Why Haiti Needs New Narratives

Reviewed by: Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-quake Chronicle by Gina Athena Ulysse Manoucheka Celeste Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-quake Chronicle. By Gina Athena Ulysse. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015. ISBN 08195-7546-1. 408 pp. $27.95 US. Paperback. In Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-quake Chronicle, Gina Athena Ulysse makes four timely interventions. First, she challenges and destabilizes popular understandings of Haiti, particularly as portrayed in traditional news and new media. Second, Ulysse demonstrates the necessity of merging her intellectual project with public engagement, thus serving as a model in a moment when more scholars are entering the public sphere as public intellectuals—appearing on television news programs, writing blogs, or participating in town-hall meetings as experts. She also troubles narratives of identity and identification by asking questions about who is considered an expert and producer of knowledge and who is considered to be the public, and what it means that one identifies as "Haitian" or "Haitian-American." Finally, Ulysse questions who identifies as allies and the roles that self-identified allies play, offering a critique of some taken-for-granted relationships with journalists, nonprofits, and NGOs. The book is a curated collection of thirty pieces: op-eds, blog posts, meditations, and essays that appeared in outlets including Ms. Blog, pbs.org, Huffington Post, Meridians, and Haitian Times. All were composed between 2010 and 2012, a period that Ulysse describes as a "writing spree" (19). While the pieces center on Haiti, they cover a range of topics including experiences of the earthquake, earthquake recovery, governments, media representations, religion, colonization, race, class, gender, and performance. These topics are often intricately woven together. Readers will encounter scholarly rigor and Ulysse's unique voice in language that enables engagement by multiple audiences. The author's deeply reflexive discussion of interactions and relationships with multiple versions of Haiti allows, if not compels, readers to also reflect on such entanglements. On multiple levels, then, this book is one that requires readers to question, or even temporarily suspend, everything they know about Haiti. This includes the prickly question that some diasporans encounter of how to identify ourselves. Ulysse claims the hyphenated term "Haitian-American," explaining that it is appropriate mathematically and because of how one identity shapes the other. She highlights the passionate debate around how people identify with Haiti, as either Haitian or Haitian-American, and the struggle to articulate or name identity in a way that also accounts for lived experience. This debate includes people of Haitian [End Page 177] descent born outside Haiti and those born in Haiti who reside elsewhere, including those such as Ulysse who were born in Haiti and live in the United States. Of her own positionality, Ulysse writes: "I live with a keen awareness that negotiating my Haitis inevitably means accepting that there are limits to my understanding, given the complexity of my position as both insider and outsider" (xiii). Regardless of the reader's relationship to Haiti—as diasporan, Haiti-based, ignorant of Haiti beyond US news, or somewhere in between—Why Haiti Needs New Narratives can (and should) be unnerving. Ulysse states that a primary goal is to shift the narrative terrain, and such a shift can cause discomfort as it challenges preexisting notions about Haiti. The pieces question the private and public relationships people have with Haiti and encourage vigilant reflection. Ulysse writes that we need narratives to "explicate its myriad of contradictions" (95). Her critiques will speak to readers of postcolonial theory, particularly the ways that she writes about "the messiness of race, class, and gender" in how people misperceive Haiti (81–82). For scholars of cultural, media, and communication studies, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives exemplifies the forward-thinking scholarship for which Bernadette Calafell and Herman Gray have called, in that it pays attention to performance, representation, and the affective and ideological labor of media.1 In "Why Context Matters: Journalists and Haiti," Ulysse gives the reader a behind-the-scenes glimpse of op-ed writing but also blurs the line between consumer and producer as she writes to media about media. She engages questions of journalistic ethics, which are frequently the

Art · Library science · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Quake (natural phenomenon · Sociology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · History · Law

• Race, Media, and the Cultivation of Concern

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