In-Person | What do we owe to Haïti? A case for epistemic reparations

Please note that the time allocated for this colloquia will be devoted to discussion.

Speaker: Prof Magali Bessone (Panthéon-Sorbonne University)

About the Session: In the 2007 book she co-edited with Nancy Tuana, Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, Shannon Sullivan contributed with a chapter entitled “White ignorance and colonial oppression, or why I know so little about Puerto Rico”. In a similar vein, I believe that my - that “our” - ignorance about Haiti is a core epistemic problem that is centrally connected to our postcolonial and racial context. I also believe that it needs to, and it can, be addressed in terms of reparative justice. I will present how the idea of Haiti has been ideologically distorted, and focus on two mechanisms, silenciation and exceptionalization. I will show how they combine to produce a “specter” of Haiti which has come to obfuscate and cover the real Haiti, making it unknowable. I will argue that knowing Haiti, and recognizing Haitians as knowers, is an indispensable primary epistemic reparative step to move toward global racial justice. Epistemic reparations are key to reparative justice, which I understand, in a Millsian perspective, as a radical non-ideal theory of justice capable of motivating us all to effectively engage in achieving racial justice in our real, historical, circumstances – and I suggest that repairing the idea of Haiti could prove a decisive shifting case in building this momentum.

About the speaker

Magali Bessone is professor of political philosophy at University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne; she is a member of ISJPS-NoSoPhi, a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France and a member of the Scientific Council of the French Foundation for the Memory of Slavery. Her research focuses on theories of justice, critical race theory, and reparations. She has recently published Faire justice de l’irréparable (Vrin, 2019), and co-written with Matthieu Renault WEB Du Bois, double conscience et condition raciale (Editions Amsterdam, 2021).

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