Haiti and the Americas ed. by Carla Calargé, Raphael Dalleo, Luis Duno-Gottberg, and Clevis Headley (review)

Abstract

and Americas. Edited by Carla Calarge, Raphael Dalleo, Luis Duno-Gottberg, and Clevis Headley. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. ISBN 1617037575. 242 pp. $60 hardcover.Review by Kate RamseyThe transnational turn in Haitian studies and hemispheric turn in American studies come together in this groundbreaking interdisciplinary collection, which situates as crossroads of Americas. While until recently scholarly literature focusing on Haiti's engagement with world has centered primarily-with few major exceptions- on revolutionary era, this volume concentrates on hemispheric interconnections since then.In an introduction synthesizing book's contributions, coeditor Raphael Dalleo discusses wealth of recent studies that analyze Haitian Revolution and its reverberations in wider world context. He also surveys smaller but no less significant body of work focused on interactions between and rest of Americas from early nineteenth century to contemporary moment. Dalleo's introduction and collection as whole bear out his contentions that scholars have only begun to understand full scope of [the] relationship between and United States, and that the ongoing relationships between and [other] parts of Americas . . . have scarcely been explored (14).I found Dalleo's claim that essays and contextualize our vision of (16-17) to be consistently true across this volume, beginning with first section on Haiti and Hemispheric Independence. Sibylle Fischer's article in Haiti: Republicanism in Revolutionary Atlantic and Matthew Casey's Between Anti-Haitianism and Antiimperialism: Haitian and Cuban Political Collaborations in Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries both complicate longtime assumptions about how Latin American and Caribbean Creoles viewed postrevolutionary Haiti. Fischer's work problcmatizcs an overemphasis on international isolation of early republican by spotlighting extent to which, in 1810s, Haiti's southern coast became a gathering point for populations that were swept up in insurgencies on mainland (26). If was beacon and sometime refuge for enslaved and free people of African descent across region, Fischer points to how it also became safe haven for wider population of refugees. Her article thus complicates assumption that evoked only dread in imagination of white Creoles. That Simon Bolivar himself took refuge in southern during these years is well known, as is President Alexandre Petions financial and military backing of Latin American wars on condition that slavery be abolished wherever Spanish rule was overthrown. What has not been recognized, Fischer argues, is extent to which Bolivar's political thought was shaped by his experiences in Haiti, and in particular by his admiration for what he considered Petion's success in preventing republic from fracturing into microsovereignties.The specter of Haitian Revolution cast long shadow over nineteenth-century colonial Cuba, with wealthy Creole slaveholders fearing-and, along with Spanish colonial officials, frequently invoking- prospect that would lead to race war. Yet Matthew Casey argues that those who sought to overthrow Spanish rule in Cuba saw in markedly different ways. He explores how was safe haven and support for Cuban leaders and fighters during Ten Years' War (1868-1878), and then again after 1888. One of methodological challenges of studying Haiti's aid to nineteenth-century anti-imperial struggles, as both Fischer and Casey discuss, is that Haitian government insisted that such assistance go unpublicized. In second part of his article, Casey examines how Haitian migrants in eastern Cuba during 1915-1934 US occupation of their homeland invoke[edJ Haiti's previously silenced contribution to Cuban independence in founding and soliciting funds for Cuban branch of Union Patriotique, foremost Haitian antioccupation organization (65). …