organization’s website and the full manifesto, see http://juntegente.org /en/manifiesto/. 22 Bonilla and Klein, “The Trauma Doctrine,” 35. 23 Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt. 24 Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt. 25 Beckett, There Is No More Haiti, 113; and see also Trouillout, Silencing the Past. 26 See Claxton, “Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainable Development.” 27 Averill, liner notes, Alan Lomax’s Recordings in Haiti, 106.

192  ·  Notes to Afterword

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Adey, Peter, 66, 69, 74

networks, 84 – 86, 90 – 95, 97, 98, 99 – 101, 99;

Aerial surveillance, 68; access to, 78 – 79, 83, 93,

plantation archipelagos, 153, 166; of poverty,

185n30; aerial photography, 85, 91; biometric

149 – 50, 152; of race, 3, 8 – 9, 39, 66 – 67, 71 – 74,

data, 74; colonialist aerial perspectives, 66,

129 – 30, 138, 162 – 63, 166

67 – 69; LiDAR data (w b - i c - r i t aerial mission), 92; military-logistical landscapes, 69;

Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, xi – x ii, xiv, xxii, 14, 37, 88, 168

Pictometry, 92; uav s (unmanned aerial ve-

Asaka, Ikuko, 9

hicles), 78

Asambleas de pueblo (people’s assemblies), 148

Afro-Caribbean market women, 33 – 3 4, 105

Auguste, Roseanne, xv

Agamben, Giorgio, 130

Aviation and Transportation Security Act (U.S.,

Agriculture, xv, 43 – 47, 44, 107 – 8, 109, 148, 169

2001), 73, 74

Agwe Tawoyo (loa), 127 – 28

Ayida Wedo (loa), 102 – 3

Airports: arrival of humanitarian supplies,

Ayiti. See Dominican Republic; Haiti

70 – 71; citizen protests at, 161; modernization

Azaka (loa), 47

of, 77 – 78; Open Skies agreements, 73 – 74, 76; privileged mobility at, 66, 71 – 72; as stateless zones, 91; surveillance at, 69, 71, 73; Toussaint Louverture International Airport, 70, 71, 77 – 78; United States presence at, 70 – 71 Air space: aerial views, 67, 68; control of Haitian air space, 72; geographies of, 66 – 69; military airfields, 65, 69; Ogou (loa), 81 – 82, 102, 103; Open Skies agreements, 73 – 74, 76, 77; postdisaster response, 70, 91; uav s (unmanned aerial vehicles), 78 Alcenat, Westenley, 16 – 17 Amoore, Louise, 74 Anderson, Ben, 144 – 45 Anderson, John Lee, 159, 162, 163 Anthropocene, xvi, 7, 42, 149 Antigovernment protests, xxi – x xii, 21 – 2 2, 160 – 62 Arawak people, 46, 169 Archipelagos: carceral archipelagos, 19, 20, 21, 38; coloniality, 27, 147, 149 – 50; of digital

Baby Doc (Duvalier, Jean-Claude), xv, 78, 161 Bærenholdt, Jørgen, 113 Bahamas, xv, xviii – x ix, 11, 19, 67, 150, 164, 165 Banking industry, xv, xxi, 12, 14, 43 – 4 4, 77 – 79, 86, 92, 95, 100, 112 Bar culture, 133 Bare life (Agamben), 130 Barnicle, Mary E., xxiv Batey Sol (former sugar plantation mining camp), 31 – 32 Bauxite mining, xvii, 10, 11, 12, 147 Beckett, Greg, 159, 168 Beckles, Hilary, 167 – 68 “Being human after Man” (Wynter), 145 Benin, West Africa, 102 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 152 Beyond Shock: Charting the Landscape of Sexual Violence in Post-quake Haiti, 135 Bhimull, Chandra, 66

Boat people [botpippel], 37, 38, 69, 70, 164, 179n25 Bond, David, 10 Bonilla, Yarimar, xviii, 27, 144, 146, 164, 170 Borders: airports as, 71 – 72; authority at, 115 – 16, 120 – 2 2; borders within borders concept,

xix, 31, 40, 63, 164 Caribbean, 9, 25 – 26, 67, 150 – 51, 157 – 58. See also Dominican Republic; Haiti; Jamaica c a r icom

(Caribbean Community), 15, 27,

167

31; citizenship, 75, 84, 108, 124, 148 – 49,

Carpentier, Alejo, 22

165; commercial space adjacent to, 116 – 17,

Carribean-i r n network, 156

117; commodity flows, 84, 105; defining, 75,

Casimir, Jean, 166

110 – 11, 123, 124; economic regulation at,

Castor, N. Fadeke, 142

120 – 23; flooding of, 114 – 15; foreign research-

cbdr m

ers at, 105 – 6, 116 – 2 2; Haitian women in

(community-based disaster risk man-

agement), 24

Dominican Republic, 31 – 3 4, 136 – 37; human

cbos

trafficking, 72, 115, 131, 136 – 38, 137; lakes at,

Cellphones, 58, 59, 83, 85, 87, 95 – 97, 98

(community-based organizations), 62

23, 113 – 15, 114, 118, 119, 124 – 25, 137, 188n40;

Chad Basin, Africa, 123

Malpasse-Jimaní international crossing, 114;

Chalmers, Camille, xv, 45

margins between water and land, 127 – 28;

Chandler, David, 7

Mexico-Guatemala border, 112 – 13, 119; re-

Chapman, Kate, 89, 93, 95, 96

strictions on commercial vehicles, 117 – 18;

Charcoal, 99, 108, 118

smuggling operations, 13, 69 – 70, 72, 115,

Chery, Dady, 43

136 – 37; surveillance at, 31 – 32, 71 – 74, 92,

Children: abuse of, 134, 135, 137 – 38; education

107 – 8, 116 – 18; Third Border Initiative, 73, 75;

for, 134, 155; Ezili Danto (loa), xxii, 142 – 43;

U.S. control of, 17 – 18, 69, 70, 74, 76; women

food insecurity, 16; hygienic needs of, 53; in

market traders at, 31, 33 – 3 4, 105, 116 – 17, 117.

idp

See also Islanding

researchers, 129, 134, 137 – 38; mobility of, 72,

Bosou Bwa Nan Bwa (loa), 157 – 58 [botpippel] boat people, 37, 38, 69, 70, 164, 179n25 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 107 bp

18, 42, 106, 107, 153, 165 – 66; shanty towns,

camps, 134; interactions with foreign

137; photographs of, 137; sexual exploitation of, 130 – 32, 137 – 38 Chinese development projects, xvii, 17 Cholera epidemic, 16, 52, 53, 80 – 81, 181n10

Deepwater Horizon drilling platform disas-

Chronological amnesia, 151

ter, xvii

Citadel, 13, 14

bpo

(business processing outsourcing), 87 – 88

Brathwaite, Kamau, 67, 152

Citizenship, 42, 75, 84, 108, 124, 141, 148 – 49, 165

Brazil: Haitian migrants in, 19 – 20

Claxton, Mervyn, 45

Brennan, Denise, 136

Climate change: climate justice, 15, 26, 99 – 100,

Brown, Karen McCarthy, xxii

127; coloniality of, 7, 12 – 13, 21, 60, 106,

Budd, Lucy, 68

107 – 10, 120, 150 – 51, 155 – 56, 166; conserva-

Bush, George W., 73

tion agriculture, 46; deforestation, 106, 107,

Bwa Nan Bwa (loa), 157 – 58

108, 109 – 10, 114; development projects, 13, 43, 88, 148; history of, 165 – 66; hurricanes,

Cacos (guerilla soldiers), 166 Call centers, 10, 88 camep

(Centrale Autonome Metropolitaine

d’Eau Potable), 63 Camp, Stephanie, 42 Camps, 17, 18, 35, 53, 96, 131, 134 Caracol Industrial Park, 43, 88 Carceral archipelagos, 19, 20, 21, 38 Carceral spaces: Batey Sol (former sugar plantation mining camp), 31 – 32; Guantánamo Bay (Cuba), 37, 65, 69, 72, 164; plantations, xvi, 17,

218  ·  Index

xviii – x ix, xxiv, 11 – 1 2, 108; hydrometeorological changes, 113 – 15, 188n40; refugees in the face of, 165 – 66, 168; resource extraction, xii, xvii, xxi, 10 – 13, 15, 43, 46, 147 – 48 Coast Guard, U.S., 69, 70, 74 Coloniality: air space shaped by, 66 – 67; carceral archipelagos, 19, 20, 21, 38; climate, 7, 12 – 13, 21, 60, 106, 107 – 10, 120, 150 – 51, 155 – 56, 166; commercial development, 43, 88, 148; debt, 12, 14 – 15, 108, 154, 156, 160, 165, 170, 186; detention facilities, 19 – 20, 37, 65, 69, 72, 112, 164; environmental degrada-

tion, 16 – 17, 148 – 49, 166; extractive economies, xii, xvii, xxi, 10 – 13, 15, 43, 46, 147 – 48;

Detention facilities, 19 – 20, 37, 65, 69, 72, 112, 164

labor exploitation, xi, xix, 10, 33 – 3 4, 86, 107,

Diamond, Jared, 108, 109

108 – 9, 110; mapping, 83, 89 – 90, 91 – 92, 93,

Diaspora, Haitian, 38, 50 – 5 3, 61, 95, 99 – 100

95, 96 – 97, 111; motility, 4, 33, 36, 38, 71 – 72;

Digicel, 87, 97, 99

plantations, 17, 18, 42, 106, 107, 153, 165 – 66;

Digicel umbrellas, 97, 99

poverty, 34 – 36, 38, 129, 134 – 35, 138, 149 – 50,

Digital networks, 84 – 86, 90 – 95, 97, 98, 99 – 101,

152, 197n19; racialized identities, xv, xvi, 8 – 9, 39, 68, 104, 110, 116, 130, 133, 150; rival geographies of, 31, 33 – 3 4, 42, 105, 116 – 17; slavery,

99 d i n e pa

(Direction Nationale d’Eau Potable et

d’Assainissement), 62

15, 17, 19, 42, 129 – 30, 162, 165; white settler

Doctors Without Borders, 70

colonialism, 8 – 9. See also Air space; Borders;

Dominican Republic, 9, 106; environmental

Communication technologies; Islanding;

management in, 107, 108 – 9; foreign busi-

Mobility; Offshore economies

ness interests in, 14, 41, 43, 77, 107; forests

Communication technologies: cellphones, 58, 59, 83, 85, 87, 95 – 97, 98; crowdsourcing, 83,

in, 108 – 9; highway construction in, 125, 126; humanitarian assistance flights to, 70; Lake

92, 94, 95, 101; i c t s (information and com-

Enriquillo, 23, 113, 114, 115, 125, 137; Ley de

munication technologies), 86, 88; loas

Migración, 108; Open Skies agreements, 77;

associated with, 102 – 3; local appropriation

redevelopment plan participation, 154 – 56;

of, 58, 59, 83, 85, 87, 93, 97, 98, 99; patching,

relations with Haiti, 104, 107, 124, 154 – 56;

97, 98, 99, 100; privatization of, 87 – 88,

sex tourism, 131, 135 – 37, 136, 137; sugar pro-

90

duction in, 107, 109; United States relations

Community activism, 24, 26, 38, 45 – 46, 61 – 64, Conuco agriculture, 46, 147, 148, 169 Coronavirus pandemic, xix, 2, 38, 144, 145, 148, 159 – 60 cosm a

with, 14, 77, 107 Droughts, 11, 48

96, 167

Drug trafficking, 13, 18, 57 – 58, 69 – 70, 72, 74, 112 Du Bois, W. E. B., 9, 25 – 26, 154 Duvalier, Jean-Claude (Baby Doc), xi, xv, 78, 161

(Haiti Communautaire OpenStreetMap

Haiti), 95, 96 c o v i d -19

virus, xix, 2, 38, 53, 73, 144, 145, 159 – 60

Cowen, Deborah, 65, 76, 84 Creole language, 38, 107, 155 Cruz-Martinez, Gibrán,  26–27 Cuba, xvii – x viii, 17 – 18, 37, 43, 65, 69, 72, 164, 165

Earthquake (January, 2010): anti-government protests after, 21 – 2 2; commercial development after, 43, 88, 148; community activism, 24, 38, 45 – 46, 61 – 64, 96, 100, 167; fatalities, 1, 39, 174n2, 179n30; Hurricane Katrina compared with, 11, 34, 37 – 39, 64, 75; living conditions after, xv, xvi, 3 – 4, 12, 31, 34 – 36, 35, 39 – 40, 50 – 5 3, 61, 63, 96, 131, 134, 164, 197n19;

Danbala Wedo (loa), 102 – 3

media coverage of, 16; migrations after, 20,

Danticat, Edwidge, 160, 161 – 62

34, 37, 38, 69, 70 – 72, 75, 164; reconstruc-

Davies, Carole Boyce, 138

tion funds, 4, 21 – 2 2. See also Humanitar-

Debt, 12, 14 – 15, 108, 154, 156, 160, 165, 170,

ian aid; Mobility; Network capital; Water

186

infrastructure

Deforestation, 106, 107, 108, 109 – 10, 114

Easterling, Keller, 19, 78

de Gaulle, Charles, 67

e c l ac

Democracy: digital access, 85 – 91, 97, 98, 99,

(Economic Commission for Latin Amer-

ica and the Caribbean), 86

100; in Haiti, xv, xx, 4, 159; peasant democ-

Education, xv, 36, 155, 163

ratization, xxiv, 42; reconstructions of,

Eichenberger, Joseph B., xxi

9, 26; United States interference with, xi,

Elliott, Anthony, 51, 71, 174n8

162 – 63

Environment: agriculture, xv, 43 – 47, 45 – 46,

Deportations, xv, xix, 19, 31, 33 – 3 4, 37 – 38, 69 – 70, 72 – 75, 108, 164

107 – 8, 148, 169; air pollution, 36, 39; environmental justice movements, 26, 148, 151; ero-

de Souza e Silva, Adriana, 96

sion, 113, 114, 118 – 20, 119, 126; extractive econ-

Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 81

omies, xii, xvii, xxi, 10 – 13, 15, 43, 46, 147 – 48;

Index  ·  219

Environment (continued)

Google Earth maps, 92, 94

flooding, 113 – 15, 114, 119, 124, 125, 137; high-

Gorman, Sean, 89

way construction, 125; mining, xvii, 10, 11, 12,

Graham, Stephen, 86, 88

17, 43, 147, 148; oil industry, xii, xxi, xxi – x xii,

Grassroots movements, xi, 138, 139, 1 70

10, 21 – 2 2, 160, 161 – 62; rainfall, 11, 16 – 17, 106,

Gregory, Derek, 19

113, 115; river systems, 48, 115; roads, 11, 89,

gr et

113 – 15, 118 – 20, 119, 125, 126; toxic waste disposal, 21, 38 – 39. See also Hurricanes; Lakes

(Groupe de recherche et d’échange tech-

nologique), 61, 63 Groundswell International, 46

Environmental activism, 62, 109, 148, 151 – 52

Grove, Kevin J., 24, 25, 101

Erosion, 113, 114, 118 – 20, 119, 124 – 25, 126

Guantánamo Bay (Cuba), 37, 65, 69, 72, 164

Escobar, Arturo, xxvi

Guatemala, 112 – 13, 119

Eudell, Demetrius, 15 Export-assembly industry, xi, 5, 108 Export.gov, 87 Extractive economies, xii, xvii, xxi, 10 – 13, 15, 43, 46, 147 – 48 ExxonMobil, 13, 167 Ezili Danto (loa), xxii, xxv, 142 – 43

Habeus viscus (Weheliye), 130 Haiti, 106; anti-government protests, xxi – x xii, 21 – 2 2, 160 – 62; centrality in disaster studies, 145 – 46; debt payments, 108; democracy in, xv, xxiv, 26, 42, 162 – 63; Dominican relations with, 104, 107, 124, 154 – 56; history of, xiv, xv, xxii, 13 – 1 4, 37, 88, 107, 145 – 46, 160 – 61, 168;

Factories, xi, 5, 43, 44, 108, 164, 165

Industrial parks in, 43, 88, 148; Lake Azuei,

Fanmi Lavalas, xiv, xxii

23, 113, 114, 118, 125, 137, 188n40; media im-

Fanon, Franz, 150, 153

ages of, 7; United States interventions in,

Fatalities, xvi, 1, 16, 39, 164, 174n2, 179n30

xi, 2, 5, 66, 68 – 70, 74 – 75, 107, 162 – 64. See

Feminism, 43, 110, 131, 135, 157

also Borders; Earthquake (January, 2010);

Figueroa, Esther, xii, xvii, 146 – 47, 173, 190n10, 191n29, 199 Financial flows, 10, 15, 20, 31, 59, 79, 95, 97, 108, 111 – 1 2, 154, 156, 160, 165, 180n33, 186

Port-au-Prince Haitian diaspora, 38, 50 – 5 3, 61, 95, 99 – 100 Haitian-Dominican Republic border: exploitation of, 124; Haitian women at, 118 – 19; lakes

Fishing, 127 – 28

at, 23, 113 – 15, 114, 118, 125, 137, 188n40; re-

Flooding, 113 – 15, 114, 119, 124, 125, 137

searchers crossing, 105 – 6, 117 – 18, 120 – 23;

Fly Me to The Moon (Figueroa), 146 – 47

restrictions, 118 – 19; roads at, 118 – 20, 119;

Food access, 34 – 35, 38, 43 – 47, 53, 108, 128, 154,

women market traders at, 31, 33 – 3 4, 105,

169

116 – 17, 117

Fossil fuels, xvii, 13, 15, 46, 154

Haitians: access to communication technology,

Foucault, Michel, 19, 188n34

58, 59, 83, 85, 87, 90, 93 – 97, 98, 99; in rebuild-

France, 14 – 15, 67, 168

ing process, 38, 61 – 63; self-representations,

Free-trade zones, 20, 43, 180n33

marginalization of, 93; as sources of data,

The Fugees, 38 Funerary practices, 39

96, 100 Haitians in the Dominican Republic: expulsions of, 19 – 20, 107, 108; as forced labor on sugar

Gaia Earth, 90 Galemba, Rebecca, 112 – 13, 119, 120 García Lopez, Gonzalo, 148 – 49, 151 Garment industry, xi, 110, 135 g e o -Can

(Global Earth Observation Catastro-

phe Assessment Network), 99 GeoEye satellite, 92, 185n30 Geomapping, 91 Gilmore, Ruth, 166 gis

systems, 94

Goldring, Mark, 129

220  ·  Index

plantations, 107; Haitian women in, 31 – 3 4, 136 – 37; Ley de Migración, 108; Parsley Massacre (1937), 107; sex workers, 131, 135 – 37; undocumented Haitians in Dominican Republic, xix, 72, 107 – 8, 165 Haiti Gender Shadow Report, 131, 135 Haiti Support Group, xiv – x v, 44 Hallward, Peter, 37 Harrison, Faye, 138 Healthcare access, xv, xix, 2, 36, 53, 72, 155 Hertzian space, 91 – 92, 101. See also Cellphones; Mapping; Satellite technologies

Heyman, Josiah, 76

37 – 39, 64, 75, 85; just recovery movement,

Highway construction, 125

6, 15 – 16, 34, 64, 99; mobilities in aftermath

Hill, Lauryn, 38

of, 66, 68 – 69, 75, 164 – 65; rebuilding after,

Hispaniola. See Dominican Republic; Haiti hodr

(Hands On Disaster Relief), 132 – 33

168 – 69; water, access to, 49 – 50 Hurston, Zora Neale, xxiii, xxiv, 22

Homeland Security (U.S.), 73 Horst, Heather, 84 Horticultural practices, 169 hot

(Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team),

95, 96 Hotels, 43, 122 Housing, xv, xvi, 3 – 4, 12, 31, 34 – 36, 40, 50 – 51, 61, 63, 164, 197n19 Hsu, K. J., 26, 99 Hudson, Peter J., 111 – 1 2 Hughes, Langston, 22 Humanitarian aid: digital humanitarianism, 84, 90 – 91, 94 – 95, 100 – 101; distribution of aid, 2 – 5, 6, 25, 35, 41, 67, 70, 72, 91 – 92, 95; effectiveness of, 2, 5 – 6, 24, 40 – 41, 67, 70, 72, 91 – 92; influence of Haitian people, xiv – x v, 5 – 6, 34, 38, 44, 61 – 63, 91, 96, 100, 115 – 16, 121 – 2 2; military interventions, xi, 5, 41, 65, 69 – 70, 74, 93, 107, 130, 164; Tet Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen, xv; wa s h cluster, 38, 40, 52, 83; women’s center constructed by, 51 – 52, 181n8. See also m i n u s t a h (United Nations Stabilization Mission); Mobility; Water infrastructure Humanitarian workers: housing for, 35; locational technology, 89 – 90; mobility of, xvi, 21, 30 – 31, 35, 36, 66, 70 – 71, 120 – 23; network capital of, 36 – 37, 53 – 54, 74 – 75; sexual abuse by, 129, 130 – 31; understanding of local culture, 42, 61 – 62, 89, 91, 133; voluntourists, xvi; wa s h

cluster, 38, 40, 52, 83

Human trafficking, 72, 115, 131, 136 – 38 Hume, Yanique, 18, 22 Hunter East Harlem Gallery, 67 Hurricane Dorian, xviii – x ix, 11, 150, 164 Hurricane Irma, xviii, 150 Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans), 11, 34, 37 – 39, 64, 75 Hurricane Maria (Puerto Rico, 2017), xviii, 11, 12, 34, 66, 68, 148, 150, 167 Hurricane Matthew (2016), xviii, 11 – 1 2, 16 – 17,

icis

(informal commercial importers), 71 – 72

ick l

(Institut Culturel Karl Lévêque), 6

ictd

(Informational and Communications

Technology for Development), 90 icts

[Information and communication technol-

ogies], 86, 88 idps

(internally displaced persons), 2 – 3, 38,

50 – 5 3, 61, 96, 131, 134 ihrc

(Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commis-

sion), 43 imf

(International Monetary Fund), xv, xxi,

43, 160 Im/mobilities: carceral archipelagos, 19, 20, 21, 38; deportations, xv, xix, 19, 31, 33 – 3 4, 37 – 38, 69 – 70, 72 – 75, 108, 164; detention facilities, 19 – 20, 37, 65, 69, 72, 112, 164; of Haitians after earthquake (January, 2010), 72; i d p s (internally displaced persons), 2 – 3, 19, 38, 50 – 5 3, 61, 96, 131, 134; plantations, 17, 106, 107, 153, 165 – 66; slavery, 15, 17, 19, 42, 129 – 30, 162, 165. See also Islanding; Surveillance Industrial parks, 43, 88, 148 Information technologies. See Communication technologies; Mapping; Surveillance Institute for Gender Development Studies, 156 Intellectual networks, 22, 26, 27, 43, 144 – 45, 150 Internet, 76, 79, 87 – 88, 96 inured

(Interuniversity Institute for Research

and Development), 61 – 62 Islanding: carceral archipelagos, 19, 20, 21, 38; containment, 31 – 32, 37, 84; as counterpower, 152; islanding effect, 23, 27, 36 – 37, 66, 76, 80, 85, 91, 140, 149; isolation, 69, 72, 152; offshoring, 19, 20, 21, 22, 69, 70, 74; in postdisaster situations, 36 – 37, 72; sustainability, 153 – 54 Island studies, 7 iteca

(Institut de Technologie et Centre

d’animation), 6

99, 150 Hurricane Michael, 150 Hurricanes: climate change, xviii – x ix, xxiv, 11 – 1 2, 99 – 100; environmental degradation, xviii – x ix, xxiv, 11 – 1 2, 16 – 17; fatalities, 16, 164; infrastructure collapse, 11, 12, 34 – 35,

Jaffe, Rivke, 21 Jamaica, xvii, 11, 17, 19, 24, 86, 101 James, C. L. R., 22, 150, 153 jdi

(Jamaica Digiport International), 86

Jean, Wyclef, 38

Index  ·  221

Jesuit Refugee and Migrant association, 137

Lissaint, Antoine, 137

Jimaní (Dominican Republic), 114, 115, 122, 138

Loans, xxi – x xii, 14, 108, 160, 161 – 62

Joseph, Néhémie, 162

Locational technologies: access to, 90, 93 – 97,

JunteGente, 167

185n30; appropriation of, 97, 98, 99, 100;

Just recovery movement, 6, 15 – 16, 34, 64, 99, 151

humanitarian networks, 93; mapping, 83, 89 – 90, 91 – 92, 93, 95, 96 – 97, 111; satel-

Kamugisha, Aaron, 18, 22, 150 Kaplan, Caren, 68 – 69 Kaufmann, Vincent, 33 Kincaid, Jamaica, xxiv Kinocene, xvi – x vii Klein, Naomi, 15, 167, 170 Komite Dlo (Water Committee), 55 – 56, 56, 63 Krize konjonkti (conjunctural crises), 109

lite technologies, 8 – 9, 66, 68, 72, 78, 81 – 85, 91 – 93, 185n30; social media as, 100 Logistics: delivery systems, 2, 6, 50, 52, 53 – 55, 67, 70, 72; foreign control of, 92 – 93; inequalities of humanitarian logistics, 90; of islandness, 66; military operations, 2 – 3, 17 – 19, 65, 68 – 70, 76, 84, 91 – 93, 130; supply chain logistics, 84; as system of mobility, 65 – 66 Lomax, Alan, xxiii, xxiv Louverture, Toussaint, 70, 71, 77 – 78, 168

Labor force: exploitation, xi, 107, 110, 130, 136,

Loyd, Jenna, 2 – 3

137, 169; garment industry, xi, 110; Haitians in Dominican Republic, xix, 19, 31 – 33, 107 – 9, 124, 136 – 37, 165; information labor, 10, 86, 88; labor migrations, 10, 33 – 3 4, 107, 108 – 9; sugar harvesting, 31 – 32, 107, 108 – 9; wages, xi, xix, 5, 86, 107, 110; women in, 31, 33 – 3 4, 53, 86, 105, 116 – 17, 117 Lafito Global Business Park, 88 Lake Azuei, 23, 113, 114, 118, 125, 137, 188n40 Lake Enriquillo, 23, 113, 114, 115, 125, 137 Lakes: drainage for, 125; erosion by, 119, 126; flooding of, 113 – 1 4, 114, 119, 124 – 25; impact of climate change on, 23, 113 – 1 4, 119 – 20, 125; jurisdiction of, 125, 126 Lambi Fund, 61 Land ownership: in alternate vision of reconstruction, 154, 155; Black women’s neighborhood associations, 138 – 39; by Haitians in diaspora, 50 – 52; real estate development, 35, 43, 168, 186; U.S. corporations’ control of land in Dominican Republic, 107 Language, 38, 39, 107, 117, 121, 155 Lanmè kache (Hidden Sea), 170 – 71 Larkin, Brian, 91 La Saline massacre, xxii, 161 Lasiren (mermaid), 127 – 28 Latrines, 53, 92, 133 Lavalas movement, xiv, xxii LeBron, Marisol, 164 Legba (loa), 28 Léogâne, Haiti, 23, 38, 50, 53, 62, 132 – 33 Ley de Migración, 108 lgbtqi

rights, 156

LiDAR data (w b - i c - r i t aerial mission), 92 Lightfoot, Natasha, 42

222  ·  Index

Madan Sara, 136 Mahabir, Joy, 152 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 145 Malpasse-Jimaní international crossing. See Haitian-Dominican Republic border Mapping, 83, 89 – 90, 91 – 92, 93, 95, 96 – 97, 111 Marcelin, Magalie, 131 Marcus, George, 30 Marines, U.S., xi, 5, 107 Markets, 31, 33 – 3 4, 42, 105, 116 – 17, 117 Market traders, women as, 31, 33 – 3 4, 105, 116 – 17, 117 m a r ndr

(Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Re-

sources and Rural Development), 45 Maroon communities, 18, 147, 152, 166, 169 Marronage, 22, 152 Martelly, Michel, 43, 162 Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda, 20 Marvin, Simon, 88 Marxism, 110, 150 Massacres of civilians, xxii, 105, 107, 161 Massey, Doreen, 30 Massif de la Selle, 115 Mavhunga, Clapperton, 96 Mbembe, Achille, 166 McKittrick, Katherine, 139 Media, xvii, xviii, 7, 16 – 17, 37, 70, 92, 129, 159 Medical supplies, access to, xix, 2, 36, 53, 70 Met Agwe (loa), 127 – 28 Mexico, 4, 75, 112 – 13, 119 Migrations: deportations, xv, xix, 19, 31, 33 – 3 4, 37 – 38, 69 – 70, 72 – 75, 108, 164; fear of, 37, 168; i d p s (internally displaced persons), 2 – 3, 38, 50 – 5 3, 61, 96, 131, 134; interception of, 19,

20, 69, 70, 74, 111 – 1 2; labor migrations, xix,

Moïse, Jovenel, 160, 161, 162

10, 31 – 3 4, 72, 107 – 10, 136 – 37, 165; Ley de

Môle Saint-Nicolas, 65

Migración, 108; rural exodus, 43 – 45;

Monsanto, 43, 45

sex trafficking, 72, 115, 131, 133, 136 – 38,

Montulet, Bernard, 33

140 – 41; United States policies, 19 – 20,

Moore, Amelia, 7

69 – 70, 74, 75, 164, 165; wet foot/dry foot

Morales, Ed, 165

policy, 20. See also Haitians in the Domini-

Morris, Aldon, 25 – 26

can Republic Military, U.S., xi, 2, 5, 65, 69 – 70, 74, 93, 107, 130, 164

Motility, 4, 33, 36, 38, 71 – 72 Mountz, Alison, 2 – 3, 36 – 37, 91 Mullings, Beverley, 1, 2, 3, 4 – 5, 109 – 10

Military bases, 17, 18, 19, 38, 112, 148 Mining, xvii, 10, 11, 12, 17, 43, 147, 148 m i n u s ta h

(United Nations Stabilization Mis-

sion): communications infrastructure of, 83, 100; human rights abuses by, 130, 131; jurisdiction of, 100, 115; U.S. troops and, 70, 84; wa s h

clusters, 38, 40, 52, 83

Mobile communication devices, 53, 54, 58 – 59, 58, 85, 87 – 88 Mobile money, 59, 79, 95, 97 Mobility: cellphones, 58, 59, 83, 85, 87, 95 – 97, 98; citizenship, 75, 84, 108, 124, 148 – 49, 165; delivery systems, 2, 6, 50, 52, 53 – 55, 67, 70, 72; deportations, xv, xix, 19, 31, 33 – 3 4, 37 – 38, 69 – 70, 72 – 75, 108, 164; detention facilities, 19 – 20, 37, 65, 69, 72, 164; distribution of potable water, 48, 49, 52 – 5 3; drug trafficking, 13, 18, 57 – 58, 69 – 70, 72, 74, 112; of epidemics, xix, 2, 16, 38, 52 – 5 3, 80 – 81, 144 – 45, 159 – 60, 166, 181n10; financial mobilities, 10, 15, 20, 31,

Narcoeconomy, 13, 57 – 58, 69 – 70, 72, 74, 112 National Science Foundation (U.S.), 105, 122, 133 Nepal, u n peacekeepers from, 16, 52, 53, 80 – 81, 181n10 Network capital: aerial surveillance, 92 – 93; of aid workers, 74 – 75; communication devices, 53 – 54, 58, 59, 83, 85, 87, 95 – 97, 98; defined, 31 – 32, 174n8; of foreign actors, xvi, 36, 39 – 40, 51 – 54, 116 – 18, 120 – 23, 134 – 35; of Haitian diaspora, 38, 50 – 5 3, 61, 95, 99 – 100; land owners, 51 – 52, 61; mobile money, 20, 35, 59, 79, 95, 97, 112, 186; motility, 4, 33, 36, 38, 71 – 72; transportation, 36, 37, 39 – 40, 51, 53, 66, 88, 97, 116, 118 – 20 New Orleans (Hurricane Katrina), 11, 34, 37 – 39, 64, 75 Nixon, Angelique V., 139, 164, 165 Nou Pap Domi, 160

59, 79, 95, 97, 108, 111 – 1 2, 154, 156, 160, 165, 180n33, 186; human trafficking, 72, 115, 131, 133, 136 – 38; i d p s (internally displaced persons), 2 – 3, 38, 50 – 5 3, 61, 96, 131, 134; inequalities of, xiv, 34, 52 – 5 3, 71 – 75, 72 – 7 3, 88 – 89; mediation of, 105 – 6, 117 – 18, 120 – 23, 120 – 2 4; monetary flows, 41, 51 – 52, 61, 95, 97, 180n33; motility, 4, 33, 36, 38, 71 – 72; passports, 7, 34, 51, 72 – 74, 117, 120 – 2 2, 167; as privilege, xvi, 30 – 31, 36, 39 – 40, 71 – 75, 91, 116 – 18, 120 – 23, 134 – 35; refugees, 37 – 38, 69 – 70, 72, 74, 107 – 8, 164 – 66, 168; sea space, 2, 37, 38, 69, 70, 74, 92, 164; sexual exploitation, 72, 115, 131, 133, 136 – 38, 140 – 41; slavery, 15, 17, 19, 42, 129 – 30, 162, 165; smuggling operations, 13, 69 – 70, 72, 115, 136 – 37; software, 88 – 89, 136; of transnational elites, xvi, 43, 45, 62, 72, 86,

Offshore economies: diaspora, Haitian, 38, 50 – 5 3, 61, 95, 99 – 100; extractive economies, xii, xvii, xxi, 10 – 13, 15, 43, 46, 147 – 48; factories, xi, 5, 43, 44, 108, 164, 165; free-trade zones, 20, 43, 180n33; i c i s (informal commercial importers), 71 – 72; Industrial parks, 43, 88, 148 Ogou (loa), 81 – 82, 102, 103 Oil industry, xii, xxi, xxi – x xii, 10, 21 – 2 2, 160, 161 – 62 Open Skies agreements, 73 – 74, 76, 77 Operation Lockdown (peyi lók), 161 osm

(OpenStreetMap), 83, 89 – 90, 93, 95, 96

Oxfam, 129

88, 108, 110, 116 – 18, 120 – 2 2; U.S. control of,

Packer, Jeremy, 74

2, 69, 70, 74, 76. See also Aerial surveillance;

pa j

Airports; Borders; Communication technologies; Islanding; Migrations; Network capital; Tourism

(Programme pour une Alternative de Jus-

tice), 6 Palan, Ronen, 20 Panama Canal, 65

Index  ·  223

Panopticism, 8 – 9, 66, 68, 72, 83 – 85, 91 – 93

11 – 1 2, 15, 34, 66, 68, 148, 150, 167; mining in,

Papa Gede (loa), 170 – 71

148; Moïse government in, 160; mutual aid

Papa Legba (loa), 28 pa p da

(Platform for Alternative Development

in Haiti), xv, 6, 15, 45, 156 Parks, Lisa, 54 – 55, 90, 96 – 97

groups, 148, 151, 167; p r o m e s a junta in, xviii, 163; United States relations with, 65 – 66, 75, 165 Pugh, Jonathan, 7, 101

Parsley Massacre (1937), 107 Partenariat pour le Développement Local, 46 Passi, Anssi, 122, 123 Passports, 7, 34, 51, 72 – 74, 117, 120 – 2 2, 167

Quisqueya, 106. See also Dominican Republic; Haiti

Patching, 97, 98, 99, 100 pdna

(Haiti Post-Disaster Needs Assessment),

131 Peake, Linda, 1, 2, 3, 4 – 5, 109 – 10 Peasants, xv, 42 – 46, 43 – 46, 107, 108 – 9, 161, 166 – 67 Pénette-Kedar, Maryse, 163 Perry, Keisha-Khan Y., 138, 139 PetroCaribe Scandal, xxi – x xii, 21 – 2 2, 160, 161 – 62 Peyi lók (Operation Lockdown), 161 Phone charging, 97, 98 Photography, 85, 91, 137 Piquet Rebellion (1843), xv Plan 2020 (Puerto Rico), 148 Plantationocene, xvi, 166 Plantations, 17, 18, 42, 106, 107, 153, 165 – 66 Le Plateforme Haïtienne de Plaidoyer pour un Développement Alternatif (pa p da ), xv, 6, 45 Platform for Alternative Development in Haiti (pa p da ), xv, 6, 15, 45, 156 pohdh

(Plateforme des Organisations Haïti-

ennes de Droits Humains), 6 Political protests, xxi – x xii, 21 – 2 2, 160 – 62 Pornotroping, 129 – 30 Port-au-Prince: aerial view of, 67, 68; demographics of, 108; export-assembly industry, 108; La Saline massacre, xxii, 161; map of, 89; osm

(OpenStreetMap), 89; political-spatial

struggles in, 34 – 36; postearthquake conditions, 2, 34 – 36, 35, 38 – 39; sanitation in, 38 – 39, 53, 54, 63; Toussaint Louverture International Airport, 70, 71, 77 – 78 Poto Fanm + Fi (Women and Girls’ Pillar), 135 Poverty, 34 – 36, 38, 129, 134 – 35, 138, 149 – 50, 152, 197n19 Preval, René, xiv, xv, 70, 87 prodev

(educational organization), 163

Public water kiosk, 55 – 56, 56, 61 Puerto Rico: anti-government protests in, 160; debt, xviii, 18; Hurricane Maria (2017), xviii,

224  ·  Index

Race and racism, 162 – 63, 166; deportations, xv, xix, 19, 31, 33 – 3 4, 37 – 38, 69 – 70, 72 – 75, 108, 164; detention facilities, 19 – 20, 37, 65, 69, 72, 112, 164; geographies of, 31 – 32, 66 – 67, 72 – 74; inequalities of mobility, xiv, 34, 52 – 5 3, 71 – 75, 72 – 7 3, 88 – 89; intellectual networks, 9, 25 – 26, 26 – 27, 43, 145, 154; observations of deforestation, 110; pornotroping, 129 – 30; poverty, 34 – 36, 38, 129, 134 – 35, 138, 149 – 50, 152, 197n19; racialized identities, xv, xvi, 8 – 9, 33 – 3 4, 39, 68, 104, 110, 116, 130, 133, 150; racial justice movement, 156; of refugee status, 37 – 38, 69 – 70, 72, 74, 107 – 8, 164 – 66, 168; sexual exploitation, 72, 115, 131, 133 – 3 4, 136 – 38, 140 – 41; in United States diplomacy, 162 – 63; women, 33 – 3 4 Racial capitalism, 13 – 1 4, 24 – 26, 166 Raffestin, Claude, 188n34 Rainfall, 11, 16 – 17, 106, 113, 115 Rape, xi, 53, 130, 131, 135, 161 Rasanblaj (gathering, assembling), xxiii, 152 Rasin San Bout (loa), 170 – 71 Ratha, Dilip, 95 Refugees, 37 – 38, 69 – 70, 72, 74, 107 – 8, 164 – 1665, 168 Reparations/reparation payments, 13, 14, 15, 26 – 27, 150, 167 – 69 Researchers: border crossing by, 105 – 6, 117 – 18; exploitation of, 120 – 2 2; housing for, 35, 50, 122; mobility of, 21, 35, 36, 116 – 17, 120 – 23; network capital of, 21, 36 – 37, 53 – 54; reactions to existence of transactional sex, 133; unequal power relations, xvi, 21, 35 – 36, 39 – 40, 50, 116 – 18, 120 – 23, 134 – 35 Resilient Power Puerto Rico, 15 – 16 Rice cultivation, 44 Río Massacre, 105 Rival geographies, 42 – 43 River systems, 48, 115 r nddh

(National Network for the Defense of

Human Rights), 161

Roads, 89, 113 – 15, 118 – 20, 119, 125, 126

Simbi Dlo (Simbi of the Water), 60

Roitman, Janet, 123

Skinner, Ewart, 86

Rosello, Ricardo, 160

Slavery, 15, 17, 19, 42, 129 – 30, 162, 165

Roy, Arundhati, 146 – 47

Slavery reparations, 15, 27, 167 – 68

Ruling 0168-13, 108

Smith, Neil, 49

Rural migrations, 34, 43 – 45

Smuggling operations, 13, 69 – 70, 72, 115, 136 – 37

ru s a l

(Russian mining company), 17

Ruwanpura, Kanchana, 49

s o fa

(Solidarite Fanm Ayisyén), 6, 156

Software, 88 – 89, 136 Solar energy, 55, 56 – 57, 61

Sailboats, 118 saks

(Sosyete Animasyon ak Kominikasyon

Sosyal), 6 Salazar, Noel, 30 Salvador (Brazil), 138 Samaritan’s Purse, 50, 51, 52, 60, 133 Sanitation, xvi, 4, 38, 48, 55; cholera epidemic, 16, 52, 53, 80 – 81, 181n10; latrines, 53, 92, 133; wa s h

clusters, 38, 40, 52, 83. See also Water

infrastructure Sans Souci Palace, 13, 14, 176n43 Sassen, Saskia, 111 Satellite technologies, 8 – 9, 66, 68, 72, 78, 81 – 85, 91 – 93, 185n30 Schiller, Nina Glick, 30 Schuller, Mark, 16, 26, 51, 53, 93, 99 Scott, David, 7 Sea environment, 1 – 8, 11, 38, 69, 70, 74, 75, 127 – 28 “A Sexual Culture of Justice,” 156 Sexual justice organizations, 156 Sexual violence: children’s susceptibility to, 130, 138; exploitation of women, 53, 179n19; human trafficking, 72, 115, 131, 133, 136 – 38; by peacekeeping forces, 129, 130 – 31, 134; pornotroping, 129 – 30; racialized, 129 – 30;

Solnit, Rebecca, 1 Sosúa (Dominican Republic), 136, 137, 138 Spillers, Hortense, 129 Spirits: air space, 81 – 82, 102, 103; communication, 102 – 3; Ezili’s lament for children, 142 – 43; margins between water and land, 127 – 28; power of water, 49, 59 – 60, 64, 170 – 71 Sri Lankan peacekeepers, 130 Starosielski, Nicole, 90 Stephens, Michelle, 20, 60 Stoler, Ann, 19, 38 Sugar production, 31 – 32, 107, 108 – 9 Sur, Malini, 105 Surveillance: access to, 69 – 70, 92 – 93, 94 – 95, 185n30; at airports, 71 – 72, 73; along border crossings, 115; bathymetry equipment, 117; biometric data, 74; at border crossings, 76, 105, 116; data analysis, 78, 79, 91 – 92; mapping, 83, 89 – 90, 91 – 92, 93, 95, 96, 111; Open Skies agreements, 73 – 74, 76, 77; panopticism, 8 – 9, 66, 68, 72, 83 – 85, 91 – 93; passports, 7, 34, 51, 72 – 74, 117, 120 – 2 2, 167; racialization, 3, 71 – 74, 107; satellite technologies, 8 – 9, 66, 68, 72, 78, 81 – 85, 91 – 93, 185n30; at sea, 38, 69, 70, 74, 75; of women, 31, 33 – 3 4, 105

rape, xi, 53, 130, 131, 161; reports on, 131 – 32, 135; teenage girls and survival sex, 135; trans­

Tap-taps, 39 – 40, 71, 116

actional sex, 133, 179n19

Tawil-Souri, Helga, 85

s h a da

(Haitian American Society for Agricul-

tural Development), 107 Shanty towns, xix, 31, 40, 63, 164

Tax-free economic zones, 112 Teaiwa, Teresia, 153 Téléco telephone company (Haiti), 87

Sharpe, Christina, 137

Territory, 111 – 1 2, 120 – 23, 188n33

Sheller, Stelle : career of, xxii – x xiii; correspon-

Tèt Kale Party (p h t k ) , xxii

dence of, xi, xi – x ii, xx – x xi, 154; feminist

Tet Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen, xv

peace movements, 154, 157; political com-

Tourism: Americans in Cuba, 17 – 18; develop-

mitments of, ix – x i; on U.S. interventions in

ment for, 10, 12, 16, 19, 43; in Jamaica, 11;

Haiti, xi – x ii, xx – x xi; w i l p f (Women’s In-

privileged mobility, 31, 36, 66, 71, 73, 76; re-

ternational League for Peace and Freedom),

search travelers, xvi, 36, 39 – 40, 62, 116 – 18,

xi, xii, xxi

120 – 23, 134 – 35; sexual economies, 129, 130,

Shipping containers, 51, 181n8

134 – 38, 156; social impact of, 10, 16, 88 – 89;

Shoaff, Jennifer, 31, 33, 34

transnational elites, xvi, 43, 45, 62, 72, 86, 88,

Simbi Andezo (Simbi of the Two Waters), 60, 64

108, 110, 116 – 18, 120 – 2 2

Index  ·  225

Toussaint Louverture International Airport, 70, 71, 77 – 78 tps

(Temporary Protected Status), 20

Transportation: inequalities of, 39 – 40, 53 – 54,

Wages, xi, xix, 5, 86, 107, 110 War on Drugs (U.S.), 69 – 70 wa s h

clusters, 38, 40, 52, 83

Water infrastructure: cholera epidemic, 16, 52,

70; logistics of, xix, 2, 36, 53, 66, 70; of medi-

53, 80 – 81, 181n10; delivery systems, 50, 52,

cal supplies, xix, 2, 36, 53, 70; roads, 89,

53 – 55; government initiatives to improve,

113 – 15, 118 – 20, 119, 125, 126; truck transporta-

181n10; humanitarian interventions for,

tion, 40, 118 – 20; of water, 52 – 5 3

50 – 51, 55 – 56, 56, 63; hydrometeorological

Treaty on the Open Skies (Helsinki 1992), 77

changes, 113 – 15, 188n40; kiosks, 57, 58, 60, 61;

Triangular Business Park, 88

local involvement in, 55 – 56, 56, 61, 63; spirits

Trinidad, 65, 156

of the, 49, 60, 64; treatment systems, 48, 49,

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 151, 168

50, 51, 52; wa s h cluster, 38, 40, 52, 83; water

Trujillo, Raphael, 107 Trump, Donald, 66, 68, 75

quality, xvii, 53, 55, 115 w b-ic-r it

aerial mission (LiDAR data), 92

Weber, Max, 26 uav s

(unmanned aerial vehicles), 78

Ulysse, Gina A., 138 Unemployment, 36, 137 Unions, labor, 88 United Nations. See m i n u s t a h (United Nations Stabilization Mission) United States: business interests of, xi, xv, 14 – 15, 43, 45, 87, 107, 160; embargo on Venezuelan fuel shipments, 160; interference in Haitian democracy, 162 – 63, 164; interference with aid deliveries, 70; migration policies of, 2, 19 – 20, 37, 69 – 70, 74, 75, 164, 165; military presence in the Caribbean, xi, 2, 5, 65, 69 – 70, 74, 93, 107, 130, 164; occupation of Haiti, 14, 166 – 67; Open Skies agreements, 77; PetroCaribe Scandal, xxi – x xii; relations with Dominican Re­ public, 14, 77, 107; War on Drugs (U.S.), 9 – 70 Urry, John, 51, 71, 174n8 usa i d,

xi, 44, 86, 181n8

Ushahidi, 94, 185n37 U.S. Trade and Development Agency, 77 – 78

Weheliye, Alexander, 130 Wekker, Gloria, 138 Werner, Marion, 1, 2, 3, 4 – 5, 109 – 10, 135 Wet foot/dry foot policy, 20 White, Pamela, 162 – 63 Wilentz, Amy, 160 w ilpf

(Women’s International League for Peace

and Freedom), xi, xii, xxi Women: abandonment of, 133 – 34; activism of, xi, xii, xxi, 131 – 32, 135, 138, 139; adolescent girls, 135; containment of, 31 – 32; exploitation of, xi, 31 – 32, 53, 130 – 34, 157 – 58, 161, 179n19; feminism, 43, 110, 131, 135, 157; healthcare for, xv; in high-tech service industries, 86; legal rights of, 131 – 32; as market traders, 31, 33 – 34, 105, 116 – 17, 117; in reconstruction process, 131 – 32, 154; sanitary facilities for, 53; sex tourism, 131, 135 – 37; wilpf (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), xi, xii, xxi Women’s center, 51 – 52, 181n8 World Bank, xv, xxi, 12, 43 – 4 4, 77 – 79, 86, 92, 95, 100 World Trade Organization, 111 World Vision, 137 Wynter, Sylvia: “being human after Man,” 130,

van Hauwermeiren, Roland, 129 Vannini, Philip, 17 Venezuela, xxi – x xii, 21 – 2 2, 160, 161 – 62 La Via Campesina, 46

145; on the Caribbean’s survival, 150, 156 – 57; on climate emergencies, 166; on debt payments, 15; plantation archipelagos, 153, 166; significance of Haiti to, 22

Viet tel (Vietnam), 87 Vodou, xxii, xxiii, 105, 146 Voluntourists, xvi

226  ·  Index

Yeampierre, Elizabeth, 15 Yida Zhang project, 11