States of Ghetto, Ghettos of States: Haiti and the “Era de Francia” in the Dominican Republic, 1804–1808

In December 2009, the “Ghetto Biennale,” billed as a salon des refusés for the 21^st century, was held in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a country already rhetorically ghettoized within its planetary neighborhood by the label “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.” Within Haiti, the Cité Soleil ghetto is often treated as a war zone within a country that is not at war, or like a criminal version of a civil zone — an uncivil zone. In Cité, events like the post-Aristide United Nations Minustah campaign popularly named “Without Pity for the City” recently found an unexpected counterpart in the May 2010 military and police operations in Tivoli Gardens and elsewhere in Kingston, Jamaica. Tivoli Gardens, like Cité Soleil, raises many questions of the freedoms, un-freedoms, and quasi- or anti-states built on the margins of constitutional zones. This essay proposes that the power of forcibly excluded demographic elements to ultimately leverage influence beyond the boundaries of the state, as in the case of the varied communities affiliated with Christopher Dudus Coke, is proportional to the struggles of the state itself to refine its image and consolidate its power internationally. From Haiti, the earliest example of a self-emancipated Afro-diasporic postcolonial state, we can glean the devastating obstacles to the establishment of internationally recognized sovereignty. I chart here the trajectory through which Haiti’s 1804 sovereignty was recast internationally as a paradox of sovereign brigandage — an outlaw state – through legal challenges from the French in Santo Domingo to international commerce in Haitian ports. This 1804–1808 legal assault on Haiti issuing from the era de Francia in what is now the Dominican Republic can help us to understand Haiti’s willingness to try to expel brigandage from its own sovereignty with little heed to the constitutional rights of citizens of its ghettos.