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Haitian Rhythms Under Scrutiny: Guantánamo Bay Bio-surveillance and Blackness at the Border

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In 1994, President Joe Biden, then a senator on the Foreign Affairs Committee, said during an interview, “If Haiti—a God-awful thing to say—if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up three hundred feet, Haiti wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.” During this time, his party’s administration was detaining Haitians in Guantánamo Bay and enacting an intrusive regime of bio-surveillance, examining their blood for the presence of HIV/AIDS. This state-sanctioned insistence on narrating Black Haitian movement into the United States as a biological and legal threat to the sanctity of white democracy undergirds contemporary immigration surveillance practices and modes of social classification. Biden’s remarkably callous statement situated abjection as the Haitian origin story. It also concealed the role of US foreign policy in re-entrenching and extending the legacy of Western colonialism in Haiti. Haitian countermemories of Western empire direct us away from supp

Haitian Rhythms Under Scrutiny: Guantánamo Bay Bio-surveillance and Blackness at the Border Shamira Ibrahim In 1994, President Joe Biden, then a senator on the Foreign Affairs Committee, said during an interview , “If Haiti—a God-awful thing to say—if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up three hundred feet, Haiti wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.” During this time, his party’s administration was detaining Haitians in Guantánamo Bay and enacting an intrusive regime of bio-surveillance, examining their blood for the presence of HIV/AIDS. This state-sanctioned

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