Disaster Studies and Cultures of Disaster in Haiti

Les grandes mutations et les métamorphoses traversent souvent des phases ténébreuses, chaotiques et douloureuses. Il m’arrive paradoxalement de croire dans la lumière tragique des désastres et la pathétique magie des catastrophes.¹

In an important essay published shortly after the Haitian earthquake of 2010, Deborah Jenson critiques the prevalence of discourses of disaster in writings about Haiti.² From the time of the Revolution, ‘disaster’ and ‘catastrophe’ have been some of the most common terms used by outsiders in particular to refer to Haiti, and natural disasters have often been aligned with political, revolutionary turbulence. As Jenson notes, ‘slave insurrection as figurative earthshaking [and] seismological upheavals as literal earthshaking, are mixed and matched in the history of representations of Haiti’ (p. 103). More recently, even before the earthquake of 2010, and amid the ongoing painful, apparently stalled period of transition from Duvalierism, disaster-related terms continued to proliferate in relation to Haiti: most prominently, ‘ecological disaster’, ‘humanitarian disaster’, and ‘disaster capitalism’. As Jenson argues, these expressions are freighted with political meaning, in that the term ‘disaster’ itself has become ‘a kind of metonymy for the Haitian state and its history’ (ibid.). Jenson finds the use of the term ‘disaster’ in relation to the issue of corruption in Haiti’s political economy ‘deeply worrisome’, as it ‘unintentionally closes the loop with that earlier tradition regarding the advent of a black state as disaster, and replaces a whole national tradition with a kind of apocalyptic signifier, as if nothing were there but what might replace it’ (ibid.). Following the earthquake, Jenson considers the critic’s task to be ‘to claw the future out from the debris, all without wrongly and prejudicially consigning Haiti, its state and its history, to disaster. In the midst of crisis, we need to repeat and repeat to ourselves something simple: that Haiti, dear Haiti, no matter how tested and remapped by disaster, is not, in itself, disaster… Haiti is not disaster’ (p. 112; emphasis original).

This essay develops Jenson’s very worthwhile exploration of the use of the term ‘disaster’ in relation to Haiti, and takes seriously her caution not to cast the nation and its people as inherently, inevitably disastrous. It reconsiders the usefulness of the term in referring to Haiti (and, to a lesser extent, the broader Caribbean), by engaging with the emerging interdisciplinary field of disaster studies; reflecting on the degree to which understandings of Haiti’s political, social, and historical issues may be enhanced through this engagement; and considering, conversely, how the case of Haiti may affirm, complicate, or call into question some of the prevalent ideas in disaster studies.

Disaster studies is a sprawling, multidisciplinary area of research that has developed at the points of convergence between ecocriticism, literary studies, historical studies, and postcolonialism, among other disciplines. ‘Disaster’ itself is a polyvalent and often-contested term; according to Charles E. Fritz’s classic social-scientific definition it is ‘an event concentrated in time and space, in which a society or one of its subdivisions undergoes physical harm and social disruption, such that all or some essential functions of the society or subdivision are impaired’.³ It engages most fundamentally with the social, cultural, economic, and political implications of disasters. While there have been literary and historical accounts of disasters for thousands of years, it is generally agreed that the first social-scientific study of disaster is Samuel Prince’s analysis of the 1917 Halifax, Nova Scotia disaster.⁴ The 1950s marked an important period in the discipline in the United States, when the National Opinion Research Center and the National Academy of Sciences carried out studies on the social and psychological effects of disasters. These findings were first analysed in influential articles by Fritz and Eli S. Marks, and later by George W. Baker, Dwight W. Chapman, and Allen H. Barton.⁵ In terms of methodology, social scientists have tended to engage in inductive field studies, visiting sites of disasters, usually after the disaster strikes.⁶ More recently, and as the theoretical work on disasters has developed, there has been something of...