Sensing History, Seeking Justice

Abstract

Sasha Huber’s Shooting Back-Reflections on Haitian Roots portraits (2004) and the Haïti chérie (‘Haiti, my beloved’, 2010) performance are multi-sensorial works which voice an incessantly reverberating call for justice and solidarity with the absent and silenced victims of past, and ongoing, violences; from Columbus’s 1492 ‘discovery’ and landing on Hispaniola; the Duvaliers’ dictatorship in Haiti; and the 12 of January 2010 earthquake that became a disaster. Taking Huber’s works as the starting point, the article explores the ways in which these wakeful pieces gesture towards an ambivalent repair and perform a form of justice against legal, epistemic and representational regimes of ‘un-visibility’. With each tak-tak-tak of the staple gun, the shining staples, or the contour of a snow angel, these works conjure a space of defiant care and Afro-diasporic solidarity, protest and presence, creating an alternative ‘archive of affect’.