This chapter contextualizes the crisis ensuing from the 2010 earthquake by looking at the rhetoric surrounding U.S. aid and intervention in Haiti. It explores what a Marshall Plan for Haiti would look like and whether or not such a plan would require an ideological shift in the ways in which Haiti’s place in history might be reconceived so that such a plan might actually create results that, to date, have escaped the engagement of the international community.

From Tectonic Shifts : Haiti Since the Earthquake, edited by M. Schuller & P. Morales. Copyright © 2012 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Used with permission of the publisher.

Tous droits réservés. Republié avec l'autorisation du·de la détenteur·rice du droit d'auteur et de l'éditeur·rice, Rienner.

Sovereignty. Sugar. Revolution. These are the three axes this book uses to link the works of contemporary women artists from Haiti—a country excluded in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literary studies—the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. In From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, Myriam Chancy aims to show that Haiti’s exclusion is grounded in its historical role as a site of ontological defiance.

At the end of a long, sweltering day, on January 12, 2010, as markets and businesses attempt to close for the day, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude, shook the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, leaving over 250,000 dead, over 1.3 million injured and another 1.5 million homeless. The earthquake itself lasted for only 45 seconds, but nothing would be the same again for anyone on the ground, for any Haitian watching monuments fall to the ground from afar, on television screens, for anyone with a personal tie to its land.

Understanding exile as flight from political persecution or forms of oppression that single out women, Myriam J. A. Chancy concentrates on diasporic writers and filmmakers who depict the vulnerability of women to poverty and exploitation in their homelands and their search for safe refuge. These Afro-Caribbean feminists probe the complex issues of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class that limit women’s lives.

This essay explores the ways in which women’s advocacy for sexual freedom leads to the reformulation of national identities such as sexualities and gender. The author analyzes the ways in which restrictions against homosexuality, especially the discursive erasure and denial of lesbian existence, suggest that sexuality may be a crucial avenue for social and political transformation.

Today, after twenty years of active and visible work on the national scene, Haitian feminism is at a crossroads. My paper seeks to address the nature of this crossroads, which I believe is at an impasse between legal reform and cultural shifts that have lagged behind the movement that occasioned structural change at the State level. Complicating this impasse further has been the effects of foreign policy between the US and Haiti that has unduly impacted the agricultural sector, especially rice production, an exclusively female domain historically.

This journal is an introduction to a discussion on the complex lives and experiences of women of colour and the past generations that describes what led them to where they are today. Chancy pays homage to the many women who do not have access to academic forums, but have impacted the lives of writers, artists and activists. Through the narrative of grandmothers, she relates the protaginism of women of colour in unstable times.

This article is a translation from Creole of a compilation of the presentations by Haitian feminists given in several workshops, interviews and conversations in Encuentro workshops in 1993. It details the feminine condition in Haiti, the history of feminist mobilization and the feminist movement in Haiti and the current crisis women are facing. Chancy presents a detailed account of history of the feminist movement so as to build a better understanding of the current state of the country for women, especially women who are head of their households and/or work outside of the home.