Edward Said articulates the many, many problems of Huntington's famous (or infamous?) book. I was just perusing Huntington's work and shocked by some of the appalling lack of nuance and detail or just vast generalizations he made. For instance, the brief mentions of Haiti emphasize it as some aberration that is a lone civilization or culture, one that is not perceived by Latin Americans as part of the region and seen as bizarre or different from the lens of Anglophone Caribbean peoples. When making these statements, Huntington relies on the words of a Panamanian politician and one quoted Afro-Caribbean. One would think more nuance and evidence would be buttressed by Huntington, akin to his more careful attention to modern Japan, but I guess Haiti does not merit the additional scrutiny. With people like Huntington as an intellectual influence in the Bush administration, one can see why the 2004 coup took the shape it did.
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