American Imperialism’s Undead

Abstract

Rafe Dalleo, American Imperialism's Undead. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016. 256 pp.The premise of American Imperialism's Undead is the extent to and the manner by which the United States's occupation of has been absented from - even disavowed - our understandings of regional American history, despite the occupation's enormous influence on writers, theorists, activists, and other Caribbean social actors of the anti-colonial twentieth century. There was once a time when one certainly might have said as much about the Haitian Revolution, a capital event world history that was long silenced, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has so eloquently outlined,1 global narratives of modernity and human liberation. The only truly revolutionary bid for radical and absolute human freedom the so-called Age of Revolutions, Haiti's war of independence has received sustained attention from scholars and been visible the wider world only the last few decades. Times have changed to a large extent, yes. The Haitian Revolution is an increasingly known, puzzled over, recast, debated, interrogated, and examined event. This is not the case, however, for the nearly two-decades-long military occupation of Haiti, during which the United States blatantly and violently undid Haitian national sovereignty - a process of political usurpation that was many ways one of the afterlives of the Haitian Revolution.American Imperialism's Undead works to challenge the obfuscation of this seminal moment Haitian, US-American, and circum-American history. Dalleo argues, compellingly and convincingly, that to not attempt an understanding of the occupation is, fact, to deeply misunderstand regional realities throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, to not think about the occupation is to neglect its constitutive purchase on the development of Caribbean modernism both its political and its cultural forms. Dalleo maintains that while we as scholars have largely attended to figurations of Haiti's revolution Caribbean and Latin American mid-century anti-colonial discourse - and regional bids for properly 'post'-colonial states - it seems we have not known quite what to do with Haiti's de facto re-colonisation smack dab the middle of the de-colonial twentiethcentury Americas. Is this because, Dalleo queries, we are unsettled by the extent to which has occupied this liminal space between avatar of radical independence and sombre cautionary tale - this living, humiliated instantiation of the real costs of raging against the imperial machine? And, if so, has that feeling of 'unsettledness' led us to ignore the fact that alternative models of sovereignty, statehood, and post-coloniality emerged throughout the region in the shadow of the occupation of Haiti (3)?These are some of the key questions Dalleo poses this excellent book. At its core, American Imperialism's Undead makes a claim about the historiographical missteps that tacitly designate narratives and events that fall outside our intellectual comfort zones as somehow less worthy of inquiry and engagement. …