policy-making process, (2) connecting the academic part of the discipline with the wider world of social problems, (3) bringing anthropological knowledge to the media’s attention, (4) becoming activists concerned with witnessing violence and social change, (5) sharing knowledge production and power with community members, (6) providing empirical approaches to social assessment and ethical practice, and (7) linking anthropological theory and practice to create new solutions.” See Low and Merry, “Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas,” Current Anthropology 51, no. S2 (2010).
13 Academics in general, including anthropologists, who engage with the public sphere are still stigmatized and are not taken as seriously by some peers. At the same time, anthropologists, especially in the United States, are concerned that, in the media, matters regarding human conditions tend to be discussed by non-specialists. For more on this issue, see Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), and Thomas Hyllan Eriksen, Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006).
14 American Anthropological Association website, AAAnet.org.
15 Besteman and Gusterson, Why America’s Top Pundits, 3.
16 See Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison, eds., African-American Pioneers in Anthropology (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999).
17 Indeed, my work stems from a much bigger lineage that includes Haiti’s own tradition of ethnology, which dates back to the work of nineteenth-century anthropologist and politician Anténor Firmin. The Bureau d’Ethnologie in Port-au-Prince founded by Jean Price-Mars incorporated works that not only blurred the lines between ethnology and the literary but also stemmed from a radical activist perspective against U.S. occupation and other forms of imperialism. The particularities of my training, though steeped in North American traditions, did include area studies that incorporated and recognized the impact of the Haitian school.
18 See Faye V. Harrison, “The Du Boisian Legacy in Anthropology,” Critique of Anthropology 12, no. 3 (1992): 239–60.
19 Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis: The Study of Negro Life in a Northern City was first published by Harper & Row in 1945 and was reprinted twice, in 1962 and 1970, with updates commissioned by the original publishers. The first printing included an introduction by the popular novelist Richard Wright.
20 St. Claire Drake, “Reflections on Anthropology and the Black Experience,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1978).
21 For a critique of the problems of “allyship” see Aileen McGrory, “Queer Killjoys: Individuality, Niceness and the Failure of Current Ally Culture” (Honors thesis, Department of Anthropology, Wesleyan University, 2014).
22 Prior to the quake Farmer joined the office of the UN envoy that was headed by Bill Clinton. There was a strange irony in this trio of white American men—Farmer, Clinton, and Penn—as the “saviors” of Haiti, which at times prompted me to refer to them as “the three kings.”
23 This question is answered in part by Raoul Peck’s documentary Fatal Assistance (2013), a two-year journey inside the challenging, contradictory, and colossal post-quake rebuilding efforts that reveals the undermining of the country’s sovereignty and concomitant failure of relief groups, international aid, and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) with ideas of reconstruction that clashed with actual Haitian need. It also offers insights on where did the money (not) go.
24 I raised this question during a plenary session at the twenty-first annual Haitian Studies Association conference in 2009. I also explored this issue in some detail in the 2011 Ms. blog piece “Why Context Matters: Journalists and Haiti,” which is included in this collection. I develop these ideas even further in my book-in-progress, “On What (Not) to Tell: Reflexive Feminists Experiments.”
25 Swedish anthropologist and former journalist Staffan Löfving considers the issues of temporality in these two fields. He notes that “writing slowly about fast changes constitute[s] a paradox in anthropology. The paradox in journalism consists of writing quickly and sometimes simplistically about complex changes.” Quoted in Eriksen, Engaging Anthropology, 110.
26 In the inaugural Public Anthropology review section of the American Anthropologist, Cheryl Rodriguez noted “the ways in which anthropologists are using cyberspace to create awareness of women’s lives in Haiti. Primarily focusing on the use of websites and the blogosphere as public anthropology, the review examines the scholarly and activist implications of these forms of communication”: see Rodriguez, “Review of the Works of Mark Schuller and Gina Ulysse: Collaborations with Haitian Feminists,” American Anthropologist 112, no. 4 (210): 639.
27 There was something brutal and disconcerting about the even greater presence of foreigners with means and power on Haitian soil, an “humanitarian occupation,” as these have been called by Gregory H. Fox (2008), or a neo-coloniality in the post-quake moment that intuitively brought me back to seeking solace in the work of Aimé Césaire, especially Cahier d’un retour au pays natal / Notebook of a return to the native land, and Discourse on Colonialism. Both of these texts had profound influence on my thinking as an undergraduate student and were instrumental in my decision to study anthropology to be of help to Haiti. I became more familiar with Suzanne Césaire’s work, The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945), which inspired me to finally embrace my secret attraction to surrealism as I gained a deep appreciation for her lyrical rage. These works made me even more open to the possibilities of performance as an ever-expansive space to express raw emotions. Lastly, I should add that there is another complex point, concerning the appeal of these Martinican writers to me as a Haitian, which I believe is necessary to note but won’t discuss any further.
28 See Gina Athena Ulysse, “Homage to Those Who Hollered before Me,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 3, no. 2 (2003).
29 See chapter 21, “When I Wail for Haiti: Debriefing (Performing) a Black Atlantic Nightmare.” An extended version of this essay, titled “It All Started with a Black Woman: Reflections on Writing/Performing Rage,” will be published in the black feminist anthology Are All the Women Still White?, edited by Janell Hobson (New York: SUNY Press, forthcoming).
30 I was asked to serve as the program chair for the Caribbean Studies Association annual conference under the leadership of Baruch College sociologist Carolle Charles, who became the first Haitian president elected in the association’s thirty-seven-year history. My role was to organize a five-day international conference in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, that would eventually consist of over 150 panels and more than six hundred participants. I knew that to focus, there would be no time to commit to writing.
I
RESPONDING TO THE CALL
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Avatar, Voodoo, and White Spiritual Redemption
January 11, 2010 / Huffington Post @ 1:13 p.m.
Avatar is not just another white-man-save-the-day movie. As a black woman and a cultural anthropologist born in Haiti, I had doubts about the depiction of race in the film. Before seeing Avatar, I worked on resisting the urge to categorize this film as yet another Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, or Pocahontas redux, as some critics have dubbed it. White-man-gone-native is
