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This chapter outlines the findings and analysis for nonadaptive systems. Specifically, it looks at the three nonadaptive seismic response systems developed following the 2001 Bhuj, Gujarat, India, earthquake; the 2004 Sumatra, Indonesia, earthquake; and the 2010 Haïti earthquake. In practice, each system adapted to the shattered context in which it was operating to some extent. Indeed, some adjustments were made, but none altered the operational environment substantially. In Gujarat, the shadow of hostility with neighboring Pakistan curbed the flow of information between jurisdictional levels to support rapid response and recovery. In Sumatra, the earthquake and tsunami led to the resolution of the long-standing civil conflict with the Free Aceh movement, a very positive outcome, but the organizational networks and communications channels among national, provincial, city, and district jurisdictions that had been ruptured for decades needed to be rebuilt. In Haïti, the existing government was overwhelmed by the enormous tasks confronting the small nation, which, in most cases, involved full-scale redesign and development. In each case, the international community gave generously in humanitarian assistance to meet the immediate needs of the affected populations, but the local capacity to carry out the longer-term tasks needed to be developed.

Whereas, on the heels of a devastating hurricane’s passing, the final pages of Maximin’s L’Île et une nuit (Chapter 4) hint at both architectural and architextual (re)building in the wake of catastrophe, Chapter 5 examines two works by Haitian Yanick Lahens that directly address the task of (re)construction in the aftermath of large-scale destruction. The chapter begins with a discussion of so-called writings of disaster (Jenson) that have, from the early days of colonization to the present, cast Haiti in a negative, counter-productive light. To the contrary, as a creative counter-discourse to discourses of disaster, literary works from Haiti can be understood as literature of reconstruction. As a phenomenon that is by no means new to Haiti, literature of reconstruction is conceptualized not only as a blueprint or framework for reassessment and rebuilding in/of Haiti, but is demonstrated to constitute, in and of itself, an example of the very reconstruction of which it speaks. In this light, close readings of Lahens’s post-earthquake texts Failles (2010) and Guillaume et Nathalie (2013) illustrate the architextuality of Haitian literature and how, precisely, this vibrant body of works embodies both the path and potential for identity-building in the French Caribbean.

This concluding chapter cites Haiti—its shadow relationship to the United States; its minor and minoritarian archives; its role as a ligament in the body of hemispheric history—to draw parallels between the various models of minoritarian criticism presented in the book. Presenting these parallels also demands the drawing of links between the figurative and everyday, that is, the costs of moving ground that is most recently signified by the Haitian earthquake. In seeking to reframe the terrain of political critique, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti stands as a tragic reminder of its stakes: not an excavating of deeper and new meanings, but rather the forceful eruption of them. The chapter stresses on how the book aims to move critical discourse out of its divided formations, and instead wade in an ongoing uncertainty that can take no refuge in the calm waters identified as nineteenth-century American literature.

As a complement to the in-depth literary analyses that follow, Chapter 1 begins by examining a bona fide architectural structure, the Haitian gingerbread house, as a literal—i.e. physical—manifestation of authentic French-Caribbean construction. Drawing from both (past) traditional techniques and present-day technologies and innovations, the Gingerbreads’ vernacular architecture is described as a fundamentally localized, transformative building process that, for the purposes of this book, equate with what can be understood as the vernacular architexture of the French Caribbean. Hence, the recent “spatial turn” (Conley) in literary criticism should encompass not only natural but human landscapes in so far as their integral role as characters in the telling and creating of the region’s identifying narratives. Consequently, three brief textual analyses of French-Caribbean works serve to illustrate how the construction of individual and collective identities is informed by the architectural and architextual structures found within literature. The chapter concludes with an overview of relevant literary criticism, in particular as pertaining to the role of literary form in the evolving fields of spatial and postcolonial theory.

Chapter 6 opens with the story of a missionary helicopter raining down bread on victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Considering the outrage that followed this demeaning “gift-charity,” the chapter explores common tensions of gift and gift exchange in three areas relevant to philanthropic aid pertaining to health: economic development, religious liturgy, and conflicts over social justice in humanitarian relief, particularly looking at the popular parable, “Give a man a fish . . .” Charity is something we all love to hate, yet it persists as a religious ideal that inspires altruism. No discussion of faith-based responses to health can entirely dismiss the fact that charitable activities characterize virtually every religious organization and culture. The chapter closes the book by exploring the broader nuances of this traditional gift-based response in the context of the liberation theology and solidarity also expressed in many faith-based health-care services.