Hollywood imagines revolutionary Haiti: the forgotten film Lydia Bailey (1952)

Abstract

This article explores the history of Lydia Bailey, the only US studio-made film to depict the Haitian Revolutionary period. It asks why, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, such an unlikely project might have seemed commercially promising enough to justify a significant production budget. The essay draws on private studio memorandums as well as public press discussions to shed light on the high stakes in debates over racial representation and colonialism/decolonization in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and to illuminate everyday assumptions of white supremacy as these shaped the making of the film and its promotion. Production files and a range of industry, daily and weekly mainstream white press and Black newspapers document the racial divide shaping the film’s production and reception. The story of the making and forgetting of Lydia Bailey reveals the process by which transnational Black history and Black struggle became more public and legible in the wake of WWII anti-fascism and internationalism, and then was driven back off stage by the political mobilization of Cold War anti-Communism.