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 DOI: 10.1177/0921374014527920

published online 15 April 2014Cultural DynamicsApril Shemak

in post-earthquake HaitiThe cartographic dimensions of humanitarianism: Mapping refugee spaces

  

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The cartographic dimensions of humanitarianism: Mapping refugee spaces in post-earthquake Haiti

April ShemakSam Houston State University, USA

AbstractThis article examines the post-earthquake politics of space via the literal and cultural mapping of internally displaced persons in Haiti to consider the cartographic dimensions of humanitarian biopower. I begin by analyzing OpenStreetMap Haiti, an online collaborative cartographic project, which mapped Haiti’s roads and refugee camps after the earthquake by using high-resolution satellite imagery, global positioning system technologies, and aerial photographs—much of which is derived from US military data—in order to facilitate “humanitarian” efforts on the ground. I contend that the visual text produced by OpenStreetMap Haiti, which functions as a map to locate and situate refugees, represents a particular form of humanitarian biopower. In the second half of this article, I analyze a 2012 work of comics journalism titled Tents beyond Tents, which offers a critique of humanitarian “aid” from the perspective of Haitians who occupy the internally displaced persons camps created after the earthquake. I consider how the comic functions as a cartographic project, or cartoon mapping, through depictions of the spaces of the refugee camps in and around Port-au-Prince.

Keywordscartography, comics journalism, Haiti, humanitarianism, refugees

The government can name streets if it wants to, but people have their own way of establishing landmarks. A church, an empty house, a park, a public building, a stadium, a

cemetery—anything can be a landmark. People invent their own personal map of the city. … To the landscape of this crumbled city, people have added elements of the old one still present in their memory. For the population whose minds are always in ferment, things

accumulate instead of disappearing. We’ll have to wait for a generation who never knew the old city and who will be willing to accept a new map.

Dany Laferrière, The World is Moving around Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake

Corresponding author:April Shemak, Department of English, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 77341, USA.Email: aas004@shsu.edu

527920 CDY0010.1177/0921374014527920Cultural DynamicsShemakresearch-article2014

Article

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2 Cultural Dynamics

Immediately following the January 2010 Haitian earthquake, the spaces that hundreds of thousands of displaced Haitians did and did not occupy were of central concern to the Haitian government, non-governmental organizations, and US military, political, and economic interests as evidenced by the military’s efforts to preclude Haitians from seeking asylum in the United States, the management of refugee camps in Haiti as part of the “humanitarian” effort, and the continued deportation of Haitian asylum seekers from the United States. This article examines the post-earthquake politics of space via the literal and cultural mapping of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Haiti to con-sider the cartographic dimensions of humanitarian biopower. I analyze the politics of mapping and humanitarianism in two visual representations of post-earthquake Haiti. The first is OpenStreetMap Haiti (OSM Haiti), an online collaborative cartographic project, which mapped Haiti’s roads and refugee camps using high-resolution satellite imagery, global positioning system (GPS) technologies, and aerial photographs—much of which is derived from US military data—in order to facilitate “humanitarian” efforts on the ground. I contend that the visual text produced by OSM Haiti, which functions as a map to locate and situate refugees, represents a particular form of humanitarian biopower as the discourse surrounding the project configures Haiti as a tabula rasa requiring enlightened, technological “First World” interpretation. Given the powerful properties of digital mapping, it is necessary to consider the social, politi-cal, and cultural effects of the maps produced and the significance of casting these spatial practices as humanitarian. As J.B. Harley (2001) writes, “Our task is to search for the social forces that have structured cartography and to locate the presence of power—and its effects—in all map knowledge” (p. 152). Maps structure the world in particular ways by delimiting space and assigning these spaces a particular meaning; they are “textual practices that weave together power and social relations” (Wainwright and Bryan, 2009: 170).

Cartography has historically been deployed on behalf of states and empires as a means of exerting institutional power over space. European colonialism in particular played a central role in the development of cartography as a science. Graham Huggan (2008) observes,

The exemplary role of cartography in the demonstration of colonial discursive practices can be identified in a series of key rhetorical strategies implemented in the production of the map, such as the reinscription, enclosure and hierarchization of space, which provide an analogue for the acquisition, management and reinforcement of colonial power. (p. 21)

OSM, which originated in England in 2004, is part of a relatively new form of online cartography, and represents the impact of globalization on visual technologies (and vice versa), which have contributed to the idea of “Earth without borders” and “the notion of global or planetary unity” (Kurgan, 2013: 9). I will situate OSM Haiti within historical context of the colonial mapping of Haiti, particularly that done during the early-20th-century US occupation. In doing so, I hope to peel back some of the seductive power of digital “one world” humanitarian mapping discourses to read beyond their scientific, empirical epistemologies and examine their rhetorical nature as well as the politics of the discourse surrounding the project. As Harley (2001) asserts, “all maps are rhetorical texts” and “state an argument about the world” (p. 163).

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In the second half of this article, I analyze a 2012 work of comics journalism titled Tents beyond Tents, which offers a critique of humanitarian “aid” from the perspective of Haitians who occupy the IDP camps created after the earthquake (Pharès Jérôme and Pierre, 2012).1 I consider how the comics function as a cartographic project, or cartoon mapping, through depictions of the spaces of the refugee camps in and around Port-au-Prince. Comics and cartography have more in common than what may initially be appar-ent. Comics are made up of the individual frames/panels of cartoon sketches. “Cartoon” and “cartography” share the etymological Latin root “carta,” which means “card,” but also carries the connotation of “map” and “chart.” The “graphy” of “cartography” con-notes the Greek word “graphein” for “to draw.” Hillary Chute (2008) explains “Cartoon comes from the Italian word cartone, meaning cardboard, and denotes a drawing for a picture or design intended historically to be transferred to tapestries or to frescoes” (p. 454). Furthermore, the artistry of cartooning is not unrelated to early cartographic representations, which often relied upon illustrations to convey a sense of place; European Medieval maps (mappae mundi) often included elaborate illustrations of spiritual, myth-ological, and other cultural elements in addition to topographical details (Thieme, 2012: 153–154). Comics also present visual reproductions of space. As Scott Mcloud asserts, “[c]omics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments” (quoted in Chute, 2008: 455).

I consider how Tents beyond Tents functions as an alternative cartography for map-ping Haitian space post-earthquake by foregrounding the lived experiences of people in the tents and the politics of humanitarianism. As Hillary Chute (2011) articulates, “Because of its spatial conventions, comics is able to map a life, not only figuratively but literally. It can diagram a life on a page” (p. 109). With their visual elements, comics provide a specific perspective through which to see this world so that the language and visuals in Tents beyond Tents work in conjunction to create an explicitly subjective car-tography. With the use of testimonies, Tents beyond Tents thus serves as an archive to record the stories of displaced Haitians, so that it carries a historical and cultural signifi-cance that reaches beyond the present moment to “spatialize memory” (Chute, 2011: 108). Yet, one must also keep in mind that the author and cartoonist make selections of what to include in the archive and how to portray it to the world. Unlike the grid system of a conventional cartographic map, which divides the earth into symmetrical parts of north and south, east and west, the panels of comics produce asymmetry, something which is visually suggestive of the uncertainty of the lives of displaced Haitians and camp spaces. I thus consider how Tents beyond Tents offers an alternative way to map the precarious and unpredictable realities of displaced Haitians, in ways not afforded by the hyper-rationalization of space that OSM promotes through its emphasis on “precision” and “accuracy.” While I do not want to suggest that Tents beyond Tents carries the power to change humanitarian configurations of Haitian space, its spatial politics is revealing of the humanitarian biopower that propels OSM.

Mapping Haiti

When Christopher Columbus christened one of his first landing sites in the New World “Hispaniola,” he initiated the European orientation of space on the island and

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throughout the hemisphere, although he was himself dis-oriented, believing that he had arrived in Asia. Spanish cartographer Juan de la Cosa, who traveled with Columbus on his voyages, is credited with creating the first official Western map of the Antilles (Alvarez, 2003). De la Cosa’s map included Hispaniola, and it represents how European territorial claims became visually charted on paper. Once under French colonial rule, Saint Domingue played a significant role in the development of French scientific practices including cartography, especially naval cartography. As James McClellan (2010) observes, “Every expedition to Saint Domingue …. had a carto-graphical component designed to collect information for improving maps, and the desire for better maps likewise motivated the work undertaken in the colony concern-ing longitude and the chronometer” (p. 124).

With the success of the Haitian Revolution in overthrowing the French colonizers in 1804, the new leaders renamed the western portion of the island “Hayti”, an indig-enous word for “mountainous land” (McClellan, 2010: 15) as they wrested material and symbolic territory from European control.2 Haiti has subsequently undergone numerous struggles over space that reflect tensions between large landowners, peas-ants, the US military, nationalists, dictators, and neoliberal strategists. Who uses the land and how it is navigated has been of central concern for Haitian society. For exam-ple, the land tenure system in Haiti operates through an informal title system that dates back to the division of former French colonial plantations; the country does not have a systematized comprehensive cadastre to define property (Lundahl, 2012). After the Haitian Revolution when the plantation system was dismantled, parcels of land were distributed under President Pétion, and Haitians claimed plots of land for themselves for small-scale farming. The economy was transformed as agriculture was no longer aimed at monocultural crop production for export, and the focus shifted to local mar-kets and subsistence farming (Mintz, 2010: 112). An extensive market system devel-oped. Coffee replaced sugar as the crop for export since it suited the small-scale production (Mintz, 2010: 115). While some crops are produced for sale in local mar-kets and export, Sidney Mintz notes that land use has been marked by “conservative” agricultural practices intent on farming for subsistence rather than large-scale produc-tion of crops (Mintz, 1989 [1974]: 274).

Laurent Dubois explains the lakou (courtyard) system of rural Haiti in the 19th cen-tury developed out of the agricultural and economic changes following independence. The lakou was an egalitarian land arrangement, which exists external to the state govern-ment. Lakou refers to the assembly of houses around a courtyard shared by members of an extended family; it created its own system of land rights:

In many communities great care was given to the placement of boundaries—often “living fences” made out of cactus, … The means of access to and from properties also required careful discussion, many communities settling on a network of small paths with few large common roads. (Dubois, 2012: 111)3

Yet, the peasantry has also been subject to the power of the elite who, aligned with the state, “live by controlling and taxing the rural masses, and find their sustenance and their power in rural productivity” (Mintz, 1989 [1974]: 271). Elites have typically lived in the

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urban center, separated spatially and politically from the population of the rural country-side (Nicholls, 1996: 71).

Well before the 2010 earthquake, a complex aid apparatus consisting of hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) intervened into and reoriented Haitian space through various projects and practices. Perhaps the most powerful symbols of NGO mobility and the reordering of space are the expensive sport utility vehicles used by many aid workers to traverse the country, signaling a disconnect between the impover-ished recipients of aid and the large budgets of aid organizations. Erica James (2010) explains the ways in which such organizations commodify suffering as a means of legiti-mizing themselves and gaining funding (p. 32). She writes of the bureaucratic and scien-tific “technologies of trauma” (medicine, psychiatry, and law) deployed by such organizations to “diagnose and authenticate” the suffering of “viktim” of trauma. These practices, which are intended to aid the suffering of the “viktim,” also result in a kind of othering of Haitians that reproduces asymmetries of power between the aid apparatus and “viktim.” What James carefully and eloquently lays out in her study are the ethical dilemmas that often arise when outside interveners bring “aid” to “suffering” Haitians. Indeed, in the years since the earthquake, there have been increasing criticisms of NGOs and the fact that a large portion of the money pledged for relief efforts has not been deliv-ered to Haitians (Katz, 2013a, The Big Truck that Went By).4 I mention the ethical debates surrounding NGOs in Haiti to provide some context for considering the impact of humanitarian aid on Haiti as I move into an analysis of OSM Haiti in the next section.

New cartographers

The field of cartography has undergone dramatic changes in the last decade with the widespread availability of Geographic Informational System (GIS) digital technologies (Crampton, 2010). One of the major developments was the 2005 release of Google Earth, an interactive virtual globe, which allows anyone with internet capabilities to “zoom in” and view locations throughout the world. One result of this rapidly increasing digitiza-tion of map data is that professionally trained cartographers, working on behalf of uni-versities, state institutions, and other official bodies, no longer hold complete control over mapmaking. Amateur users now have the tools to create maps that can be made available on the internet (Goodchild, 2007; Hodson, 2013). OSM is one such platform that uses volunteer mappers to “create a free and open map of the entire world, built entirely by volunteers surveying with GPS, digitizing aerial imagery, and collecting and liberating existing public sources of geographic data” (http://hot.OSM.org/about). As a wiki, it operates in the same manner as Wikipedia, with anyone allowed to contribute, and periodic review of the accuracy of edits.

The development of volunteer mapping has created great controversy within the fields of geography and cartography, with some scholars and practitioners seeing it as the “democratization” of cartography while other scholars remain wary of the kind of knowl-edge produced through volunteer-created digital maps, whether this information is cred-ible, and how it is used. Matthew Sparke (2011) argues that “cartographic ‘democratisation’ is only beneficial for a privileged few who can buy into the new market-mediated sur-veillance system” (p. 387), and asserts, “it would be naïve to ignore the ways in which

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pre-existing asymmetries in access to the Internet and computer technologies will go on skewing the distribution of benefits and costs of Web 2.0 map making” (p. 388). This is especially relevant to Haiti, where access to computer technology is limited.

Yet some advocates see volunteer mapping as a powerful tool for social activism and human rights work, which has contributed to the development of “crisis-mapping,” whereby volunteers use amateur mapping platforms such as OSM, Google Map Makers, and Ushahidi to map areas designated to be in crisis due to political unrest or natural disasters (Anderson, 2008). Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) serves as one such forum that “acts as a bridge between the traditional Humanitarian Responders and the OSM Community” (http://hot.OSM.org/about). As of this writing, HOT has mapping projects in Haiti, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Somalia, and Senegal. As appealing as it might be to see open source mapping platforms as offering a “transparent” view of the world, the part-nerships between such organizations and military, state and international agencies requires “mapping” these maps, tracing the links between volunteers and governments, aid agencies and militaries to analyze how the crisis-mapping cartographic gaze can potentially become a tool mired in neoliberal imperialistic structures.

Almost immediately, the 2010 Haitian earthquake became a crisis-mapping project for OSM to map roads and refugee/IDP camps. With the arrival of humanitarian organi-zations following the Haitian earthquake came the need of aid workers to navigate the often-unfamiliar spaces of Port-au-Prince and other affected areas and locate refugee camps, hospitals, and other services. As Andrew Turner, an OSM contributor working from his home in Arlington, Virginia, put it, “There was no road data on the ground. No one had any maps and so in terms of being able to respond and understand where roads and infrastructure were, there just was no data” (quoted in Boyd, 2010). These remarks suggest that Haiti was a blank space, a cartographic text yet to be written. The statement parallels colonial attitudes towards space, which Graham Huggan (1994) explains,

In fostering the notion of socially empty space, the blank map was fully exploited by colonisers of the new, “virgin” lands; blank maps proved equally valuable to the commercial and geopolitical agents of imperialism in countries such as Africa and India, which, altogether densely populated, could be impersonally refashioned for the purposes of political control and economic gain. (p. 9)

New digitized cartography systems like OSM can perpetuate such colonial notions by continuing to equate the perception of blank space and the absence of a technological imprint as evidence of “Third World” inferiority. The quest for “accuracy” in charting Haitian space reflects how science naturalizes the biases inherent in any mapmaking and perpetuates the notion that the map is merely an “accurate” reflection of reality. ITO World, an online company that creates visualizations of transportation systems, describes OSM Haiti’s mapping authority:

during this crisis a remarkable story unfolded; of how people around the world could virtually collaborate and contribute to the on-the-ground operations … to produce the most authoritative map of Haiti in existence … Within hours of the event people were adding detail to the map, [after high resolution satellite imagery of Haiti was made freely available] were able to trace

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roads, damaged buildings, and enter camps of displaced people into OSM. (ito world blog, 2010, author’s emphasis)

The implication is that, essentially, anyone with a computer anywhere in the world could become an aid worker and assist in creating a superior map of Haiti, without having to leave the comfort of his or her home.

The use of computer software programs that rely on GPS information has created the notion that spaces can be mapped to the minutest degree and the knowledge derived in doing so opens the world up to more efficient functioning. Yet this emphasis on accuracy is also about who has the power of the gaze that esteems this form of scientific, empirical order. As Harley (2001) contends,

Accuracy and austerity of design are now the new talismans of authority culminating in our own age with computer mapping. We can trace this process very clearly in the history of Enlightenment mapping in Europe. The topography as shown in maps, increasingly detailed and planimetrically accurate, has become a metaphor for utilitarian philosophy and its will to power. (p. 162)

As much as OSM Haiti emphasizes “objective” empirical accuracy of its map, its work is also embedded within a powerful subjective visual narrative of humanitarian altruism that disavows Haitian subjectivity. ITO World, which explains its work as “cre-ating a narrative around transport,” produced an online video that visualizes the edits made to the OSM Haiti, where, within 30 seconds, a darkened “unmapped” Haiti of 9 January 2010 before the earthquake is transformed to an illuminated, mapped Haiti of the end of January 2010. Christopher Osborne (2010), of ITO World, explains,

Figure 1. Screenshot of ITO visualization of OSM Haiti.OSM: OpenStreetMap.

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In the video, each flash represents a new edit into OSM, and this visualisation is a vivid picture of how much work was contributed by volunteers, following the quake. First the primary and secondary roads (green and red) are added and then smaller residential streets and then many other features such as the blue glowing camps of displaced people that emerge.

What is notable about Osborne’s remarks is that not only does he describe the map as a representation of Haiti, but it is also a map of the accumulation of cyber “humanitarian” work.

With its visualization of time accelerated, the narrative produced for OSM Haiti is that of a spectacular light show, where Haiti becomes illuminated from darkness and as such, it suggests the transparent management of space.5 Such a portrayal perpetuates rac-ist perceptions that have long plagued Haiti. Yet OSM Project Haiti has been held up as a triumph of the marriage between technology and humanitarianism, an endeavor that supposedly facilitates Haiti’s entrance into modernity. Leonard Doyle from the International Organization for Migration, which now oversees OSM Haiti, explains that they are “training ordinary volunteers including community mobilizers—how to make a map, how to give a voice to community that perhaps has never really seen itself before” (author’s emphasis).6 Doyle’s remarks reflect what Gayatri Spivak (1985) has described as colonial “worlding”: “the necessary yet contradictory assumption of an uninscribed earth which is the condition of possibility of the worlding of a world generates the force to make the ‘native’ see himself as ‘other’” (p. 254). Doyle’s remarks reveal how the OSM map is imbued with a kind of agency to act as witness. A prominent theme of dis-courses surrounding crisis-mapping entities such as OSM, Google Map Maker, and Ushahidi is how maps serve as visual witnesses to humanitarian crises, and are thus aimed at “raising awareness” of their viewers, an idea that relies upon notions that visi-bility equals truth.7

It is important to consider how this new technology is changing how we view disaster, crisis, and the Third World. While OSM, Ushahidi, and Google tout themselves as hav-ing an impact on humanitarian efforts in the world, as Lisa Parks notes, it is necessary to consider how “humanitarianism is intertwined with digital and disaster capitalism” (Parks, 2009: 535). What are the connections between global humanitarianism, global capitalism, and how the globe is represented in the virtual realm of cyberspace?

OSM Haiti uses DigitalGlobe and GeoEye for tracing geographic information, along with “old CIA maps from the 1940s that volunteers used to trace streets and buildings in the damaged areas.”8 In her book Close Up at a Distance, Laura Kurgan (2013) notes that “DigitalGlobe and GeoEye [are] both major contractors for the US government in the development and deployment of high resolution satellite images” (p. 31). Maps are interpretations of information, and even what may appear to be self-evident with the “global” view of Google Earth and the locational capabilities of GPS, which are seem-ingly capable of pinpointing precise locations, the information must also be interpreted to build a map. But “what is at issue [with satellite imagery] is interpretation, other inter-pretations are possible” (p. 31). Thus, I am interested in both the map created from OSM Haiti and the kinds of interpretations surrounding this cartography because as Kurgan (2013) writes, “we too often see [maps] simply as representations and descriptions of space” (p. 16). In ordering information and space for us, maps also exhibit a “tyranny of

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orientation” (p. 17) that, among other things, erases those subjectivities that are also central to interpreting a space.

On the surface, OSM Haiti appears to facilitate a kind of democratic process that steps outside of the boundaries of official mapmaking, producing what Joe Gerlach refers to as “vernacular mapping.” While OSM Haiti may have been an effective tool for some aid workers, and it may appear as though the routes of OSM’s humanitarian mapping can only lead to positive outcomes where humanitarian aid reaches its destination, mapping is never a neutral act, but is a discourse imbued with social and political interests. As Gerlach (2010) writes, “With OSM, what is at stake is the map itself and the question of who gen-erates, owns, and takes care of our geographic abstractions”. For, if the map produced by OSM can be used by “humanitarian” aid workers, it can also be used by US and United Nations (UN) military forces (in the name of “humanitarianism”) who continue to reroute refugees, or by economic players interested in establishing free trade zones. The narrative surrounding OSM’s humanitarian mapping is, to use the words of Karen Piper (2002), a “cartographic fiction,” cleansed of the kinds of forces that control the movements and routes of Haitians following the earthquake, for while OSM may have produced a “defini-tive” map of Haiti, routes to aid have continually been blocked, in part, by bureaucracy and the US military. There is a disconnect between the discourse of cartographic transpar-ency put forth by OSM and the flows of aid that have continually been hindered by break-downs in communication, ill-conceived aid projects, and so on.

Mapping economic development: free spaces?

OSM has been embraced by some Haitians who have been trained in the mapping tech-nology. In the days following the earthquake, Haitians in the diaspora participated by translating Krèyol SMS messages, which was obviously a vital part of the effort. Since then, OSM has worked on training and establishing a locally based offshoot, Comunité OpenStreetMap de Haiti (COSMHA). One Haitian participant declared, “Ce projet peut vraiment contribuer a notre développement” (“This project can truly contribute to our development”:9 http://cosmha.wordpress.com). Yet, as OSM Haiti has extended its reach beyond that of the immediate needs of the rescue efforts, there are concerns as to what all of the data collected might lead to. Amy Wilentz (2013) has a more ominous view of what is happening when young Haitians are trained by OSM to map their country:

These bright young mappers are, … cheerfully doing the detail work of Big Brother,or at least of MINUSTAH or some future Tonton Macoute-style police … it’s OpenStreetMap’s innocent army, a battalion of smart Haitians rushing around Haiti with notebooks and cameras, going about their task with, I believe, the best will in the world. (p. 130)

In the time since the initial earthquake relief crisis-mapping effort, OSM has expanded its focus in Haiti to include assisting in the country’s economic development by linking with neoliberal enterprises, which have a long history of exploiting Haiti for cheap labor, minimal taxes, and few labor laws. As its ties to neoliberal enterprises strengthen, the “open map” of OSM contributes to restricting and closing off spaces for some Haitians as seen in its most recent project in Haiti, now under the direction of its humanitarian

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offshoot HOT. According to its website, the project partnered with a US Agency for International Development (USAID) project Haitian Recovery Initiative (HRI):

HRI was interested in partnering with HOT around a pilot project which would improve the baseline data in the territory of the Commune of Saint-Marc and create mapping capacities within the Saint-Marc Development Corridor (SMDC): a group of mappers agile in using the techniques, technologies, and training approaches of the OSM project (http://hot.osm.org/projects/field_mapping_in_saint_marc_haiti_0).

Another project, CAP103, is funded by USAID to map areas in the north of Haiti in the Cap Haitian Development Corridor (CHDC):10 “Since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, meanwhile, HOT mappers have taken to dirt bikes with GPS units mounted on the handle-bars, to map the footpaths and byways of remote towns and villages.” The main project of the CHDC is the Caracol Industrial Park, aimed at providing jobs in the north of the coun-try with the main factory owned by a Korean textile company Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd, which has a track record of labor disputes and low wages at its factories in other countries. The construction of the park also displaced hundreds of local farmers from their land (Katz, 2013b, “A glittering industrial park”).11 In what ways does the mapping of HOT contribute to the accumulation and organization of territory for the consolidation of eco-nomic and political power of foreign interests in Haiti? The marriage between HOT and USAID points to the troubling possibilities for digital crisis-mapping.12

US occupation and Haitian space

As previously stated, the data used by OSM Haiti come largely from the US military and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which have long documented and mapped Haitian space. The early-20th-century US occupation (1915–1934) enacted a state of exception in the coun-try by rewriting Haiti’s constitution to allow foreign interests to own land, and installing a puppet government during which banks were taken over by US interests. The occupation, in fact, had terrible effects on the economy as it increased dependence on exports and exacer-bated the taxes imposed on the peasantry and lower classes (Trouillot, 1990: 102–104). These conditions set the stage for the dependence on foreign (especially US-owned) factories under the Duvalier regime, which relied upon cheap Haitian labor (Trouillot, 1990: 200–201).

One of the major projects of the occupation was the building of roads to facilitate military control over the country. The road-building project entailed the resurrection of the 19th-century corvée system in which peasants were used as forced labor to build roads. In response, the Cacos, a group of peasant fighters from the countryside, fought the military. In his 1982 Atlas critique d’Haïti (“Critical Atlas of Haiti”), the Haitian geographer Georges Anglade (1982), who perished in the earthquake, dedicates the work to Charlemagne Péralte, leader of the Cacos rebellion who was assassinated by US sol-diers, who subsequently put his corpse on display in the town of Hinche in an attempt to quell the rebellion. Anglade refers to Péralte’s “1er prix de Géographie d’Haïti 1901” (first prize in the geography of Haiti in 1901) (p. 9).13 It is not insignificant that Anglade chooses to dedicate his geographic study of Haiti to the leader who fought to gain control over Haitian space during the US occupation.

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In his account of the occupation Cannibal Cousins—a title that evokes sensational-ized notions of Haitian primitivism—US marine, John Houston Craige (1934) wrote of the road-building project:

The Americans had their hands full in the cities and paid little attention to the wild hinterland. Then came the road-building program … . A new road running from the capital to … the heart of the caco territory, was undertaken. Over breathtaking passes it wound its way, through Mirebelaise and Los Cahobas into the domain of the wild men of the hills. For a century this had been unknown country to the Haitians of the coast … Now busy road-building camps were established at frequent intervals commanded by laughing white boys who did not hesitate to stop the most powerful caco chiefs in the trail, confiscate their beloved rifles and send them off to jail for offences against the law. (p. 63)

Craige’s remarks do not reveal the human toll of the war with the Cacos, where the military used concentration camps and torture and an estimated 50,000 peasants died and another 600,000 fled the country (Kaussen, 2008: 34). As part of their attempt to gain military and social control over the country, Mary Renda writes, “Military cartographers literally remapped the country, dividing it into departments, districts, and subdistricts, which could be policed and managed more readily than the nation’s traditional configu-ration” (quoted in Kaussen, 2008: 34). The result of the road-building and remapping was a transformation of how Haitians traveled and occupied space. As Mintz (1989 [1974]) notes, prior to the occupation

the larger coastal towns, such as Jérémie, Jacmel, and St. Marc, were united economically with one another (and to some extent with the capital) by a lively coastwise shipping system, and the inland towns were tributary to those of the coast. (p. 272)

With the changes to the configuration of transportation and inland roads, Port-au-Prince grew as an economic center, rerouting mobility to further the flow of capital to the ben-efit of elites. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1990) notes that “spatial polarization” continued under the Duvalierist state: “The most vivid metaphor for this new spatial organization is the layout of this new national roads system, which skips villages and regional market towns in the name of speed and ‘modernization’” (p. 184).

One of the cultural responses to the occupation’s military mapping came from the Haitian indigeniste poet Phillipe Thoby-Marcelin (2000) in his 1928 poem “L’Atlas a Menti” or “The Atlas Lied”:

Blotter-paper-sky

The airplane is a nasty spot

moving

tracing loop-the-loops

Bouqui weaves a plait of palm fronds

And Roumer studies geography

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12 Cultural Dynamics

Oh Bouqui

spit out the wad of your scorn

Sing a boula

and beat the assótor

and dance the chica

Behind the mountains there are more mountains

EH?

And that’s how

the foreigners make Haiti so

small

with their maps.

Thoby-Marcelin’s poem reflects the imperial power of mapping where the global view from the airplane renders Haiti an insignificant space that is contested through the indi-genist cartography of the folk character Bouqui, who weaves a straw mat producing what Valerie Kaussen (2008) describes as, “an alternative cartography: in interweaving sur-face and depth, it opposes the flattened map of the colonizer” (p. 34). It is not from ink and pen that Bouqui creates this cartography but through the fronds of native palm trees; it can be seen and touched in a way not possible from an airplane. Through the reference to the airplane, the poem speaks to vantage point and space—from where does one see Haiti and what are the limits of vision?

Like Thoby-Marcelin’s anti-imperial poetic cartography, contemporary Haitian writ-ers, both in Haiti and in the diaspora, have challenged the post-earthquake “worlding” of Haiti. In prose that echoes Thoby-Marcelin’s themes, filmmaker Raoul Peck writes of his return flight to Haiti after the earthquake:

On the flight to Haiti organized by the French Foreign Ministry the conversations around me seem bizarre … They have drawn up plans for headquarters, and pore over satellite photos. They pronounce names of places, of districts that are familiar to me, linked to my most intimate memories. For them, these places are the HQs, sites of intervention, impact zones. From time to time, I intervene in a friendly way to correct misunderstandings that could be fatal. (Peck, 2010: 44, author’s emphasis)

Peck’s remarks bring into relief the problems of attempting to remedy Haiti’s problems from outside—in this case—literally from outer space. Moreover, his remarks reveal the alienating discourse of mapping from an international “humanitarian” perspective.

Tents beyond Tents

In light of the immense biopower of the humanitarian aid machinery and the US and UN military that too often relegates refugees to a silent, downtrodden position, I consider

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how Tents beyond Tents produces its own cartography by presenting visual testimonials of life in the camps in Port-au-Prince from the viewpoint of camp dwellers who convey their struggles to secure a space for themselves in Haiti. This is particularly noteworthy since refugees and IDPs are often seen as having no legitimate claims to space. Written by Jean Pharès Jérôme, a reporter for the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste, and illus-trated by Haitian artist Chevelin Pierre, Tents beyond Tents is published in English with a few Krèyol phrases, and thus, speaks (back) to an international audience through its affiliation with the international organization Cartoon Movement, which publishes polit-ical cartoons and comics journalism from around the world on its website.14

Comics journalism is a growing area of journalism that intersects with other non-fiction visual narratives such as Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Maus (1986) about the Holocaust; Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003), a memoir of the Iranian Revolution; and Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993). Comics journalism serves as a kind of extended version of the political cartoon, with text in the form of word bal-loons and captions, and accompanying illustrations. As Hillary Chute (2008) explains, “Comics might be defined as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially” (p. 452). Toni Pressley-Sanon (2011) has examined the ways in which Western journalism and news photographers, claiming objectivity, have perpetuated the othering of Haitians in news coverage after the earthquake. Thus, rather than purport to being “objective” journalism, comics journalism highlights the subjective nature of its topic: “The turn from the assumed truth of the photographic image and also from the detached per-spective and bland rhetoric of traditional journalism toward an emphasis on personal experience and artistic metaphorization challenges the notions of accurate representa-tion” (Vanderbeke, 2010: 75). While not explicitly engaging with OSM Haiti’s map, Tents offers a striking example for comparing the conceptualization of space, humani-tarianism, and witnessing. Although the creators of comics make decisions about how panels are arranged on the page, the results are often non-linear for the reader. Sometimes panels are ordered sequentially to tell a story, at other times, frames work more fluidly and dialectically alongside each other, allowing the reader to form her own understanding.15

Not unlike Thoby-Marcelin’s poem that re-envisions Haitian space through Haitian cultural markers, the title Tents beyond Tents invokes the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains, there are more mountains,” which speaks to the “endless challenges of life.” Here, the proverb is revised as “Tents beyond Tents” to evoke how this spatial metaphor linking struggle to the environment has become adapted to reflect the refugee/displaced person’s space of the camps. It invokes the “extradiegetic space,” which is the “space outside the fictive world of the comic,” and “the material space that surrounds the indi-vidual panels” (Lefèvre, 2009: 160). “Beyond” refers to the endless sea of tents in the camps, and also suggests the stories and testimonies that could not be told in the pages of the comics, but are hovering just outside of its frames.

Through its charting of the spaces of refugee camps, Tents beyond Tents represents a kind of “comics-mapping” that portrays displaced Haitians and the spaces they occupy that contrasts sharply with the biopolitical humanitarian structures that track them. Through its visual and print portrayals of camp life, Tents beyond Tents offers a

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critique of various humanitarian organizations and IDP camp projects. It renders refu-gee spaces through fragments of testimony and illustrations with which readers must engage and take the time to “decode” as “an author’s spatial construction of the page can beg rereadings and deliberately confuse narrative linearity” (Chute, 2008: 460). This provides an alternative to the hyper-velocity of cyber-mapping where with the click of a button, the OSM map is altered. As Chute (2008) writes, with comics, “nar-rative development is delayed, retracked, or rendered recursive by the depth and vol-ume of graphic texture” (p. 460).

Moreover, the artistic components that make up the comics genre serve as tools to create unique spatial arrangements between words and pictures: word bubbles, cap-tions, panels/frames, “tiers”—a series of panels/frames, “gutters”—the blank space in between frames, and “splash”—a frame that takes up at least half a page. Tents beyond Tents makes liberal use of color, which emphasizes that the stories depicted are a part of the ongoing present in Haiti. The comics set visual and print meaning on a symbiotic plane that offers an alternative visual architecture that exists beyond the cartographic authority of longitude and latitude coordinates upon which conventional cartography relies. Through the arrangement of image and text on the page, comics create a differ-ent orientation to space. The cartography that the comics produces accretes with every frame and takes time to unfold. Tents beyond Tents navigates between large panoramic views of barren outdoor spaces as well as lush mountainous landscapes, the close prox-imity of tents in the camps, and the confined interior spaces of the tents.

Tents beyond Tents was published on the second anniversary of the earthquake on the website Cartoon Movement, and in the New Internationalist and the Boston Haitian Reporter. It represents a transnational text that portrays the new geographies of Haitian space that has been reconfigured by the earthquake through the bodies of Haitians them-selves and calls for what Edward Soja refers to as “spatial justice”16 through its critiques of NGOs, the Haitian government, landowners, and others. Tents beyond Tents focuses on those Haitians still living in the camps 2 years after the earthquake, depicting the failure of both NGOs and the Haitian state to assist citizens with security (theft, rape, etc.), overcrowding, and sanitation problems. It maps the spaces which refugees attempt to occupy and their relations to these spaces, and documents how increasingly inhospita-ble the tents have become. For example, some panels depict interior spaces of the tents, but also foreground the lack of privacy and security with the portrayal of other people in close proximity outside the tent doorways. It points to the contradictions of humanitarian biopower that purports to give aid but creates new injustices and inequalities through the transmission of cholera, discontinuation of services, and bureaucratic red tape. The illus-trations depict people standing in line to get water, selling food, as well as the conditions in the camps—the heat, crowded spaces, and deterioration of the tents. Whereas OSM’s mission is to chart the roads and buildings of Haiti for accuracy to assist humanitarian workers, Tents beyond Tents charts a broken humanitarian cartography by marking the lack of refugee mobility, the gaps of humanitarian assistance, waste accumulation, and the abandonment of the camps by humanitarian organizations. Through its critique of state and international governing bodies, it functions as a comics-map where Haitians attempt to define their own spaces.17

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Carto(on)graphies

The first page of Tent beyond Tents condenses information and perspective surrounding the conditions of Haiti after the earthquake. A large panel on the top half of the page, known in comics lingo as a “splash,” depicts the crumbling National Palace, which became an iconic image of earthquake destruction (Figure 2).

The palace stands alone surrounded by green grass, with the Haitian flag flying, and no people in the frame. We are shown the palace from the perspective of someone stand-ing on the ground in front of the palace. It is not until the second page of the comics, a full-page splash, that the vantage point is revealed as coming from the direction of the Champ de Mars tent camp that is situated directly across the street from the palace (Figure 3).

On this page, the palace sits in the background and the sprawling camp takes up the foreground of the frame, signaling a relationship between the camp and the palace. Readers/viewers perceive this from a slightly elevated vantage point, which foregrounds that we remain at a certain distance from the camp, and in a powerful position to gaze. The juxtaposition of the palace and the camp at the opening of the comics visually estab-lishes one of the comics’ major themes—Haiti’s broken government and its inability to address the needs of those in the camps. On the first page (Figure 2), the frames below the palace image depict a minimalist map that is simply illustrated with a red dot and a ring around the earthquake’s epicenter. The adjoining frame explains, “Those people flooded into the areas where there wasn’t rubble, taking over every available space; parks and squares, private lots, a golf course, tent cities sprang up everywhere.” Thus, the reorganization of people and space after the earthquake is foregrounded from the begin-ning of the text. The final frame of this first page depicts an internally displaced man, Joshua Lewis, who is shirtless, standing inside a tent, stating, “I survive through the diaspora, through friends in Europe. My only hope is in God, I do not count on our lead-ers.” His words thus reinforce the image of broken government. He is portrayed as if speaking directly to readers. The fact that the comics foregrounds the refugee’s testi-mony runs counter to conventional depictions of refugees as mute, something with which humanitarian organizations are often complicit (Malkki, 1995; Nyers, 2006; Shemak, 2011). Since cartographies are reflective of the social environments in which they are made, the voices of refugees that are woven into the comics create a living, embodied refugee cartography of the camps.

The critique of humanitarian organizations is made explicitly in the print narrative, but is also embedded within the drawings. For example, one of the tents featured on the title page appears in the foreground with the letters “USAID” printed on it. Elsewhere in the work, other NGOs become visually implicated in the critique: the Red Cross, Oxfam, Action against Hunger, and Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC).

As mentioned, one of the most ubiquitous images seen after the earthquake was that of the aerial view of the collapsed National Palace. In Tents beyond Tents, the aerial perspec-tive is used to strategically render the conditions in which refugees live, the configurations of the camps as a whole, and the relations of humans to spaces of the camps. For example, one panel, which is featured twice in the comics, gives an aerial view of the

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triangular-shaped piece of land upon which the Champ de Mars camp is constructed, sand-wiched between major city streets across from the National Palace (Figure 4).

This aerial illustration requires the reader to consider the incongruities of living in a camp in the middle of a major thoroughfare across from the symbolic site of the nation’s authority.

Another frame that features an aerial view perspective is in a panel that describes how a woman named Beatrice and her family live in their tent, “Unemployed, her family relies on good Samaritans and NGOs to feed, clothe, and send the children to school. At night, they pack like sardines into the tiny tent.” It is voyeuristic in that viewers see the arrangement of family members from above arranged in the space as they sleep. The tent is portrayed in muted tones of gray and tan, and the space itself is orderly and calm, but the number of bodies makes it crowded with two adults and two children occupying one mattress and four other children sleep on the floor surrounding the bed (Figure 5).

Figure 2. (a) The crumbling National Palace, (b) a minimalist map that is simply illustrated with a red dot and a ring around the earthquake’s epicenter, (c) tent cities that sprang up everywhere, and (d) an internally displaced man, Joshua Lewis.Source: Tents beyond Tents.

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There are several panels featuring residents speaking from interior spaces within their tents. Residents appear to be speaking directly to the viewer rather than to others within the frame. One man expresses frustration at the bureaucratization of the NGOs, “Officials from IOM [International Organization for Migration] kept coming here to take a census. I don’t know what that’s going to do.” Refugees’ testimonies critique the failures of the NGOs and what Erica James (2010) refers to as “bureaucraft” when “professional bureaucratic discourses and practices that arise from expert or ‘secret’ knowledge are employed to reframe and transform the experience of suffering” which can be “employed to generate multiple forms of power and capital for the provider of aid” (p. 28).

Throughout Tents beyond Tents, the continuous threat of camp evictions reveals how precarious camp geography is, and why refugees are desperate to move into more stable environments. The struggle over the control of space and the power of landowning elites is depicted through panels explaining that some camps are located on land that various individuals claim as their property while the text sardonically states, “you don’t need a magnifying glass to see that people are living in difficult conditions.” The reference to a magnifying glass highlights perspective; the deplorable conditions are evident for

Figure 3. The vantage point as seen from the direction of the Champ de Mars tent camp that is situated directly across the street from the National Palace.Source: Tents beyond Tents.

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everyone to see, thereby making the push to evict refugees from individually owned property all the more troubling. The camp in Petionville, a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince, is “cleared” after its mayor gave a small amount of money to each family to pay for rent for housing as part of President Martelly’s relocation program. These are cast as “orderly” relocations.

Towards the end of Tents beyond Tents, following panels depicting the newly elected President Martelly, and commitments of aid to relocate families, there is a splash that takes up the top half of a page, which depicts violent “relocations” of refugees who have “been illegally pushed off both private and public land” (Figure 6).

The brutality of these evictions is captured through the illustration of a police officer in the foreground, who is visciously tearing off the side of a tent, with a machete in his hand, forcibly evicting families from a camp in Delmas. In addition to his menacing demeanor, he also wears sunglasses, which is reminiscent of the Ton Ton Macoutes, the notorious secret police of the Duvalier era. In the background of the panel, there is a mother fleeing with her children, those who suffer most from insecurity in the camps. The panels below this splash depict a man with bandages on his stomach, which captures the aggressive force used by the police in the evictions.

Figure 4. Frames from Tents beyond Tents.

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Another panel depicts a group of protesters. The following page illustrates the Delmas mayor’s ironically absurd response that the evictions were carried out because the area is a public space for everyone that “must not be privatized by a group of people” and “the only thing I am interested in for the time being is this: an empty place.” The emptiness is portrayed as desolation with debris lying in the street, very few people, and no tents, which speaks to the expendability and invisibility of those who are repeatedly displaced.

In addition to the portrayals of the struggle to find a secure space in the camps, the comics foreground the embodiment of refugees in these spaces. As Chute (2011) explains, “if comics is about mapping, it is also about bodies—about locating them in space and time” that becomes “a kind of compensation for lost bodies, for lost histories” (p. 112). For example, through a depiction of a child shielding his eyes from the sun, or a woman perspiring, we get a sense of the inhuman conditions of the tents as they become “fur-naces” in the heat of the day and “sieves” in the rain (Schuller, 2010). The story of Gergile Chaneur, who is a tailor by trade, is particularly ironic. He is shown speaking while sitting at his sewing machine in his tent, with another panel showing some of his

Figure 5. Crowded tents—some frames from Tents beyond Tents.Source: Tents beyond Tents.

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creations neatly displayed—pants, shorts, and a shirt. But as he states, “With so little money, my neighbors can’t be bothered to visit a tailor. The first need they have every day is to eat.” Chaneur thus is farther down the “food chain”; clothing (especially tai-lored clothing) must come after food. Moreover, as a tailor, Chaneur becomes symbolic of the stitched-together lives of the tents. Chaneur’s story challenges the perception that the refugees merely wait for a handout from an aid organization, but instead, it illustrates how residents desperately want to make a life for themselves.

The frame that makes up the bottom half of the final page of Tents beyond Tents returns to the site of the opening of the comics. It is similarly staged with the Champ de Mars camp in the foreground and the crumbling presidential palace in the background. The only words in the frame, which are the final ones in Tents, are the fragment “and after that, there are mountains,” which reiterates the struggle that continues in the camps. There is an image of a woman at the bottom of the panel, with only her head visible, as if she is stepping into the frame from the “gutter,” and gazing directly at the reader/viewer. We are not given her name and she does not speak, but her stare is simultaneously skeptical, accusing, and ques-tioning. It is a gaze that challenges the comfortable vantage point of the reader/viewer/

Figure 6. Panels depicting violent “relocations” of refugees.Source: Tents beyond Tents.

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voyeur to consider the implications of what we are seeing, which is that there is no solution in sight for displaced Haitians. At the same time, this image is in tension with the role of reportage in the comics since this woman does not speak, which reveals the limits of the comics as a space for testimony. She represents those voices that remain silenced. That these stories have come to light at all is largely because of the ethos of an educated journal-ist and artist, and the resources behind the Dutch-based Cartoon Movement, which allowed for the publication of Tents on its website. Yet they too are also at a certain distance from the subjects in the camps.

As compelling as this piece of comics journalism is, it is limited in its ability to chal-lenge or transform such powerful forces of OSM, the US military, and the humanitarian enterprises in Haiti. But just as we might read Thoby-Marcelin’s poem as a critique of the US Occupation’s military control over space, so too might we read Tents beyond Tents as a critique of humanitarian aid’s imperial control over Haitian space. We must ask to what might OSM lead to in the future as it expands its scope and becomes further connected with other humanitarian, economic, and political entities? What will it mean for those displaced Haitians who are most dispossessed of space?

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Michaeline Crichlow and the anonymous peer reviewers who provided useful insight for revising the essay. I also thank Tanya Shields for her comments on this essay in its early stages.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. As of this writing, the work is made up of 16 pages. An editor at Cartoon Movement states that the organization would continue to publish more chapters in the future dependent on funding (Tjeerd Royaards, 2013, personal communication).

2. For resources on studies of Haitian and other Caribbean geographies, see Thomas A. Rumney’s (2012) Caribbean Geography: A Scholarly Bibliography.

3. Dubois notes that the Haitian geographer Georges Anglade (1982) mapped the market system of the lakou (p. 110). For more on living fences, see Sidney Mintz’s (1962) “Living fences in the Fonds-des-Nègres Region, Haiti.”

4. See Raoul Peck’s film Assistance Mortelle (Fatal Assistance) on the failures of humanitarian aid following the earthquake.

5. The title of Paul Farmer’s book AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame uses the spatial metaphor of geography to emphasize this othering of Haiti.

6. International Organization for Migration, “Mapping a way from disaster in Haiti” video on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/13211783.

7. Another interactive platform, Ushahidi, that has been credited with “democratizing” informa-tion, was initially developed by a Kenyan expatriate, David Kobia, to chart the violence in Kenya following 2007 presidential elections (http://www.ushahidi.com/about-us). Ushahidi Mission 4636 was a project devoted to the Haiti response, and while it admirably featured Haitian contributors (many of whom worked as translators of Haitian Krèyol texts into English), it is also important to note that it worked with US Military in their emergency

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response, and has strong links with the US State Department (http://www.mission4636.org/history/). See Dr Muki Haklay’s blog in which he compares the maps created by OSM, Google Map Maker, and MINUSTAH (http://povesham.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/haiti-–-further-comparisons-and-the-usability-of-geographic-information-in-emergency-situa-tions/). In 2012, Google gave control of its map data to the World Bank. See Mitchell (2012) and Google Maps (2012).

8. For a comprehensive overview of the operations of OSM, see Poore and Wolf (2013), “Metadata squared: Enhancing its usability for volunteered geographic information and the GeoWeb” (p. 55).

9. Author’s translation.10. http://frontlinesms.ning.com/forum/topics/frontline-sms-consultancy-in-haiti-with-hot-

humanitarian11. Valerie Kaussen (2011) writes of the creation of the Corail-Cesselesse camp by the US Army

as a way of moving displaced Haitians off of a golf course, noting that it was intended to “provide one permanent source of cheap labor for a revitalized garment factory sector.”

12. In April 2013, Drone Adventures, a Swiss organization, joined forces with OSM Haiti as part of its mapping effort. The recent history of the use of drones in bombing campaigns in Afghanistan draws the links between OSM and militarism together even further. See Linebaugh (2014).

13. For an extended review of Anglade’s Atlas in the context of the history of geography in the Caribbean, see Trouillot (1983).

14. An editor at Cartoon Movement, Matt Bors, states that they would like to ultimately publish the comics in French and Krèyol, with the intention of disseminating it throughout Haiti (Werman, 2012).

15. Chute (2011) notes that cartoonist Bechdel states, “Cartoons are like maps to me” while Scott McCloud describes comics as “temporal maps” (p. 109).

16. Soja (2010) writes,

justice, however it may be defined, has a consequential geography, a spatial expression that is more than just a background reflection or a set of physical attributes to be descriptively mapped … the geography, or the “spatiality,” of justice … is an integral and formative com-ponent of justice itself, a vital part of how justice and injustice are socially constructed and evolve over time. (p. 1)

17. For another example of Haitians representing themselves after the earthquake, see Pressley-Sanon’s (2011) discussion of the group Tele-Geto.

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Author biography

April Shemak is the author of Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). She has also published articles and reviews in Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Textual Practice, Postcolonial Text, Anthurium, and Postcolonial Literary Studies: the First Thirty Years. She is currently an associate editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies.

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