03 Mar Diss intro

First attempt at the less-than-exciting opening paragraphs of my introduction…comments welcome

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti laying bare the immense infrastructural inadequacies of the tiny island nation. In the weeks and months that followed, international coordination efforts focused on managing the devastation and carrying that management into rebuilding the country. For many international observers, the calamity offered an opportunity to “build back better” – a trope often bandied but seldom elaborated beyond administrative organizing.  The central focus of this dissertation is to ask, “Build back better than what?” More particularly, this dissertation is interested in how some bodies (particularly Haitian bodies) become essentialized and depoliticized through an imaginary of disease and the ways in which these processes are mobilized in the pursuit of political and economic agendas that are couched in humanitarian  and development frames.

Throughout this dissertation, I illustrate that the relatively new mantra of “build back better” is short sighted in multiple ways. It is historically short-sighted in that its understanding of the history of Haiti is encompassed in the near-recent past, and does not take into account the deeply embedded historical legacy of American military and philanthropic interventions that reach back nearly 100 years. It is politically short-sighted in its refusal to engage with the Haitian people as truly political subjects of a sovereign nation. And finally, that it is epidemiologically short sighted in its consideration of how Haitians are engaged in their own health management.

Each of these short comings are dependent upon a failure to recognize the citizenship of Haitians themselves – both specifically in relation to their nation-state and more generally in relation to global political processes. I argue that it is through the lens of health citizenship that we can begin to unravel the imaginative geographies of Haiti that have been transnationally constructed. And while I am not claiming that it is the only lens through which to come to understand these processes, this lens does offer a unique insight across multiple scales and between historical periods in the way that bodies become particularly marked and managed through the guise of health and disease management.

By situating the examination through the lens of health citizenship, I am pointing to the ways in which global processes of intervention enter into and are enacted upon the bodies of Haitians. I am re-centering the body as the site of political enactment, particularly from the top down, not because the lived messiness of everyday existence is not important, but because it is precisely the invisibility of that messiness that informs grand schemes in humanitarianism and development through health.