City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2015 Privilege in Haiti: Travails in Color of the First Bourgeois Nation- State in the Americas Philippe-Richard Marius Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1041 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Privilege in Haiti Travails in Color of the First Bourgeois Nation-State in the Americas by Philippe-Richard Marius A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2015 ii © 2015 Philippe-Richard Marius All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Donald Robotham ___________ _____ Date Chair of Examining Committee Gerald Creed __ _ _ Date Executive Officer Jeff Maskovsky Donald Robotham Ida Susser Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract Privilege in Haiti Travails in Color of the First Bourgeois Nation-State in the Americas by Philippe-Richard Marius Adviser : Professor Donald Robotham Who are the elites in the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere? Do Haiti’s elites constitute themselves in a Blackness vs. Whiteness/Mulattoness opposition? In investigating these questions, this ethnography encompasses in the object of study the nation’s middle classes educated in Western ways, and it arrives at an analysis of social relations among privileged national subjects within and across boundaries of color. Its central thesis is the material unity in privilege of Haiti’s colorist fragments. Noirisme, a fundamentalist strain of Haitian black nationalism that reached hegemony in the dictatorship of François Duvalier in the 1960s, is in marked retreat in contemporary Haiti. Its lingering influence nonetheless continues to foster a black qua black sociality among privileged black nationalists. Mulatto nationalism, as political project and public discourse, lapsed into irrelevance sometime around the mid-point of the 20th century. Mulâtrisme, the ensemble of presumptively mulatto worldviews, is reduced today to an obsessive measurement and reproduction of approximations of whites’ somatic features, and arrives at a mulatto qua mulatto sociality. Notwithstanding the political instrumentality of the colorist fragmentation, through competencies in Western cultures, the fragments recover societal cohesion in the reproduction of privilege, and in colorist thought and action, over against the interests of the vast monolingual poor Creole-spekaing majority. The analysis sees one effect of the fragmentation in the rupture of a potential moment of liberal politics in the privileged classes at the boundary of color. v The Wenner-Gren Foundation generously supported this project with a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant vi Introduction page 1 Chapter 1: Snapshot of a Western Place: Modern and Racialized, Unequal and Moral page 19 Chapter 2: Historical Context page 32 Chapter 3: Noirisme and the Political Instrumentality of Blackness page 53 Chapter 4: Black-Nationalist Sociality page 76 Chapter 5: Mulatto, Prejudice and Other White Tidemarks of the Nation page 99 Chapter 6: Unity in Colorism page 123 Chapter 7: Material Unity in Privilege page 149 Chapter 8: Knowing White page 173 Chapter 9: The Political Economy of Knowing White page 186 Conclusion: Liberal Politics in a Problematic of Hermeneutics – Yon Travay Jigantès page 213 Notes page 218 Bibliography page 228 1 Introduction A week and a day after I first arrived in the field in March of 2011, it shifted significantly from what it was at my arrival. I was at a trendy bistro in Pétionville, a municipality outside Port- au-Prince often known as a suburb of privilege to foreigners of some acquaintance with Haiti. Informed by my primary and secondary schooling under the Duvalier dictatorship and a dozen or so years of post-secondary studies in New York City, the whole augmented by decades of independent reading in popular and learned literatures, I had landed at the airport on Thursday, the previous week, to begin fieldwork in what was axiomatically the first black Republic. The questions I came to investigate did not change at the restaurant. Who are the elites in the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere? Do Haiti’s elites constitute themselves in a Blackness vs. Mulattoness opposition? The operational questions through which I entered the central thesis of the investigation did not change either. How do members of Haiti’s elites distinctively enact their elite status, in what contexts and with what consequences? How is the construction of Haiti’s elites contested, and by whom? Are there determinate barriers to inter-elite mobility? However, it began to transpire to me at the bistro that the truly rich and the merely comfortable in the middle and upper-middle classes share a cohesive sociality across lines of color in the reproduction of privilege. Yet more significantly, I also began to understand, the vast majority of Haiti’s population, which is indeed dark-skinned, and poor and socio-politically marginalized, is an object, not a subject, of the national identity in blackness. At the bistro, a study of privileged life in a Haiti taken to be a black Republic began to seem as viable as attempting empirical observation in a labyrinth of smoke and mirrors. That Friday evening, I was at Kay Atizan (Artisans House), a restaurant which is very much a place of the black Republic - in its Haitian Creole name, in its decorative artifacts 2 evocative of Haiti’s vernaculars bequeathed by the African past, in the house band playing on Friday nights1. I was there with a black gynecologist. We had known each other from kindergarten through high school before I left Haiti to attend college in the USA. We had not communicated in the intervening decades until I randomly came across his contact information on a social-media Website the previous January. When he picked me up at home earlier in the evening to come to the restaurant, he drove a late-model four-wheel drive hatchback. When he had stopped by the house yet earlier in the afternoon, he had driven a sedan. I asked him whether one of the two vehicles was his wife’s; it wasn’t. His wife generally drove yet a third car of the family. They use the four-wheel drive at night, or when security is otherwise an issue, because of its higher clearance off the ground: “Si w bezwen monte twotwa a pou w debloke tèt wou” [If you need to drive over the sidewalk to get yourself out], he explained. As the gynecologist and I spoke about Haiti and shared news of our private and professional lives, the inconsequential stories of his everyday amounted to a portrait of privileged life. The stories were also tales of variously becoming a bourgeois middle-class subject, a Haitian, or a black Haitian. The story of his teen-aged daughter setting the agenda of the family’s most recent vacation would have a familiar ring to many a household in the global North. Perusing the Internet, she found a cruise out of a port in Florida, and enlisted her younger sister to convince their parents to make that their vacation destination. The latter eventually made the appropriate reservations to fly to Miami, cruise the Caribbean Sea, and return home. In a simpler mode of family recreation, the gynecologist occasionally takes early morning drives with the children to the rural interior. On these more or less impromptu excursions, they leave at dawn, and the destination is what random town or hamlet they reach from which the gynecologist can return to Port-au-Prince by late morning to attend to what business of the day 3 he may need to. His father did the same with him when he was a boy and, as it happens, so did mine with me. The gynecologist specifically placed those outings in the context of acquainting his children with Haiti. He furthers the acquaintance with planned trips to landmarks of the national past such as King Henri Christophe’s Citadelle Laferrière near Cap Haitien. The day before the gynecologist told me of these excursions at Kay Atizan, a wealthy fair-complexioned executive, the sole fair-skinned Haitian who ever told me of being white, had also told me of taking her teenage son to see the Citadelle, to show him the grandeur of his country’s past, she told me, in the wake of the American military occupation that facilitated President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return from exile in 1994. She adamantly opposed Aristide’s return. Incidentally, the gynecologist was no fan of Aristide either. For both, those visits to the countryside and to the national patrimony would effectively be trips of becoming Haitian in the momentary encounter with the rural place and the glory of the imagined past. In another anecdote related to me by the gynecologist during our evening at Kay Atizan, he recalled with bemused paternal affection a dinner with his wife and children at La Plantation, an upscale restaurant in Pétionville where the cost of dinner for two can reach upwards of $100 US2. As they perused the menu his younger daughter insistently asserted her desire for “mayi moulen” (cornmeal) – her general preference also at home. The dishes at La Plantation are heavily inflected by French culinary traditions. “Mayi moulen” is a staple of poor Haitians’ diet – in lieu of the more expensive “diri” (rice) – and is remembered in popular memory as the principal food served to the slaves of yore.