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This chapter explores the role of the popular media in igniting anti-Haitian violence in Caribbean states. In 2001, Ibo Simon, a powerful media person was charged with flaring up racist hatred and violence against Haitian immigrants in Guadeloupe. This chapter explains the journey of Ibo's channel “Canal 10” in being an integral part of violent atrocities against Haitian migrants. However, the media also assisted in recognizing the inherent Haitian cultural elements in Guadeloupean society. One section of the Guadeloupean media perceived illegal immigration by Haitians to be responsible for insecurity, violence, and other social evils in society. While the other half of the media focused on Haitian history. In short, the popular Guadeloupean media played an essential role in spreading both anti-Haitian discourse as well as admiring Haitian history and culture.

This chapter discusses and tries to uncover multiple meanings and alternative historical accounts implicit in paintings and literature that depict the ordeals of the Haitian “boat people” in their trans-Caribbean crossings. It investigates how Haitian painters have developed an iconography to create history paintings that seek to synthesize onto canvas one of the salient experiences of Haitian history, and how these images are echoed in Caribbean literature.

This introductory chapter gives an account of anti-Haitianism which spread across the Caribbean basin. Special attention is given to the condition of Haitian immigrants residing in the Caribbean states such as the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana. The chapter also explores the steps taken by antiracist and human rights organizations to bring justice to these Haitian immigrants. Racial characteristics of Haitian migrants, Intra-Caribbean relationships, and Haitian history and diasporas, all are explored briefly to understand the reason behind the clashes between Hiatian migrants and host societies.

Elizabeth McAlister’s chapter provides a much-needed lineage and analysis of the ideology and practice of Haitian and American Christian evangelicals who, in response to a burgeoning acceptance of vodou under Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s administration, believed that Haiti’s political, economic and social troubles could be ameliorated through a rededication to Christian values and the “transforming power” of Jesus Christ. McAlister demonstrates that this commitment to Christ and Christian traditions by evangelicals and Protestants, who some scholars estimate that they consist of a third of the Haitian citizenry, is influenced by colonial events, specifically the religious sacrifice of a pig by vodou practitioners at the beginning of the Haitian Revolution. Thus, the work of religion and ritual in the years before and after the earthquake, according to McAlister, works to “re-narrate Haitian history.” Additionally, the Christian evangelical movement reasserts the centrality of Jesus Christ in the spiritual, political, and historical space of Haiti—in effect suppressing non-Christian practices—and therefore “recast[ing] Haitian civil religion.”

Greg Beckett locates the hub of the discourse rotating along a Western axis of shock and pain that unendingly constructs Haiti as delinquent. His research examines institutional roles in reproducing difference. Appropriately, Beckett asks: “Is it possible to speak of Haiti without speaking of crisis?” and “what do we really mean by crisis, and what do we mean by crisis in Haiti?”

The brutal images of U.S. Occupation oppositional leader Charlemagne Péralte’s bullet-ridden body during a particularly violent year of 1919, as Yveline Alexis demonstrates, highlights the ways in which interventionist forces sought to make Haitian defiance undesirable in the midst of northern aggression.

The work of Wien Weibert Arthus demonstrates the complexity of desire when nations attempted to mold themselves to U.S. foreign policy strategies. An anticommunist Haiti proved to be insufficient to the Kennedy administration and the billions promised to Latin American and Caribbean governments for development projects and societal improvements. Authoritarian leadership, weak infrastructure and the hurdles to reconcile nationalistic pride and “international assistance” illuminate the intricacies of sovereignty and the machine of global aid programs—struggles that continue to this day and help us unpack the current issues in tent camps and other sites hard hit by the earthquake, and also policy and financial matters at the executive and local level where non-governmental and international organizations tend to dominate.

Nick Nesbitt identifies and engages the notion of difference and deviance in Haitian history and its connections to international relations. The author locates the discourse rotating along a Western axis of shock and pain that unendingly constructs Haiti as delinquent through his study of U.S./Haiti.

Patrick Sylvain’s chapter impels the reader to ask: What are the ways Haitian leadership create openings for or replicate discourses and systems that make the nation susceptible to harm? Given the media and popular criticism from Haitian citizens against former Haitian president René Préval’s muted and deficient leadership in the aftermath of the earthquake what perceptions are reinscribed or “structural vulnerabilit[ies]” revealed between state and nation?

In an effort to bridge the local and state deliberations scholar Harley Etienne pushes academics and national and international leaders within the world of politics and social service to take seriously the “discipline and practice” of urban planning. Urban planners are critical components to the recovery effort because they “coordinate land use, design policy to achieve long-term goals of urban growth, regeneration and economic development.” Etienne asserts that the relationship between the country’s formal institutions (i.e. legal and educational systems) and Haiti’s “social organization [and] capacity for social service provision” are relegated to secondary or tertiary roles in national planning strategies. Hence, in an effort push the boundaries of the field Etienne emphasizes that a broad, interdisciplinary spectrum of professionals—from law and social work to civil engineers to public policy advocates—engage in a comprehensive and unified dialogue to produce durable urban and rural regeneration and offset popular pressures to “rush” the rebuilding process.

Lastly, the enlightening conversation between four leading scholars on Haiti, Alex Dupuy, Tatiana Wah, Robert Fatton, Jr. and Èvelyne Trouillot explicates Haiti’s relationship with the international community and critiques the virtual trusteeship of Haiti by foreign governments. These thinkers of Haitian affairs help to anchor the volume’s themes, which include discussion of sovereignty, economic and cultural development, citizenship, urban planning, Haitian history and disaster capitalism.

Karen Richman’s work centers religion and faith in post-earthquake Haiti and establishes that in spite of “speculative claims” about vodou’s impact upon the nation and the experiences of Haitians during this complex and arduous time, there remains a void in empirical scholarship regarding the “religious implications” of Haiti’s monumental seismic event. In what ways and to what extent have Haitian people’s faith shifted due to the tremors on January 12^th and the subsequent days after? What can we learn historically, culturally, and politically about specific communities and their relationship to the state, civil society and international organizations through a religious context?

The conclusion reflects on the theme of the land in Haitian literary history and considers finally the emergence of the new literary journal edited by James Noël and Pascale Monnin, IntranQuîlités, and judges it to be an important mediator of Haitian writing, and a means of promoting a new, 21^st-century cosmopolitanism.

The work’s epilogue concludes the story of the islandwide Haitian Revolution by recounting the collapse of the Ferrand regime in Santo Domingo. Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 threw the Spanish-American world, including Santo Domingo, into disarray. The resulting upheaval enabled an alliance comprised of rebel Spanish-Dominican colonists, the British, and even some Haitian factions that toppled the Ferrand regime in a war that ended in July 1809. After telling the story of this seldom-recounted episode in the Napoleonic Wars, the epilogue then rearticulates the book’s core contributions and significance for Atlantic and Caribbean as well as Haitian and Dominican history.

Similarly, anthropologist Mark Schuller examines social health risks in urban neighborhoods, specifically cholera, in which these health threats were amplified by measures taken by NGOs. Interestingly, the discussion about the origins of the cholera outbreak, where more than 300,000 people have been affected and 5,000 have died, dominate news desks and encourages the reader to think about the circulation of disparaging ideas about Haiti when foreign relationships are renewed in the wake of this tragedy.

This chapter details the military history of Hispaniola from 1795, when the French Republic ejected the rival Spanish empire from the island, to 1801, when Toussaint Louverture unified the island under his rule. This is the first of two chapters to focus on the rise and governance of Louverture, a former slave who rose rapidly through the military ranks and, like his eventual nominal superior Napoleon Bonaparte, parlayed his military triumphs into political power. As Toussaint formulated an independent foreign policy, repelled British invaders from Hispaniola, and waged a brutal civil war against rival André Rigaud, Santo Domingo factored centrally into his strategic thinking, diplomacy, and military leadership. This chapter details these dynamics and culminates in Toussaint’s successful but short-lived invasion of Santo Domingo, which exacerbated a growing rift between the black general and France’s ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Scholar Sibylle Fischer analyzes representations of this crisis through the Haitian body and astutely challenges readers and those who claim to act or speak for those who suffer must watch their “complicity” in physical, structural, or symbolic violence. And, in turn, they must aim to actively engage in an “historical, philosophical or representation contextualization” in order to oppose one’s collusion in aggressive exploits.