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"Deeply researched and lived, Greg Beckett's portrait of Port-au-Prince is full of insights about an often misunderstood city at one of its least understood times."—Jonathan M. Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster
"A knowledgeable and moving tour d'horizon of the crises that Haitians have lived through since the fall of the Duvalier dynasty: coups, countercoups, occupations, hurricanes, and the devastating 2010 earthquake. Greg Beckett navigates this scene alongside insightful and witty Haitians from all walks of life. It's an intriguing look at the way people manage to survive intense and ongoing political and natural trauma."—Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti
"Exceptionally written, Greg Beckett's book is a poignant, very human tale that highlights how people in Haiti endure and respond to 'crisis.' It offers rich ethnographic detail, revealing diverse local perspectives on multiple events from the catastrophic to the 'everyday.' There Is No More Haiti is an important and needed text, centering human faces, experiences, understandings, and voices behind the statistics and honoring their dignity."—Mark Schuller, author of Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti
"Simply put, this is a breathtaking work: overwhelmingly smart, overwhelmingly careful and deliberate in its attentions, and, above all, overwhelmingly filled with love for the places and people whose lives (and deaths) it seeks to understand."—Patrick Anderson, author of Autobiography of a Disease
"Greg Beckett is among a new generation of young scholars who offers a non-Eurocentric path for understanding 'the other.' With solid theoretical credentials, he brings an urgently needed and sincere humanistic empathy to his subjects—the only way to make sense of our collective present."—Raoul Peck, filmmaker and director of I Am Not Your Negro
List of contents
List of Photographs
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Forest and the City
2. Looking for Life
3. Making Disorder
4. Between Life and Death
5. Aftermath
Postscript
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Greg Beckett is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western University in Ontario.
Summary
This is not just another book about crisis in Haiti. This book is about what it feels like to live and die with a crisis that never seems to end. It is about the experience of living amid the ruins of ecological devastation, economic collapse, political upheaval, violence, and humanitarian disaster. It is about how catastrophic events and political and economic forces shape the most intimate aspects of everyday life. In this gripping account, anthropologist Greg Beckett offers a stunning ethnographic portrait of ordinary people struggling to survive in Port-au-Prince in the twenty-first century. Drawing on over a decade of research, There Is No More Haiti builds on stories of death and rebirth to powerfully reframe the narrative of a country in crisis. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Haiti today.
Additional text
"At once poignant and urgent, There is No More Haiti develops a slow and intensively empathic ethnography that unfolds . . . through, and despite, a furiously rapid, chaotic historical moment marked by multiple crises."
