Space and Power: A Postcolonial Feminist Geographic Critique of Disaster Reconstruction in Haiti

Abstract

Geography enjoys complex theories of space. Feminist geographer Doreen Massey (2005) argues space is relational and multiple, a product and producer of social relations. By comparison, disaster scholars and the field of disaster studies engage with space minimally. Often, space is simply viewed as the static container within which things happen. This thesis aims to extend disasters' spatiality beyond floodplain boundaries and seismic mapping to reimagine space as a logic of power. Here, I locate the popular disaster response slogan build back better which reframes disasters as an opportunity to bring about positive change (Cheek & Chmutina, 2024) and follow this phrase to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Build back better frames Haiti's official response and recovery through two key documents (what I term master disaster texts): the Post Disaster Need Assessment (PDNA) and the Action Plan for National Recovery and Development of Haiti (PARDH).

I use a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) supported by a feminist geographic and postcolonial theoretical framework to examine the discursive role of space in Haiti's disaster response texts and to unpack the power bound up in the better world they propose. I engage with material response and recovery phases as well as imagined, possible futures which shape but also exceed the disaster management cycle. I refer to these dimensions collectively as Haiti's refondation. Through my FCDA of Haiti's master disaster texts, space emerges both as key tool in Haiti's refondation and as a site of negotiation. Six spatial themes are visible in the PDNA and PARDH, identified through coding. Analyzing their use in context, I find that Haitian space is reimagined through the productive rationalities and relations of neoliberalism, most likely at the instruction of foreign forces. Here, I trace the PDNA and PARDH's rescaling of the disaster from local to national levels where the myth of the modern state is invoked. Once there, a new (old) problem emerges: concentration and centralization around Port-au-Prince or the Haitian State's incomplete relationship with population and territory. A spatial solution is proposed: development hubs evenly spaced out across the country and connected to remake Haiti into the right order of things and governable in neoliberal terms and relations. I also locate a response from the Haitian State in which it carves out a space for itself in refondation, not by challenging the so-called rules of the game but rather its own position within be in relation to them.

This research demonstrates that space matters to disasters. In the case of Haiti's refondation, space is at the heart of reconstructing Haiti materially and producing desirable relations (for some) within an unequal international system. These findings reaffirm that the way we think and write about disasters is important, including their spatiality. Doing so works to bring into being a certain future amongst many and to define what actions are rendered imaginable and by whom. Feminist geographies and postcolonial studies provide an apt framework to uncover the gendered and raced dimensions of building back better accounting for the structural inequalities perpetuated by patriarchy and colonialism. This theoretical pairing should be considered beyond the case of the 2010 Haiti earthquake as should more investigations into the space and spatiality of disasters more broadly.