Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001, xvi + 414 pp., notes and index

Abstract

Mary A. Renda has written an engaging study of the history of the U.S. occupation of Haiti and its aftermath in relation to the wider cultural dynamics of U.S. imperialism and the changing character of American national identity in the first half of the twentieth century. Taking Haiti is part of an important and growing literature on the cultures of U.S. empire building seeking to shed light on the complexity of the interaction between the agents of U.S. expansion and the peoples with whom they come into contact. In particular this emergent field of study has illuminated the role of both formal territorial expansion and the more informal types of U.S. imperialism in the production of U.S. national identity. The occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the creation of a Haitian Gendarmerie under the aegis of the U.S. Marine Corps, as Renda makes clear, not only had important implications for the culture of the U.S. civilising mission, but also fed directly into the changing character of national-imperial culture in the United States itself. She argues that the U.S. occupation of Haiti after 1915 was ‘one of several important arenas in which the United States was remade through overseas imperial ventures’. The Haitians, like others, engaged with, resisted, or accommodated U.S. institutions and citizens and in the process contributed ‘in unexpected ways to the matrix of an emerging U.S. imperial culture’ (p. 12). Ultimately her book is aimed at understanding the U.S. occupation of Haiti ‘as an event in the cultural history of the United States, broadly conceived’ (p. 20).