ABSTRACT
A glaring weakness in Latin American studies is the uneasiness displayed by some Latin Americanists toward including Haiti in their analyses of the region. One hears it said at conferences, and not always in hushed tones, that Haiti ‘belongs’ more to sub-Saharan Africa than Latin America. Those who espouse this view often remark that Haiti is the only least developed country in the Western Hemisphere, a distinction it shares with a majority of African countries but which puts it at odds with its American neighbors (from a geographic standpoint, the claim is actually false). To the extent that Haiti receives coverage by Latin Americanists, it is often parsimonious, at best, and, at worse, selective: limited to discussions of natural disasters, pandemics and dictatorships, perpetuating what Paul Farmer called ‘Haiti’s bad press’. But why should Haiti have to be in one regional/cultural imaginary or another? Why this compulsion by scholars to put things in boxes and pretend that they are hermetically sealed?
