Haiti's history is convoluted and proud, with ailing institutions working to redistribute
resources and quell recurring insurgencies. However, its reputation is marred by decades of
fraught attempts to normalize international relations with nations opposed to its politico-
economic independence. This informative history, despite the reverence it experiences in Black
Studies and other academic inquiries, has seen little use in policymaking, particularly within
programs expressly redressing crises beleaguering nations in the Global South. The same may
be said of Frantz Fanon’s radical work which bridged medicine with a critique of institutions,
power relations, and colonialism. Fanon’s writings characterize colonized—and therefore
Haitian—resistance as the inevitable response to colonial subjugation of national interests,
Haitian bodies and minds, and systems of government. Using Fanon’s unique analyses in A
Dying Colonialism (1994), examples of domestic resistance to medical intervention,
sociopolitical unease towards foreign gang violence suppression, and histories of colonial
medicine and Haitian resistance, I argue that long-term cholera and gang violence prevention
are impossible without an end to outsized American and Western colonial interference in
Haitian affairs.
Haiti’s nationalist movement has rarely faltered after multiple internal and externally instigated coup d’états, but why has it remained so close yet so far from real economic independence? Sociopolitical theorists point to neo-colonialism and its neoliberal economic systems of mercantilist finance, but others ascribe Haiti’s instability to deeper epistemic systems of thought that maintain the justifications for the ruling powers’ neocolonial actions and hinders Haitian activists. I identify one such epistemic system, Green’s (2021) “Eurochristianity”, and argue that it is Haitians’ and international finance’s adherence to the world-system as it stands that continues to impede the nation’s progress towards liberation. I investigate the role of Christianity in Haiti and U.S.-Haitian affairs through historiographical analysis and literature review; explore the contributions of Eurochristianity to the continuation of this world-system, namely via neoliberal economics that maneuver and exalt capital over human social development; then conclude with an extensive review of Christianity’s incongruities with Black independence movements, including critiques of Black liberation theory for engendering quietism and psychologically deceptive palliatives that undermine the crucial resilience of Haitian national pride, and consult feminist theologies for solutions. Colonial-imperial epistemologies must be usurped for Haitian resilience to avoid metastasizing into a listless obsequiousness to the neocolonial system.