The narrative in those accounts was familiar: one of inept governments, helpless victims, and an aid community doing all it can to bypass the first in order to save the second. In response, Schuller and Latin America specialist Pablo Morales gathered 59 contributors who were either Haitian or knew the country deeply and assembled a new, wide-ranging anthology, “Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake.”
Published last week, the book features analysis from leading scholars, journalists, and activists. There’s a strong New England contingent: Boston Haitian Reporter editor Manolia Charlotin, Wesleyan sociologist Alex Dupuy, BU School of Medicine professor Marshall Fleurant, Brown University Haitian language specialist Patrick Sylvain, and Partners in Health physicians Louise Ivers and David Walton.
Through these eyes, a much more unsettling narrative emerges — one of an aid community dominated by unwieldy, out-of-touch nongovernmental organizations, also called NGOs, and past foreign interventions that set the stage for the quake’s epic death toll. It’s a narrative, the book argues, that is critical to understanding a country where some 500,000 people remain homeless.
“This is the first collective attempt to open up a dialogue that has been for the most part shut out,” said Schuller, who teaches at the City University of New York’s York College. “We need to listen carefully to Haitian people and the articulation of their needs, and I hope this book will be the first step in that conversation.”
Schuller spoke to Ideas via Skype from Port-au-Prince.
IDEAS: What distinguishes “Tectonic Shifts” from other books about the 2010 earthquake?
