Description
It is almost two years since Haiti requested military assistance from the international community to address a worsening political and humanitarian crisis in the country. Six months ago a Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) led by Kenyan troops and authorised by the UN Security Council deployed a contingent of troops who have been struggling to deliver the necessary stability that would enable elections. Amid this ongoing political turmoil, the familiar ‘repertoire of Haitian abjection’ has once again been reanimated across mass media platforms.
In seeking to reflect on what role the international community can productively play in the restoration of Haitian politics, this paper will turn to Haiti’s futures past and share from a research project at the intersection of international relations, history and visual culture studies. It will turn to another Haitian political leader, President Dumarsais Estimé, who issued a very different invitation to the international community in 1948. Estimé was the driving force behind a project of cultural diplomacy – the Bicentenaire de Port-au-Prince – which interlinked domestic and foreign policy agendas seeking to promote international partnership of benefit to regeneration efforts in Haiti following the departure of occupying US forces a decade earlier. Estimé simultaneously lobbied the UN hard to host one of UNESCO’s first ever development projects, in Haiti’s Marbial Valley during the late 1940s. The Estimé government’s concurrent collaboration with the international community in these two projects demonstrates the administration’s keen awareness of emergent international agendas and the ways in which Haiti and Haitians could exert influence and agency by contributing to new global projects
Amid ongoing turmoil in Haiti, this paper seeks to consider if revisiting these visions of Haitian futures past could influence how international actors perceive and deal with current political developments in this beleaguered Caribbean nation.
