The Haiti Exception ─ Anthropology and the Predicaments of Narrative

This collection of essays considers the ways and extent of Haiti's 'exceptionalisation' its perception in multiple arenas as definitively unique with respect not only to the countries of the North Atlantic, but also to the rest of the Americas. Painted at once as repulsive and attractive, abject and resilient, singular and exemplary, Haiti has long been framed discursively by an extraordinary epistemological ambivalence. The nation has served at once as cautionary tale, model for humanitarian aid and development projects, and point of origin for general theorizing of the so-called Third World. What to make of this dialectic of exemplarity and alterity? How to pull apart this multivalent narrative so as to examine its constituent parts? The contributors to The Haiti Exception take up these and other such questions from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives, among which Africana Studies, anthrohistory, art history, Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, education, ethnology, Jewish Studies, literary studies, performance studies, and urban studies. As they revise and interrogate their respective praxes, they accept the challenge of thinking about the particular stakes of and motivations for their own commitment to Haiti. Engaging in the decidedly risky anthropological practice of reflexivity, the scholars, activists and other social actors gathered here consider their own often fraught role in constructing Haiti in and as narrative.

Alessandra Benedicty is assistant professor of Caribbean and postcolonial literatures in French at the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the City College of New York, and the author of Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (Lexington Books, 2015)

Jhon Picard Byron is director of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology in the Faculty of Ethnology, UEH.

Kaiama L. Glover is Assistant Professor of French at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Mark Schuller is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northern Illinois University