This paper explores approaches to "later recovery" or "slow recovery" in postdisaster contexts, viewing it as a positive force by terming it "slow healing" contracted to "shealing." Slow healing hopes to develop a multi-scalar, processual, open-ended, and future-oriented approach to asynchronous and differentiated processes and practices of individual and collective recovery. "Shealing," as used here, then denotes ongoing, individual, and collective efforts through remaking and building one's life post-disaster. This process of shealing, of re-making and making lives liveable, is a process of assembling, or trying to assemble, life and livelihoods, without necessarily immediately eradicating all traces of destruction which might be vestiges of a life before the disastrous manifestation of compound vulnerabilities. Shealing provides an alternative to assumptive, linear approaches in order to enfold healing and vulnerability reduction within day-today , continual, accepted, non-spectacular actions. From a noun or an attribute, "shealing" functions as a verb by being a continuous and open-ended process in the present, not just a defined stage, whether a hoped-for endpoint or a recovery of some predisaster state. Shealing allows theorising the many ways of living in and through disaster experiences alongside the range of everyday post-disaster approaches to re-making one's life that an individual or community might embrace. Shealing forms a joint scholarly-practical approach that better addresses what needs to be done and accepted after experiencing a disaster. This paper focuses on disasters, but wider implications and connections emerge, such as for grief, trauma, and social work.
In a reiteration of a long history of pathologization of Haiti and Haitians, the cholera epidemic was framed as endemic, an inevitable outcome of the 2010 earthquake, and a quasi-confirmation of Haiti's premodern, exceptional predicament. Baseball in the Time of Cholera and Haiti in a Time of Cholera, widely viewed but not extensively analysed documentaries, challenge this linking of disaster and disease. They reveal forms of epistemic injustice and counter the politics behind such misappropriations of cause and effect in the UN-introduced cholera outbreak. Centring on the notion of hurt, this essay explores the ways in which the two films give value to personal testimony, stories of individual life and loss, offer a relational take on life with cholera, and, in so doing, contribute to the 'narrative defeat' of the UN (Payton 2017). In effect, the two films, as the article argues, formulate a political ecology of the epidemic: they compel a rethinking of the relationship between forms of experiential knowledge, such as personal testimony, and forms of slow violence that occur when an environment is rendered dangerous, or when an introduced disease becomes an endemic threat. RÉSUMÉ Encore un exemple de la pathologisation d'Haïti et des Haïtiens, l'épidémie de choléra de 2010 a été représentée comme endémique, inévitable après le tremblement de terre 2010, tout en étant une confirmation du malheur exceptionnel de ce pays «prémoderne ». Baseball in the Time of Cholera et Haiti in a Time of Cholera, deux films largement circulés mais pas considérés d'une façon analytique, remettent en cause le lien entre désastre et épidémie. Ils montrent des formes d'injustice épistémique et opposent les motifs politiqués derrière cette attribution erronée des causes et des effets de cette épidémie introduite par l'ONU. Cet article, centré sur la notion de douleur, explore comment ces deux films donnent valeur aux témoignages personnels, les témoignages de la vie et de la perte, donnent une perspective relationnelle sur la vie avec le choléra tout en contribuant à 'la défaite narrative' de l'ONU (Payton 2017). En effet, les deux oeuvres cinématographiques, comme l'article le suggère, offrent une écologie politique du choléra: ils nous font repenser le rapport entre connaissances expérientielles, comme le témoignage, et la 'slow violence' qui devient visible quand un environnement est rendu dangereux ou quand une maladie importée devient endémique.
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