ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the space/place of Titanyen in the Haitian collective imaginary. As a mass burial site of victims of the extrajudicial killings of the Duvalier dictatorship and the military regime of Cédras, and later on, of the dead bodies of the 2010 earthquake victims, Titanyen comes to represent a stratified sediment of the “ungrievable” victims of necropolitics—expendable and disposable life. Through a lens that intersects Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer and psychoanalytic understandings of collective trauma, Braziel offers a reading of Raoul Peck’s film Assistance Mortelle (2013) as an enactment of mourning rites for the ungrieved victims of state violence and state failure.
