Haiti has been imagined as "already dead" within the Western visual regime (Philogene 2015). The nation is oversaturated by representations of environmental problems, health disparities, and political upheaval. Most of the health issues that the population face can be linked to environmental degradation, slavery, and imperialist processes that have altered the landscape, producing mass precarity (Farmer 2003, Moore 2017, McNeille 2015, Verges 2017 ). This project is an attempt to illustrate the actors and forces that have shaped the nation's health politics - through the lens of toxicity. After the 2010 earthquake, Vodou priest/believers and sexual minorities were indicted by the masses for the earthquake (Ulysses 2010). The religion was also blamed for the Cholera epidemic that took thousands of lives in the Artibonite region. Historically, Vodou functions as a paradox being both a tool of biopolitics and portrayed as a "social Hygiene" problem by both Haitian elites and Western powers (Ramsey 2011). Toxicity in this project is used to speaks to toxic discourses that seek to scapegoat instead of addressing the lasting impact of the plantation economy in contemporary Haitian health.CitationsMintz, Sidney, and Michel Trouillot. "The Social History of Voodoo." Ghettobiennale: 123-47.Moore, Sophie Sapp. "Organize or Die: Farm School Pedagogy and the Political Ecology of the Agroecological Transition in Rural Haiti." The Journal of Environmental Education 48, no. 4 (2017): 248-59.Philogene, Jerry. "Dead Citizen” and the Abject Nation: Social Death, Haiti, and the Strategic Power of the Image." Journal of Haitian Studies 21, no. 1 (2015): 100-26.Ramsey, Kate. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.Verges, Francoise. "Racial Capitalocene." In The Futures of Black Radicalism, 1-266. Brooklyn, New York: Verso, 2017.
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