Migration and Refuge

Front matter

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Té glise, Continents a la dérive: Haiti between Shifting Continents, Past and Present I

Part I. The Eco-Archive t For an Eco-Archive 29 2 Haitian Odysseys 69 Part II. Literary Witnesses

Part III. The Anthropocene from Below Epilogue: Land and Seas of Migration and Refuge, Past and Present 218

Bibliography 225 Index 245

Acknowledgments

I could not have written this book without the vital support of many people. After six wonderful years at the College of Charleston, I arrived at the University of Pittsburgh in fall 2013. At the time, I had the kernel of an idea for my next book, and over the next few years, my colleagues in the Department of French & Italian, my home at Pitt, helped me sustain and develop the project. I am grateful for Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Lina Insana, Francesca Savoia, Giuseppina Mecchia, Dave Pettersen, Todd Reeser, Brett Wells, Neil Doshi, Chloe Hogg, Lorraine Denman, Jim Coleman, Monika Losagio, and Alana Dunn. For your hard work and for allowing me the time to work through ideas and questions with you, a special thanks to the graduate students, including Jen Boum Make, Maxime Bey-Rozet, Sylvia Grove, Paulina Tomkowicz, Dahlia Rizk, Cole Cridlin, Brendan Ezvan, Pat Nikiema, Emma Ben Hadj, Matt Blair, Jon Devine, Emily Bryan, Don Joseph, Ally Dorman, and Phoebe Marshall.

The interdisciplinary spirit is alive and well at Pitt. I have the great privilege of working with a diverse group of people across academic departments and centers. For your intellectual energy and guidance, thanks to Jonathan Arac, Shalini Puri, Lara Putnam, Marcus Rediker, Pernille Roge, Molly Warsh, Felix Germain, Michele Reid-Vazquez, Jeanette Jouili, Drew Armstrong, and Jerome Branche. To Abigail Owen, the driving force behind the Environmental Humanities Research Seminar, a joint program between Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University, your leadership and creative mind are inspiring. Research grants from Pitt and a sabbatical were indispensable to the completion of the book. I would like to recognize the financial support of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, the Humanities Center, the Center for Latin American Studies, the European Studies Center, the University Center for International Studies and the Hewlett International Grant Program.

viii Migration and Refuge

For permission to reprint part of a revised and expanded version of my article, “The Global Frame of Haiti in Yanick Lahens’ Failles,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES 19.3 (Summer 2015), I would like to thank the Taylor & Francis group.

I am also in debt to scholarly communities away from home. For over a decade, I have learned much from the Haitian Studies Association. For allowing me the space to present papers, participate on panels and round tables, and instill me with a deep sense of Haitian history, culture, and literature, I am thankful to members, past and present, and especially Alix Cantave, Sarah Davies Cordova, Micheline Rice-Maximin, Joélle Vitiello, Alex Dupuy, Regine Jean-Charles, Nadève Ménard, Alyssa Sepinwall, Marlene Daut, Mark Schuller, Valerie Kaussen, Christian Flaugh, Chelsea Stieber, Nathan Dize, Philip Kaisary, and Jason Herbeck.

For the opportunity to present work in progress and to be a part of engaging conferences, I have the utmost gratitude for the Winthrop-King Institute of Florida State University and, in particular, Martin Munro and his students and staff. In addition to Martin, I thank Rodney Saint-Eloi and Eliana Vagalau for spearheading the Jean-Claude Charles Collective and inviting me to contribute to its ongoing initiatives. I would also like to acknowledge the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies and the University of London; the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), with high praise for Carine Mardorossian and Maria DiFrancesco; and Rob Nixon, whose participation in our Humanities Center colloquium was the highlight of the semester. Rob, your thought-provoking lecture at NeMLA in Pittsburgh was a keynote for the ages. Many thanks to Daniel Desormeaux and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, for encouraging scholars to think of Haiti “beyond commemorations.” To Toni Pressley-Sanon and Sophie Saint-Just, your superb editing of the volume on Raoul Peck helped me think through a critical piece of my work on Yanick Lahens. And to Jason Herbeck and Vincent Grégoire, thank you for showing me why Camus remains a crucial figure today.

I would also like to recognize those who have left their mark on this book in immeasurable ways. To Dominic Thomas, Alain Mabanckou, and Louis-Philippe Dalembert, thank you for your generous spirit and encouraging words. Your visits to Pitt were inspiring. To Regine, Lia, Patrick, Maggie, Phil, and Sara — my former cohort — your work continues to inspire me.

Acknowledgments ix

To the stellar team at Liverpool University Press, particularly Anthony Cond and Chloe Johnson, I express my heartfelt thanks. At every step of the publication process, you helped me patiently and promptly. Sarah Harrison, your copyediting was masterful. To Martin Munro and the anonymous reader, a special thanks to you both for steering the manuscript in the right direction. You did not just see the flaws of my work, you also made invaluable suggestions for a better book. I made it through revisions with the aid of a group of unofficial readers who made comments to parts of the manuscript. To Katelyn Knox, Neil Doshi, Dave Pettersen, Phil Usher, and Jason, thank you for taking the time to help me refine the book.

Finally, I wish to thank my family, near and farther away, for lifting me up on a daily basis. My father- and mother-in-law, Jitu and Manju Asthana, provide warmth and sustenance, without fail. Anaya and Ty, writing this book with you in mind is the highest of highs. To Shiv, who somehow believes that she has not earned an acknowledgment, I say pshaw! And Mom and Dad, for making it all possible, I dedicate this book to you both.

Introduction Tè glise, Continents à la dérive

Haiti between Shifting Continents, Past and Present

Faille: cassure des couches terrestres accompagnée d’une dénivellation tectonique des blocs séparés. Telle est la définition neutre, froide, classique, d’un phénomène géologique finalement assez fréquent et assez répandu. Phénomène qui pourtant en silence, millimètre après millimètre, fraction de seconde après fraction de seconde, se déroule à des kilomètres sous l'écorce terrestre. Phénomène inconnu pour la grande majorité des Haïtiens mais connu de certains d’entre nous qui avions choisi de l’oublier. Et puis, somme toute, la terre nous paraissait tout à fait ferme sous nos pieds. Alors pourquoi s'inquiéter? Parce que ce métabolisme lointain et silencieux est d’une lenteur telle qu’il peut servir d’alibi à l’oubli, de prétexte à la passivité, d’excuse à l’ignorance.

Yanick Lahens, Failles, 31

Writing in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck Haïti on January 12, 2010, Yanick Lahens contemplates life on fault lines. In the passage cited above, from Failles, the book published later that same year, Lahens comes to terms with the collision of human and geological time and space, and the apparently sudden awareness brought by the earthquake: the Earth moves beneath us. And yet, if the great majority of Haitians were unaware, some knew, Lahens admits. The “distant metabolism” of the planet is too slow to appear on human radar, Lahens implies, thus making it easy to forget. In this short chapter, entitled “Continents à la dérive,” Lahens makes a key argument about the consequences of passivity and ignorance. The earthquake exposed a crosshatching of social, economic, and political fault lines. Like shifting tectonic plates, these networked forces are largely invisible, yet their visible effects, she contends, are equally as devastating. The failure to see these rifts is owed, in large part, to the different speeds with which they move. “Si la lenteur des phénomènes souterrains nous a forcé à l’oubli,” she writes, “c’est paradoxalement la vitesse de ceux qui se déroulent en surface qui nous contraint à l’esquive et nous conduit donc au même déni” (Failles, 33). This paradox moves between oubli, or the passive forgetting of geological fault lines, and déni, the willful denial of political fissures. If the earthquake was caused by slow-moving plates that destroyed the natural and built environment, spectacularly, in seconds, political decisions, enacted relatively quickly, have consequences with a long afterlife. In either case, she suggests, the refusal to face up to reality ends in disaster.

Lahens’s reflection on conflicting speeds of geological and political bodies in Haiti can be compared to what Rob Nixon has called “slow violence.” “By slow violence,” he writes,

I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all ... [It] is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. (Slow Violence, 2)

Nixon is concerned here with damage done to natural and built environments by sovereign governments and international coalitions, as well as corporations of national and transnational reach. In the increasingly deregulated age of neoliberal globalization, political and economic powers operate with impunity, and they are largely able to do so, Nixon argues, because the harm is spread out over long periods of time.! Lahens contemplates political violence in a similar

1 Onthe invisibility of environmental harm, see Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America (New York: Aperture, 2014). Misrach and Orff achieve an innovative collaboration between the visual arts and digital mapping technologies to examine the links between industrialization, ecological degradation, and public health. They shed creative and critical light on dangers that seep into land, water, and human bodies over time.

way. She argues that the earthquake revealed, in the most brutal way, the aftereffects of political and economic factors that, over time, created conditions of precarity and insecurity for thousands and thousands of people in greater Port-au-Prince. Failles presents a painstaking critique of numerous actors and entities in Haiti, in the larger hemisphere of the Americas, and across the Atlantic in Europe. All bear responsibility for conditions on the ground. Lahens suggests that Port-au-Prince and its environs were already in the grip of an attritional violence that enabled the earthquake to wreak sudden devastation. She finds that the juxtaposition between slow and fast violence also laid bare a moral fault line. As Chapter Three demonstrates, Lahens works through this problemspace in various writings of non-fiction and fiction, thus anticipating a challenge posed by Nixon. “How do we bring home,” he asks, “ ... and bring emotionally to life — threats that take time to wreak their havoc, threats that never materialize in one spectacular, explosive, cinematic scene? ... How do we both make slow violence visible,” he continues, “yet also challenge the privileging of the visible?” (Slow Violence, 14-15). Lahens’s critique of the slow violence of political power offers a way to answer Nixon’s questions through what I am calling an “eco-archive.” At its most basic, it denotes a body of literary texts that depict ecological change over time and its impact on matters of social and environmental justice. The prefix “eco” refers to the shared, lived space of ecological problems, between humans and non-humans, and “archive” to the accumulation of texts that reveal overlapping histories of past and present. This book develops this idea through each of the chapters below. Failles belongs to the eco-archive because it records the violent clash of sub- and superterranean bodies and considers the ramifications of this disastrous collision.

The most urgent forms of slow violence that Nixon and other environmentally minded postcolonial scholars have addressed in the early twenty-first century are global warming and climate change. So, too, Lahens. Failles brings the reader to view the earthquake and the scandalous conditions in Haiti that it laid bare as a global crisis. In fact, before she laments the “dégradation de la production agricole et de l’environnement [haitien]” (33), she conceives of these and other deadly fault lines in planetary terms. Crucially, she writes, “Mais cette propension au déni n’est pas seulement haitienne. A l’échelle de la planète, nous avons oublié que la terre vit. Qu'elle a un âge, qu’elle passe par des cycles. Nous avons perdu la mesure de notre âge géologique. Nous avons perdu la mesure de l’espèce” (32). It is perhaps easy to overlook this fleeting reference to “our geological age,” given that so much of the testimony of Failles is focused on the place of Haiti in regional, hemispheric, and global histories. But I suggest that the chapter’s focus on “shifting continents” also extends to the unstable movement that can be read in the pronoun “nous” as it expands and retracts between “we Haitians” and “we humans on the Earth.” When Lahens evokes a living planet and gestures to humans as a species, it is important, I think, to read a tension between Haitian and global experience. In this way, the latter is a collective, if not universal nous. In thinking about local space in the global context of environmental crises, Lahens is in step with a growing number of artists, intellectuals, and scientists who are all coming to terms with the fact that, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed, globalization and global warming are now on a collision course.’

In addition to Nixon, another such thinker is the French philosopher Michel Serres. Following the earthquake that struck near San Francisco, California on October 17, 1989, Serres wrote Le contrat naturel. Comparing the geopolitical and cultural assumptions that inflect Serres’s text sharpens the contrast with the historical awareness of Lahens’s critical and creative imaginary in Failles. Furthermore, it sets up a key problem that this study interrogates throughout: Haitian writers contribute in varied ways to debates about the converging paths of human and geological histories, yet at the same time their meditations on the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism are largely neglected in these very debates about the future of human life on the planet.

Le contrat naturel opens by recognizing the physical autonomy of the planet and closes by describing how the author senses its life and alterity to humanity. In the first section, “Guerre / Paix,” Serres takes another look at classic depictions of battle scenes, in painting (Goya’s “Duelo a garrotazos” of the “black paintings”) and literature (Homer’s The Iliad), and realizes that, beyond the epic combat between men, another, more pernicious battle has long taken place, only one that had been hiding in

2 Chakrabarty writes, “... self-conscious discussions of global warming in the public realm began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the same period in which social scientists and humanists began to discuss globalization. However, these discussions have so far run in parallel to each other. While globalization, once recognized, was of immediate interest to humanists and social scientists, global warming, in spite of a good number of books published in the 1990s, did not become a public concern until the 2000s” (“The Climate of History: Four Theses,” 198-199).

plain sight. “Faut-il distinguer deux batailles,” Serres asks, “la guerre historique qu’Achille livre à ses ennemis et la violence aveugle faite a la rivière? Nouveau déluge: le niveau croît” (Contrat naturel, 15). The inability to see the battle scene of climate change in its entirety, Serres finds, is inherently a failure of vision. Like Nixon, he is deeply unsettled by the accumulation of battles waged against the planet. “Redoutons aussi que les solutions à court terme,” he warns, “ ... ne reproduisent, en les renforçant, les causes du problème. Moins évidemment apparaissent les causes à long terme, qu’il faut expliciter maintenant” (20-27). Serres makes an urgent appeal to what might be called “the care of the Earth.”* As the title makes plain, he does so with the explicit aim of retrofitting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract. Thinking more globally, Serres envisages an alliance between humankind and the Earth:

Dés lors, dans le monde reviennent les hommes, le mondain dans le mondial, le collectif dans le physique, un peu comme à l’époque du droit naturel classique, mais avec pourtant de grandes différences, qui tiennent toutes au passage récent du local au global et au rapport renouvelé que nous entretenons désormais avec le monde, notre maitre jadis et naguére notre esclave, toujours notre héte en tous cas, maintenant notre symbiote. (Contrat naturel, 67)

Serres’s argument turns on the conception of radical historical breaks. After the founding of natural law, the new relationship he proposes with the Earth is conceived with a view to a future symbiosis of humans and the planet that depends on a contractual relationship. Interestingly, Serres describes the former relationship in terms of Hegel’s master/ slave dialectic. Lahens historicizes the political fault lines of the zoro earthquake in the failure of eighteenth-century European colonialists and twentieth-century imperialists to “humaniser le Noir” (Failles, 70). For Lahens and other Caribbean thinkers, questions of climate change and the survival of the planet have always been inextricably linked to the foundational problem of slavery. In this historical light, Serres’s

3 This idea lends planetarity to Michel Foucault’s ethical turn, at the twilight of his career, to the question of subject formation and its “aesthetics of existence,” including the constituent problems of “self-writing”; “technologies of the self”; and “care of the self [le souci de soi]” that complete the second and third volumes of History of Sexuality. Michel Foucault, L’'Usage des plaisirs (1984); The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume 2, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1986), and Le souci de soi (1984); The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality Volume 3, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1988).

use of the master/slave narrative to underscore the urgency of climate change is telling of the scotoma, or a kind of historical blind spot that continues to have a deleterious effect on European historical vision.* Serres’s ambiguous language harks back to the texts of Enlightenment philosophes, including the man that inspired the proposal of a natural contract. In the Social Contract, Rousseau wrote, “Man is born free, yet everywhere lives in chains.” As Christopher Miller observes, “Rousseau

. sounds like he recognizes the evil of slavery in this famous opening of the Social Contract, yet he too ignores the Atlantic slave trade, as he does throughout his vast writings, with one tiny exception. He makes slavery a metaphor for the condition of man in modern (which means European) society” (The French Atlantic Triangle, 7; emphasis in original). By “contract,” Serres similarly walks a fine line between metaphor and reality. He describes it at once as a declaration of peace with the Earth, our “host” — an “armistice dans la guerre objective” (Contrat naturel, 67) — and an acknowledgment of the status of humans as parasites.” As Ian Tucker argues, Serres ponders the “materiality of the human condition” (“Sense and the Limits of Knowledge,” 149). But he also reminds his readers of a relational shift in which the human threatens to destroy the host planet.® In the end, the philosopher takes on the role of an ecological man, homo ecologicus, who, having felt the earth move beneath him, becomes aware that he is but “une trémulation de néant, vivant dans un séisme permanent” (Contrat naturel, 190). Unlike Lahens, who struggles to write after the earthquake, Serres communes with “la Terre spasmodique” and, in a moment of ecstasy, is ready to sign a pact with the planet (190).

4 I borrow this use of scotoma as an inability to see and acknowledge a traumatic past from Réda Bensmaia in Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Bensmaia writes, “It is quite surprising to see just how many taboos still exist when it comes to France’s history of colonization in Africa, the Middle East, and especially the veritable scotoma that exists in relation to the history of the Algerian War” (39).

5 In the context of preserving and sharing wilderness areas, Gary Snyder also raises idea of natural contract. “The commons,” he writes, “is the contract a people make with their local natural system” (The Practice of the Wild, 31). See also Christopher D. Stone, “Defending the Global Commons,” in Greening International Law, ed. Philippe Sands (New York: New Press, 1994), 34-49.

6 For an introduction to the interdisciplinary background of Serres, see Stéphanie Posthumus, “Vers une écocritique française: le contrat naturel de Michel Serres.” Mosaic 44.2 (June 2011): 85-100.

Serres and Lahens respond to the planetary power of earthquakes with similar questions, yet they arrive at strikingly different conclusions. Playing on Galileo’s supposed utterance “Eppur si muove! [And yet, it moves],” or the radical proposition that the Earth moves around the sun, Serres mobilizes the Italian’s challenge to papal authority to argue that scientists of today are once again in a similar bind by having to convince contemporary authorities of the looming catastrophe of climate change. Behold, Serres declares, “la Terre s’émeut [the Earth is moved]” (Contrat naturel, 136). As Bruno Latour explains, it “has become — has become again! — an active, local, limited, sensitive, fragile, quaking, and easily tickled envelope” (“Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” 3). For some, Serres flirts with what is generally referred to as “deep ecology,” or a vision of the relationship between humanity and nature that is “ecocentric” rather than anthropocentric, or nature mastered by humans.’ As Jonathan Krell demonstrates, this is a simplistic reading of Serres’s position. Furthermore, Maria Assad has argued that it would be a mistake to overemphasize the figurative dimension of Serres’s text. “The Natural Contract,” she writes, first lays the foundation for a rigorous scientific-judicial appeal to its postmodern reader. Only then does the vision of an as yet unrealized world created on the basis of a natural contract between the Planet Earth and humankind move the author to passionately poetic expressions, equally serious in their intent. (Reading with Michel Serres, 153)

I would also add Latour’s parenthetical remark that “The Natural Contract is first of all a piece of legal philosophy” (“Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” 4). But, while Latour generally praises the earnest originality of Serres’s thought, he signals the fatal flaw of its central proposition of a natural contract. “What seems impossible, however, in Serres’s solution,” Latour continues:

is the quaint idea of establishing a new social compact with all those quasi-subjects. Not that the idea of a contract is odd ... but because in a quarter of a century, things have become so urgent and violent that the somewhat pacific project of a contract among parties seems unreachable. War is infinitely more likely than contract. (5)

7 See Luc Ferry, Le nouvel ordre écologique. L’Arbre, l'animal et l’homme (Paris: Grasset, 1992). The book includes a sustained critique of Serres. For a concise account of their differences, see Jonathan Krell, “Michel Serres, Luc Ferry, and the Possibility of a Natural Contract,” 1-13.

Latour’s reflection on the urgency of the last twenty-five years — nearly the same time as that between Le Contrat naturel and Failles — highlights the divide in literary—philosophical responses to earthquakes in places as far apart as Haiti and California. Both Serres and Lahens ponder the difference of geological time that irrupts during an earthquake, and both consider the relative incapacity of humankind to grasp the slow but devastating problem of climate change. However, if their texts coalesce around the problem of time, they diverge markedly with respect to the political dimension of space. Serres may have laid awake in fear of the aftershocks in Palo Alto, but he did not have to confront the scale of death and destruction that Lahens witnessed in Port-au-Prince. Both Serres and Lahens experienced geological events, yet the earthquake in Haiti was a disaster not solely because of something that happened “naturally” — some act of God or Mother Nature — but because of the social conditions on the ground. Estimates of deaths in the earthquake in Haiti vary widely, with the Haitian government putting the toll at 316,000 and a group commissioned by the U.S. Agency for International Development issuing a report with a much lower number, somewhere between 46,000 and 85,000. However, after calling into question both of these estimates, Robert Muggah and Athena Kolbe conducted several household surveys and came up with the figure of 158,000 fatalities in the six weeks following the quake.* These important disputes in accounting notwithstanding, all of these figures are unprecedented in Haitian history and pale in comparison to the sixty-three deaths recorded in California. In other words, their man-made fault lines were worlds apart.’

It is unquestionable that certain populations are more vulnerable than others to earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods. The implications of the disparities in the effects of earthquakes in California, Haiti, Chile, and Japan have historically fallen under the critical purview of social scientists attuned to the problem of difference that has also long been a focal point of postcolonial studies. Comparing Serres and Lahens reminds

8 See Athena R. Kolbe et al., “Mortality, crime and access to basic needs before and after the Haiti earthquake: a random survey of Port-au-Prince households.” Medicine, Conflict and Survival 26.4 (2010): 281-297; see also Robert Muggah and Athena Kolbe, “Haiti: Why an accurate account of civilian deaths matter.” Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2011. http://articles.latimes.com/2z011/jul/12/opinion/ la-oe-muggah-haiti-count-20110712 (accessed September 20, 2017).

9 Inthe Chilean earthquake of February zoro, which measured a magnitude of 8.8, 525 people are reported to have perished.

us of the gap between the environmentalist concerns of European and North American writers and those in the Caribbean. As many critics have pointed out, after years of a (relative) mutual lack of engagement, environmental and postcolonial critiques have found some common ground.” In this regard, Mark D. Anderson’s critical perspective in Latin American studies is instructive. In his important study of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, Anderson argues that the concept of “natural disaster” can be understood only in relation to a norm that is socially constructed and then mediated and reappropriated through cultural and political means.!! Failles can similarly be situated as a form of “disaster writing,” in that Lahens considers how the earthquake made visible the social and political norms that have historically colluded to keep Haiti on the edge of precarity. Yet, unlike Serres, who adopts a satellite’s view of the Earth to take in the “plaques humaines immenses et denses” (Contrat naturel, 35), Lahens is moved as much by the global threat of the earthquake as by the scenes of devastation in her local environs. The difference between the Haitian experience of disaster and what it means for the view of the globe from above creates palpable tension in the pages of Failles.

Lahens and Serres grapple with the place of the human in this age of ecological reckoning, but they approach this human/planetary conjuncture from different angles. As Nixon shows, this is the fundamental problem of the Anthropocene, or the name for a new geological epoch, the Age of the Human, first proposed and debated in scientific circles. Given the devastation of the earthquake in Haiti, followed by several others around the globe, a slew of massive hurricanes and five-hundred-year floods, and the increased attention to global warming and climate change, it might appear logical and unquestionable that the Earth has entered a new age. And yet, the growing gulf between the rich and poor, as well as the seemingly unprecedented crisis of migrants and refugees, tells another story about the state of the globe. As Lahens suggests, it is not just continents that are à la dérive. “A crucial imaginative challenge is facing us,” Nixon stated in an address to the Modern Language Association:

10 See Graham Huggan, “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (Fall 2004): 701-733; see also Ursula K. Heise, “Globality, Difference, and the International Turn in Ecocriticism.” PMLA 128.3 (2013): 636—643.

11 Mark D. Anderson, Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 28.

How do we tell two large stories that seem in tension with each other, a convergent story and a divergent one? Set against the collective story about humanity’s geomorphic impacts that will be legible in the earth’s geophysical systems for millennia to come is the story of the human species, a much more fractured narrative ... . In terms of the history of ideas, what does it mean that the Anthropocene as a grand explanatory species story has taken hold during a plutocratic age? How can we counter the centripetal force of that dominant story with centrifugal stories that acknowledge immense disparities in human agency, impacts, and vulnerability?”

In this speech, Nixon at once rehearses and expands upon the questions, cited above, that he had raised earlier in Slow Violence. In Failles, Lahens opens a profound engagement with an accelerating Anthropocene by critiquing generalizing narratives that erase particular histories of different modes of being human and of thinking ecologically.

Taking the comparative analysis of Lahens and Serres as its point of departure, this book argues that Haitian literature has long anticipated epochal thought with stories from the eco-archive that challenge the neocolonial and neoliberal political economies that undergird the dominant narratives of the Anthropocene. A range of texts, fiction and nonfiction, historicizes the intertwining of political and environmental problems brought to the surface by the earthquake by recalling previous disasters and imagining stories in their wake. Along with Lahens, several Haitian writers depict the imbrication of geological, political, and social fault lines to complicate the exceptional image of Haiti as a site of disaster, an ill-fated country with a resilient population. As Sibylle Fischer has demonstrated, Haiti has long been the “modernity disavowed” at the core of Western systems of thought that made grand claims about the enlightenment subject and the promise of capitalism to enable and guarantee democratic freedoms.’ However, as the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot pointed out on numerous occasions, not only did this modernity fall far short of its declared universal reach, it would also define humanity largely in terms of economic value. Furthermore,