US Occupation Of Haiti Research Articles

Re/Assembling the Imaginary: Counter-Narratives of Haiti’s Transnational Textile Industry

Since the 1970s, Haiti’s zòn franch (dislocated sites where garments are assembled and processed for export to the North), have reconstructed bonds of coloniality through structural violence. Despite over two hundred years of Haitian independence from French colonial rule, and over 80 years since the US occupation of Haiti, these “ports,” exempt from tax and duties, are often viewed locally as self-contained non-independent islands that reproduce a colonial logic of transnational wealth extraction. Mixing voices from ethnographic fieldwork and literature, this article examines the creative resistance of Black women garment workers in Northern Haiti. It sees their opposition to a precarious local textiles industry, to substandard labor conditions in the zòn franch and to increased climate vulnerability as a legacy of Black Haitian women’s continuous resistance to plantation slavery. I conceptualize the combination of informal livelihood strategies the women deploy as a form of what Haitian anthropologist and artist Gina Athena Ulysse calls rasanblaj (2015), or the re/assembly or regrouping of ideas, things, people. For Black women workers viewed as disposable by outsiders and a wealthy elite, self-organized textile-based initiatives not only tackle ecological issues such as waste management, but also extend social and educational benefits to the local community.

Archive as Offering

This essay tells the story of Estrea Jean Gilles, a nineteen-year-old girl who was killed by Marines during the US occupation of Haiti (1915–34). With the crash described as an “unavoidable” accident and the documents cataloged under “miscellaneous,” Estrea’s archived life guides this study of transnational practices of anti-Black violence and accounts for the possibilities of Black women’s futures beyond their record of disappearance. Naming the layered applications, quotidian quality, and refusals of physical, psychological, and archival violence during the US occupation, this essay ultimately considers experimental historical practices as an opportunity to intervene in the presumed teleology of Black women’s lives through the practice of archival offering.

When Images in Haiti Fail: The Photograph of Charlemagne Péralte

ABSTRACT In 1919, the US Marines took a staged photograph of the recently killed insurgent Charlemagne Péralte in order to impede other oppositional fighters during the US Occupation of Haiti. Local viewers interpreted the reproduced and circulated photograph of Péralte crucified to a door as a sign of his martyrdom and strength. While scholars most often turn to Philomé Obin’s circa 1970 painting Cruxification de Charlemagne Péralte pour la Liberté to discuss the generative possibilities of the photograph, I return my attention to the photograph and the earlier context of its making, display, and distribution. Turning back to the visual field of the photograph and its moment allows for distinctive insight. Specifically, my interest lies in what happens when images in Haiti during the US Occupation failed to operate as intended by the Marines. It explores how the contours of this kind of failure become a site for reinterpretation. I privilege examples of how Haitians assert their engagement with the visual by focusing on descriptions, responses, and references to images. Doing so enlarges one’s perception of aspects of the visual that are not built, painted, or made by Haitians but, as I argue, were seen and reinterpreted by some of the country’s early twentieth-century marginalized viewers for their own benefit.

North Atlantic Circus, and: A State of Occupation, and: Haiti's Marché en Fer, and: Secret of La Sirène, and: Supreme Séance

North Atlantic Circus, and: A State of Occupation, and: Haiti's Marché en Fer, and: Secret of La Sirène, and: Supreme Séance Patrick Sylvain (bio) North Atlantic Circus I was not introduced to the circusas a child. North Atlantic magicwas projected through a two dimensionalTV, where jugglers rode on unicyclesand threw pins in rapid circlesas if they were four arms—Vishnu. The universe spun in iron cageswith looping cyclists and daredevilswho rode their motorcycles sideways,backwards, or standing as if ridingan iron horse. I swallowed those imagesas natural as sacramental breads. I was an adult, teachingMiddle-school immigrantswhen we encountered the circus.Clowns jumping through flaming hoops,and obedient elephants droppingcake-sized dung, the air reeked. We ate cotton candy and popcornwhile hoping the man and womanbalancing on a highwired chairin tight blue outfitswould not plunge the thirty feetonto the un-netted painted floor. So many images, so many whip-controlled tigers,and growling lions executing tricks. A glitteringmale trainer commanded with a metal wandand a whip. Always a whip in this carnivalesque land.Beneath the grunts, magic in the air. cruelty stayedbehind the curtains with ongoing applause. A State of Occupation (US Occupation of Haiti: 1915-34) 1 Before the dawn of July nineteen-fifteen, the oceanWaves moaned the weight of the iron sharksFaring marines like storms approaching the HaitianShores. As wind whimpered through avocado trees,And the engines roared toward the absent prince'sPort of Port-au-Prince, the frigates and the pelicansShrieked their warnings so vigils could be kept, andDoors locked against the descendants of Columbus,Who took for themselves Amerigo Vespucci's name [End Page 225] Given to two continents as if Monroe was an absoluteGuardian doctrinaire of the Americas. And you, MajorGeneral Butler, spearheaded the new pillage of an oldColony with stanzas of gold in its national bank coffer.The bow of your ship, USS Connecticut, sliced throughWaves as sharp as a blade. Your 5th and 13th regimentsTouched another soil, soiling sovereignty for capital. 2 Dear Major General Butler and Admiral Caperton,Haiti was a night light flickering out against chaoticWinds, and your American hands were the perfectParawinds. The gentle giant who only stepped inTo provide order. Haiti was a land of bandits. A landOf political marauders that had to be brought into line.A line of civility where French-speaking niggers wouldLearn the southern etiquettes of Jim Crow coquetries.The black man was nothing to you but a commodity,Chattel labor with no will to sing his own songs beyondHis designated cage that was formulated by Columbus'sProgeny. They tinkered with servitude and slavery, madeCapitalism God's providence, and the white manGuardian of the eternal spring of dolled-up tyranny.Charlemagne Péralte and his men, the wretchedInheritors of the earth, smelled the leaves of trickery. 3 These men who formed the resistance were calledCacos. Black-chested men with blood-stained shouldersLike the crying caco bird. Black and red. BlacknessOf the night made them weightless, birds with silentWings that fluttered in the white man's imagination.But you, your officers, and your regiments practicedWarfare like the intake of breaths. Killing was a sniff.A way of tricking sons and daughters into informants,Bribing so your swords would minimize the red stains stackedInside the sheaths. You succeeded in knowing how blackShadows walked without stirring the grass and blending inWith the foliage. You succeeded by turning neighbors intoNational venom, accomplices in a kinsman's death. So,It was that Jean-Baptiste Conzé, a northern businessmanFrom Grand Rivière, greedy for more capital, who aided CaptainHerman Hanneken like a pimp's whore in capturing Péralte. 4 Before Blackface was a staple of Broadway and Hollywood,Captain Hanneken adorned a blackface with peasant garb,And ammunition in burlap sacks. His Gendarmerie soldiers,Black Haitians, also disguised, pursuing Charlemagne PéralteThrough the wooded mountains like a mongoose hunting snakes.Jean-Baptiste Conzé made...

Black Indigeneity and Anti-Colonial Rebellion in Eugene O’Neill’sThe Emperor Jones

In The Emperor Jones, a rebellion orchestrated by the “Native Chief,” Lem, dramatizes Eugene O’Neill’s Indigenocentric reimagining of the US occupation of Haiti. O’Neill honoured his primary source, James Weldon Johnson’s Self-Determining Haiti, by creating a Black Indigenous leader who orchestrates the overthrow of an invader from the United States. Taking Lem seriously corrects a critical tradition preoccupied with the outsized “emperor,” Brutus Jones, and inattentive to Indigenous Americans in the play.

Regionalism, Imperialism, and Sovereignty: West Indies Federation and the Occupation of Haiti

Examining the West Indies Federation during the twentieth century against the backdrop of the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 shows the complex roots of decolonization and helps us understand the occupation as a foundational event for the twentieth-century Caribbean imaginary, much as the Haitian Revolution was for the nineteenth. The occupation is usually considered only in relation to its impacts in Haiti and the United States, but Haiti’s symbolic significance meant that its occupation shaped the perspectives of Caribbean people throughout the region. Major thinkers of federation, particularly Richard B. Moore and George Padmore, developed their political perspectives through responses to the occupation. We can thus see the questioning of nation-state independence and the critique of neocolonialism (as a form of US economic imperialism allied with elites in the neocolony) emerge from the lessons of Haiti’s occupation.

Beebe’s Shell-Shocked Fish: Modernist Form in Scientific Writing During the US Occupation of Haiti

Beebe’s Shell-Shocked Fish: Modernist Form in Scientific Writing During the US Occupation of Haiti

Haiti and the Uses of America: Post–U.S. Occupation Promises by Chantalle F. Verna

Reviewed by: Haiti and the Uses of America: Post–U.S. Occupation Promises by Chantalle F. Verna Millery Polyné Haiti and the Uses of America: Post–U.S. Occupation Promises. by Chantalle F. Verna. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. 234 pp. ISBN 0813585163. $99.95 hardcover, $29.95 paper. In Chantalle F. Verna's meaningful new book Haiti and the Uses of America, she presents the critical question that many urban elite Haitians of the 1930s and 1940s considered: "What place, if any, was there for foreign and … U.S. involvement in Haitian affairs?" (23). Washington's presence in the republic, specifically during World War I and the interwar period, in the form of military violence, discriminatory practices, and financial intervention, was deliberate and substantial. However, to frame Haitian responses to foreign aggression as simply unyielding or rebellious, as some scholars have done, remains insufficient. According to Verna, inter-American policy and programming that was largely facilitated and funded by Washington produced a complex set of agendas among urban elites regarding US international interests. Additionally, Haitian intellectuals' and government officials' recognition of the state's role in the development of nineteenth-century Pan-Americanism opened up a space for elite reassessment of the meaning and impact of political and economic cooperation in the Americas. Haitian decision-makers and social reformers sought to nurture ties with powerful foreign individuals and institutions, particularly in North America, for varied reasons, including "campaigns to secure political power, initiatives to educate individuals on the island, attempts to bolster the local economy, or efforts to contribute to contemporary international debates" (22). These intellectual, sociocultural, and political collaborations proved strategic, in order to advance Haitian progress and/or individual benefit. They also reveal the tragedy of North American imperial dominance a century after the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Verna is not necessarily interested in the genre or tools of tragedy per se, but one reads in her monograph how the liberal projects of inter-American cooperation gave early to mid-century development and democratic ambition a "romantic" history of thwarting coloniality and dependence and thus defining a more humane and prosperous future.1 The reality of nineteenth-century post-independence economic and political marginality and the US Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) produced a Hegelian tragedy, an imperial "collision" of military coercion, rapacious speculation, and land acquisition. At the same time, this tragic encounter allowed for and "prompt[ed]" Haitian sociopolitical contemplation on how to better "engage politically" and test the limitations and weaknesses of "the collision between receding [End Page 150] and emergent worlds."2 Inadvertently Verna reveals the complex layers of tragedy, opening up a new reading of Haiti–US relations during the pivotal moment of the US Occupation and the transitional period in Haiti of the 1930s and 1940s, a time that that "infused tremendous hope and expectation" (xii). Although the book's primary focus is the post-Occupation period, its initial chapters take a wide historical view of Haitian attempts to establish political, cultural, and economic connections within the Americas during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Verna highlights the important hemispheric engagements, emerging ideologies, and transatlantic challenges—from antiblackness to territorial security—that prompted Haitian statesmen and revolutionaries like Solon Ménos, Haiti's foreign minister to the United States (1911–1918); Henri Christophe; and Alexandre Pétion to seek pragmatic alliances and "good relations" with regional and transatlantic neighbors (21, 24, 26). In an effort to protect Haitian sovereignty and procure important assets for individual elites, the establishment of regional networks—and ideally reciprocal connections—was vital. At the same time, the corrosive culture of coloniality and antiblackness, components of the tragedy, sharpened critiques of foreign intervention by noted Haitians. Hannibal Price, a nineteenth-century Haitian diplomat, asserted that Haitian progress had been "retarded and compromised by the … revolutions and disturbances ceaselessly stirred up by foreign merchants or by bankers" (qtd. 38). Verna assures the reader that the air of cooperation and attempts at infrastructural development that permeated elite inter-American discourse certainly encountered castigation by key Haitian figures who saw such efforts as overseas aggression. Haitian workers, intellectuals, and government officials, along with many Caribbean and Latin American...

Occupying Creole: The Crisis of Language under the US Occupation of Haiti

Occupying Creole: The Crisis of Language under the US Occupation of Haiti

Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror, and the Zombie Complex by John Cussans

Reviewed by: Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror, and the Zombie Complex by John Cussans Lucy Swanson Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror, and the Zombie Complex. By John Cussans. London: Strange Attractor, 2017. ISBN 978-1907222474. 404 pp. $26.95 paperback. Zombies and "Voodoo" have long served as a shorthand in Anglo-American popular culture for the supposedly barbaric nature of Haiti and Haitians. In Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex, John Cussans charts this discursive and thematic network of (pseudo-) ethnographic, journalistic, and cinematic representations of Haiti that has served to dehumanize and demonize the nation since at least the events that began the Haitian Revolution in 1791. Cussans approaches the subject of the zombie and Vodou as a scholar of visual culture with a background in cultural history. He seeks to demystify the portrayal of the nation in films and other cultural products by contextualizing their creation in relation to contemporaneous sociohistorical events that shaped Haitian relations with international powers (primarily the United States and France). Through this examination, Cussans elaborates a theory of the "Zombie Complex" mentioned in his title. He states that it "refers to a range of ethical, psychological, and political thought-problems clustered around the central figure of the living-corpse which, though ostensibly fictional, stubbornly reminds us of the horribly actual limits (or lack of limits) of humanity, the individual and the human" (iv). Through this nexus of ontological questions, he links the "apocalyptic flesh-eating zombie" (100) that emerged with George Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead to the Haitian folkloric living dead figure, typically a passive victim controlled by a zombi master. This research dovetails with Kaiama Glover's recent article "'Flesh like One's Own': Benign Denials of Legitimate Complaint" (Public Culture, 2017), which explores how the cannibal zombie can be related to the abject way Haiti is portrayed in US news media. In the introduction to Undead Uprising, Cussans narrates his interest in the subjects of the book. He cites an early encounter with what he calls "Voodoo-horror" in a Hollywood B-movie, and describes a connection with his doctoral work on imitative behavior in the British "Video Nasty" controversy in the 1980s and in the work of French philosopher Georges Bataille.1 These references reflect the author's methodology, which includes critical analysis of sensationalistic popular culture read through the lens of philosophy and cultural history. Cussans examines the role of mimetic behavior as it relates to the zombie complex, offering a very interesting account of references to the purported role of Mesmerism in the Haitian [End Page 165] Revolution. He examines how the practice—a precursor to hypnotism—arrived in colonial Saint-Domingue, and how it came to be viewed as playing a decisive role in the 1791 revolts inaugurating the revolution. Given his personal and professional background, Cussans identifies himself as "an armchair historian" (vi) of Haiti, yet his work is thoroughly researched and maintains a highly critical eye toward the exoticizing and othering way in which Haitian Vodou is presented in Western media and popular narratives, even those with purported journalistic or objective value. He makes extensive reference to critical work within the field of Haitian studies, which anchors his discourse and helps it to serve as a corrective to the exploitative works he analyzes. Undead Uprising is divided into two parts, each containing four chapters. The first examines the folkloric Haitian zombi, while the other tracks the evolution of the figure into a violent flesh-hungry monster through the vehicle of Romero's Night of the Living Dead. The transition between the two major parts of the book is illustrated by a graph labeled "Axis of Living Death" (220), which offers a visual interpretation of the transformation of the zombie myth. The largely chronological organization allows the reader to better understand the changing but enduring significance of Vodou to representations of Haiti globally. In the first chapter, the author studies William Seabrook's 1929 travelogue The Magic Island, which introduced the zombie to North American audiences. In addition to interrogating the zombie's role as justification for the US Occupation of Haiti, the chapter elaborates on Bataille's significance to the...

Black Labor, White Sugar: Caribbean Braceros and Their Struggle for Power in the Cuban Sugar Industry

Scholars have long recognized the importance of Haitian and British Caribbean migrants to early twentieth-century Cuba. Although they loomed large in Cuban racial debates and sustained one of the largest sugar industries in the world, the migrants themselves received disproportionately less attention than the analyses of racial ideologies, sugar production, and empire in which they were evidentiary fodder. With Black Labor, White Sugar, Philip Howard joins a growing group of scholars both within and outside Cuba who are analyzing migrants and migration more explicitly, a reflection of increased interest in Caribbean migration, transnational history, and Cuba outside Havana. Howard traces the racial and economic exploitation of the migrants and their varied efforts to assert control over their lives through the first decades of the twentieth century. In so doing, he makes new claims about the extent of migrants' labor organizing in the sugar industry and adds to ongoing historiographic debates about race and mobilization in the Cuban Republic.Howard explains migration to Cuba as a convergence, not just of economic and political conditions but also of racial debates and worker consciousness within Cuba. For students of race in Cuba, the 1913 legalization of Caribbean labor migration is second only to the 1912 violent repression of the all-black Partido Independiente de Color for what it reveals about ideas of race, citizenship, work, and political power in the Cuban Republic. Howard, more than any other previous scholar, posits an explicit connection between the two. He shows that an influential report on labor and migration by the Cuban Agricultural Department was written during the 1912 repression and actually made subtle references to the unfolding events as it recommended allowing Caribbean migration. From this perspective, immigrants were brought in not just according to the arithmetic of population and wage rates but also based on a calculus attuned to an emerging, assertive black Cuban consciousness.Howard's analysis of sugar workers follows the same logic. Planters employed the management tactics from slavery to successive groups of workers until economic crisis and Cuban xenophobic nationalism closed Cuban borders in the 1930s. Initially, Caribbean migrants were recruited amid rising Afro-Cuban mobilization. Soon, Howard argues, immigrant workers, especially Jamaicans, adopted the class consciousness of worker internationalism and anarcho-syndicalism, followed later by the race consciousness of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. By the 1920s, poor economic conditions in Cuba reduced Jamaicans' willingness to migrate; likewise, their reputation for mobilization made them less desirable to sugar planters, who increasingly turned to Haitians, maintaining the pattern of employers hiring the most exploitable labor. Although he treats different immigrant groups separately, Howard suggests that when it came to their participation in formal organizations and efforts to assert autonomy workers of all nationalities participated.Black Labor, White Sugar was published on the heels of Robert Whitney and Graciela Chailloux Laffita's book on the British Caribbean presence in Cuba, but the texts focus on different themes. Howard goes into more depth about workers' experiences and ends with the deportations in the 1930s, whereas Whitney and Chailloux Laffita spend more time on British Caribbean migrants' identities and individual interactions with British imperial and Cuban national state structures, an analysis that focuses more on the process of repatriation and hovers more in the 1930s and subsequent decades.One of the biggest challenges in writing about migrants in the Cuban sugar industry is discerning the extent of their involvement in various labor organizations and their reception of radical ideologies. Organizations throughout Cuba published pamphlets invoking migrant workers in the eastern part of the island, but few sources provide any smoking guns about migrants' actual responses. Did field workers' cane fires represent a “nascent expression of the workers' consciousness” and a gesture of support to ongoing anarcho-syndicalist organizing (p. 141)? While in Cuba, did Marcus Garvey discuss the US occupation of Haiti, as he had in speeches elsewhere? If so, were any Haitian immigrants there to hear him and understand his speech? Did Haitian writer Jacques Roumain's 1944 fictional account of a Haitian cane cutter accurately reflect the class consciousness of workers a decade before? In each of these cases, Howard responds to the ambiguous and circumstantial evidence in the affirmative, albeit cautiously. He thus makes what are perhaps the strongest claims yet for immigrant workers' participation in formal unions and radicalism. Alongside other textured histories of labor and mobilization in eastern Cuba, Black Labor, White Sugar is sure to engender lively debate.

The Talking Dead: Narrating the Past in Yanick Lahens's Bain de lune

Dead men tell no tales. However, in Haitian author Yanick Lahens's fourth novel, de lune (2014), the voice of recently murdered woman insists on being heard. What is remarkable in de lune is not, however, that the dead do indeed tell tales but rather how the tale is told. In the novel, Lahens employs two narrative voices: the first-person (je) narrator, linked to the mutilated body of Cetoute Florival that washes up on the shore of Haitian village, and the second-person plural (nous), which embodies an ambiguous collective of Haitian peasants and bourgeois landowners spanning time and space. These distinct narrative voices and the formal division between je and nous within the novel call into question conventional wisdom on the narrative capacity of the recently departed but also, and perhaps more importantly, illustrate the novel's active engagement with the past, as de lune undermines traditional distinctions of past, present and future.Recipient of the prestigious Prix Femina in 2014, de lune traces the lives of two Haitian families through narrative that spans from the US Occupation of Haiti in the early twentieth century to the present day. Adding breadth and complexity to rich story, two distinct yet overlapping narrative voices unfold the history of the Lafleur and Mesidor families. To help manage the plurality of voices and myriad characters, the novel includes two paratextual elements. The first is family tree spanning at least seven generations, and the second is glossary of the Kreyol terms and Vodou spirits that appear within the text. Ostensibly serving as guides for the reader, these elements send another message: de lune is rooted in Haiti's and unpacking that history requires specific tools for uncovering the past. This article reveals and examines the narrative elements Lahens employs to engage Haiti's history. Specifically, I argue, the two distinct narrative voices offer historical matrix that allows the novel to uncover Haiti's history in way that challenges traditional historiographical practices.To fully appreciate the novel's position within contemporary Haitian literature, it is imperative to understand its lineage within the contexts of both Haitian literature and Lahens's previous works of fiction. More specifically, I consider the implications of what seems to be return to the Haitian peasant novel amid post-earthquake literary production in Haiti. Furthermore, the fact that Lahens revisits characters and themes that appear in short story titled Bain de Lune, from 1999, reinforces the significance of return to the past in the production of the novel. This double return surrounding the book's genesis works with the dual narrative voices employed in the novel to reveal an active, almost inescapable, engagement with the past and further uncover complicated, ambivalent relationship to history. Contradicting previous notions of pastlessness within the Caribbean, de lune reveals an overabundance of the past, perhaps highlighting the singularity of Haitian authors and their relationship to history as distinct from other Caribbean authors.1Freak of HistoryRecent scholarship has focused on Haiti's position in globalized framework, drawing attention to what the editors of special edition of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies have called a new understanding of Haiti's place in the world, and the world's place in Haiti.2 This special edition seeks to posit Haiti as an active player in globalized world, suggesting that the nation should not be seen as an aberration, a freak of history, but rather an integral part of the history of the Western world.3If indeed Haiti is central player in globalized world, it has rarely played by the rules, often disrupting or outright discrediting Western discourses on statehood, revolution, and history. For instance, Michael T. Clark suggests, in the modern era of nation states, Haiti has never existed as sovereign state but rather as a field of power between the Haitian peasantry and the outside world. …

Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance by Ronald Angelo Johnson

Reviewed by: Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance by Ronald Angelo Johnson Philippe Girard (bio) Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance RONALD ANGELO JOHNSON Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014 241pp. US historians of the colonial and Revolutionary eras have realized the need to eschew parochial celebrations of American exceptionalism and to situate historical developments within a wider (the buzzword is “Atlantic”) context. More specifically, US debates on race and slavery in the 1790s were directly inspired by the events of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). In his classic From Rebellion to Revolution (1979), Eugene Genovese used [End Page 793] that revolution as the pivotal moment when slave resistance in the Americas transitioned from narrowly focused uprisings aimed at escaping the plantation world to full-fledged revolts that challenged the very notion of human bondage. Early America may have been a “city upon a hill,” but it did not develop in isolation from neighboring towns. A field that lends itself particularly well to cross-national approaches is foreign policy, especially since the early US Republic was not yet a hegemon and it had to contend with the demands of its partners. Scholarly interest in the diplomatic relations between the United States and Haiti (known before 1804 as French Saint-Domingue) goes back to the 1930s, following a nineteen-year US occupation of Haiti. Early works included Charles Tansill’s The United States and Santo Domingo (1938), Ludwell Montague’s Haiti and the United States, 1714–1938 (1940), Rayford W. Logan’s Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti (1941), and Alexander De-Conde’s The Quasi-War (1966). These authors embraced the traditional approach dominant at the time, both in style and substance: readers were treated to a series of diplomatic dispatches written by great men eager to defend national security interests for the greater good of the country. The culture wars inherited from the 1960s did not leave the field untouched. As part of a larger reassessment of the Founding Fathers and their involvement in plantation slavery, revisionists denounced their policies toward the Haitian Revolution. According to Tim Matthewson’s A Pro-slavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic (2003) and Gary Wills’s “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003), US policymakers were motivated at best by their financial interests and at worst by their racist impulses. Those two factors overlapped when it came to one key issue, slavery, and they underpinned the knee-jerk opposition of Virginian planters like Thomas Jefferson to the Haitian Revolution. As often with historiographical developments, the pendulum has now swung back. The most outspoken member of this postrevisionist school is Arthur Scherr, whose long and argumentative Thomas Jefferson’s Haitian Policy: Myths and Realities (2011) took no prisoners as it strove to rescue Jefferson’s unjustly maligned reputation. Gordon S. Brown embraced a more nuanced and convincing approach in his Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (2005), which took into account the legitimate questions raised by the revisionists while underlining the manifold priorities of US policymakers torn between their eagerness to [End Page 794] foster close relations with Haiti for commercial purposes and their desire to contain its slave revolt for national security and racial reasons. Into this crowded field steps Ronald Angelo Johnson, an associate professor of history at Texas State University in San Marcos and the author of Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance. Like Brown, Johnson may be labeled a moderate postrevisionist. He champions President John Adams and his secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, whom he largely portrays as well-intentioned statesmen. Under their leadership, “the United States financed a fight for universal emancipation and independence for people of color” (4). Johnson is not blind to the inability of these men to fully escape the racism prevalent in their time, but he emphasizes their willingness to engage their Haitian partners almost as equals, which stood in sharp contrast with Jefferson’s later attitude. Johnson would not have added much to Brown’s own work if he...

Figures of terror: The “zombie” and the Haitian Revolution

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the relation of the figure of the zombie to the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolution in the Atlantic World. While existing research often stresses the strong link between the zombie and the slave, this is not borne out by the contemporary discourse on the Haitian Revolution. Whereas horror and terror are associated with the zombie from its inception, it is only with the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) that US-American writers and directors invented the zombie of popular North Atlantic culture: a soulless slave without consciousness directed by a zombie master. As I argue, this amounts to a neo-colonialist act of symbolic re-enslavement of the self-emancipated Haitians. This time they are deprived not merely of their freedom as under the slave regime, but even of their consciousness.

Beyond Authenticity: The US Occupation of Haiti and the Politics of Folk Culture

This essay turns to a seminal ethnography, Jean Price-Mars’s So Spoke the Uncle (Ainsi parla l’oncle ), considering this text’s engagement with the politics and poetics of Black folk culture during the US occupation of Haiti. It is well established that So Spoke the Uncle (1928) is a foundational text in indigéniste and noiriste movements, which offered ideological responses to the problem of US imperialism by turning to the beliefs and cultural practices of the masses. However, a full understanding of Price-Mars’s legacy must include his participation in transnational conversations on folk culture that invigorated Black literary production in the interwar period. While Price-Mars is often read as a purveyor of authentic folk culture, I argue that he turned to the folk not merely to reinforce their authenticity, but to demonstrate their historicity. Given the intellectual climate, this understanding of the folk was a strategic epistemological intervention. On one hand Price-Mars challenged an ongoing imperial narrative that cast Haitian culture as not only barbaric, but also ahistorical : fundamentally detached from (yet paradoxically a threat to) civilized modernity. On the other hand, his work also revised celebrations of folk culture that nostalgically relegated this group to a space of premodern myth, even as the folk served as passive inspiration for the modern artist. Price-Mars’s comparative method and his emphasis on the subversive potential of Vodou and folklore help to emphasize the folk’s active participation in the historical processes that had shaped Haiti since before the revolution. Neither primitive threat nor nostalgic anecdote to modernity, the folk themselves are modern. By highlighting the historicity of the folk, Price-Mars is able to emphasize the material circumstances of their lives and argue for their role in strategies of resistance.

US Occupation and Frankétienne’s Schizophrenic Writing

This article explores the ways in which what I am calling the “schizophrenic writing” of Haitian author Frankétienne constitutes an aesthetic response to the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). I argue that the US occupation of Haiti is symptomatic of a shift in the symbolic order from which the Haitian subject is once again excluded as “other.” In H’éros-chimères , Franketienne’s personal trauma—his conception during the rape of his mother—merges with the traumatic structure of Haitian history—from slavery to dictatorships and natural catastrophes. Readable as a bodily inscription and as a textual repetition, the “original” wound(s) initiate(s) Frankétienne’s nonrepresentational writing, which questions Western ideologies by occupying the uninhabitable site of the real. The argument is twofold: first, I address some general questions about the specificity of the US occupation compared to other phenomena such as colonization, military deployment, economic exploitation, and even humanitarian intervention. Second, I investigate the notion of Frankétienne’s schizophrenic writing, which I posit as an attempt to occupy the real . If colonization and subsequent interventions in Haiti confiscated the domain of the symbolic—typically reserved for Western subjects—then occupying the real may become a political gesture of resistance that reveals the unexpected consequences of what was at the time conceived as a “generous intervention.”

Women on the Move: Reinterpreting Haitian Migration to Cuba through an Analysis of the Bahamas

Of the many legacies of the first US occupation of Haiti, migration has been paramount in shaping economic development and cultural transformation. In giving rise to mass migration among the peasantry, the US occupation instituted migration as a livelihood option for Haitians. The large majority of Haitian migrants went to Cuba. Since Haitian men traditionally harvested sugar and, accordingly, were recruited to work on Cuban sugar plantations owned by US companies, the composition of the migration was primarily male. Given the high proportion of men, Haitian migration to Cuba during the occupation has largely been interpreted through a male perspective. Studies have generally focused on the conditions of laborers, presented as exclusively male, on sugar estates. The attention given to male labor migrants has framed the study of the movement of Haitian women to Cuba. When Haitian women have been considered, their mobility has been defined in relation to Haitian men, stripping Haitian women of their agency. In this paper, I argue for a reinterpretation of Haitian migration to Cuba that considers the mobility of Haitian women independently of Haitian men, based on the descriptions of two Haitian women who migrated unaccompanied to the Bahamas. In presenting their stories, I draw on observations gained from ethnographic fieldwork among Haitian migrants in the Bahamas during the late 1990s to call into question the historical depiction of Haitian women in Cuba. I discuss the hardships unaccompanied Haitian women faced in the Bahamas and propose that these difficulties would have been similar for Haitian women who migrated independently to Cuba. Given the scale of the migration and the role of foreign interests and investments in its direction, the migration of Haitian peasants to Cuba during the US occupation of Haiti established precedents that were repeated in later movements across the Caribbean, including the Bahamas. Understanding the conditions under which Haitian women migrated to Cuba, therefore, is critical for interpreting subsequent migrations of Haitian women in the region.

The US Power Elite and the Political Economy of Haiti’s Occupation: Investment, Race, and World Order

The centennial of Wilsonian interventionism was marked in 2015, remembering the US occupation of Haiti in 1915 and Haiti’s resistance to that signal event in its history. This article surveys the issues of economics, race, and realpolitik embedded in the political economy of US interactions with Haiti that heard their crescendo in that occupation, which lasted until 1934. It delivers insights derived from a forensic analysis of Woodrow Wilson’s perception of race and his decision to intervene in Haiti. The attitudes enabling US military leaders to implement a policy of occupation are described through a study of Admiral William Caperton’s role in the US intervention. It also interrogates what constitutes the “state” as it pertains to foreign policy, along with a Gramscian inspection of who benefits ( cui bono ) from empire. This approach eschews dichotomies of whether or not the US as a whole materially benefited from empire, and instead simply looks at who individually gained, and what were the capacities of these beneficiaries to craft policy. In short, the project answers the questions of why, who, and how the US occupation was undertaken in 1915. Haiti and the United States, along with the relationship between them, can be understood only through an examination and analysis of culture, economics, geopolitics, and race. The United States had a hemispheric hegemonic agenda that drove it to promote an investment agenda targeted at Haiti. It justified its violation of Haiti’s sovereignty through longstanding, deeply entrenched racial stereotypes and civilizational taxonomies. Taken together, a constellation of perceptions and interests aligned to create an image of Haiti that allowed the US to reconcile its founding ethos as a republic, having the consent of the governed, with its empire formation in the name of liberal interventionism and colonial uplift.

Capture Land: Jamaica, Haiti, and the United States Occupation

The possibility of United States intervention had hovered over Haitian politics for several years prior to the occupation. But Haiti’s allies in Jamaica had reasoned that with the right sort of leadership it could be averted. The question above all was what the US military troops would do in Haiti. A Jamaica Times editorial sounded a dismal warning that under US control “it will be very hard for Hayti ever again to emerge as an independent state.” Yet even if this was so, the paper argued, the results would be to Haiti’s benefit: “Hayti must become a very different country to that which is at present breaking the heart of all those who really love her, shocking and disgusting the sensibility of the civilized world.” The “civilized world,” however, had never been kind to Haiti. A Jamaica Times journalist in 1915 was correct in stating that Haiti had fared better at the hands of sympathetic Jamaican reporters than at those of writers outside the Caribbean. This was in large measure a result of the frequency of exile of prominent Haitians in the island, which facilitated enduring associations. But the events of July 1915, when Haitian president Vilbrun Guillaume-Sam was publicly and brutally killed by rival forces, presented a new circumstance unlike anything that had prevailed before. Some Jamaicans had previously advocated some form of foreign control to take Haiti out of its quagmire of short-term governments. Where Haiti would go, now that US marines were on the ground, was undeterminable. Over the next two decades Jamaican observances and commentaries on the US occupation of Haiti reflected a particular British West Indian view. While some US commentators—especially within the African American community—would grow increasingly oppositional to their government’s military control of the republic, the response of Jamaicans was less consistent. They were guided in various ways by racial and regional solidarity but their public statements about occupied Haiti also implied their own conflicted perceptions of empire. Over the nineteen years of US rule in Haiti, Jamaican elites would reflect some of the contradictions of their Haitian counterparts as they contemplated the marine presence, Haiti’s future, and the role of US imperialism in the Caribbean.

Then and Now: Haitian Journalism as Resistance to US Occupation and US-Led Reconstruction

During the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, Haiti’s Fourth Estate, the Haitian press, stood in solidarity with ordinary Haitians and became a fixed feature of the resistance in Haiti to foreign occupation for nineteen years. The alliance featured conservative publications like Le Matin , traditional commercial papers like Le Nouvelliste , and radical antioccupation ones like Haïti-Intégrale and La Presse . Despite their differing political persuasions, owners of the dozens of newspapers in Haiti challenged the Haitian state and the United States for the loss of Haitian sovereignty, and many went to jail for it. In 2015, an alliance between Haiti’s leading media organizations, the ANMH and AMIH, has emerged in the face of a new US-led interference, this time in the country’s reconstruction. The threat to the country’s sovereignty by the international aid community has come at a time when political and economic institutions remain weak. Haiti’s press stands out as an institution willing to hold an open debate about Haiti’s recovery and development. This role is significant given the country’s fledgling democracy and persistent socioeconomic crises brought on by two decades of political upheavals and natural disasters culminating with the 2010 earthquake. The narrative in Haitian newsrooms and radio programs on the ground echoes the narratives of 1915. The strategies employed by Haiti’s alliance of media organizations today, both mainstream and alternative, harkens back to the solidarity on display between Haiti’s radical and conservative press when Haiti faced occupation in 1915. The censorship and repression of the Haitian press is evident today, but when faced with an external threat to national self-determination, Haiti’s media continues to act as an advocate for the Haitian people.