April 24, 2025: EarthquakeStudying: Haiti in 2010

[125 years ago this coming weekend, the first name in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of seismic quakes, leading up to a special post on Richter himself!]

On two distinct but interconnected ways to AmericanStudy a Caribbean catastrophe.

First things first (and I know I offer this disclaimer often when I write about global events and issues, but I think it bears repeating each and every time): the horrific earthquake that hit Haiti in January 2010 is a specific event and history, our understandings of and engagements with which must be centered on that island nation and its people. The hundreds of thousands of Haitians killed and millions more uprooted, the hundreds of thousands of destroyed or severely damaged homes and other buildings (including the National Palace), the urgent and still in many ways ongoing humanitarian crises that resulted from all those and many more effects; these tragedies have to be framed and responded to as centrally and fundamentally Haitian, and nothing I say on an AmericanStudies blog is meant to redirect or minimize that attention.

Yet of course the United States is linked to the rest of the world, and in some specific cases it’s even more clearly and significantly connected in ways that demand we also engage such global stories in terms of what they help us see in ourselves. I’m not sure there’s any other nation of which that’s more true than Haiti: from its early 19^th century Revolution and the both inspiring and fraught effects of that event in the Early Republic U.S.; to the striking number of 20^th century moments in which the U.S. directly intervened in Haitian politics, including an extended (nearly two-decade, in fact) occupation early in the century and an ambiguous but unquestionable influence on a coup at the turn of the next century; the United States and Haiti have played as prominent a role in each other’s histories over the last couple centuries as any two Western Hemisphere nations. When the U.S. helped spearhead relief and recovery efforts after the quake, particularly the January 22^nd “Hope for Haiti Now” telethon, that role has to be understood as in some way connected to these longstanding relationships—whether a continuation of US interventions, guilt for that history, or some combination of the two and other factors as well.

But that’s not the only way to AmericanStudy the U.S.’s role in the earthquake’s aftermath, and I would say it’s at least as meaningful to understand this moment as part of a humanitarian foreign policy alternative to those histories of global intervention and realpolitik influence. No American political leader embodied that humanitarian perspective better than President Jimmy Carter (RIP), and Carter was of course still doing that humanitarian work long after his presidency, including in Haiti with those affected by the earthquake. And while that humanitarian perspective and role can and should be extended anywhere in the world, it’s perhaps especially meaningful in a Western Hemisphere context—given the U.S.’s history of interventions and interference, but also and maybe even more importantly given the concept of creolization, of the ways in which we can even more fully parallel the histories, communities, and identities of nations like the U.S. and Haiti. In at least some ways, that is, the 2010 earthquake hit us as well.

Last quake tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Famous quakes or other natural disasters you’d analyze?