Occupation Of Haiti Research Articles

Haiti’s new Dictatorship: The Coup, the Earthquake and the UN Occupation

Haiti’s new Dictatorship: The Coup, the Earthquake and the UN Occupation

Horses Chomping at the Global Bit: Ideology, Systemic Injustice, and Resistance in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse

Zora Neale Hurstons Tell My Horse (1938), ethnographic portrayal of Jamaica and Haiti, emphasizes the ideological constraints of identity and the material consequences that such constraints produce. Through such consequences, Hurston depicts the relationships between the United States South and the Caribbean, focusing on the plantation economies of those regions; however, when she reveals the differences between them, she expresses ambivalence about the United States's privilege and power, endorsing its imperialism with nationalist rhetoric. Demonstrating her privileged identity as American, Hurston employs nationalist ideology to construct the United States as democratic, progressive, and innocent, and she accomplishes this construction with her portrayals of the Caribbean as uncivilized, regressive Other. Such constructions reify national boundaries and lend support to the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915 to 1934). However, Hurston's text also de-naturalizes racial identity and emphasizes diasporic connections among Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean, particularly those connections that demonstrate cultural resistance. Thus, Hurston ultimately portrays Haiti as resilient and resistant to exploitative ideology by focusing a large portion of Tell My Horse on the African-derived practice of voodoo, emphasizing how its adherents subvert social hierarchies with their performances of ritualized spirit possession. Several scholars point out the contradiction of Hurston endorsing United States imperialism while celebrating resistance to it, but they fail to draw any conclusions about that contradiction. John Rowe recognizes that Tell My Horse offers sentiments opposed to those of Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) and that Hurston's endorsement of imperialism contradicts her advocacy of resistance through voodoo; however, he fails to reconcile or explain any of these contradictions (127,137-138). Similarly, Annette Trefzer highlights Hurstons conflicting impulses to support the U.S. occupation of Haiti and to celebrate Haitian resistance to exploitation, but she merely concludes that the conflict between racial and national identifications remains essentially unresolved in Hurston's work (308). Hurston's contradictory assertions, however, suggest that national identities can supersede other identity categories as influences upon individual behavior and belief. The disparity between her stances on U.S. imperialism in Tell My Horse and her other texts indicates that her marginalization as African woman allows her to view the U.S. critically from within, while her privileged position as American constrains her ability to maintain a critical perspective when she is outside of the country. Ultimately, Hurston's text both de-naturalizes identity categories and demonstrates the insidiousness of them. Interestingly, Hurston's perspective anticipated current examinations of the South's global relationships. Reading Hurston in a post-Hurricane Katrina context, Keith Cartwright sees Hurston's examinations of circum-Caribbean migrations and Afro-Atlantic agency as pioneering and (762); and Hurston's vision is prophetic not only in terms of real world events like Katrina but also in relationship to present-day scholarship. As James Peacock asserts, the United States South, if the exception within the country, is actually the norm for the rest of the world, particularly when the plantation is viewed as paradigmatic (269; see also Smith and Cohn 15). Examining plantation histories, Matthew Guterl describes the Gulf South as the northern rim of Mediterranean that includes the Caribbean, and he asserts that many of the negative stereotypes about the U.S. South capitalize upon the region's association with the Caribbean (98, 103). Robert Hall also describes the Deep South as part of an interconnected cirum-Caribbean creole culture, as many of the African survivals, transported during the slave trade, can be found in Caribbean locales such as Haiti and Jamaica as well as in the United States (106). …

“The Independence So Hardly Won Has Been Maintained”: C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti

“The Independence So Hardly Won Has Been Maintained”: C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti

Zora’s Politics: A Brief Introduction

In his introduction to reading Zora Neale Hurston’s politics, Mitchell argues that contemporary scholarship has misread Hurston in significant ways, distorting Hurston’s work and reputation to serve contesting political agendas; thus, in recent years, she has been associated with “a bewildering array of affiliations: republican, libertarian, radical democrat, reactionary conservative, black cultural nationalist, anti-authoritarian feminist, and woman-hating protofascist.” Recuperating Hurston from this impossible political melee of labels, Mitchell argues, requires a careful reading of Hurston’s work dating from her earliest pieces in the late 1920s, as well as surveying her many yet to be published manuscripts and letters; it requires recognition of the transnational and comparative lens through which she reported on political maneuvers and military histories, as well as reading not only her strong criticisms but also her silences, ironic phrasings, and nuanced critiques in her writings on global colonial enterprises. Mitchell’s introduction to the two Hurston essays here reprinted, “I Saw Negro Votes Peddled” (1950) and “Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism” (1951)—courtesy of the American Legion Magazine—is set in the larger frame of his assertion that Hurston’s work should be read with a deep appreciation of her staunch anticolonialism. Tracing her political philosophy through her views of how race and religion are used to valorize an international culture of violence that serves imperialistic and colonial ends, Mitchell takes his reader on a tour of Hurston’s transnational commentary—from the US occupation of Haiti, to the Spanish and British on the Florida peninsula; from Communist Russia and China, to election practices in the US—to set the stage for our encounters with these rarely read Hurston essays. Reading Mitchell’s “Zora’s Politics: A Brief Introduction” provides a firm foundation for a more complex understanding of the impressive range of Zora Neale Hurston’s political and literary oeuvre.

Toward a Literary Psychoanalysis of Postcolonial Haiti: Desire, Violence, and the Mimetic Crisis in Marie Chauvet’s Amour

Critics of Haitian writer Marie Chauvet's controversial novel, Amour, are habitually fascinated by destructive psychosexual complex of novel's protagonist and first-person narrator, Claire Clamont. A sexually repressed upper-class Haitian woman whose fantasy life vacillates between scenes of unbridled sexual desire and self-immolating masochism, Claire, who describes herself as a dark-skinned old maid, is thirty-nine-year-old elder sister and housemate of two bodacious mulattoes. Their successful adventures in love and marriage draw a striking contrast with Claire's position as a subjugated victim of racism in her own family as well as in mulatto elite into which she was born. Stigmatized by color and tortured by decades of repressed desire reignited by presence of Jean-Luze, live-in French husband of her youngest, whitest, and now pregnant sister Felicia, virginal Claire records in her journal lurid details of her revolt. Effaced behind a veil of hypocrisy and politesse, she secretly orchestrates a quasi-incestuous affair between Jean-Luze and her other sister, Annette. In so doing, she projects onto Annette her own violent desire for Jean-Luze and enacts revenge against both her sisters and her brother-in-law, himself visibly tormented by adulterous desire. Although her increasingly sadistic machinations are ultimately unsuccessful, they provide libidinal fodder for Claire's own fantasy life as she repeatedly satisfies her desires alone in her bedroom, assisted by thoughts of her sisters' sexual encounters with beloved Jean-Luze. Claire's neurosis plays out in context of 1930s Haiti, a period that marked final years of presidency of Stenio Vincent, authoritarian light-skinned leader who negotiated end of US occupation of Haiti and was sympathetic to rising black middle class and black nationalist ideals of post-occupation years (Nicholls 166, 178-79; Trouillot 107). In Chauvet's hands, Vincent regime is recast as far more autocratic and brutal dictatorship of Francois Duvalier of 1960s, with its fascistic Noiriste ideology and unprecedented political terror, represented in novel by vicious and brooding black military commander, Caledu. Having seized power in 1957, Francois Duvalier radicalized Haiti's negritude movement so as to legitimate what J. Michael Dash has called the most disturbing manifestation of state power in Haitian history (16), which was characterized by extreme violence and aimed at ending mulatto domination of state (Trouillot 167). Allied with exploitative US business interests and indiscriminately torturing members of former mulatto political elite, particularly women, into submission before new black leadership, character Caledu--whose name literally means who beats hard1--becomes disavowed object of Claire's sadomasochistic fantasies alongside white Jean-Luze. It is this incendiary combination of eroticism, political violence, and social satire that led to novel's extraordinary suppression upon publication in 1968 and to its author's exile. (2) For in addition to subverting norms of elite racial and gender respectability in Haiti through her depiction of sexually famished Claire, protagonist's double-edged critique unmasked prejudices and complacency of mulatto class and corrupt brutality of Noiriste state. For today's readers as well, one of challenges of interpreting Amour derives from novel's striking juxtaposition of domestic love plot with sociopolitical one, both of which are seen through eyes of sexually deprived, racially ostracized, and doubly rebellious Claire. In domestic love plot, Claire waits in vain for validation and sexual satisfaction she feels Jean-Luze's love would bestow upon her. When she does not receive this love, she attempts to sabotage his relationship with her sister Felicia, first by substituting her sister Annette as object of his desire, and eventually by planning Felicia's murder. …

Up Close and Personal: Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Identity and the Writer's Life

I have met Edwidge Danticat several times, and always I come away thinking of her as a sweet, innocent, talented writer, who seems to be removed from it all. Since the appearance of her first novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) at the tender age of twenty-five, the word was out that she was someone to watch, and indeed that prediction has proven true. Danticat has been prolific, producing a book or two yearly: Krik? Krak! (1996); The Farming of Bones (1998); Behind the Mountains (2002); After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel (2002); The Dew Breaker (2004); Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (2005); and her most recent rifle, a memoir, Brother, I'm Dying (2007). She has also edited two important collections, The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Men and Women of All Colors and Cultures (2000) and The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (2001). Edwidge Danticat is perhaps the most popular Caribbean writer. Her books are taught, both nationally and internationally, across many different disciplines: African American, ethnic and women's studies, and comparative literature. Countless papers and dissertations have been presented on her work, and at almost every conference within the last ten years, scholars have presented a wide array of critiques on one or more of her works. Haitian by birth and affinity, Edwidge Danticat has received many awards including the Fiction Award from The Caribbean Writer, 1994; the National Book Award nominafon for Krik? Krak!, 1995; Best Young American Novelists for Breath, Eyes, Memory by GRANTA, 1996; the American Book Award for The Farming of the Bones, 1999; and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Brother, I'm Dying, 2008. The idea for this interview was hatched in 2006 when Danticat and I both participated in the Association of Caribbean Women Writers & Scholars Conference (ACWWS) in Miami. We began a conversation there, but were too distracted by all the events to make it meaningful. I decided to put it off until we met up again, but Danticat and I each became consumed by our own projects. We decided that the Internet would be the most expedient way to get this done. My approach to this interview was personal, as one Caribbean woman to another, whose works revolve around our love and commitment to the region. In this setting, I sought to discover the intersection of this woman and her writing. Opal Palmer Adisa: You came to the U. S. A. when you were quite young, but still, I suspect, you were raised with Haitian cultural sensibilities even in the U. S. A. Although this might be redundant or even obvious, what is your relationship to Haiti, not simply in the political realm, but on a more visceral, navel-string level? What does Haiti mean to you? Edwidge Danticat: Haiti is and will always be one of the two places, the United States being the other, that I call home. Haiti is where I was born and Haiti was my first home. I am like most Haitians living with my feet in both worlds. I go to Haiti as much as I can. I still have a lot of family there. I have always lived in Haitian communities in the United States, so while I have left Haiti, it's never left me. OPA: What are your hopes for Haiti, given its historical precedent, being the first country in the New World to earn its freedom, and now being considered one of the poorest nations in the world? ED: Recently there was an article in all the world's papers about people eating cookies made of clay in Haiti to quash hunger. Then Haiti was one of many places where people had demonstrations against hunger. This was quickly followed by a story about a group of Haitian sea migrants, so-called boat people, drowning off the coast of the Bahamas. You can't be Haitian, human, and not feel sad for all that. But you can't be human and not also hope, so we go on hoping. Haiti is sometimes the canary in the mine. The U. S. occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934 can tell us a lot about what's going to happen in Iraq in a few years. …

Vodou nation: Haitian art music and cultural nationalism

While the Haitian musical tradition is probably best known for the Vodou-inspired roots music that helped topple the two-generation Duvalier dictatorship, the nation's troubled history of civil unrest and its tangled relationship with the United States is more intensely experienced through its art music, which combines French and German elements of classical music with Haiti's indigenous folk music. Nation examines art music by Haitian and African American composers who were inspired by Haiti's history as a nation created by slave revolt. Around the time of the United State's occupation of Haiti in 1915, African American composers began to incorporate Vodou-inspired musical idioms to showcase black artistry and protest white oppression. Together with Haitian musicians, these composers helped create what Michael Largey calls the Nation, an ideal vision of Haiti that championed its African-based culture as a bulwark against America's imperialism. Highlighting the contributions of many Haitian and African American composers who wrote music that brought rhythms and melodies of the Vodou ceremony to local and international audiences, Nation sheds light on a black cosmopolitan musical tradition that was deeply rooted in Haitian culture and politics.

Recombinant Mythology and the Alchemy of Memory: Occide Jeanty, Ogou, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines in Haiti

Abstract During the first United States occupation ofHaiti, from 1915 to 1934, Haitian band composer Occide Jeanty wrote compositions for the Haitian Presidential Band that contained culturally encoded critiques of U.S. occupation forces. In his compositions, Jeanty invoked the legend of Haitian general Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the soldier who led Haiti to independence in 1804 and whose spirit was absorbed into the Vodou religion as a type of Ogou, or warrior spirit, through a process that I term "recombinant mythology," in which people in the present use mythologically oriented language to highlight praiseworthy characteristics of cultural heroes.

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

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.

The Response of the African American Press to the United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

The Response of the African American Press to the United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

Vodou and History

Haitian Vodou has long been viewed through a distorted lens by outsiders. In the nineteenth century, as the Republic of Haiti suffered from a unique degree of economic and political isolation implemented and enforced by the powerful slaveholding empires and nations that surrounded it, Vodou was commonly represented as the ultimate antithesis of “civilization,” as a case of African superstition reborn in the Americas. During the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, images of Haitian Vodou as a terrain of demonic possession, absurd superstition, and zombis proliferated in the United States. At the same time, the twentieth century has also seen the publication of several careful ethnographic works about Vodou. During the 1930s, Melville Herskovits published his Life in a Haitian Valley, which argued that the Haitian religion had West African roots. During the same period Zora Neale Hurston wrote her less well-known Tell My Horse. Both of these works attentively described aspects of Vodou, as did Alfred Metraux's classic 1959 text Voodoo in Haiti. The next year Harold Courlander's Drum and Hoe provided detailed examinations of Haitian ritual music. The filmmaker and dancer Maya Deren published her at times experimental Divine Horsemen, which drew on Joseph Campbell's theories in seeking to describe the theological system of the religion. Another dancer, Kathryn Dunham, also described Vodou in her Island Possessed, published in 1969. The obstinate, broader stereotypes against which these works were articulated influenced the ways in which all these authors wrote about and interpreted the religion. These texts, notably those by Metraux and Deren, fought a battle for Vodou, confronting the idea that was it was little more than a “cult” or the expression of “superstition,” with carefully crafted descriptions of the belief systems and ritual of what they showed to be a complex and deeply rooted religion. This work on Vodou developed alongside other works on “Afro-Atlantic” religions, such as Cuban Santeria, and Brazilian Candomble, as well as on the African influences on Afro-American Christianity.Melville Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971); Zora Neal Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990); Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1959); Harold Courlander, The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: McPherson and Company, 1953); Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969). Among the classic broader studies of African religion in the New World are Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), and, more recently, Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983).

The Second U.S. Occupation

The date was October 15, 1994, 60 years after the end of the first U.S. occupation of Haiti. Exiled President Aristide was finally back in Haiti but surrounded, in every sense, by the putschist Haitian military and the occupying U.S. forces.

Won and lost

Behind the dancing crowds, the drums and bamboo-pipe-trombones, the beautiful murals, smiling soldiers, new schools and cleaned-up sewers, there is another side to the US occupation of Haiti

The NAACP and the American Occupation of Haiti

The NAACP and the American Occupation of Haiti

The Afro - American Response to the Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

The Afro - American Response to the Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934

The Withdrawal of the United States from Haiti, 1928-1934

The United States occupation of Haiti — despite benevolent intentions — was a thinly-disguised military dictatorship. The official view of the Department of State that the numerous U. S. officials there were merely advisers to the legitimate Haitian government, acting in accordance with limitations prescribed by treaty, was a polite fiction. It deceived no one, particularly the large number of Haitians who resented foreign experiments in benevolent despotism in their land.The real ruler of Haiti, as the system had evolved by the pivotal year of 1928 — the last “normal” year before the political crisis which precipitated withdrawal — was General John H. Russell, United States Marine Corps, the U. S. High Commissioner. The nominal ruler, President Louis Borno, generally relied upon his U. S. advisers. In Russell's own words “[Borno] has never taken a step without first consulting me.” When differences arose, usually as a result of pressures exerted on Borno by local politicians, General Russell was free to make appropriate concessions. But his will prevailed in any showdown conflict. The General was noted for his fairness, however, and his relations with Haitian officials were usually harmonious. Yet his military background, combined with his devotion to efficiency and economy, was not well-suited to preparing a dependent people for enlightened self-rule.