Georges Eugene Fouron

All in the Family: Gender, Transnational Migration, and the Nation‐State

Over the years, feminist scholarship has illuminated the ways in which genders are differentiated and gender hierarchies are constituted as part of the way women and men learn to identify with a nation‐state. Much less has been said about the social reproduction of gender in transnational spaces. These spaces are created as people emigrate, settle far from their homelands, and yet develop networks of connection that maintain familial, economic, religious, and political ties to those homelands. The task of this paper is to begin to explore the ways in which gender and nation are mutually constituted within the transnational social fields that link homeland and new land. This paper is exploratory, using a case study of Haitian transnational connections as a catalyst for future investigation.

Race, blood, disease and citizenship: the making of the Haitian-Americans and the Haitian immigrants into ‘the others’ during the 1980s–1990s AIDS crisis

This article traces the ‘otherisation’ of US denizens of Haitian descent during the 1980s and 1990s, subsequent to their incorporation into the ‘4-H club’ as ‘Haitians’, regardless of their citizenship. It argues that by collapsing the categories Haitian-Americans and Haitian immigrants into ‘Haitians’ and by accusing this collectivity of bringing HIV/AIDS to the United States, the US medical and political leadership and sectors of the media nullified the Haitian-Americans’ US citizenship and maligned both groups’ identity, promoting their alienation from the larger US population. It concludes with a plea to reframe the concept of citizenship and reassess the normative notion of belonging to the US nation-state.

Poverty in Haiti: Essays on Underdevelopment and Post Disaster Prospects

On 12 January 2010, an earthquake of a magnitude of 7.0 on the Richter scale struck metropolitan Port-auPrince, the political and financial capital of Haiti, and transformed the town into a giant pile of rubble. Already the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere, the devastation exacerbated the precarious life conditions of the Haitian population that was recuperating from the destructive impacts of three consecutive deadly hurricanes the previous year. Less than a year after the disastrous seism had afflicted Port-au-Prince, many researchers rushed to publish treatises to reflect on the enormity of the catastrophe, especially on the ways it could have been prevented. As one, they have portrayed Haiti as ‘a failed state’ and have argued that the devastating impact of the seism was due, not so much to its destructive powers, but to the country’s chaotic domestic situation and the failure of the Haitian state to fulfil even its basic obligations towards the population. It is from this particular perspective that Mats Lundahl’s book should be read. Lundahl is a Swedish economist who has been studying Haiti and its economy since 1969. Published in early 2011, Poverty in Haiti comprises 13 chapters divided into four parts respectively titled, History, Contemporary Problems, The Failed Transition, and A Future for Haiti. Except for the last chapter of the fourth part, which is forebodingly titled, ‘After the Earthquake: What Future for Haiti?’ this book is a compilation of articles Lundahl has been writing about Haiti since 1992. The central thesis of the book is that the determinants of Haiti’s extreme underdevelopment and endemic poverty are ‘population growth and erosion, the functioning of markets, the lack of technological progress, and the characteristics of the Haitian state’ (p. 60). While no one would deny that these factors have greatly contributed to Haiti’s present condition, it is rather disconcerting to observe that the author has completely ignored the global context in which Haiti has evolved since 1804 when it defeated the French Army to overthrow slavery and colonialism. The United States and the other colonial powers of the time refused to recognise the new nation and imposed an onerous trade embargo upon it. That made it difficult for Haiti to sell its products on the international market and forced the Haitian government to purchase all that it needed to function on the black market at very inflated prices. When the trade embargo was finally relaxed by John Quincy Adams (1825-1829), the Haitians were forced to extend to the United States the status of ‘most favoured nation’ which further decimated its economy. When France decided to recognise the young nation’s independence in 1825, it imposed a crippling indemnity upon it and threatened to re-colonise it if the Haitian government did not agree to pay. Washington refused to acknowledge the appeal for protection by the Haitian leaders as guaranteed by the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. As a result, the ‘Haitian economy has never recovered from the financial havoc France (and America) wreaked upon it’ (Robinson, 2007: 22). In 1915 at the onset of World War I, the United States invaded Haiti and occupied it until 1934. The US Marines did not land in Haiti to address the country’s recurrent social and political chaos as Lundahl maintains, but, rather, to keep in check the French and German near monopoly on the Haitian economy and to replace them with US investors (Dupuy, 1997). In 1918 the Americans rewrote the Haitian constitution that hitherto had barred whites from owning land in Haiti. As a result, 28,000 hectares, mostly peasant lands, were requisitioned by the occupation forces, which established a land-lease programme to woo US financiers in Haiti. Although the plantations were subsequently abandoned, the peasants never recovered their lands; instead, they were transferred to the US supported Haitian elites (Plummer, 1992). As Lundahl rightly states, Haiti has never had a ‘responsible state’; instead, the Haitian state has always been predatory and brutal (Fatton, 2002). However, successive Haitian governments collaborated with foreign interests to brutalise the population and extract wealth from the urban poor and the Haitian peasantry through what is known in Haiti as the politique de doublure, or politics by understudy. Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 48, No. 4, 581–588, April 2012