The Haitian zombie motif: against the banality of antiblack violence

Abstract

The circulation and consumption of the images of suffering and lifeless black bodies is a longstanding feature of US visual media. Since each archive of suffering and dead black bodies operates within specific histories, discourses, and affective relationships, this article examines a particular collection of images: the Time magazine photos of the 2010 Haiti earthquake victims. The article argues that the photos evoke the uncanny by using the Haitian zombie motif – an image of ‘monstrous’ black racial difference. The article traces the photos’ elicitation of the uncanny in two ways: one, it highlights how the images produce self/other slippages and thus affirm the uncanny; and two, it examines the insidious and violent ways these slippages dehumanize, dismember, and dispossess those depicted to produce a ‘negative familiarity’ for the non-black observer, thus lending to the banality of antiblack violence. The article ends with a call for ‘radical empathy’ to combat this violence.

Keywords

antiblackness journalistic photos of the Haitian earthquake radical empathy the uncanny zombie

As subjects of research and representation, Haitians have often been portrayed as fractures, as fragments – bodies without minds, heads without bodies, or roving spirits.

(Ulysse, 2015: 16)

(Image 36) (Schwartz, 2010b)

Consequence

A man shot dead by police lies on the ground as looters continue to roam the streets in the downtown business district of Port-au-Prince.

The circulation and consumption of the images of suffering and lifeless black bodies are longstanding features of US visual culture. From lynching photos of the 19th and 20th centuries to images of black ‘misery’ and death in foreign places, to current-day viral images of black people’s killings at hands of police, black bodies have long been ‘objects’ of exchange through the media of still and moving photography (Alexander, 2004; Brown, 2014; Campbell, 2004; Simpson, 2004; Wasserman, 1998). What are the emotional demands of such depictions on the supposed (read: non-black) observer? What do irreverent representations of dead and suffering black bodies reveal about antiblack racialization in the US? Given that each archive of lifeless and suffering black bodies operates within specific histories, discourses, and affective relationships, I approach these broad questions by examining a specific collection of images: the Time magazine photos of the 2010 Haiti earthquake victims. Haiti has held a particular place in US imagination as an exemplar of ‘primitive’ blackness (Dash, 1988; Trouillot, 1990). US media has thus repeatedly used ‘evidentiary’ portrayals of Haitian ‘crises’, ‘poverty’, and ‘misery’ to support and defend the abjection of black people in the US and abroad (see also Renda, 2001). Hence, the Time photos of the quake’s aftermath are uniquely placed to reveal how ‘evidentiary’ photography of black suffering and death supports and facilitates antiblackness.

The Haitian slave revolt and revolution (1791–1804) has been one of the most systemically punished events in contemporary history: it toppled the world’s most lucrative colony at the time (Dubois, 2012) and defied an Enlightenment humanism and modernity premised on black ‘non-being’. Soon after Haiti secured its independence in 1804, Haiti’s leaders

defined all Haitian as ‘black,’ thereby striking a shattering psychological blow against the emerging intellectual traditions of an increasingly racist Europe and North America that saw a hierarchical world eternally dominated by types representative of their European-derived somatic norm images. (Knight, 2005: 395)

Since then, white colonial powers (which increasingly included the US) have used political, economic, ideological, and discursive tactics to ‘restore’ Haiti/Haitians to the category of black ‘non-being’. To that end, Vodou – Haitian popular religion based on the pillars of healing, wholeness, and ancestor veneration – has been much maligned in European and North American print and visual media. These media specifically constructed Vodou ‘as a religion of blood and sacrifice, as a religion of sexual orgies and malevolence, thus resulting in the widely shared perception that the practice of Vodou equals sorcery and witchcraft’ (Michel, 2006: 27). On a material level, such ‘images of Haiti’s popular religion . . . have long served as a pretext for denying the Haitian majority full civil capacity and agency’ (Ramsey, 2011: 1) and for ‘justifying’ white control over the first self-actualized black nation and, by extension, all black people.

During the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), US journalist William Seabrook constructed the figure of the zombie (or animated corpse) to express white interwar fears of black revolt and ‘dissatisfaction with Western civilization’ (Renda, 2001: 225). Seabrook (1989[1929]) explicitly draws on Freud’s ‘uncanny double’ (discussed below) to transform the indigenous zonbi archetype¹ from an allegory about the dehumanization of slavery to the Haitian zombie motif – that is, an image of ‘monstrous’ black racial difference born from ‘Voodoo [sic] magic’. And, as I will argue below, the Haitian zombie motif would be used to ‘reinscribe’ non-being onto Haitian bodies, black bodies by portraying them as ‘flesh’ and fungible (or interchangeable) commodity, as well as threats to white global minority rule. The Haitian zombie motif would thus recur in US visual media at specific moments, each time to assuage modernist anxieties by projecting white fears and fantasies onto a ready-made ‘monstrous’ black ‘other’.

One such recurrence came in 2010, when the Haitian zombie motif appeared in journalistic photos that visually reduced Haiti earthquake victims to ‘fractures’ and ‘fragments’, to ‘bodies without minds’, to unnamed things and objects (Ulysse, 2015: 16). Although many news outlets circulated dehumanizing images of the quake’s aftermath, Time magazine went so far as to publish them in an online gallery and glossy coffee-table book. Each photo includes a caption, which attempts to curate what the supposed observer ought to see and feel when encountering the observed. One of Time’s photos (image 36 in the gallery, Schwartz, 2010b) depicts a man lying on the ground. He seems to look directly into the camera, about to grimace into a smile. But, upon reading the caption, we realize that he is, in fact, dead – a lifeless body or ‘flesh’ imitating the living. The photo title, Consequence, blames the man for his death – as is often the case in the US when it comes to black victims of police shootings. The people in the background suffer a similar yet inverse portrayal: defined as ‘looters’ roaming the streets, they are stripped of their human qualities and given the attributes of the living dead – emotionless, aimless, menacing. This photo – like the others in Time’s collection – employs the Haitian zombie motif, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. The photo thus achieves its desire to unnerve and unsettle the supposed observer.

In line with affective analyses of photography, I explicitly read the Time photos as social agents able to elicit desired emotional responses (Brown and Peers, 2006; Brown and Phu, 2014; Gell, 1998; Harris, 2004; Mitchell, 2005; Pinney, 1997). I therefore counter materialist approaches to photography, which center the camera as ‘a technology of surveillance, a discursive site, and an ideological apparatus where meanings are constructed through the circulation of photography’ (Brown and Phu, 2014: 3). Instead, whereas materialists’ lens tend to ‘marginalize photography’s shadow subjects, most notably, women, racialized minorities, and queer sexualities’, I use an affective approach to center the marginalized by focusing on feeling, and on the affective relationship between the observer and observed. My central aim, here, is to examine the structure of feeling as it is used to construct black racial difference through ‘evidentiary’ documentation, and how the feeling thus evoked reinforces antiblackness.²

In this article, I specifically argue that the Time photos of the 2010 Haiti earthquake victims employ the Haitian zombie motif, and therefore, elicit feelings of the uncanny, that is, the psychological feeling of encountering something strangely familiar (Freud, 1997[1919]).³ Understandings of antiblackness found in Afro-pessimism and black feminist theory provide my argument’s conceptual underpinnings. I begin this article by discussing how documentary photographs of black suffering and death produce an emotional distance between observer (read: the non-black ‘self’) and observed (read: the black ‘other’). Further, I discuss the uncanny, in its manifestation of the ‘double’, as a slippage between the self/other binary that elicits fear of the racialized ‘other’.⁴ Finally, I use this conceptual framing to examine the specific case of the Haitian zombie motif and the affective consequences of its recurrence in the Time photos of the quake victims. Yet I do not reproduce the Time photos here, refusing to circulate images of black suffering and death. My decision not to depict the photos is ultimately a gesture toward empathy for the ‘zombie’, rooted in the reclamation of the indigenous zonbi archetype – a sort of decolonial notion of the human (I return to this in the coda).

Images of black suffering and death: self/other and the uncanny ‘double’

Early US photojournalism documented human suffering to stir empathy toward action (Brown and Phu, 2014). For instance, US photojournalist pioneer Jacob Riis took photographs of poor European immigrants in the late 1800s to draw attention to the plight of these subjects and move the middle class to action: his work was ‘concerned with the production and circulation of feeling designed to produce an activist viewer, one whose disgust at the dirty stain of immigrant life became transformed first to pity, then indignation, and then the drive to change social conditions’ (p. 12). The effectiveness of Riis’s photos rests on the idea of white people’s shared humanity, or the sameness of the observer and observed: ‘neither observers nor observed are “separate populations, one of producers and the other of consumers, or one of object and the other of spectator,” but rather parts of a dual self that is both “producer and consumer”’ (Newton, 2001: 133; see also Bakewell, 1998: 28). More recently, US journalistic photos of Russia’s war on Ukraine have almost unfailingly shown the suffering and humanity of Ukrainian refugees to emphasize the sameness of (white) Americans and (white) Ukrainians. Conversely, blackness has been consistently excluded from a (white) humanism that is premised on black disposability and fungibility (Spillers, 1987; Warren, 2017; Wilderson, 2020).

Journalistic photographs of black suffering and death operate against a racialized text wherein black people are always already read as non-beings – that is, the ‘other’ (read: ‘flesh’) against which the human (read: ‘body’) is defined. Spillers’s (1987) distinction between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ is crucial here. Whereas the ‘body’ represents the ‘liberated subject-position’, the ‘flesh’ represents the ‘captive’ who is deprived of subjecthood (p. 67). To effectively render bodies into flesh, bodies must be homogenized, dispossessed of feeling, and transformed not into ‘animals’ but into ‘meat’, and the violence that produces this ‘meat’ must be rendered invisible and therefore normal (see also Ibrahim, 2021; Warren, 2017). It is in this way that black bodies have been reduced to ‘flesh’ through the violence inherent in chattel slavery and racial capitalism (see also Spillers, 1987). Along these lines, images of black ‘flesh’ have been allowed to circulate as fungible commodity (Ibrahim, 2021).

Visual depictions of black suffering and death create an emotional distance between the presumed observer and observed that may be read on one hand as apathy, and on the other, as sympathy. I specifically suggest that documentary photos of black suffering and death in the US elicit an apathy informed by the routinization of antiblack violence, whereas such photos in foreign (read: black) countries are meant to evoke the sympathy of the ‘liberated subject’ for the ‘captive object’. In the case of the former:

Black death and violence suffused through a banality of police brutality, racial profiling, hypervigilance and pathological criminality becomes the source of imploding danger . . . White supremacy including the police, the media, the judicial system, and the education sector produce a perception of gratuitous violence as violence contingent upon criminal acts. In so doing, through these structural forms of anti-Black violence is rendered invisible in the constant gratuitous disrespect for and wounding of Black humanity in civil society’s discourse and perception. (Ibrahim, 2021: 6)

In the case of the latter, black suffering and death are removed from the observer’s social context, thus producing a sympathy that is devoid of responsibility. As Sontag (2003: 102) writes:

The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers . . . and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power. So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent – if not an inappropriate – response.

In her analysis of journalistic photos of foreign black death, Brown (2014: 195) contends that ‘black bodies on silver gelatin or digital prints constitute the penultimate other – distant and familiar, ready and replenishing.’ Continuing, she adds that ‘death is not only profitable but also poignant. Extranational peoples can serve, not only in their own extermination, but also in rendering that extermination as a fully functioning visual metaphor.’ A metaphor that has little to do with the expected viewer of the photograph, who is often read to be non-black, and therefore removed from the death they are witnessing at a safe distance. Yet, both apathy and sympathy support the banality of antiblack violence by participating in black people’s pain and inevitable death through ‘bystanderism’, inaction, charity, and saviorism.

When images of black suffering and death simultaneously announce and trouble the distance between observer and observed, this produces feelings of the uncanny. In early 20th-century European psychoanalysis, there are two types of uncanny experience: the return of an infantile complex, and the return of primitive beliefs within the psyche of ‘civilized’ people (Freud, 1997[1919]). I focus on the uncanny of the second type, which lurks in the distance, ‘gap’, or ‘empty space’ between modernity’s binaries (Jervis, 2008: 11). This uncanny necessarily disturbs the boundaries between self/other, allowing an unsettling slippage between the two (Jervis, 2008; see also Gunning, 2008). Freud, 1997[1919]: 210) explicates the self/other slippage through the concept of the ‘double’, which he defines as the ‘doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self’, or the primitive part of the self that returns as a spectral mirroring. The ‘double’ is the ego’s way of projecting its most undesired qualities ‘outward as something foreign to itself’ (Freud, 1997 [1919]: 212). Through ‘rationality’ and ‘enlightenment’, modern subjects supposedly claimed sovereignty over God and superstition, distinguishing themselves from a ‘primitive other’ or ‘savage’ dominated by religion and fancy (Freud, 1997 [1919]; Latour, 1993). Yet, the ‘savage’ is but a modernist construction meant to constitute the ‘self’ by defining the ‘other’ (Trouillot, 2003); and we would thus do well to be reminded of the under-acknowledged metaphorics of racialization and racism and antiblackness that permeates the language of psychoanalysis, and so many of its central tenets, terms, and tropes.

The uncanny ‘double’, therefore, can be seen as a sort of intimate alterity that produces (often overtly violent) fear when recognized. Jacques Lacan (1959–1960) expands upon the intimacy of the ‘double’ through his concept of extimité (or extimacy), which indicates the ‘nondistinction and essential identity between the dual terms of the outside and the deepest inside, the exterior and the most interior of the psyche, the outer world and the inner world of the subject’ (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2014: np; see also Dolar, 1991). Relatedly, Deutsch and Yanay (2016: 21) contend that within ‘the national field, the concept of the “double” (me and not me) is a vital phantasmagoria of the other, “the enemy,” toward whom feelings of violence are directed.’ Taking the case of Nazi and Hutu propaganda, they describe how racist and xenophobic discourse and images may be used to foster ‘negative identification and a fear of the “double other,” and thus create the conditions for “violent intimacy”’ or genocide’ (Deutsch and Yanay, 2016: 21). Indeed, the ‘double’ must be killed in protection of the ‘self’ (Freud, 1997 [1919]). Hence, fear of the ‘double’ can be used by non-blacks to support the unjust murders of black people in purported self-defense.

Photography is particularly apt for producing the uncanny, not only due to its haptic qualities but also because it provides a way of capturing ‘material objects in a strangely decorporealized yet also supernaturally vivid form’ (Castle, 1995: 137). Photos of the dead can be especially uncanny because they immortalize the dead through the medium of photography itself. ‘If the photography bespeaks a certain horror, it is because “it certifies that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing”’ (Barthes, 1981[1980]: 79). But, to effectively conjure feelings of the uncanny, such photography needs to skillfully employ a recognizably uncanny motif that permits the self/other slippage (see also Freud, 1997 [1919]). According to Freud, such uncanny motifs include ghosts, spectral images, and haunted houses. Building upon this list, roboticist Masahiro Mori (1970: 33) adds too-real prosthetics, human-like robots, and zombies, all of which produce a ‘negative familiarity’ in their likeness to humans and humanness. Below I examine how photographs of black suffering and death in the wake of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake use the Haitian zombie motif to elicit the uncanny. I trace the photos’ elicitation of the uncanny in two ways: one, I highlight how the images – through their skillful use of the Haitian zombie motif – produce self/other slippages and thus affirm the uncanny; and two, I examine the insidious and violent ways these slippages dehumanize, dismember, and dispossess those depicted to produce a ‘negative familiarity’ for the supposed (read: non-black) observer. But first, I discuss the origins and recurrence of the Haitian zombie motif in more detail.

The Haitian zombie motif in journalistic photos of Haiti’s earthquake victims

American attitudes to Haiti can be seen in terms of the creation of self-serving or rather self-aggrandizing images designed to tame the alien or threatening world on the outside. These images acquire a cumulative force over time and consistently resurface in order to define and reconstruct Haiti in terms which emphasize its difference or ‘Otherness’. (Dash, 1988: 1)

US journalist William Seabrook pioneered the whitewashing of the indigenous zonbi archetype: he effectively reread the zonbi through a lens of antiblackness where ‘Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasure’ (Wilderson, 2020: 15). The zonbi as it functioned in postcolonial Haitian society was a means of remembering the history of enslavement and critiquing capitalist consumption (McAlister, 2012: 472). But in his best-selling travelogue, The Magic Island, Seabrook (1989[1929]: 93) introduces the zombie to white US audiences as a ‘monster’ – like a demon, werewolf, or vampire – while noting that the zombie is ‘exclusively local’. An important excerpt from the book reads:

It seemed . . . that while the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost, nor yet a person who had been raised like Lazarus from the dead. The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life – it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. People who have the power to do this go to a fresh grave, dig up the body before it has had time to rot, galvanize it into movement, and then make of it a servant or slave, occasionally for the commission of some crime, more often simply as a drudge around the habitation or the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks, and beating it like a dumb beast if it slackens.

Operating within a sociohistorical vacuum, Seabrook presents the zombie as ‘nothing but [a] poor ordinary demented human [being], idiot, forced to toil in the fields’, a mere artifact of ‘Voodoo’ or ‘witchcraft’ (pp. 101–102). He simultaneously denies the violence of slavery and racial capitalism and reifies notions of black people as chattel and perpetuators of violence. The zombie metaphorically becomes animated black ‘flesh’ – ‘forged through violence, accumulation, fungibility, and terror’ (Ibrahim, 2021: 5). Seabrook thus textually strips the zonbi archetype of its relevance and sociality, effectively transforming the zonbi into an image of ‘monstrous’ black racial difference, or the Haitian zombie motif.

The Haitian zombie motif, so constructed, also functioned to reflect US attitudes to Haiti at the time. In US imaginary, Haiti is unsettling in that it is the United States’ ‘double’ or doppelgänger. Haiti and the US were both born as modern Republics in the Western Hemisphere after a bloody revolution; however, Haiti – due to its blackness – was a foreigner within that both articulated and disarticulated Western modernity. Haiti as extimité (the foreigner within) blurred the line between the interiority and exteriority of Western modernity. To borrow Dolar’s (1991: 6) phrasing: Haiti ‘[pointed] neither to the interior or the exterior but [was] located there where the most intimate interiority coincides with the exterior and becomes threatening, provoking horror and anxiety.’ Take, for instance, Seabrook’s (1989[1929]: 102) words to Polynice, a Haitian informant:

‘Polynice,’ I said, ‘that’s just the part of it I can’t believe. The zombies in such cases may have resembled dead persons, or even been ‘doubles’ – you know what doubles are, how two people resemble each other to a startling degree.’

This designation of Haiti as the ‘foreigner within’ had been used to justify US control of Haiti (see Dash, 1988).

At the onset of the Great Depression, the Haitian zombie motif satisfied a white public that desired a ‘monstrous’ black ‘other’ to assuage anxieties over black rebellion amid economic collapse and black internal migration (Renda, 2001).

In the 1930s, myriad cultural forms (e.g., novels, short stories, memoirs, travel narratives, plays, and films) made use of the belief that in Haiti, the dead could be made to rise in their soulless bodies and would then be subordinated to the will of a master. These images could be threatening: monstrous, once-dead black men rising up, embodying white fears of black revolt at home as well as abroad. (p. 225)

The proliferation of the motif in US media corresponded with a decline in national lynching rates because of anti-lynching activism and shifts in public attitude (see Wasserman, 1998). The zombie thus offered a way to imaginatively consume and also contain or destroy the monstruous black ‘other’ when it reached beyond the bounds of white controls.

Only with the translation to cinema would the full uncanny potential of the zombie be realized (Bishop, 2006). Unlike vampires or ghosts, whose uncanniness can be conveyed effectively in literary form, ‘zombies do not speak [and] all their intentions and activities are manifest solely through physical action;’ therefore, they ‘must be watched’ (p. 201). Film provided the perfect conditions for the zombie. Through its use of the 24-frame-per-second shot, cuts, and afterimage, film animated the zombie, transforming its otherwise ‘silent and shallow nature’ into a series of movements and gestures that recall a humanness that is negatively familiar (p. 201). Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), which launched the still-popular genre of zombie cinema, brought the Haitian zombie motif to life. White Zombie, a film set in 1930s Haiti, uses extensive cuts and sharp juxtapositions of light and dark to animate the zombie. The film tells the story of how Beaumont (Robert Frazer) enlists the help of Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi), the zombie master, to kill Madeleine (Madge Bellamy) and turn her into a zombie so that Beaumont can possess her forever. The film ends with the death of Legendre and Madeleine’s ‘awakening from her zombified state to the embrace of her love, Neil [John Harrison]’ (Garland, 2015: 275–276). The White Zombie infuses the Haitian zombie motif with an element that had been missing in Seabrook’s text – contagion (see also Garland, 2015). That a white woman could be made into a zombie speaks to the then fears of racial degeneration through the sullying of the ‘pure white maiden’.⁵ The film also reflects white masculine anxieties around industrial labor: ‘Haiti is the locus and source of evil, but also provides, in the figure of the zombie, a vehicle for commenting on an industrial civilization that threatens to turn [white] men into “a species of zombies”’ (Renda, 2001: 226). Indeed, since most of the film’s actors are white, ‘those who have been previously zombified and enslaved are, significantly, white men’ (p. 226). In effect, White Zombie uses Haiti and the zombie as ‘socially inert props’ (Wilderson, 2020: 15) to express white fears of racial demise through miscegenation and economic precarity (Renda, 2001).

The most recent zombie film to be set in Haiti, Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), based on Wade Davis’s (1985) book of the same title, mirrors a real contagion: HIV/AIDS (see also Garland, 2015). In 1983, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) labeled Haitians an ‘at-risk’ group for HIV/AIDS – soon after over 55,000 Haitian migrants had landed on the shores of Florida seeking political asylum in the United States (Fouron, 2013). This ascription created a ‘biopolitics of otherness’ that used the notion of contaminated blood to create Haitian immigrants into ‘objects of state control’ (Fassin, 2002: 201; see also Fouron, 2013). In addition to othering Haitian immigrants as carriers of disease, the CDC label fostered the idea that Vodou was to blame for the spread of the virus (Farmer, 1993). After Haitian Americans led widespread protests in major cities in the US, the CDC removed Haitians as an HIV/AIDS ‘at-risk’ group, but the correlation between Haitians and HIV/AIDS had already taken hold on the US public imaginary (Fouron, 2013). This helps explain the relative success of The Serpent and the Rainbow, decades after the genre of zombie movies set in Haiti had gone out of mode.

The Haitian zombie motif – and other portrayals of Haitian alterity – forced Haiti into a rigid set of stereotypes that allowed a particular image of the country to filter into US consciousness (Dash, 1988: 102). Over time, these stereotypes would constitute a discourse of Haitian exceptionalism that repeatedly portrays Haiti and Haitians as ‘unique, bizarre, unnatural, odd, queer, freakish, or grotesque’ (Trouillot, 1990: 4). The discourse of Haitian exceptionalism repeatedly resurfaces in US visual cultural in different – albeit predictable – forms (Glover, 2012).

On 12 January 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing an estimated 220,000 people, injuring 300,000, and displacing 1.5 million others. The US news outlets that covered the quake’s aftermath ran many horrific images of the victims: the photos showed ‘full on faces – the faces of children covered in blood, faces streaked with tears and matted with grime, faces of abject misery’ (Kennicott, 2011: 2). As Kennicott writes, ‘something about Haiti made it permissible to display human suffering without the usual fears of exploiting the victim and alienating the reader’ (p. 1). This ‘something’ is a discourse of Haitian exceptionalism that is at once antiblack and xenophobic. Photojournalistic standards around photographing the wounded and dead coalesced in the 2000s, during the documentation of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars:

What emerged was a language of synecdoche that largely removed human beings from scenes of carnage. Blood on the sidewalk stood in for bleeding bodies. Empty shells of cars and buses along with destroyed buildings became standard substitutes for the wounded or dead. When seen at all, the body was shrouded or partially obscured. If the body was that of an American soldier or civilian contractor, the standards were even stricter, the invisibility all but absolute. (p. 2)

The US government further banned photographs of dead soldiers and civilians being brought back from the war in Iraq (Dear, 2006: 89). Conversely, the 2005 media coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans underscored the antiblackness in US news media, as media outlets published images of black suffering and abjection alongside headlines that recycled racially coded language (Sommers et al, 2006). The media treatment of black Katrina victims in New Orleans prefigured that of the Haitian quake victims five years later, with at least one crucial exception: the US government would explicitly caution ‘national media not to publish photographs of dead bodies found in New Orleans’ (Dear, 2006: 89). This censorship was not out of respect for dead black bodies, but in direct response to criticism of how George W Bush handled post-Katrina recovery efforts (Dear, 2006). But victims of the Haitian earthquake, as black extranational people, constituted penultimate ‘others’ onto which the US could place its fears and fantasies without threat of domestic backlash.

The Haitian zombie motif would return in journalistic photos of the 2010 quake. Time magazine staff photographers Shaul Schwarz and Timothy Fadek were among the non-Haitian photojournalists tasked to document the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake. Time later compiled 43 of Schwarz and Fedek’s photos in an online gallery titled ‘Haiti’s Earthquake Destruction: Time Exclusive Photos.’ It then republished the photos in a coffee-table book, Haiti: Tragedy and Hope, to help raise funds for Haiti earthquake relief. Above the ‘enter’ button that allows access to the online gallery is a warning that reads, ‘Some of the photographs that follow contain extremely graphic content.’ The warning fails, however, to prepare the expected viewer for the gruesome scene that is to follow. Using the earthquake as apocalyptic backdrop, the Time photos specifically elicit the uncanny by employing the Haitian zombie motif to allow three kinds of self/other slippages: between person and thing, between living and dead, and between body and flesh.⁶

Person or thing

(Image 3) (Schwartz, 2010c)

Excavation

As rubble is cleared, lives lost in the quake continue to be uncovered.

A subset of the Time photos specifically blurs the distinction between human beings and objects, epitomizing the Haitian zombie motif as artifact of invisibilized violence. The third photo in the gallery portrays an ambiguous image of a corpse. The photo depicts a sea of earth-toned rubble accentuated with thin iron rods and broken splashes of color: coral, lime-green, Caribbean blue. At the front-right corner is what appears to be a lace curtain or tablecloth, a sign of the domestic life that once filled the now decimated homes. On the left-back of the photo are three men who are surveying the rubble for human remains or signs of life. The man nearest to the left front of the photo is manually digging out what appears to be a bloated corpse covered in sand-colored soot that blends him into the surrounding debris. While a torso and two bent arms can be deciphered, the arm lying on the ground seems almost object-like, nearly indistinguishable from the debris on which it lies. The face of the corpse is distorted: there are impressions of where the eyes, nose, and mouth are supposed to be. However, the camera’s face-detection software, which looks for properties common to all human faces (Schapire, 2013) – namely, ‘the property that the region of the eyes is often darker than the region of the nose and cheeks’ and ‘that the eyes are darker than the bridge of the nose’ (Viola and Jones, 2001: 10) – would have difficulty distinguishing the bloated face from an inanimate object. As Kennicott (2011: 5) poignantly observes,

a powerful argument about the body and humanity is present in the work of many of the photographers who went to Haiti. The camera was asking one of the most fundamental and perennial questions of photojournalism: Is this a thing, or a person?

Moreover, the title of the photo, Excavation, gestures towards an archeological dig as if the person buried is an artifact of a distant past and not a casualty of a recent (un)natural disaster – the convergence of socioeconomic marginalization, rapid urbanization, and global antiblackness. The photo’s title, therefore, lends to the objectification and zombification of the body, as well as obscuring the structural violence that permitted the death by placing this violence at a temporal distance.

(Image 5) (Fadek, 2010c)

Lost

The body of a woman remains trapped under a collapsed hotel in downtown Port-au-Prince.

The fifth photo in the gallery represents a woman solely as limbs. The title of the photo, Lost, could be read in a few ways: the woman is missing; she has lost her life; she has lost her limbs. The bright hotel signage and fluorescent-green building in the backdrop produce a Hollywood-esque feel, while the legs punctuate the almost cinematic violence. The photo’s caption says that the legs belong to a woman who has been trapped under the debris, but without this context, the dust-covered limbs could be read as movie props, a mannequin, or better still, Masahari Mori’s (1970) too-real prosthetic. As Mori writes, prosthetics become uncanny when they are ‘too real’; he adds that ‘when we notice it is prosthetic, we have a sense of strangeness’ (p. 34). The earthquake resulted in approximately 4,000 to 7,000 amputees (UN Development Programme, 2010). Humanitarian organizations outfitted many of these new amputees with prosthetics, but the lack of long-term rehabilitation meant amputees lacked comfort with their prosthetics – and thus, these artificial limbs were not at all like Mori’s uncanny prosthetics (O’Connell and Ingersoll, 2012).⁷ That the woman is ostensibly represented as prosthetic legs in a country of thousands of new amputees not only dehumanizes and disembodies the woman pictured, but also metaphorically equates her disembodiment to the dismemberment of many others.

Living or dead

(Image 15) (Schwartz, 2010d)

In Need

A woman waits for medical treatment.

Another subset of photos shows obviously living human subjects, yet still produces the uncanny by depicting these subjects as unfeeling zombies, removed of human emotionality. An older woman lies on her side; the unnatural angle of her head and arms gives the appearance that they are detached from her brightly dressed body (Image 15). In another image, a man whose face is crusted in plaster glances sideways, appearing to see without seeing (Image 11). These photos present subjects as the living dead, unaware of their surroundings. But what we really see expressed on their faces is what many Haitians aptly call kriz – that is, ‘an emotional reaction to trauma’ marked by dissociation, loss of consciousness, convulsions, dizziness, and extreme weakness (Beckett, 2013: 41). Derivois et al (2018: 79) posit that the ‘resiliency’ of Haitian natural disaster victims does not ‘imply the absence of trauma’. They suggest that what appears to be Haitian exceptional resilience may actually be ‘pathological resilience’ – that is, ‘a form of resilience that sublimates setbacks and makes it possible to ‘roll with the punches’ without the ability to bounce back in the long term.’ Although the earthquake victims were able to rely on familial, social, and spiritual networks to navigate the earthquake’s aftermath, many survivors naturally experienced long-term post-traumatic stress, depression, and anxiety. But a nuanced conversation about psychological trauma did not gain traction in the US media, as reporters seemed more comfortable with the trope of Haitian ‘resilience’ that portrays Haitians as having a higher tolerance for pain and suffering than most people (Ulysse, 2015).⁸ This trope

functions in tandem with that of Haitian barbarism, situating the country and its populace in a space – a state? – of exception . . . It subtly [denies] true empathy, allowing the rest of the world – a world that conceives of itself in part as not-Haiti – to imagine and accept Haitians as somehow other than human. (Glover, 2012: 200).

By upholding notions of Haitian resilience, it seems that these photos are designed to alienate the expected observer.

(Image 11) (Schwartz, 2010a)

Caked On

A man covered with debris takes a moment to catch his breath after hunting in the rubble.

Visual documentation of suffering earthquake victims did contribute to an unprecedented global outpouring of aid toward earthquake relief in Haiti. However, this aid went primarily to international humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross and Oxfam, which the same journalistic photos depicted as white saviors come to help the devastated, alien island nation (Schuller, 2015). Sontag (2003: 18) reminds us of the problem with the visual documentation of suffering:

Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in a select number of wars [or natural disasters] happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally in the form that is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view.

To wit, when media attention on the quake waned, so too did public concern, or rather, the minimal detached sympathy that had passed for it.

Body or flesh

(Image 31) (Fadek, 2010a)

Crisis

According to Haitian President René Préval, 7,000 people have been buried in a mass grave.

The final subset of photos I examine explicitly blur the distinction between ‘bodies’ and ‘flesh’ by homogenizing the dead to such a degree that the dead appear interchangeable. Image 31 depicts the discolored, swollen legs of the dead. The torn shoes, nylons, and skirts are an indication that these legs once belonged to women. The individual identities of these women seem no longer to matter as their blood runs together. While their faces are hidden, the underwear and genital area of several women is shown. This peculiar and deeply misogynist way of cutting up the body and violating the privacy of the deceased is another horrific aspect of a particularly female-inflected dehumanization. The subjects of these photos ‘entered the visual space of photography . . . without inscription’ (Benjamin, 1999[1931]: 512). Their lack of inscription or namelessness points not to their innocence, as Benjamin would have it, but to a crisis of anonymity: an inability to identify and distinguish, which leads to the creation of mass graves. This metaphorically foreshadows the way humanitarian aid structures exposed women to gender-based violence.⁹

(Image 25) (Fadek, 2010b)

Morgue

The dead are collected in a parking lot at the main hospital.

(Image 19) (Fadek, 2010d)

The threat of disease

The dead are dumped into the back of a truck to expedite their removal. The decaying bodies represent a major health crisis for the survivors.

The title of image 25, Morgue, is in terrible humor as the ‘morgue’ it references is really a hospital parking lot. Unlike an actual morgue where the dead are preserved for identification and respectful burial or cremation, the dead are here pictured as mere ‘flesh’. The single wooden coffin against a backdrop of anonymous dead black bodies both disrupts and emphasizes the fungibility and disposability of blackness. Similarly, image 19 shows bodies being shoveled, like refuse, into the back of dump truck. According to Afro-pessimist philosophy, since black is read as not human, ‘it cannot claim “difference” or “particularity” as a feature of existence (because these belong to the human)’ (Warren, 2017: 394). If black differentiation and personhood are unavailable in life, then they will not be permitted in death. But the caption suggests this lack of differentiation is permissible because the dead represent a ‘threat of disease’. This recalls the zombie contagion that is evocative of racial degeneration. In fact, when contagion by blackness is feared, black death becomes not only tolerable but desirable, even necessary.

What is missing from the Time archive, however, are the people who ‘sat in front of their destroyed homes, with their dead neatly wrapped, for the most part in pristine white sheets, by their side’ (Farmer, 2011: 277). This omission, which counters a long tradition in Haiti where the dead are venerated, and ancestors revered (Hurbon, 1987), is a stark silence that amplifies the myth of Haitian alterity.

Conclusion: bringing it ‘home’

The return of the Haitian zombie motif in 2010 was itself an uncanny phenomenon, a repetitive compulsion rooted in modernist anxieties that require a black ‘other’. At the time, the US was still recovering from the Great Recession of 2007–2008 and was two years into the tenure of its first black President, which purportedly marked the beginning of US post-racialism. Against this economic and sociopolitical backdrop, a devastating earthquake struck Haiti. This (un)natural disaster allowed US visual culture to seize once more upon the Haitian zombie motif, both to express white fears of black rule, and to aggrandize the US as benevolent savior.

The year 2020 saw the circulation and consumption of a different archive of black suffering and death: the cellphone and bodycam footage of the murders of unarmed black men, like George Floyd, that circulated on social and news media. George Floyd was one of the 164 US black men and women killed by police in the first eight months of 2020 (Cohen, 2020). Although activists used footage of the murders of black people as evidence of antiblack violence and fuel in the fight for racial justice, many (black folks in particular) shuddered at the irreverent circulation of the viral images of dead black bodies (see also Ibrahim, 2021). Why is it okay to ‘share’ still or moving images of these deaths in digital media and newsprint? What anxieties do these images address? ‘Is this how a claim for human rights [black lives] is made, in the grotesque triangulation of a desecrated body of a victim, an intrepid photographer, and an awed metropolitan reader?’ (Fischer, 2013: 69). This particular archive of black pain and death occurred during a Presidential administration that had emboldened white supremacists, and amid a pandemic that had damaged the US economy, infected millions, and killed over 400,000 people in the US alone.¹⁰ Perhaps this iteration of the visual circulation and consumption of black suffering and death was a way of projecting fears of pandemic-related death and economic uncertainty onto a ‘convenient’ black ‘other’, even while maintaining distance from the very emotions that permit the policing and killings of black people in the first place.

Coda: how to empathize with a ‘zombie’

Images of black suffering and death do little to produce transformative or ‘radical empathy’ since such images tend to function within a white humanist framework that necessitates black non-being (see also Ibrahim, 2021; Jung and Costa Vargas, 2021; Warren, 2017). As Schuller (2021: 97) suggests, radical empathy ‘requires humanizing accounts of tragedy [so that] human loss is felt just as deeply as that of people who look and think like us, whoever that is.’ Taking this further, I posit that realizing such empathy with black and non-white people also requires a rejection of white humanism and reclamation of decolonial subjectivities and collectivities. The indigenous zonbi archetype, I suggest, offers a decolonial humanism that venerates spiritual, epistemological, and ancestral connections to lan guinée (literally Guinea or general Africa), and rejects the capitalist production of soulless shells (see also McAlister, 2012).

Hence, whereas the Haitian zombie motif portrays Haiti as the epitome of ‘monstrous’ black racial difference, the zonbi archetype recalls black emancipatory possibilities and the continued need for struggle, affirmation, and empathy. It is along these latter lines that Haitian Spiralist writers¹¹ ‘allow for the unresolved tensions allegorized by the zombie and its avatars to sustain narratives that will not rely on an idea of unambiguous heroism or victimhood – narratives that lead us ultimately toward a hard-won empathy, but arguably more real’ (Glover, 2012: 207). Grappling with and dismantling the affective distance between self/other, I argue, is a necessary condition for realizing this ‘hard-won’ or radical empathy with the ‘zombie’. I thus end with this quote about the Haitian Spiralist zombies – and by extension, the indigenous zonbi archetype:

they have been degraded and debased, but they have not lost their sense of self or of significance. They suffer immensely, but they also dream. And while they may never become heroes, they will not stop remembering that they are humans. (pp. 202–203).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article benefited from the thoughtful and productive feedback of Marylin Ivy, Kaiama Glover, and Tiana Bakić Hayden. I also gratefully acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers and the journal editors, particularly Marquard Smith and Kimberly Juanita Brown, for their invaluably constructive critique.

ORCID iD

Darlène Dubuisson

Notes

Darlène Dubuisson is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching span political and legal anthropology, activist and engaged anthropology, Black feminist anthropology, Black intellectual histories, migration and transnational studies, and speculative fiction and visual culture.

Address: University of Pittsburgh, 3302 WW Posvar Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15260-4601, USA. [email: ded118@pitt.edu]

References

Alexander

(2004) The Black Interior. Saint Paul: Graywolf.

Bakewell

(1998) Image acts. American Anthropology 100(1): 22–32.

Barthes

(1981[1980]) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Howard

. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.

Beckett

(2013). Rethinking the Haitian crisis. In: Polyné

(ed.) The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis and Development. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 27–50.

Benjamin

(1999[1931]) Little history of photography. In: Jennings

(ed.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927–1934. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 507–530.

Bishop

(2006) Raising the dead. Journal of Popular Film and Television 33(4): 196–205.

Brown

Peers

(2006) Pictures Bring Us Messages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Brown

Phu

(2014) Feeling Photography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Brown

(2014) Regarding the pain of the other: Photography, famine, and the transference of affect. In: Brown

Phu

(eds) Feeling Photography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 181–203.

10.

Campbell

(2004) Horrific blindness: Images of death in contemporary media. Journal for Cultural Research 8(1): 55–74.

11.

Castle

(1995) The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

12.

Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2021) Covid data tracker. Available at: http://covid.cdc.gov (accessed 20 October 2022).

13.

Cohen

(2020) It’s been over 3 months since George Floyd was killed by police: Police are still killing Black people at disproportionate rates. CBS News, 10 September. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-floyd-killing-police-black-people-killed-164/ (accessed 13 June 2020).

14.

Dash

(1988) Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes in the Literary Imagination. London: Macmillan.

15.

Davis

(1985) The Serpent and the Rainbow. New York, NY: Werner Books.

16.

Dear

(2006) Remembering Katrina but please, no photos of dead people. Space and Culture 9(1): 89–91.

17.

Derivois

, et al (2018) Resilience in Haiti: Is it culturally pathological? BJPsych International 15(4): 1–3.

18.

Deutsch

Yanay

(2016) The politics of intimacy: Nazi and Hutu propaganda as case studies. Journal of Genocide Research 18(1): 21–39.

19.

Dolar

(1991) I shall be with you on your wedding-night: Lacan and the uncanny. Rendering the Real 58: 5–23.

20.

Dubois

(2012) Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.

21.

Fadek

(2010a) ‘Crisis’. Haiti’s Earthquake Destruction: TIME Exclusive Photographs. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1954087_2024931,00.html (accessed 2 April 2016).

22.

Fadek

(2010b) Morgue. Haiti’s Earthquake Destruction: TIME Exclusive Photographs. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1954087_2024902,00.html (accessed 2 April 2016).

23.

Fadek

(2010c) Lost. Haiti’s Earthquake Destruction: TIME Exclusive Photographs. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1954087_2043675,00.html (accessed 2 April 2016).

24.

Fadek

(2010d) The threat of disease. Haiti’s Earthquake Destruction: TIME Exclusive Photographs. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1954087_2024921,00.html (accessed 2 April 2016).

25.

Farmer

(1993) AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: The University of California Press.

26.

Farmer

(2011) Haiti After the Quake. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

27.

Fassin

(2002) The biopolitics of otherness: Undocumented foreigners and racial discrimination in French public debate. Anthropology Today 17: 3–7.

28.

Fischer

(2013) Haiti: Fantasies of bare life. In: Polyné

(ed.) The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis and Development. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 69–86.

29.

Fouron

(2013) Race, blood, disease, and citizenship: The making of the Haitian-Americans and the Haitian immigrants into ‘the others’ during the 1980s–1990s AIDS crisis. Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power 20(6): 705–719.

30.

Freud

(1997[1919]) The uncanny. In: Hamacher

Wellberry

(eds) Writings on Art and Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 193–233.

31.

Freud

(2004[1919]) The uncanny. In: Sander

(ed.) Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 74–101.

32.

Garland

(2015) Hollywood’s Haiti: Allegory, crisis, and intervention. In: ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’ and ‘White Zombie’. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 19(3): 273–283.

33.

Gell

(1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon.

34.

Glover

(2012) New narratives of Haiti; Or, how to empathize with a zombie. Small Axe 16(3): 199–207.

35.

Glover

(2013) Insularity and internationalism: An interview with Kaiama L Glover, The Public Archive. Available at: http://thepublicarchive.com/?p=3881 (accessed 20 October 2022).

36.

Gunning

(2008) Uncanny reflections, modern illusions: Sighting the modern optical uncanny. In: Collins

Jervis

(eds) Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. New York, NY: Palgrave, 50–68.

37.

Halperin

(1932) White Zombie. Los Angeles, CA: Roan Group Archival Entertainment.

38.

Harris

(2004) The photograph reincarnate: The dynamics of Tibetan relationships with photography. In: Edwards

Hart

(eds) Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images. London: Routledge, 139–155.

39.

Hoffman

, et al (2016) Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites. PNAS 113(16): 4296–4301.

40.

Hurbon

(1987) Comprendre Haïti. Essai sur l’Etat, la nation, la culture. Port-au-Prince/Paris: Ed. Henri Deschamps/Karthala.

41.

Ibrahim

(2021) The dying black body in repeat mode: The black ‘horrific’ on a loop. Identities. Epub ahead of print 1 Dec 2021. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2021.

42.

Jentsch

(1997[1906]) On the psychology of the uncanny. Angelaki 2(1): 7–16.

43.

Jervis

(2008) Uncanny presences. In: Collins

Jervis

(eds) Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. New York, NY: Palgrave, 10–49.

44.

Jung

M-K

Costa Vargas

(eds) (2021) Antiblackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

45.

Kennicott

(2011) Codes of exposure: Imaging the body and suffering in Haiti. Afterimage, 12.

46.

Lacan

(1997) The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, Porter

trans. New York, NY: Routledge.

47.

Latour

(1993) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Porter

. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

48.

Mariani

(2015) The tragic forgotten history of zombies. The Atlantic, 28 October. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/how-america-erased-the-tragic-history-of-the-zombie/412264/ (accessed 3 April 2016).

49.

Masahiro Mori (1970) The uncanny valley. Energy 7(4): 33–35.

50.

McAlister

(2012) Slaves, cannibals, and infected hyper-whites: The race and religion of zombies. Anthropological Quarterly 85: 457–486.

51.

Michel

(2006) Vodou in Haiti: Way of life and mode of survival. In: Michel

Bellegarde-Smith

(eds) Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

52.

Mitchell

WJT

(2005) What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

53.

Newton

(2001) The Burden of Visual Truth: The Role of Photojournalism in Mediating Reality. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

54.

O’Connell

Ingersoll

(2012) Upper limb prosthetic services post Haiti earthquake: Experiences and recommendations of Haiti-based rehabilitation program. Journal of Prosthetics and Orthotics 24(2): 77–79.

55.

Pascoe

(2010) What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

56.

Pavón-Cuéllar

(2014) Extimacy. In: Teo

(ed.) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. New York, NY: Springer.

57.

Pinney

(1997) Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. London: Reaktion.

58.

Ramsey

(2011) The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

59.

Renda

(2001) Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism, 1915–1949. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

60.

Schapire

(2013) Explaining AdaBoost. In: Schölkopf

, et al (eds) Empirical Inference. New York, NY: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1–16.

61.

Schuller

(2015) Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

62.

Schuller

(2021) Humanity’s Last Stand: Confronting Global Catastrophe. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

63.

Schwartz

(2010a) ‘Caked on’. Haiti’s Earthquake Destruction: TIME Exclusive Photographs. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1954087_2025410,00.html (accessed 3 April 2016).

64.

Schwartz

(2010b) Consequence. Haiti’s Earthquake Destruction: TIME Exclusive Photographs. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1954087_2043839,00.html (accessed 3 April 2016).

65.

Schwartz

(2010c) Excavation. Haiti’s Earthquake Destruction: TIME Exclusive Photographs. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1954087_2043669,00.html (accessed 3 April 2016).

66.

Schwartz

(2010d) In need. Haiti’s Earthquake Destruction: TIME Exclusive Photographs. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1954087_2025413,00.html (accessed 3 April 2016).

67.

Seabrook

(1989[1929]) The Magic Island. New York, NY: Paragon House.

68.

Simpson

(2004) Archiving hate: Lynching postcards at the limit of social circulation. ESC: English Studies in Canada 30(1): 17–38.

69.

Sommers

, et al (2006) Race and media coverage of Hurricane Katrina: Analysis implications, and futures research questions. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 6(1): 1–17.

70.

Sontag

(2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York, NY: Picador.

71.

Spillers

H J

(1987) Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. Diacritics 17(2): 64–81.

72.

Trouillot

(1990) The odd and the ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean and the world. Cimarron 2(3).

73.

Trouillot

(2003) Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York, NY: Palgrave.

74.

Ulysse

(2015) Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Earthquake Chronicle. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

75.

United Nations Development Programme (2010) Human Development Report. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

76.

Viola

Jones

(2001) Robust real-time object detection. Cambridge Research Laboratory Technical Report Series.

77.

Warren

(2017) Onticide: Afro-pessimism, gay black nigger #1, and surplus violence. Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23(3): 391–416.

78.

Wasserman

(1998) Media rhetoric and images of lynching in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Michigan Sociological Review 12: 68–94.

79.

Wen

, et al (2018) Gender differences in psychosocial and physical outcomes in Haitian amputees. American Journal of Occupational Therapy 72(3): 1–8.

80.

Wilderson

(2020) Afropessimism. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.