Narrating crisis: Rwanda, Haiti, and the politics of commemoration

In the late-twentieth century, the Rwandan Civil War and genocide (1990--1994) and a Haitian military coup and junta (1991--1994) occasioned horrendous acts of political violence. The United States (US), as the world's last superpower, and the United Nations (UN) possessed the political and military might required to ameliorate these conditions. This potential power to intervene sparked debate over humanitarian responsibilities in the Global North, but depictions of these events often devolved into caricature, obscuring the adverse impact of US and UN foreign policy on Rwandan and Haitian political stability as well as the international community's failure to prevent or limit that violence. Narrating Crisis examines US and European as well as postcolonial responses to Rwandan and Haitian political crisis and identifies a pervasive discourse on "failed states" that reproduces colonial narratives of African tribalism, Haitian savagery, and the illegitimacy of black sovereignty.;Each chapter identifies new iterations of these narratives in US and European film and mass media as well as African, Caribbean, and Haitian-American literary texts that seek to confront but sometimes duplicate a colonial gaze. These competing visions of Rwanda and Haiti relate to a larger discursive quarrel over the meaning of modernity, which post-Enlightenment thought has long associated with European/Euro-American civilization. Rather than a product of cultural or racial backwardness or a "Third World" failure to assimilate to "First World" modernity, postcolonial political violence is bound up with the material history of colonialism and the persisting narratives and economic inequalities it continues to produce. Ongoing strife in Rwanda and the aftermath of Haiti's 2010 earthquake put the importance of this investigation into sharp relief, as colonialist paternalism continues to influence Euro-American as well as postcolonial responses to African and Caribbean political turmoil. This project also reveals the insufficiencies of a binary distinction between hegemonic Euro-American narratives and subversive African-Caribbean narratives, as regressive and progressive accounts of African and Caribbean political violence can be found within both the so-called developed and developing worlds.