Haitian Refugees Research Articles

Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species by Neel Ahuja

Reviewed by: Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species by Neel Ahuja Alison Bashford Neel Ahuja. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. xix + 262 pp. Ill. $24.95 (978-0-8223-6063-6). After decades of publications on biosecurity, Ahuja's title—Bioinsecurities—promises something different. On the one hand, there is much that is familiar to a generation of medical historians for whom the connection between microbes, humans, nonhumans, and national and imperial polities and politics is standard fare. Ahuja rehearses scholarship on the racialization of borders and epidemic control, and a Foucauldian generation's work on the government and risk management of communicable disease. On the other hand, there is a larger argument that is more novel. Ahuja tracks how, over the twentieth century, fear of disease became a kind of hope, an optimism. It all underwrote, and produced, not so much a security state as an apparently protective state; "the imperial state as protector of life" (p. 5). This book is a cultural study of infectious disease and U.S. empire, drawn in part from the long tradition of histories of colonial medicine, but in far larger part from post-Foucault, feminist, and postcolonial science and cultural studies. What makes this a 2016 scholarly intervention and not, say, a 1996 or 2006 cultural history of disease, government, freedoms, and biosecurity is Ahuja's integration of animal studies and interspecies analysis. The book is part of Duke's "Anima" series. At the same time, and with some benign contradiction, he takes a strong cue from scholarship on "affect," the power of emotional and visceral responses largely of humans. Bioinsecurities is structured by "space," "time," and "scale." The opening chapters are organized around the geographies of health segregation. These will be most familiar to medical historians. Ahuja considers two sites where imperial/ racial management and microbial/health management coincided: Hawaii, with a focus on the leper colony on Molokai; and the segregation of the venereally infected, or suspected, in the Panama region in wartime. Ahuja seeks to align these segregative impulses with a U.S. ambition toward benign empire. The chapter on regulation of sex workers and control of venereal disease argues that antimalarial campaigns were its inspiration. The idea that mobile, not stationary, sanitary cordons were constructed around soldiers is interesting. And Ahuja's suggestion that local antimalarial campaigns were the model is worth considering in an historical field that tends to presume inspiration from the longer history of spatial/sexual management of venereal disease. The chapter on leprosy in Hawaii argues against the idea that segregative sites were "camps" for annihilation or extermination. Rather they were a productive part of the government of civic subjects, even of liberal reform. But who argues, or ever argued, the former? In fact, this interpretation of sites of medical segregation, including leper colonies, is long-accepted. That sites of modern medical isolation were almost always sites of civic production was already familiar long before Agamben, camps, bare life, and necropolitics entered scholarship via adjacent disciplines, and that some time ago. [End Page 674] The "time" section tracks a shift toward a pharmaceutical model of prevention, with an interest in vaccines. This chapter is far more novel, documenting primate research undertaken in the development of polio vaccines. Ahuja analyzes NIH-initiated, but offshore-located, primate research laboratories in Puerto Rico and in Central Africa. He thus moves forward in time (to the decolonizing years and Cold War era), but the ambition to conceptualize this chapter through and about time is not entirely successful. The successive space/time/scale logic of his book seems imposed rather than organic, at least in this chapter. And yet the "scale" logic does assist our understanding of security and bioinsecurity in the final two chapters. "Scale," for Ahuja, signals the emergence of international health in more recent decades, as well as the broadening drug-based prophylaxis on a global level. He analyzes smallpox; not the classic eradication program, but refreshingly the smallpox vaccination program in the Iraq War. The final chapter concerns early HIV/AIDS prevention, and its entanglement with Haitian refugees. Here, the return...

Ambivalence and Discourse in Alien Nation

The 1988 film Alien Nation depicts the immigrant experience in historical and contemporary America where these groups come to comprise minorities who feel not only the social ostracism of alienation, but also that they form a nation within a nation because of their different linguistic traits, physical appearances, and social customs. Furthermore, the title, in all its ambivalence, emphasizes this rift since the word alienation has been split in two; hence, despite affirmative action policies, while assimilation occurs to some degree, social acceptance does not-not in the film, and not in reality. Because of this scission minorities must seek bonding through solidarity within their own ethnic group, forming enclave communities, which upholds a systemic bondage from which they must continually strive to free themselves since the majority denies them positions of true authority as well as the respect that they deserve.Perspective determines which culture is the alien nation here; accordingly, several questions arise. First, do the Newcomers regard America as an alien nation to which they must assimilate and into which they must integrate? Second, do Americans deem the Newcomers as a displaced alien nation that seeks refuge in the much ballyhooed land of the free that ostensibly welcomes the poor, the tired, and the hungry? Third, do Americans consider themselves as turning into a nation of aliens where mainstream society is threatened?The film is set in 1991 in Los Angeles. Three hundred thousand aliens from an extraterrestrial, mining slave-ship have landed and ACLU has worked to free them from quarantine. This sounds suspiciously like the boatloads of Caribbean exiles that throngedAmerica's shores in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Mariel boatlift as well as the undocumented economic refugees from Mesoamerica. America's selective, open-door policy to take in the disenfranchised from other cultures is parodied at this point to illustrate the hypocrisy of rhetoric and action, when Cubans were welcomed as political refugees (prior to the Wetfoot/Dryfoot policy enacted in the wake of the Elian Gonzalez debacle in 1994) as compared to the policy regarding Mexican and Haitian refugees who faced deportation if they were apprehended without proper visa documentation since they were considered economic refugees.The film shows a flashback news clip of former President Ronald Reagan, who in the early 1980s proposed federal budget cuts to alleviate the deficit by stating, We have come to a turning point ... a moment for hard decisions. If not us, who? And if not now, when? Within the film, Reagan's message implied that America must harbor refugees by default since they have nowhere else to turn. Nevertheless, immigration laws tended to favor whites rather than blacks: consider how Cubans were welcomed while Haitians were repatriated during the 1990s when desperate refugees braved crossing the Caribbean on makeshift rafts to escape their dire conditions. The appropriation of Reagan's text removed from its original context changes the meaning, especially since he was no longer president in 1991. As his speech, shown on a bar television, diminishes into an indistinguishable hum, the bartender turns and we see that he is an extraterrestrial Alien.This apparently inconsequential juxtaposition of images is ambivalent also since the freedom and opportunity that America connotes provide the Alien (minority) with a servile position, complete with bowtie, reminiscent of the menial positions that blacks were relegated to until very recently in America's history. As the first image of the Aliens (minorities), it perpetuates the idea of a uniformly and uniformed, service culture in the ilk of the McDonald's commercials from that time period in which Calvin, the young black lad, becomes the happy, hard-working assistant manager from 19902 and the segue from 19923. It is an example of subtle racism, a theme that runs throughout the film in which you can have a nice title, be a part of the team, and . …

The Life and Death of Anna Gardie: American Theater, Refugee Dramas, and the Specter of Haitian Revolution

On July 21, 1798, New York City newspapers reported a complicated murder and that had occurred early on the morning of July 20, 1798 (Melancholy Catastrophe). Anna Gardie, a well-known actress from Saint Domingue, was killed by her husband, whose subsequent suicide left behind a young orphaned son. A sensational real-life tragedy, Anna Gardie's life and death also became part of a larger history of Atlantic revolution, Haiti and its refugees, and transnational performance cultures. She debuted on Saint Domingue's colonial stages before crossing the Atlantic and finding success in France. During the French Revolution, she retraced her path to Saint Domingue before finally fleeing northward during the Haitian Revolution. Once in the United States, she had reinvented herself as a popular dancer, singer, and pantomimist, her celebrity shaped by partly suppressed, ambiguous associations with foreign revolutions. (1) Occurring against the backdrop of the XYZ affair, the 1798 Quasi-War with France, and the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, Gardie's appearance in the historical record highlights the ambivalent, shifting sympathies and anxieties with which Americans greeted French Atlantic culture during the 1790s. Gardie's life and death also point to the profound impact of the Haitian Revolution on American performance practices from the 1790s to the 1830s. Anna Gardie and other refugees from the Haitian Revolution helped forge what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has characterized as a creole commons, with spaces and publics organized around emergent identities and performance practices in the age of Atlantic revolution (26). Performing refugees brought distinctive Creole theatrical practices to US stages and other public spaces--intercultural forms such as pantomime, melodrama, and racial masking. Foregrounding the processes of substitution or surrogation that Joseph Roach discusses in Cities of the Dead, Gardie and her fellow refugees in the 1790s became popular, sentimentalized, and theatrically appealing embodiments of Saint Domingue's revolutionary history, and American audiences responded to their performances of material loss and cultural prestige with their own mix of aspirations and anxieties (2). Gardie's story survived beyond the revolutionary era; it was revived in the 1830s, decades after her death and after the Haitian Revolution, when stage manager, playwright, and early American cultural historian William Dunlap recounted her tragic end in his 1832 History of the American Theatre. In Dunlap's historical account, Gardie's death and the nostalgic scene of Haitian refugee performance returned as a cryptic but symbolically rich story of Caribbean slave revolution's haunting influences on US culture. Dunlap's History revived Haiti's dramatic refugees in order to bolster a narrative of American culture's dangerously transnational origins and its subsequent maturation. Nostalgically invoking the tragedies of Saint Domingue's refugee actors, Dunlap offered Gardie and her compatriots as a lesson on the enduring dangers of America's interracial intimacies. TRAGEDY IN THE FRENCH BOARDING HOUSE The first detailed report of the Gardie murder-suicide appeared in the New York Weekly Museum for July 21, which described the dreadful circumstance that had occurred between three and four in the morning of July 20 (Saturday). Another account elaborated on the location, calling it a noted French boarding-house at Pearl and Broad Streets (Jealousy!). Gradually accumulating more details, the accounts reconstructed a lurid, dramatic, and mysterious irruption of violence. Monsieur Gardie (whose given name is no longer known), the Weekly Museum reported, got up, ordered the boy to rise, and got into her bed. The boy hearing his mother cry out, asked what was the matter? Mr[.] Gardie desired him to lie still; his mother had only fainted--Soon after, hearing a knocking against the partition, he got up and went to the bed, where he found Mr. …

Reconfiguring the Law of Non-Refoulement: Procedural and Substantive Barriers for those Seeking to Access Surrogate International Human Rights Protection

Both geographic and normative constraints restrict access to surrogate international human rights protection for those seeking a haven from serious human rights abuses. Primary among territorial restrictions has been the fall-out from the US Supreme Court's decision in Sale v. Haitian Council Centers in which the court explicitly ruled that nothing in US statutory law, or in the 1951 Convention on Refugees or its 1967 Protocol, precluded the interdiction of Haitian refugees in international waters and their return to the country of origin without an effective interview on their protection clams. This ruling is in transparent contradiction to the general international law norm of non-refoulement according to modern scholarship and emerging case law. This paper concludes that Sale should be overturned by statute as should related pre-screening practices. A new standard of “jurisdiction” should be adopted which does not depend on territorial access to a signatory state but on whether the state is exercising power in fact. Similar concerns exist with respect to safe third country agreements which often offend the international customary right of the asylum seeker to choose where his or her claim will be filed. This paper argues that the right of choice should be recognized and onward travel and admission to the country of destination allowed. This result is especially called for where return of the alien by the country of first contact raises serious concerns under the law of non-refoulement. Imbalances noted in this paper include those generated by the new terrorism related grounds of inadmissibility in the United States and the summary denial of children's asylum claims flowing from gang violence. Other questions are raised in this paper concerning work authorization and detention of asylum seekers. Access to an employment authorization document for those filing colorable claims should be recognized by statute to render US practice consistent with that of most other states. Release from detention, on the other hand, for asylum seekers has now been broadly recognized by the US Department of Homeland Security where the asylum seeker's identity can be ascertained and the claim is non-frivolous in nature. This approach is largely consistent with international law, although there have been unnecessary delays in implementing it. On the substantive law, the international customary norm of non-refoulment has been expanded considerably through the development of opinio juris by scholars and the practice of states. This paper traces efforts in Europe to develop a law of temporary refuge for those fleeing civil war situations characterized by humanitarian law violations. Similarly, case law under the European Convention of Human Rights has now come to focus on the harm the claimant would suffer as the result of conditions in the country of origin without identifying an explicit agent of serious harm. Related to these developments has been the notion of complementary protection under which relief can be conferred where the alien would suffer serious harm upon return to the home state but not for a Convention reason. These approaches have now received approval in the European Union Asylum Qualification Directive so that international protection may now be conferred either because the alien would suffer serious harm on account of the intensity of human rights violations taking place in the country of origin, or those conditions, taken in conjunction with the claimant's personal situation, support a finding that the claimant would be impacted. This paper argues that this latter standard has now been made a part of the customary norm of non-refoulement and that it should be recognized by statute as a basis for non-return and coupled with status where the new standard can be met. Such a measure would help restore the nation's commitment to human rights and humanitarian concerns.

The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by Emily Clark (review)

Reviewed by: The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by Emily Clark Catherine Kerrison (bio) The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. By Emily Clark. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. 279. Cloth, $35.00.) When NBC anchor Brian Williams first visited New Orleans, the cockpit announcement on landing “welcomed . . . passengers to New Orleans by noting that they’d just left the United States” (193). Many attribute New Orleans’s sultry and decidedly exotic ambience to its French and Spanish colonial origins. What Emily Clark shows in her important new book, however, is that excluding the story of New Orleans from that of mainstream America has been a deliberate process, facilitated by the creation, manipulation, and commercialization of a fascinating figure: the mixed-race quadroon woman, whose seductive and wanton character has become synonymous with the city itself. By sequestering New Orleans as the place where the “linked sins of slavery and interracial sex” were committed, the rest of the country conveniently elides its own problematic racial history (194). Quadroons were not always exclusively New Orleanian. In what Clark dubs the “quadroon press war,” which broke out in Philadelphia in the fall of 1807, the squabbling factions of the Democratic Republican Party used the word “quadroon” to smear their opposition, explicitly challenging the legitimacy—indeed, the very humanity—of the other. Philadelphia had a history of contact with the Haitian term, which emerged when Haitian refugees, white and black, poured into the city in the 1790s. But whatever early sympathy Philadelphians may have had for the republicanism of the black Haitian rebels had well and truly vanished by 1807, as the hurling of racial epithets made clear. It was the second wave of Haitian refugees, all of whom headed to New Orleans in 1809, from which the stereotype of the quadroon emerged. Nine thousand strong, the refugees did not disperse over the eastern seaboard as had those of the earlier migration; rather, they overwhelmed the tiny city of ten thousand. At least a third of the migrants were free people of color, doubling the existing population of three thousand already there. Marriage was their preferred family pattern, but for the refugees, that option was defeated by demographics and a lack of wealth. By 1829, Clark calculates, there were 2.2 free women of color to every free man of color. Unable to compete with Creole women better endowed with dowries, refugee women adopted the Dominguan role of ménagère, in which a free woman of color managed a white man’s household and frequently became his life partner. This too was a common family pattern in Saint-Domingue, but refugee women were unable to reproduce this system exactly in America. Instead, [End Page 304] Clark explains, “exigency nudged many of them toward survival strategies that recapitulated the stereotype’s features [of seductive mûlatresse], reinforced its mythology, and transferred [its] primary site” from Saint-Domingue to New Orleans (63). In the process, the stable, contractual role of the ménagère of Saint-Domingue devolved to New Orleans plaçage, a liaison between a white man and a free woman of color that was a lifeline of support for the woman but lasted only until the man found a suitable wife. This practice was, Clark stresses, an “improvisational response of the refugee generation” (100). The problem was that visitors to New Orleans in the 1820s and 1830s, such as Karl Bernhard, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and Harriet Martineau, thought they were observing a long-standing tradition. They knew nothing of the colonial demographics of the city in which it had been a statistical impossibility for everyone to marry within their racial category. They missed the strategies white fathers had pursued to claim paternity of their mixed-race children in sacramental registers, to ensure the proper disposition of inheritances. They missed the 1808 code, forbidding interracial marriages, that the paternal strategies were designed to circumvent. They missed the fact that the norm in the colonial period for free women of color was a long-term relationship with a...

The Haitian Revolution in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes

Faulkner Journal Adam Long The Haitian Revolution in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom; and George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes I n his 2014 study The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radi­ cal Horizons, Conservative Constraints, Philip Kaisary argues that since the 1930s black writers in both the United States and the Caribbean have found that “the recuperation and representation ofthe events of 1791 -1804 offered the opportunity to articulate a narrative ofemancipation in which black agency and universal intent were central” (1-2). For these writers, “one of the major attractions of recuperating the narrative of the Haitian Revolution . . . is that radical reconfigurations of the Haitian Revolution directly undermines the hegemony of the still massively influential cultural and historical body of works where the values ofthe slave society have been romantically condoned or sanitized” (12). On the other hand, for white writers, who remain largely com­ mitted to this hegemony, the Haitian Revolution has remained a silent influ­ ence. Because of this, it sometimes appears in surprising ways. George Wash­ ington Cable sets his novel The Grandissimes in the period ofthe revolution and makes a fugitive slave (an embodiment of the fear that the Revolution created in slave owners in the United States) central to the novel’s plot. Similarly, the narrators ofWilliam Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! create a Creole past, tied to the Haitian Revolution, for the character Charles Bon. Though both Cable and Faulkner include Haiti in important ways, they do so for different purposes. While Cable is able to use the Haitian Revolution to re-imagine the Creole and make assimilation possible, Faulkner’s narrators, particularly Quentin Comp­ son, remain incapable of accepting such assimilation. Though both Faulkner and Cable use Haiti as a narrative trope, like other Southern writers, they erase large elements of the actual history, turning Haiti into a literary landscape on which they can write their own narratives of as­ similation. As Edward E. Baptist notes, “Haiti’s relationship to US History re­ mains . . . invisible in American discussions of the Carribean nation’s” history (16). The actual history ofthe Haitian Revolution, when not erased, is strongly tied to the history of the United States. Not only did the Revolution happen geographically near the American South, there was also tremendous cultural exchange between displaced Haitians and Southerners. Nathalie Dessens cites the large change in the population of New Orleans as an example: “There is 79 80 Adam Long The Haitian Revolution in Faulkner and Cable no doubt that these ten thousand new arrivals [Haitian refugees] had an enor­ mous influence on a city whose population in 1805 was only eight thousand” (29). This “enabled it to resist much longer the Americanization that followed the Louisiana Purchase” (35). Thus, New Orleans became connected with the Haitian Revolution in the Southern mind, becoming a place of the Other, a place that resists assimilation. Hegemonic US identity has, in turn, attempted to erase this Otherness, to assimilate it. Michael Kreyling summarizes: “We can’t let any thing, any place be the sovereign Other, beyond the hegemonic reach of our modes of knowing, of gridding and ordering both factual and symbolic orders. We always send in the marines, or Fred and Ginger, or a com­ pany of literary and cultural critics” (120-21). In this case, Faulkner and Cable are the cultural critics. Both transform the details of the Haitian Revolution in order to turn the Haitian into a blank slate on which they can examine the dif­ fering narratives of American assimilation. Their narratives of assimilation are explored on an individual level. Nei­ ther Cable nor Faulkner portrays a migration, a mass arrival of Haitian ref­ ugees doubling the population of a US city and thus changing its character. Instead, both authors conceive of a character of mixed race possibly upsetting the hierarchy of two single families, the Grandissimes and the Sutpens. The character ofmixed blood is perceived as a threat to the assimilation ofthe fam­ ily in much the same way that the presence of Haitian refugees is perceived as a threat to the nation. Barbara Ladd argues that the character of mixed race carries “within himself or herself, the repressed history associated with...

The Caring Majority: Building a Coalition Around Domestic Workers' Rights

The Caring Majority: Building a Coalition Around Domestic Workers' Rights

Guantánamo: An American History

Guantánamo: An American History

Humanitarian Adhocracy, Transnational New Apostolic Missions, and Evangelical Anti-Dependency in a Haitian Refugee Camp

This article addresses religious responses to disaster by examining how one network of conservative evangelical Christians reacted to the Haiti earthquake and the humanitarian relief that followed. The charismatic Christian New Apostolic Reformation (or Spiritual Mapping movement) is a transnational network that created the conditions for post-earthquake, internally displaced Haitians to arrive at two positions that might seem contradictory. On one hand, Pentecostal Haitian refugees used the movement’s conservative, right-wing theology to develop a punitive theodicy of the quake as God’s punishment of a sinful nation. On the other hand, rather than resign themselves to victimhood and passivity, their strict moralism allowed these evangelical refugees to formulate an uncompromising critique of the Haitian government, the United Nations peacekeeping mission, and foreign humanitarian relief. They rejected material humanitarian aid when possible and developed a stance of Christian self-sufficiency, anti-foreign-aid, and anti-dependency. They accepted visits only from American missionaries with “spiritual,” and not material, missions, and they launched their own missions to parts of Haiti unaffected by the quake.

In liberty's shadow: the discourse of refugees and asylum seekers in critical race theory and immigration law/politics

This article addresses the potential that a kind of engaged research can have in current battles for social justice and in the transformation of college curricula as a way to recover the original critical spirit of ethnic studies. Building on critical race theory, I discuss the work of NGOs such as Human Rights First and Americans for Immigrant Justice on behalf of Haitian refugees and the role of literature in inspiring human rights actions that might redefine practices of citizenship and belonging. At a time when the United States recognises the rights of refugees but criminalises the search for asylum, coalition building between ethnic studies discourse, the legal academy and the community is vital to affirm and protect the internationally recognised rights of refugees. Crucial in this process is the role played by stories as a way to humanise the often impersonal topic of the immigration debate.

Technologies of Blood

In this article I analyze the gender, racial, sexual, and national ideologies at play in the incarceration and forced sterilization of HIV-positive Haitian refugees at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in the 1990s. Focusing on legal and medical technologies—specifically asylum law and blood medicine—as sites of biopolitical contestation, I examine the process by which these Haitian refugees' blood became the site of international anxieties over legal sovereignty, biopolitics, citizenship, and reproductive rights. This article places the asylum process and the HIV antibody blood test alongside each other as intertwined technologies of confession that seek to parse “good, truthful” desirable bodies from “bad, deceptive” bodies threatening to contaminate the body politic. I argue that penal institutions, military practices, legal frameworks, and medical testing braid together through blood to construct the US nation-state in a transnational frame and in deeply gendered, sexualized, and racialized ways.

Guantánamo: An American History by Jonathan M. Hansen (review)

Reviewed by: Guantánamo: An American History by Jonathan M. Hansen Daniel R. Miller Guantánamo: An American History. By Jonathan M. Hansen. New York: Hill and Wang. 2011. Guantánamo might seem narrow as a topic of study, but the author places it in broader contexts, which it also serves to illuminate. Geological prehistory, personal stories of women, workers, racial minorities, political and military developments, continental diplomacy, and constitutional issues all figure in the story. The overriding theme is the tragic incompatibility of liberty, the announced aim of U.S. policy, with its true objective: imperial control. Hansen depicts Guantánamo Bay as a stage on which America’s (and before that Spain and Britain’s) imperial ambitions played out. He makes frequent allusions to the wider Caribbean setting that defined Guantánamo’s strategic value for American policy makers long before it came under U.S. control. Hansen recounts little-known but fascinating episodes such as the British-led occupation of the bay during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, an episode in which hundreds of North American colonists participated, and he provides welcome detail on familiar ones such as the tense negotiations between the U.S. government and delegates to the Cuban Constitutional Convention over the terms of Cuba’s independence. Hansen makes effective use of social history to personalize the story of imperialism. He notes that in its heyday, Guantánamo was touted as an idealized American town, “the ultimate gated community,” but it was a town that enforced racial discrimination (236). Moreover it could not escape the fact that it was a military base in the tropics. Navy wives suffered from tedium when the fleet was away and from excessive male attention when it returned. U.S. labor laws did not apply to Cuban or Jamaican workers on the base while prostitution and other vices illegal in the U.S. flourished just outside. Sometimes Hansen seems excessive in his condemnation of the U.S.—he gives too little credit to turn-of-the-century anti-imperialists, and his claim that Fidel Castro sought good relations with the U.S. until he was rebuffed in the spring of 1959 seems naïve. On the other hand, he cites evidence that the U.S. War Department wanted to prolong the Cuban insurrection of the 1890s in the cynical hope that “the extermination” of both sides would facilitate the island’s annexation. And it is dispiriting to learn that the Kennedy administration contemplated manufacturing an “incident” at Guantánamo to justify an invasion of the island by U.S. troops. Hansen’s last two chapters detail the horrific treatment of Haitian refugees and military detainees of “The War on Terror,” practices that were facilitated by Guantánamo’s status as an [End Page 90] imperial enclave. They make for painful but salutary reading and go far to vindicate the author’s thesis. Some minor issues mar this otherwise excellent book. It is silent on Guantánamo’s role in U.S. imperial adventures in the early twentieth century. Additional maps would have been helpful in places such as the detailed account of the arrival of U.S. forces in 1898. A bibliography would also have been useful. Finally, the text would benefit from more careful copy editing (e.g., “U.S. military planners expected to begin the war not [in Cuba, but in?] in Puerto Rico” on page 86 and “flout” for flaunt on page 190). Daniel R. Miller Calvin College Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association

Carceral Quarantine at Guantánamo

This article examines the case of nearly 300 HIV-positive Haitian refugees the US state indefinitely detained on its Guantánamo naval base from 1991 to 1994. It argues that the predicament of these refugees emerged out of a nexus of historical threads that became entangled at Guantánamo, including the US state's near absolute exclusion of Haitian refugees, the legacy of antiblack and anti-Haitian racism, the discourses of disease that were linked to Haitian bodies, and the history of US (neo)imperial interests in the Caribbean. Its analysis centers on legal discourses and key federal court cases leading to US anti-Haitian refugee policies, including Haitian Refugee Center v. Civiletti (1980) and Haitian Centers Council v. Sale (1993), while examining the history of Haiti's political economy and relation to the United States, as well as discourses of race, nation, and contagion as they relate to Haitian migrants.

“The Fish Trusts the Water, and It Is in the Water That It Is Cooked”

This article analyzes the origins of the Krome detention center, an immigration prison that has its genesis in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1980 Mariel boatlift. I argue that the history of Krome maps the transformation of a single site from a Cold War nuclear launching pad to an ad hoc refugee camp to an institutionalized immigration detention center, or more precisely a jail. This site's transformation underscores a Cold War shift from fear of a Caribbean-based nuclear attack to fear of an invasion of undocumented and undesirable Caribbean migrants. In addition, this paper explores the forgotten experiment of removing and detaining Haitian refugees on an isolated military base in Puerto Rico, as an alternate location to Krome. In this vein, Krome's history maps military and migratory circuits between the United States and the Caribbean, and it underscores a longue durée of US militarism and colonialism in the Caribbean.

The plight of Haitian refugees in the Dominican Republic: Physical/psychosocial consequences

Haitians are the largest minority living in Dominican Republic. These destitute people escaped the deprivations and disasters of their home country only to face other more tyrannical situations at asylums in the Dominican Republic. This manuscript focuses on the health consequences facing Haitians living on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. Their plight is a humanitarian crisis that requires the joint efforts of the international community and the local governments. Key words: Haitians, Dominican Republic, asylum, health, humanitarian crisis.

Haiti, Insecurity, and the Politics of Asylum

In this article, I seek to show how states of insecurity provoked by ongoing social, economic, and political ruptures in Haiti can disorder individual subjectivity and generate the flight of individuals seeking asylum within and across borders. Nongovernmental actors working in Haiti and with Haitians in the diaspora frequently managed the long-term psychosocial effects of insecurity. Their interventions can range from repressive to compassionate and influence the formation of identity and the embodied experiences of trauma for vulnerable Haitians. The case of a young Haitian refugee who was repatriated to Haiti from the United States in the 1990s demonstrates how insecurity is both an existential state reflecting the disordering of embodied experience, as well as a collective sociopolitical condition the effects of which cannot be managed or contained within national borders. The case is emblematic of the plight of thousands of Haitians affected by the January 12, 2010, earthquake.

Air Mobilities on the U.S.–Caribbean Border: Open Skies and Closed Gates

The convergence of intensive human mobilities, offshore financial flows, and new forms of border surveillance make the Caribbean a crucial region in which to study how emerging forms of electronic data, mobile communication, and information flow are respatializing borders. The growth of tourism, the opening of free trade zones, and the expansion of transmigration between the United States and the Caribbean are one side of the picture of mobility in the region. On the other side, we find a grimmer panorama: the ongoing Cuban trade embargo, the problems of drug and gun smuggling, illegal immigration, and the continuing deaths of Haitian refugees at sea. In this article the author presents a preliminary model for understanding the contested mobility regimes along the U.S.–Caribbean “Third Border,” envisioned as an uneven and multifaceted space of connectivity and barriers that is currently undergoing complex transformations, both material and rhetorical. It draws on empirical examples and photographs of recent travel to Haiti, in particular, to highlight some of the disparities in Caribbean travel. The analysis shows how the Caribbean region is currently undergoing reconfigurations of territory, sovereignty, and material infrastructure that are informed by rhetorics of “open skies” and open trade (liberalization) which claim to increase mobility, but are in fact associated with material practices of border securitization and increased immobility, including refugee interception, migrant detention, and the militarization of air space.

The Haitian Revolution, Black Petitioners and Refugee Widows in Maryland, 1796–1820

South. But slavery and freedom coexisted throughout the United States in uneasy competition. In Maryland, lawmakers constantly grappled with and attempted to maintain a delicate balance between slavery and freedom.2 Because of this, African Americans were interconnected into a variety of labor relations: family members could be held in perpetual lifetime slavery, others could be held in term servitude as indentured servants or as term slaves, and still others could be free wage workers. Masters could benefit from the array of workers available to them, especially since the wealthier planters owned farms and plantations in the countryside and in the city. Planters could hire workers during harvest or could release work ers during slack seasons as needed. African Americans moved throughout Maryland as these planters used workers to fulfill their need for laborers on their various farms. Sometimes masters would emancipate their slaves after time served because of liberatory fervor or because they earned it. Sometimes too, because of the laws, African Americans could find a rem edy for their enslavement in court. Their success in court depended on how Maryland legislators wanted to define the state nationally, as slave or free, during that time period.

Testifying to Rightlessness

This essay is a cultural analysis of the legal testimony given in Haitian Centers Council v. Sale (HCC III), a federal lawsuit brought against the U.S. state on behalf of nearly 300 HIV-positive Haitian refugees imprisoned in a United States–operated refugee camp at Guantánamo Bay from 1991 to 1994. By reading this legal archive as both storytelling and truth-telling, it examines how the refugees speak to their experiences of persecution and of their lives inside the Guantánamo camp to illuminate what it means to have their rights and humanity stripped by their supposed guardians. These Haitian refugees inhabited both literal and discursive “zones of exclusion” that they had to negotiate in order to communicate their stories and have their claims for recognition as full persons heard and taken seriously. The essay opens by examining the historical, political, and economic context in which these refugees were situated to uncover how their rightlessness was produced and how these historical conditions established the terms of their demands for recognition. It then explores how the legal frame shaped the limits and opportunities mediating the refugees' testifying acts and moves to the testimonies themselves, outlining my method and highlighting prominent themes. It concludes by focusing on the testimonies that spoke to the hunger strike through which the refugees verbally and physically communicated their demands to be released from camp and have their full humanity recognized.

The middle passages of black migration

In characterizing the desperate journeys undertaken by African and Haitian refugees as today's “middle passages,” Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Edwidge Danticat's “Children of the Sea” complicate the idea of a single origin to a transatlantic black Diaspora. If, during an era of black power and nation building, the middle passage signified a fundamental connection with Africa, the term is more recently used to describe multiple crossings that transform the meaning of Diaspora into a vital and ongoing process. These crossings do not coalesce into a single narrative of black migration in which the trauma of slavery has been overcome. Rather, the temporal simultaneity of past and present suggests a narrative of history as repetition. Both works of fiction transform received images from a slave past in order to critique the present treatment of black asylum seekers. A Distant Shore deploys the stalled temporality of the middle passage for staging the impossibility of diasporic community in post 9/11 Britain. However, even as this novel redraws the oceanic map of the transatlantic slave trade to include continental Europe and Great Britain, Africa exists outside of that imperial history and geography. “Children of the Sea” uses the simultaneity of past and present and the symbolic value of the middle passage as a space of death to critique an oppressive Haitian regime and the treatment of Haitian boat people by their Caribbean and American neighbors. It also interrupts a stalled temporality with the prophetic time of vodou beliefs for shifting the meaning of the middle passage from death to life in a Haitian Diaspora that stretches across the Caribbean Sea.