A vain fascination: Writing from and about Haiti after the earthquake

Abstract

In the wake of the huge earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010, Haiti instantly became the focus of media attention across the world. At that moment, the tropes that had imprisoned Haiti for two centuries (barbarism, savagery, vodou, the land-that-God-forgot, etc.) began to resurface. Some Haitian intellectuals sought to combat those images, but in so doing they inadvertently revealed their complicity not only in the negative discursive construction of their country, but also in the economic and military re-colonisation of Haiti over the last decade. Adept in the fabrication of replicas of 'post-political' discourse, These Haitian intellectuals are in reality a subset of that country's morally bankrupt political class. © 2013 Society for Latin American Studies.