American Imperialism's Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism

By Raphael Dalleo

As modern Caribbean politics and literature emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, Haiti, as the region's first independent state, stood as a source of inspiration for imagining decolonization and rooting regional identity in Africanness. Yet at precisely the same moment that anticolonialism was spreading throughout the Caribbean, Haiti itself was occupied by U.S. marines, a fact that regional political and cultural histories too often overlook. In American Imperialism’s Undead, Raphael Dalleo examines how Caribbean literature and activism emerged in the shadow of the U.S. military occupation of Haiti (1915-34) and how that presence influenced the development of anticolonialism throughout the region.

The occupation was a generative event for Caribbean activists such as C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey as well as for writers such as Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, and Alejo Carpentier. Dalleo provides new ways of understanding these luminaries, while also showing how other important figures such as Aimé Césaire, Arturo Schomburg, Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, Amy Ashwood Garvey, H. G. De Lisser, Luis Palés Matos, George Lamming, and Jean Rhys can be contextualized in terms of the occupation. By examining Caribbean responses to Haiti’s occupation, Dalleo underscores U.S. imperialism as a crucial if unspoken influence on anticolonial discourses and decolonization in the region. Without acknowledging the significance of the occupation of Haiti, our understanding of Atlantic history cannot be complete.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813938950

Book preview

American Imperialism’s Undead

THE OCCUPATION OF HAITI AND THE

RISE OF CARIBBEAN ANTICOLONIALISM

Raphael Dalleo

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2016 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2016

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dalleo, Raphael, author.

Title: American imperialism’s undead : the occupation of Haiti and the rise of Caribbean anticolonialism / Raphael Dalleo.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2016. | Series: New World studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016003037 | ISBN 9780813938936 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813938943 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813938950 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Caribbean literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Haitian literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Caribbean region — In literature. | Haiti—In literature. | Imperialism in literature. | Haiti—History—American occupation, 1915–1934. | Haiti — History—1934–1986. | Haiti—Relations—United States. | United States—Relations—Haiti.

Classification: LCC PN849.C3 D34 2016 | DDC 809/.933587294—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016003037

Cover art: Dandy Baron, Edouard Duval-Carrie, 2014. Mixed media on mylar in artist frame, 36 × 36". (Private collection)

NEW WORLD STUDIES

J. Michael Dash, Editor

Frank Moya Pons and

Sandra Pouchet Paquet,

Associate Editors

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1The Independence So Hardly Won Has Been Maintained: C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti

2Harlem and Haiti: West Indian Radicals, International Communism, and the Occupation

3A Romance of the Race, Just Down There by Panama: Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean

4Gendering the Occupation: The Universal Negro Improvement Association, Black Female Playwrights, and Haiti

5Afroantillanismo, the Marvelous Real, and the Occupation: Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti

6Haiti Goes Global: George Padmore and Pan-African Anticolonialism

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

ON APRIL 22, 1922, the Negro World published an article by Eric Walrond about visiting one of the centers of African American and Caribbean intellectual life in the United States, the home of Arturo Schomburg. Walrond and his companion (identified by Walrond only as a young lady and a Columbia student but addressed by Schomburg as Miss Hurston) found Schomburg eager to talk about black history, and one subject in particular: Haiti. Walrond records Schomburg asking, What would you like to do first? and then answering his own question: Here I have a set of books on Hayti. I’d like to show you Baron De Vastey’s ‘Cry of the Fatherland in the Interest of all Haytians,’ which is, of course, a very valuable work. Spencer St. John wrote a famous book on the black republic, too. Yes, miss, help yourself. Here is Madison’s ‘History of Hayti in three volumes’ (Winds 60). Walrond’s summary of the meeting ends with Schomburg telling them about how [he] started collecting books about black history and culture. After stating that his earliest interest dates from his school days in Porto Rico, he notes that I came to America thirty years ago with the intention of studying medicine. Instead, I became interested in the struggle for independence in Porto Rico and Cuba (61).

That a Puerto Rican like Schomburg wanted to talk first and foremost about Haiti — and that discussing the history of the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere would seem naturally connected to his desires for independence in his own birthplace — should not be surprising. In the early twentieth century, people of the African diaspora throughout the Americas had a great deal invested in Haiti. For Caribbean people like Schomburg and Walrond as much as for African Americans like Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti represented the idea that black people could be agents of world history. Haiti was one of the few sovereign black nations — along with Liberia and Abyssinia — that showed that a race colonized throughout the world might in fact be capable of self-rule. Haiti was thus a key inspiration to anticolonialism going back to the nineteenth century.

Yet equally important is what goes unsaid in Walrond’s record of the conversation, a larger backdrop of which Schomburg, Hurston, and Walrond were well aware: since 1915, Haiti had been under the control of U.S. Marines, and since 1920, opposition to that occupation had become a rallying cry for African Americans and Caribbean people alike. This occupation, from 1915 to 1934, reverberated throughout the hemisphere. The conversation between the Puerto Rico–born Schomburg, Guyana-born Walrond, and African American Hurston, about Haiti and Caribbean independence — and fraught with silences — frames my project. In this book, I explore how Caribbean people during this period, often in dialogue with African Americans, engaged with — or avoided engaging with — Haiti and its occupation. In the process, I show how modern Caribbean politics and literature emerged in dialogue with a range of internationalist projects from the 1920s and 1930s, including the occupation of Haiti, the Harlem Renaissance, pan-Africanism, and Communism.

Schomburg’s earliest publication had been about Haiti. That 1904 article laments the state of Haiti’s economy while calling for modernization; it thus foreshadows the ideas about industrialization and modernization that would become rationales for the occupation. Schomburg writes that a country cannot have industry without agriculture and no industry without commerce: it is the foundation upon which nations have been built. . . . I only wish I was able to infuse in Hayti, graduates of Booker T. Washington’s technical school that would lift the people to an ambitious love that would increase the material wealth of the people and country (Schomburg 58). The modernizing project Schomburg proposes parallels the problematic nature of the article’s sources: it relies on Eurocentric authors like J. A. Froude and Moreau de Saint-Mery, writers whose views of the limitations of Caribbean people led to the notion that outsiders must infuse Haiti with modern ideas. In comparing the 1904 article to Schomburg’s later writings, such as his 1935 essay on Henri Christophe that draws on the writings of Baron de Vastey, we might imagine Schomburg’s book-collecting project as an attempt to locate the alternative sources his earlier article was missing and that would allow for more supple visions of black culture and sovereignty. Schomburg’s career was in this regard a striking success: he assembled a wonderful archive of black knowledge, including a collection of materials on Haiti, which many scholars — myself included — have benefitted from consulting.

Schomburg’s ability to acquire these materials shows the unexpected routes U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean created. Schomburg’s day job was head of the Latin American and Caribbean Correspondence Division of Bankers Trust Company, the Wall Street firm where J. P. Morgan held a controlling interest. Bankers Trust needed someone like Schomburg because of its extensive investments in the Caribbean and Central America (Nearing and Freeman 15). As Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof describes: Cosmopolitan men like Schomburg were essential resources for Wall Street firms as United States financial interests infiltrated Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Central America. His mailroom job was not glamorous, but it covered the expenses of Schomburg’s book collecting, and allowed him, in his retirement, to travel, write, and act as curator of his collection (36). Wall Street firms like Bankers Trust wielded substantial influence during the early twentieth century, with U.S. foreign policy frequently oriented toward protecting the investments that Schomburg was employed to help service. From 1900 to 1930, U.S. military forces were deployed throughout the Caribbean basin, including in Panama, Honduras, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. These interventions led to numerous long-term military occupations: my introduction will describe how the longest of these occupations, in Haiti from 1915 to 1934, came in response to the urging of National City Bank (today’s Citigroup). U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean basin during the 1910s and 1920s — the combination of military forces protecting the financial investments of these Wall Street banks — forms the immediate context for Schomburg’s bibliophilic project. Generations of scholarship have been enabled by the uses to which this Wall Street clerk put his salary.

THE AFTERMATHS of early twentieth-century U.S. empire and the occupation of Haiti are thus multiple and unpredictable, and I must include my book as embedded in the networks created by U.S. imperialism. I wrote most of this book in two places: first, a lovely office in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, just inside from the street corners where Marcus Garvey, Hubert Harrison, and Richard B. Moore lectured about racism, imperialism, and black (trans)nationalism, and in virtually the same physical space where the Krigwa Players performed Eulalie Spence’s play Her; and second, an apartment in Queens, just blocks from the Kaufman-Astoria Studios where The Emperor Jones starring Paul Robeson was filmed in 1933. The Schomburg Center that supported my research is part of the New York Public Library (NYPL) system: one of the major donors to the NYPL during the twentieth century was Brooke Astor, whose name is prominently inscribed just inside the entrance to the library’s main building on Forty-Second Street, and who was the daughter of John Russell, commander of U.S. forces in Haiti from 1922 to 1930.

I want to thank all of the staff at the Schomburg Center, especially Diana Lachatanere, Steven Fullwood, Edwina Ashie-Nikoi, Auburn Nelson, and Maira Liriano. In addition to access to the Schomburg’s fantastic resources, I also benefitted immensely from the seminar in which I read my colleagues’ exciting works in progress and received valuable feedback on my own writing. Thanks to the participants of that seminar: Zakiya Adair, Yarimar Bonilla, Marisa Fuentes, Farah Griffin, Jessica Krug, Andrew Rosa, and Salamishah Tillet. Farah, as director of the Schomburg Scholars in Residence program and convener of these seminars, provided a wonderful model of scholarly rigor and generosity. Melay Araya, my research assistant during the residence, was especially helpful in tracking down sources on Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey. Thanks so much to Michael Dash and Leah Rosenberg for writing letters in support of my application to the Schomburg residency, without which this project would not have been completed. From Astoria, I want to thank Teresa and Marina Machado for providing hospitality and child care for a very demanding toddler.

Support for my residence at the Schomburg Center came from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I visited other archives while working on this project, including those housed at the New York Public Library’s Schwarzman Building, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Tamiment Library at New York University, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, the Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Archives and Special Collections at the London School of Economics, the British Library, the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, the British National Archives at Kew, the Josefina del Toro Collection at the University of Puerto Rico, and the Special Collections of the Alma Jordan Library at the University of the West Indies, Saint Augustine. I want to thank the librarians and staff at those places, as well as at Vanderbilt University, where through Interlibrary Loan I was able to receive a digital copy of George Padmore’s pamphlet Haiti, an American Slave Colony, which is held in their Special Collections.

This book grew out of my experiences at Florida Atlantic University, teaching Caribbean literature in an area and at a university with a substantial population of Haitians and Haitian Americans. To respond to that student body, I developed a course on the representation of Haiti in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and then organized a conference on the same theme. The Haiti and the Americas conference at FAU in 2010 was generative for this book; all of the participants, particularly Alessandra Benedicty, Matthew Casey, Myriam Chancy, Michael Dash, Sibylle Fischer, Kaiama Glover, Jeff Karem, Nadève Ménard, and Lindsay Twa, helped me to think through Haiti’s place in the hemisphere. I went on to present portions of this book at a number of other conferences. The most important for the development of my ideas was the Black Jacobins Revisited conference in Liverpool; presentations by and discussions with Raj Chetty, Rachel Douglas, Peter Fraser, Robert Hill, Christian Høgsbjerg, Leslie James, Selma James, Philip Kaisary, Nick Nesbitt, Bill Schwarz, and Matthew Smith all helped me to clarify my arguments. Thanks so much to Rachel for organizing and including me in such a stimulating conference. The annual Caribbean Studies Association and West Indian Literature conferences have always been my most consistent intellectual community, and I also participated in the American Comparative Literature Association conference and the Caribbean Digital conference while writing this book. Many of the discussions at these conferences have found their way into this project, in particular those with Chris Bongie, Rhonda Cobham, Imani Owens, Kate Ramsey, Leah Rosenberg, and Faith Smith. Thanks also to Minkah Makalani for sharing a meal in Washington Heights to discuss this project and to Michelle Stephens for talking through it with me over tea. The image that appears in chapter 6 was generously provided by Minkah.

While in New York, I was also fortunate to work with the Transnational and Transcolonial Caribbean Studies Research Group (TTCSRG) (Alessandra Benedicty, Christian Flaugh, Kaiama Glover, Maja Horn, and Kelly Josephs). They invited me to participate in their reading group and also workshopped my chapter on Claude McKay and Eric Walrond. I much appreciate the community and camaraderie provided by the TTCSRG. Thanks especially to Kaiama for offering further (extremely insightful) commentary on my introduction and inviting me to present material at Barnard from my first chapter. In Florida, I discussed this project with many colleagues, including Eric Berlatsky, Kristin Block, Carla Calargé, Sika Dagbovie, Taylor Hagood, Clevis Headley, and Regis Mann. Thanks to Sika and Regis for reading parts of the manuscript. The Atlantic Studies research group at the University of Miami read and discussed my chapter on Carpentier; thanks to Nathaniel Cadle, Maria Estorino Dooling, Donette Francis, John Funchion, Alexandra Perisic, Dominique Reill, Patricia Saunders, Beatrice Skokan, Chantalle Verna, Tim Watson, and Ashli White for the extremely helpful feedback and to Tim and Ashli for organizing the event. The Padmore chapter benefitted from a meticulous reading by Leslie James.

Thanks to Edouard Duval-Carrié for granting me permission to use his art on the book’s cover. Dana Ray assisted with the creation of the index. Portions of chapter 1 were originally published as ‘The independence so hardly won has been maintained’: C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti, Cultural Critique 87 (2014): 38–59. Portions of chapter 5 were originally published as The U.S. Occupation of Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, sx salon 22 (2016).

My parents, Peter and Bruce Dalleo, are both historians, and while my training in literary and cultural studies shapes this book’s methodology, it continues my dialogue with the field of history that began with them. As an undergraduate at Amherst College majoring in history, I encountered wonderful teachers such as David Blight and Kim Brandt. I hope that the story I tell about the history of Caribbean anticolonialism lives up to the examples these fine historians have set for me. I also began to move toward literary and cultural studies at Amherst; Rhonda Cobham, Leah Hewitt, and Barry O’Connell deserve much credit for inspiring what has become my career. Finally, Elena Machado remains my most important intellectual interlocutor, friend, and partner. In the middle of the process of writing this book, my son, Leandro, and daughter, Delfina, joined us. Their joy and curiosity add so much to our lives. Seeing them learn about the world around them is an inspiration. I hope that my teaching and scholarship are helping in some way, however small, to make the world they will inhabit a little more fair and just.

Introduction

U.S. IMPERIALISM is built on amnesia. The narrator of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, while providing a history of the Dominican Republic, interrupts his summary with these throw-away lines: Oh, you didn’t know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don’t worry, when you have kids they won’t know the U.S. occupied Iraq either (19). This aside reminds readers of the U.S. refusal to acknowledge its imperialist history while emphasizing how that amnesia enables the past to be repeated by new generations of foreign interventions. If, in the comparison from Oscar Wao, Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq (4) — the occupation part of a larger attempt by the United States to use military force to remake a region — then Haiti might be Afghanistan. The first twentieth-century U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic lasted from 1916 to 1924; the occupation of Haiti began in 1915 and ended in 1934.

Although U.S. Marines were thus in Haiti for nearly two decades, no one — aside from Haitians, who, from the standpoint of global public discourse, don’t count — remembers the occupation of Haiti. As far as most scholarship is concerned — with a few notable exceptions I will discuss — the occupation of Haiti did not happen. Even in postcolonial, Caribbean, Latin American, and African diaspora studies, the occupation of Haiti is not part of these fields’ institutional memories. The imperialist amnesia of the U.S. mainstream, coupled with what the Haitian Revolution and Haitian independence have long represented to black and anticolonial thought, have silenced the occupation of Haiti. To use Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s terminology, the occupation has become unthinkable, an event that cannot be recognized or processed by dominant conceptual practices. My goal in this book will be to think through the unthinkable, first, showing that this amnesia about the occupation exists, even in places we might not expect it; and then second, making the case that our understanding of Atlantic history cannot be — and therefore has not been — complete without acknowledging the significance of the occupation of Haiti. Silencing this event has obscured how much of the history of Caribbean, Latin American, and pan-African activism and intellectual practice developed in response to the occupation of Haiti. With this book I hope to help end that silence.

I argue that the occupation of Haiti crucially shaped Caribbean politics and cultural production from outside of Haiti between 1915 and 1950, the years generally acknowledged as the period when modern Caribbean political movements and literature emerged throughout the region. The founding of the People’s National Party in Jamaica, the rise of Pedro Albizu Campos’s independentista movement in Puerto Rico, trade union organizing in Cuba and Trinidad, and analogous events in other islands are taken as evidence of a new form of anticolonial politics emerging in the Caribbean during the 1920s and 1930s.¹ This period is also considered the beginning of the region’s modern literature that first sought to take Afro-Caribbean culture seriously and speak in the name (and sometimes the voice) of the islands’ majority inhabitants: négritude in Martinique, negrismo and afroantillanismo in the Hispanic Caribbean, the Beacon group in Trinidad.²

Scholars have noticed the important part Haiti plays in anticolonial projects of this period. Victor Figueroa, Philip Kaisary, and James Arnold discuss a range of Caribbean literary responses, including the ways Haitian culture explicitly inspired the recuperation of black culture by Alejo Carpentier in Cuba and Luis Palés Matos in Puerto Rico and how Haitian history became a way to imagine revolution and nation building during the decolonization era in plays such as C. L. R. James’s Toussaint L’Oouverture (1936), Derek Walcott’s Henri Christophe (1949) and Drums and Colors (1958), Edouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint (1961), and Aimé Césaire’s La tragédie du roi Christophe (1963). Gary Wilder’s exploration of the political imaginaries of this period notes the key role that a 1944 visit to Haiti played in the intellectual development of Césaire, who would go on to be an architect of Martinique’s redefined political status after World War II; Wilder argues that the trip to Haiti in particular further demystified the idea of state sovereignty as a self-evident good (29). Haiti’s privileged position in the development of anticolonialism is therefore well known.

As much as has been written about how important Haiti was for the rest of the Caribbean acknowledging its Africanness or imagining decolonization by looking back to the region’s first independent state, however, none of these scholars engage with a key fact: that at precisely the same moment that modern Caribbean anticolonialism was being founded through narratives of Haiti, Haiti itself was occupied by U.S. Marines. The years between 1915 and 1950 are not just a period of (colonial) endings and (nationalist) beginnings; for Haiti, these decades mark an interruption to the supposed teleology of independence following from colonial domination. The critique of the occupation of Haiti inspired and taught lessons to anticolonial political movements not always reducible to national emergence, especially pan-Africanism and international Communism. Caribbean people’s understanding of imperialism, in particular the role of finance capitalism in international domination, was consolidated by analysis of the situation in Haiti. In addition, international politics in the immediate aftermath of World War I was dominated by competing versions of self-determination articulated by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson and Soviet premier Vladimir Lenin; Caribbean colonial subjects became focused on this concept vis-à-vis the occupation of Haiti as it was deployed to accuse the United States of hypocrisy in its own imperialist dealings. The idea of self-determination, once applied to European colonialism, would become key to the anticolonial discourse of the post–World War II decolonization era. Even as opponents of U.S. meddling in Haiti utilized the language of self-determination, the occupation also showed the limits of that discourse. A range of anticolonial solutions, from nationalist political parties to the West Indies Federation, Francophone departmentalization, and Puerto Rico’s Associated Free State, developed in the shadow of the occupation of Haiti. While post–World War II decolonization would eventually force these energies into the form of the nation-state, this outcome, as Wilder describes, should not be regarded as inevitable but rather as worked out in contingent and contextual, pragmatic and strategic ways (105). Returning to the lessons Caribbean radicals gleaned from the occupation of Haiti serves as a reminder of the alternative political projects they imagined.

In the aesthetic realm, the rise of indigénisme in Haiti as a nationalist response to U.S. domination has been credited as a precursor to négritude and the pan-Caribbean turn toward the region’s African roots.³ The parallel story that has not been told is of how the circulation of narratives about and images of Haiti via U.S. popular culture affected the rest of the region, with these versions of Haiti variously perceived by Caribbean people as evidence of authentic black culture or racist stereotypes complicit in colonial domination. The vogue of primitivism during this period provided literary writers access to metropolitan audiences in search of exotic sources of cultural renewal. But primitivist discourses often justified denying self-determination to the Caribbean by portraying nonwhite people as premodern and therefore incapable of — or at least not yet ready for — self-rule. Primitivism thus illustrates how the political and artistic become intertwined. Images of Haiti were especially central to primitivistic views of the Caribbean and of blackness, with Haitian religion — translated into the United States as the stereotypes of what became labelled voodoo — especially popular.⁴ The academic field of U.S. ethnography, led by Melville Herskovits, turned to Haiti as primitive Other; literary works by Eugene O’Neill and Edna Taft mobilized Haiti as a remedy for North American cultural exhaustion. By extension, the entire Caribbean became perceived as voodoo islands, sites of irrationality, insubordination, and antimodernity.

The rise of Caribbean anticolonial discourses during this period responded — sometimes directly — to these versions of the region circulating as a result of the occupation. In The Other America, Michael Dash discusses primitivism’s generative yet restricting presence in Caribbean writing by using Hayden White’s idea of discursive tropics: "Tropes, then, are basic units of discourse and tropics is the vital process that renders the unfamiliar familiar or, to use the image of Michel Foucault, that tames a world of profusion (26). Dash sees alternating elements in a Caribbean tropicalist discourse — the native as violent and libidinal as opposed to the native as mystical and free" (26). The discourse on blackness generated by the occupation of Haiti oscillated between these two tropes, from the threat of atavism described in Arthur Burks’s short stories that I discuss in chapter 3 to the celebration of Haitian spirituality as escape from modern mechanization seen in William Seabrook’s travelogues in my fifth chapter.

The occupation was a generative event for many Caribbean writers and activists, and understanding the histories of the region’s literature and decolonization requires engaging with this past. This book focuses on the influence of Haiti on the projects of C. L. R. James, the African Blood Brotherhood, Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey, Eulalie Spence, George Padmore, and Alejo Carpentier, while pointing the way to how the work of other important figures like Aimé Césaire, Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, Amy Ashwood Garvey, H. G. De Lisser, Luis Palés Matos, George Lamming, and Jean Rhys can also be contextualized in terms of the occupation. Examining responses to the occupation serves as a reminder of U.S. imperialism as a crucial if unspoken context for anticolonial discourses.

Unthinkability and National Teleologies

The silencing of Haiti’s occupation leads to substantial blind spots for postcolonial, Caribbean, Latin American, and African diaspora studies. I am not arguing that scholarship on the occupation of Haiti does not exist, or even that there is not enough research on this event. My research builds on much excellent work about the occupation, including Hans Schmidt’s The United States Occupation of Haiti, Suzy Castor’s L’occupation américaine d’Haïti, Kate Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law, and Peter Hudson’s The National City Bank of New York and Haiti, 1909–1922. My work is even more directly inspired by the insights of scholars who have examined the cultural ramifications of the occupation, including Michael Dash, Jeff Karem, Valerie Kaussen, Nadève Ménard, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Mary Renda, and Matthew Smith. These scholars have shown how Haitian writers and intellectuals such as Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Roumain, and Dantès Bellegard responded to the occupation. Dash’s Haiti and the United States, Renda’s Taking Haiti, and Karem’s The Purloined Islands in particular shed light on the ways that the occupation reverberated beyond Haiti. Rather than reproduce their work on how the occupation impacted white and black U.S. artists, intellectuals, and activists, I build on their insights to focus attention on pan-Caribbean responses that have not yet been remembered.⁵

I refer to the occupation as silenced because despite this scholarship, the occupation is not one of the histories that non-Haitianist scholars in postcolonial, Caribbean, Latin American, and African diaspora studies take for granted as foundational. Today, after much revisionist work, the Haitian Revolution is among the events central to the consensus conception of these fields: scholarship by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, David Geggus, Laurent Dubois, Sibylle Fischer, Susan Buck-Morss, Nick Nesbitt, and others has made it generally accepted that the Haitian Revolution reverberated widely and shaped how freedom, sovereignty, liberation, and decolonization were imagined in the Atlantic and broader colonial world.⁶ No scholar working in these areas is unaware of the importance of the Haitian Revolution for the cultures and histories of the hemisphere. The occupation of Haiti is not part of these fields’ collective unconscious in the same way; as a result, scholars seeking to contextualize the rise of Caribbean anticolonialism during the interwar period do so in terms of international events such as the Russian Revolution or the invasion of Abyssinia without reference to the occupation of Haiti, as chapter 1 will show. Table 1 gives a sense of just how infrequently the occupation of Haiti is even mentioned in scholarship from these fields by examining the major journals of Caribbean, postcolonial, African diaspora, and Latin American studies. I argue that this is not merely a question of omission: it is the very premises of these fields that makes the occupation unthinkable.

Table 1. Articles using Haitian Revolution and occupation of Haiti in major journals of Caribbean, postcolonial, African diaspora, and Latin American studies

Note: All search results as of December 2015. Searches performed via (a) JStor; (b) Ethnic NewsWatch; (c) LION; (d) Project Muse; (e) Taylor and Francis.

If any field has developed nuanced and powerful tools for analyzing amnesia and silence, it is Haitian studies. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History in particular makes engaging with the unthinkable the prerequisite for understanding Haiti’s place in world history. Trouillot describes how the Haitian Revolution has been written out of histories of the Age of Revolutions, arguing that Haiti’s radical conceptualization of liberty, equality, and the human makes including it too fundamental a challenge to Eurocentric notions of modernity and Enlightenment. As he puts it: The Haitian Revolution was the ultimate test to the universal pretensions of both the French and the American revolutions. And they both failed (Silencing 88). Identifying the way Haiti has been silenced allows Trouillot to profoundly critique the processes of history. He writes that any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences (26) and that by silence, I mean an active and transitive process: one ‘silences’ a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing (48). The Haitian Revolution must be omitted from Eurocentric versions of history because when reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs, human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs. They devise formulas to repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse (72).

Trouillot is careful to explain that it is not only European or U.S. history that contains these silences; silence is an unavoidable product of creating history. Silence is produced at various levels of the process by which history is assembled: Thus the presences and absences embodied in sources (artifacts and bodies that turn an event into fact) or archives (facts collected, thematized, and processed as documents and monuments) are neither neutral or natural. They are created (48). Attending to what is silenced and how silences are created sheds light on the role of power in the production of history; while Trouillot focuses especially on how imperialist versions of history consolidate control through writing out potential contradictions to the