Documenting hurt: UN, epistemic injustice, and the political ecology of the 2010 cholera epidemic in Haiti

Abstract

In a reiteration of a long history of pathologization of Haiti and Haitians, the cholera epidemic was framed as endemic, an inevitable outcome of the 2010 earthquake, and a quasi-confirmation of Haiti’s premodern, exceptional predicament. Baseball in the Time of Cholera and Haiti in a Time of Cholera, widely viewed but not extensively analysed documentaries, challenge this linking of disaster and disease. They reveal forms of epistemic injustice and counter the politics behind such misappropriations of cause and effect in the UN-introduced cholera outbreak. Centring on the notion of hurt, this essay explores the ways in which the two films give value to personal testimony, stories of individual life and loss, offer a relational take on life with cholera, and, in so doing, contribute to the ‘narrative defeat’ of the UN (Payton 2017). In effect, the two films, as the article argues, formulate a political ecology of the epidemic: they compel a rethinking of the relationship between forms of experiential knowledge, such as personal testimony, and forms of slow violence that occur when an environment is rendered dangerous, or when an introduced disease becomes an endemic threat.