Epaulettes and leaf skirts, warriors and subversives: black national subjectivity in Macbeth and Haiti

Abstract

This essay analyzes performances of primitivism and exoticism in the WPA Federal Theater Negro Unit plays “Voodoo” Macbeth (1936) and Haiti (1938) for their contradictory articulations of imperial sensibilities and radical protest. Both of these plays experienced extreme popularity, exhibited violently exotic aesthetics, and appropriated the 1802 Haitian Revolution to provide a black context for American production. The United States' imperial occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 fueled both sides of this dichotomy, allowing Haiti to be positioned as a primitive “other” and, contrarily, as an historical inspiration of black unity. This essay examines how these controversial representations projected meanings of national identity for African Americans. While exotic and primitive performances in Macbeth and Haiti identified African Americans with dominant American imperial culture through primitive representation and cultural appropriation, these same images permitted the communication of radical desires for resistance and insurgency expressed through diasporic identification and the dramatization of revolution.