Tag Archives: citizenship

Internal exiling in the face of imperialism

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On August 8, 1915, Rear Admiral William B. Caperton, Commander in Chief, Atlantic Reserve Fleet, arranged a meeting at the American Legation in Port au Prince with the two most prominent candidates for election as President to Haiti. He intended to ascertain their feelings toward the United States, and, in truth, to choose who would be the next President. Before the meeting took place he already had a sense of where each stood, but he wanted to hear their intentions directly. Relying on his chief of staff, Captain E. L. Beach, to translate, Caperton began when the two men arrived:

Gentlemen, it seems likely that one of you will be elected President of Haiti. Haiti is in great trouble; she has suffered much. The United States has come to Haiti as a good friend, interested only in Haiti’s welfare, in her happiness, in her prosperity. The United States has determined that revolution and disorder and anarchy must cease in Haiti; that unselfish and devoted patriotism must characterize hereafter the acts of the Haitian Government. Senator Dartiguenave and Dr. Bobo, realizing this momentous crisis in Haitian history, with the eyes of Haiti and the United States upon you, do you promise that if elected President of Haiti you will, in your official acts, be guided solely by earnest devotion to Haiti’s honor and welfare?[1]

Both men replied emphatically in the affirmative, and Admiral Caperton continued:

Senator Dartiguenave, in case Dr. Bobo should be elected will you promise that you will exert every influence in your power to assist him for Haiti’s good; that you will join with him heartily and helpfully and loyally?

To which Dartiguenave responded:

If Dr. Bobo is elected president I will give him the most loyal, earnest support in every effort he may make for Haiti’s welfare.

Admiral Caperton repeated the question to Dr. Rosalvo Bobo:

Dr. Bobo, if Senator Dartiguenave is elected president, will you help him loyally and earnestly in his efforts to benefit Haiti?

No: I will not! Dr. Bobo shouted. If Senator Dartiguenave is elected president I will not help him. I will go away and leave Haiti to her fate. I alone am fit to be president of Haiti; I alone understood Haiti’s aspirations, no one is fit to be president but me; there is no patriotism in Haiti to be compared with mine; the Haitians love no one as they love me.

It was decided in that moment, that Senator Dartineguave would be President. Admiral Caperton explained his decision thusly to the Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, six years later:

My idea was that the man most suitable for the Haitian presidency was one in whom the Haitians confidence, one whose animating purpose would be Haiti’s welfare, to which purpose he would give unselfish devotion; and also, one who combined such qualifications with confidence in the United States. There was never any bargaining of any kind whatever with Dartiguenave, as far as I know.

Three days after the meeting, Dartiguenave was elected in a landslide by the National Assembly. This conversation, held in private, but which had very public implications, marked the beginning of the new diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and Haiti and her people. In the U.S. political imaginary, the political subjectivity of Haitians had become only legible in their acquiescence to the U.S. Individual actors within the political sphere, and the political actions of the population at large, were not only subsumed to the needs and agenda of the U.S., but were in fact written with a pre-determined structure of what constituted a “proper” political subjectivity.

It is precisely in redefining political subjectivity for those under control – a denial not only of a sophisticated sense of political subjectivity, but also a resistance to recognizing legitimate enactments of citizenship – that citizenship of the Haitian governing body and its constituents was negotiated from across an ocean, transnationalizing citizenship, as an extension of an imperial project. When Dr. Bobo threatened to leave Haiti forever, he was not having a moment of “theatrics” (as it is described by Admiral Caperton), but rather, he materialized what was both discursively and politically occurring – an exiling. Like so many Haitians before him,[2] Dr. Bobo faced exile if not elected President, but he also faced a much deeper exile – an exiling from his own country even if he stayed.

What does it mean to be exiled while still in one’s own country? And what does it have to do with citizenship? I’ve been chewing on this problem for quite some time. In re-reading Said’s “Reflections on Exile”, what does come clear is the “unhealable rift” required of any man who would accept the Presidency under the U.S. occupation – the rift between not only himself and his country, but of his own citizenship to Haiti – which would be a much deeper estrangement from his political subjectivity.

But i think, at root, is a deeper exiling – one of the Haitian people, more generally. This happens at multiple levels, but i am interested in two: political and body. On the one hand, Haitians were systematically stripped of their rights, coming under martial law within weeks of the U.S. marines landing, coming under severe censorship within months, and finding that the hearings that were held through the court martial system were neither fair nor productive. This was partially dependent upon the imaginative construction of Haitian bodies in the eyes of the commanding forces, the U.S. State Department, and the Secretary of the Navy. Repeatedly, Haitians are configured as dirty and diseased – both reasons to instantaneously disregard them as political subjects or citizens. Their citizenship is diminished in the eyes of the Americans, as written through disease.

But how does this, the reading of bodies, come to symbolize a kind of exile? When i think of exile, i immediately think of casting out – a cutting off of that which is deemed “diseased.” People are not exiled for being “healthy” toward a government or ruling class – they are cut out, like a cancer. They represent the possibility for something else, they pose a threat to what is. They must be written and understood as diseased to be cast out, to be divided from their citizenship. What is humbling about Bobo’s defiance, in what he knew to be a defining moment, was his unwillingness to give in quietly. He knew that he was lost, either way, and so he stood there, in utter truth and without apology. 

[1] This conversation is taken from Admiral Caperton’s testimony in the Hearings before a Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, United States Senate, Sixty-Seventh Congress.

[2] Beginning with the fourth President of Haiti, Jean Pierre Boyer, who was overthrown and exiled first to Jamaica and then France, 13 of 26 Presidents since independence had been in exile – most of them in Jamaica.

 

A moment to ponder citizenship

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T.H. Marshall’s rather utopian vision of the growing inclusiveness in citizenship projects was premature, at best. In the 1950’s, at the time of his writing, social welfare was hierarchically organized decrying the reality of a universalist social citizenship. And while women, ethnic minorities, differently abled people, children and the elderly were not excluded, they did have problematic relationships within these frames (McGuinness, 2002).  Citizenship is not a single and static denomination of personhood. As Chantal Mouffe points out, “citizenship is not just one identity among others” – it is not a fixed, immutable character, rather, stands as a forceful antagonism to pre-scribed universalist and cosmopolitan constructs  (1992, 378). It is a constant state of negotiation and re-negotiation at the individual and collective levels, politically, socially and economically. Hannah Arendt argues that the liberal state, though it purports to protect the rights of men (people, see Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights), truly only protects the rights of its citizens – and apparently not very well at that.

The reconfiguration of economic and political powers through supra-national organizations has moved political mobilization, and indeed, the very nature and possibility of negotiation out of reach and even out of view of many people. This brings to bear questions about the new scale of citizenship – even as geographers grapple with questions of de- and re-territorialization and transnational migrations, citizenship is still spatially bounded to an ever-increasingly-nebulous nation-state (see: Mitchell, 2003). That political engagement, and democratic participation (particularly) are exercised at the scale of the nation-state means that the re-formation and de-formation of particular economic and political processes across various scales and through a multitude of institutions brings about questions of actual possibilities of political engagement of individuals and of groups. These shifts force us to ask: what does this do to claims to entitlements and protection of individual freedoms? (And really – what is “freedom”?)

sources available upon request

Citizenship, institutions, and government

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Today, i’m writing on citizenship. I have a vague sense of it form all the prattling i do about health citizenship, but i’ve felt that my focus has been too narrow. So, in three sentences or less, i need to define citizenship and the ways in which it has been employed socially and politically.

In going through my bibliography, i came across a fantastic article by Robert Lake and Kathe Newman that i’d read a few years ago when i was trying to disentangle health citizenship for my master’s thesis: Differential Citizenship in the Shadow State (GeoJournal, 58: 109-120). Their work is what really turned me on to trying to understand it, and using the definition by Gershon Shafir (1998, 23) :

By ‘citizenship’…we need to understand not only a bundle of formal rights, but the entire mode of incorporation of a particular individual or group into society

They go on to say that:

On this view, we look for citizenship not in the citizen but as situated in the social practices of integration and inclusion exercised by institutions of the state (Young, 2000). Under conditions of state contraction and restructuring, however, the state increasingly relinquishes the integrative functions of governance and redistribution while retaining function of repression, exclusion, and social control (Gilmore, 98; Jessop, 93). It is thus increasingly left to the shadow state to provide the arena, the mechanisms and the points of institutional access through which the offer of citizenship is extended and social integration can be accomplished.

Institutions of the state. I’ve been struggling lately with understandings of the state. On the one hand, massive state bureaucracy and surveillance is dastardly. Social services in this country are used as a telescope through which to examine, define, and control the poor. So the exercise of their citizenship right within this frame means that they also lose a rather large portion of other rights. On the other hand, if the state does not provide social services, then who does? and within what frame – with what accountability and to whom? De-democratization of the social services demobilizes the political power of the poor.

But that idea, in and of itself is a bit condescending – as if that is the only way to mobilize politically for the poor – through their collective bargaining for a meaningful social safety net. Then again, people who are struggling simply to survive hardly have time to engage politically or even socially – there is a whole host of much more complex questions that arises at this point.

It’s a question i’ve been struggling with for a few years. Less government vs. more government. What is the role of government? If the government is creating an economic climate that creates greater disparity, doesn’t it then have the responsibility to provide social safety net?

I found in my Master’s thesis a kind of utopia that i was feeling rather brazen to be so gloriously positive about. It was about the Model Cities Program funded by Johnson in 1965 (ish). What evolved from this was not only local institutions (community-built programs) that were tailored to meet the communities’ needs, but through whose process of building created political mobilization – written into the mandates were a return of citizenship to some of the most-disenfranchised populations. I worried that i was being overly optimistic until i met Jenna Lloyd, who at the time was at the CUNY Center for Place Culture and Politics. She had written her PhD on a similar project, also funded with Model Cities money.

This model was a great mixture of government bureaucracy and community involvement. At the time that the clinic i studied was dreamed up, there were 11 major hospitals and clinics within or adjacent to the model neighborhood (not one would was more than 2 miles from anyone within the bounded space), yet all were closed to the people who lived in the area. The only option for children was 11 miles away – it required at least two buses to get to. The clinic was dreamed up and built by the members of the community – and in this process taught the 100′s of people who were involved how to mobilize their citizenship toward concrete action with real consequences. All with minimal involvement from the government.

There is a balance in there that is hard not to fantasize about. Part of the fantastic-ness of it all is the historical legacy of the place – the community remembers and the people who work there and who attend there are reminded every day of the importance of dignity within this social service institute. Jenna’s dissertation did not end on quite so happy a note, from what i understand. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to discuss it in too much detail (i blame that on my own social ineptitude).

So how does this apply internationally? What if, in the transnationalizing of citizenship (see Matt Sparke’s discussion with Saskia Sassen on this), we also transnationlized the model cities project? Or is that too radical?

In the end, the conservatives managed to slowly strangle the program till it died of asphyxiation. A point that has stayed with me and still gives me chills stated that this program had provided a “blueprint for revolution” and “mayors across the nation charged the federal government with financing an attack on city hall.” I feel compelled to note that most of the model neighborhoods (including the one here in Seattle) were African American. Ah yes – citizenship…whom exactly is actually allowed to exercise citizenship and in what ways?

On that note, i am leaving off today with two videos that pose the same question: What if the Tea Party were Black? The first video is a rather inane “discussion” (insultingly so, i have to say) on CNN that fails to actually address the question (let’s not get too radical, now, CNN). The second is pointed and incredibly powerful in its exploration of the topic.

General exams the re-discovery of my roots

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I have a theory about graduate school – it only works if you’re humble enough to admit that you’re not perfect, if you submit yourself supple-y to the demands and admonitions, praises and critiques, mouldings and formations of the people you ask to take you on. At the same time, there is another process happening that i’m ever so grateful for – the constant re-examination of who i am and what is important to me: the Why I am Here question.

Today i’ve been writing the postcolonial section of my general exam statement. In some ways it’s been easier than i expected and in others so.much.harder. But the best part of it, even in the midst of the angst of realizing that i just haven’t read enough to be exam’ing, has been falling in love again with the depth of theory. Today’s gem: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Who knew?

She describes the chapters of A critique of postcolonial reason: toward a history of a vanishing present, as not standing alone, but

They are loosely strung on a chain that may be described this way: the philosophical presuppositions, historical excavations, and literary representations of the dominant – insofar as they are shared by the emergent postcolonial – also trace a subliminal and discontinuous emergence of the “native informant”: autochthone and / or subaltern.

The native informant. That seems to be the theme today. Who is the native informant and how does the native informant retain her positionality when even as she speaks, her position shifts? Is there an undoing of her native-ness in her speech? It is in this space that she points to the shift from colonial discourse studies to the transnational cultural studies.

Transnational. What does it mean to speak of the transnational? I’ve been trailing along on the tail of cosmopolitanism over the past nine months – (t)reading lightly, nothing too heavy, as i try to grasp at the meaning of Kant’s cosmopolitan man. It’s been years since i’ve read Kant for Kant’s sake. Maybe it’s time for a perusal. I do need to re-read him before Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta’s edited book, Reading Kant’s Geography.

But what has grabbed my attention is the attempt to theorize about a globalized world without diving headfirst into monolithic descriptions of what it is to be cosmopolitan. There is, of course, the fascinating conversation between Saskia Sassen and Matthew Sparke in Political Power and Social Theory over the new formations of citizenship. For Sparke, there is a transnationalization of citizenship that is happening – not so much a de-nationalization of citizenship, as Sassen would have it. I’m inclined to agree with him.

It occurred to me yesterday that citizenship comes in two forms (not necessarily a singular form) – a cosmopolitan citizenship and a rooted citizenship. These are rough notes on my thoughts (that i scribbled while sitting through a rather uninspiring lecture about health systems), so please forgive their incompleteness. These are not two completely separate iterations of citizenship. In fact, i think i’m imagining them as dynamic and in constant state of re-formation. I’m coming at this from the back-end. Most of my dissertation will be on health citizenship -  a newly emerging citizenship project to follow on the heels of the commonly held economic, political and social citizenships laid out by TH Marshall. This is not my fantastic idea – indeed, i’m borrowing heavily from Bruce Braun, Susan Craddock and Nikolas Rose (as well as Kaushik Rajan, Adriana Petryna, and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, to name a few), so it’s all still a bit wobbly.

Where i’m imagining it going, however, is toward a more geographically nuanced frame. The fixed and rooted point not only to citizenship construction but also citizenship enactment. Citizenship is as much about how a person is perceived as it is about how a person perceives him or herself, thus, the rootedness is the national citizenship (which can be multiple for particular people) both in space/place and in ideologies of nationalism. The cosmopolitan has to do with the transnationalization of citizenship – that citizenship is not only rooted and tied to a specific place but is informed by and works in tandem with transnational movements – of bodies, resources, ideas, etc.

Here is where i’m going with it:

Haitians are rooted in their Haitian-ness. Humanitarian assistance is as much about keeping the Haitian people on their island as much as it is about helping them. That the American military immediately took over the airport after the earthquake and that the Coast Guard stepped up its patrol of the International Waters between Haiti and the US is not surprising – containment. At the same time, however, their cosmopolitan citizenship (not necessarily of their own construction) is coming through international humanitarian organizations.

Health citizenship is the individual and collective negotiations in the politics of seeking and accessing health and health care. That the health (meaning, not just health care and treatment, but all things that encompass what it means to be a healthy person – physically and mentally) of the Haitian people is very much in the hands of outside organizations – that it is being meted and managed not at all through their own devising means that their health citizenship has taken on a decidedly transnational formation. In the crudest sense, for those living in IDP camps (or not, as the 100,000 IDPs outside the Camp Corail can attest), this means that their health citizenship is intimately tied to place – and not just any place – to the small and enclosed spaces (oh – i can hear Lefebvre turning in his grave) of camps. Their citizenship is out of their hands – or is it?

How does this all relate back to Spivak? I am reminded, in reading her, what wealth of insight we can be offered by reading the philosophers and literary authors of the 19th century – what they have to offer us in richness. But more importantly, i’m drawn to thinking of the nebulous identity formation that is not a singular act of an individual even as the ownership of identity is a very personal matter. It is the rootedness of intimacy with the colouring of a transnational world…

And i’ve chased that dragon into smoke…