Robert Fatton Jr - The Guise of Exceptionalism: Unmasking the National Narratives of Haiti and the United States

The Guise of Exceptionalism

CRITICAL CARIBBEAN STUDIES

Series Editors: Yolanda Martnez-San Miguel, Carter Mathes, and Kathleen Lpez

Editorial Board: Carlos U. Decena, Rutgers University; Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University; Aisha Khan, New York University; April J. Mayes, Pomona College; Patricia Mohammed, University of West Indies; Martin Munro, Florida State University; F. Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University; Michelle Stephens, Rutgers University; Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania; and Lanny Thompson, University of Puerto Rico

Focused particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although attentive to the context of earlier eras, this series encourages interdisciplinary approaches and methods and is open to scholarship in a variety of areas, including anthropology, cultural studies, diaspora and transnational studies, environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and sociology. The series pays particular attention to the four main research clusters of Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, where the coeditors serve as members of the executive board: Caribbean Critical Studies Theory and the Disciplines; Archipelagic Studies and Creolization; Caribbean Aesthetics, Poetics, and Politics; and Caribbean Colonialities.

For a list of all the titles in the series, please see the last page of the book.

Being from one country but living in and taking on the citizenship of another is an advantage insofar as it generates deep ties of affection for both places. At the same time, however, it creates a sense of detachment and rootlessness. As a native Haitian and a naturalized American, I live this fractured reality. Opting for a new citizenship alters ones identity but does not erase original bonds. Instead, it creates a liberating but ambiguous detachment. As an intellectual, I find that this detachment gives me latitude to criticize ruthlessly the claims of exceptionalism invoked not only in my two homes but also elsewhere.

This is a book that will probably displease many. It is at odds with nationalist renderings of both Haitian and American history. In fact, after giving a recent lecture on Haitis ongoing crises, a few Haitian students told me, I do not like your take. Why? I asked. You are right on everything, they responded, but you should not expound in this way in front of the blans. Similarly, Americans often object or feel uneasy when anyone denies both their countrys God-given indispensability and their societys easy commingling with the city on the hill. This is especially the case when such antagonistic pronouncements are voiced abroad, beyond the safe boundaries of the United States.

President Donald Trump has recently expressed this view in extreme terms. He condemned as anti-American any comments that were critical of the United States, suggesting that criticizing America or its policies calls into question not only ones patriotism but even ones citizenship and right to remain on U.S. soil. Singling out four liberal congresswomen of color, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts), Ilhan Omar (Minnesota), and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan), the president announced in an incendiary tweet:

So interesting to see Progressive Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why dont they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you cant leave fast enough.

That all four congresswomen are American citizens, and that three of the four were born in the United States is not the important issue. What matters is Trumps misguided notion that to be a true citizen requires an unreflective and uncritical idolatry of country. That the four are minorities in Congressthey are women, they are people of color, and three of the four have immigrant backgroundsmade them all the more vulnerable to Trumps xenophobic and racist othering rhetoric. This xenophobic syndrome is not peculiar to Trump, however, nor is it particularly American. It may be expressed in different ways and various degrees, but it exists in virtually every nation-state. Moreover, in most countries, there is an unspoken norm that to the extent that criticism is voiced, it should remain in the family; otherwise it morphs into an indecent denunciation that almost rivals treason. It is as if the insider were terrified by publicly displaying the countrys dirty laundry, and the other were incapable of thinking through the reality of what she observes. Like a magical eraser, silence will, it is assumed, remove the very visible issues and predicaments raised by criticisms. It seems to me that this is an infantile but all too common nationalist reaction that has to be rejected.