American Imperialism's Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism 0813938937, 9780813938936

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1 “The Independence So Hardly Won Has Been Maintained”
2 Harlem and Haiti
3 “A Romance of the Race, Just Down There by Panama”
4 Gendering the Occupation
5 Afroantillanismo, the Marvelous Real, and athe Occupation
6 Haiti Goes Global
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

American Imperialism’s Undead

New World Studies J. Michael Dash, Editor Frank Moya Pons and Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Associate Editors

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)

Contents

Preface Introduction

vii 1

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

25

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

44



3 “A Romance of the Race, Just Down There by Panama”: Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean 70

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

101

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

122

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

147

Conclusion

173

Notes

191

Bibliography

215

Index

237

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

viii  Preface 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

ix  Preface 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

x  Preface 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

xi  Preface 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 F ­ raser, 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,

xii  Preface 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.

American Imperialism’s Undead

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 throwaway 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 MichelRolph 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

2  Introduction 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 A ­ rnold 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 T ­ oussaint ­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 decolo-

3  Introduction nization 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 a­ nticolonial ­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

4  Introduction 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

5  Introduction 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

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

Journal (dates available) Caribbean Quarterly (1949 –2011a)

Occupation of Haiti

48

3

25

2

Journal of West Indian Literature (1986 –2009  ; 2004 –2013c)

15

0

Small Axe (2001–2015d )

99

15

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (1998–2015e)

11

1

Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2005–2015e)

9

1

Postcolonial Studies (1998–2014 )

8

2

36

8

Journal of Black Studies (1970 –2013  )

27

3

Wasafiri (1997–2015 )

9

0

Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (1984 –2012a)

13

0

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (1997–2014 e)

9

0

Journal of Latin American Studies (1969 –2013a)

29

6

Latin American Research Review (1965–2013 )

26

2

Journal of Caribbean History (2000 –2014 ) b

a

e

Callaloo (1995–2015  ) d

a

e

a

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.

7  Introduction 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 story of superiority and omnipotence, he is well aware of how even in marginalized or subjugated settings, hegemonic versions of history develop. In particular, his chapter on the erasure of the defeated African colonel Sans Souci, executed by future king Henri Christophe for refusing to submit to the group of Creole military leaders that eventually led Haiti into independence, shows how poorly that story fits into the narrative of national emergence that subsequent historians wanted to tell: “For Haitian urban elites . . . the Colonel is for them the epitome of the war within the war, an episode that, until recently, they have denied any retrospective significance. . . . This fratricidal sequence is the only blemish in the glorious epic of their ancestors’ victory against France, the only shameful page in the history

8  Introduction of the sole successful slave revolution in the annals of humankind. Thus, understandably, it is the one page they would have written otherwise if history depended only on the wishes of the narrator” (66 ). The narrative of Haitian national emerging, in which brutal foreign domination is overcome by heroic struggle that institutes a free and sovereign state, is a story that is too valuable to complicate with inconvenient details. Since Trouillot’s call for historians and philosophers to acknowledge the significance of Haiti’s revolutionary history, works like Nick Nesbitt’s Universal Emancipation (2008) and Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) have accepted the challenge of reminding the world of the contribution to modern politics and philosophy made by the most complete social revolution of the Age of Revolutions. In the wake of the bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution in 2004, a number of new academic collections appeared that further engage with this event. Collections that focus on how the Haitian Revolution affected other parts of the Atlantic world include The Impact of the H ­ aitian ­Revolution in the Atlantic World (2001), Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks (2006 ), Echoes of the Haitian Revolution, 1804 –2004 (2008), Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (2008), and African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents (2010). Today, in postcolonial, Caribbean, Latin American, and African diaspora studies, the Haitian Revolution is no longer silenced. Yet as Kaiama Glover describes, the revolution is often the only version of Haiti that makes the crossing into these fields: “Ever since its seizing of i­ndependence, [ Haiti ] has been perceived as an absolute anomaly  —  its past, present, and future readable almost exclusively through the lens of the seminal moment of its revolution” (15). In this context, the occupation of Haiti can only be a haunting shadow, much less frequently acknowledged or engaged. Sibylle Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed is for my purposes the most intriguing of the scholarship that follows from Trouillot’s groundbreaking work because of the model that it offers for thinking about how the occupation might be seen to haunt the twentieth-century Americas just as the Revolution did in the nineteenth century. She shares Trouillot’s skepticism of positivist approaches to history that ignore how the survival and acknowledgment of what is recognized as evidence is socially determined. For Fischer, colonial contexts characterized sometimes by overt censorship and always by unequal access to the public sphere mean that reconstructing history  —  cultural, political, literary, intellectual, or social  —  requires reading through silences and omissions. She qualifies

9  Introduction Trouillot’s idea of silence by describing it as disavowal (Modernity 134, 138); her research into nineteenth-century Cuban and Dominican culture suggests that rather than absent, Haiti is in fact excessive. She finds that “attempts to suppress certain memories of Haitian Revolution rarely produced silence”; Fischer therefore deploys a methodology that looks at “stories, screens, and fantasies that hide from view what must not be seen” (38) in order to show how apparently inexplicable non sequiturs or obsessions can be read to reveal anxious efforts to avoid facing the real object of concern. My first chapter will develop this methodology further to show how C. L. R. James’s surprising avoidance of engaging with the U.S. occupation of Haiti can be read through this lens. Fischer convincingly connects the disavowal of the Haitian ­Revolution in Cuba and the Dominican Republic to national consolidation. The revolution poses a problem to these discourses because what Fischer calls radical antislavery “was a shadowy, discontinuous formation with a rhizomic, decentered structure” (11) whose goals and ideology did not coincide with those of nationalism: “One of the reasons why radical anti­ slavery was not readily assimilable by local elites was that it did not fit into the protonational mold of other local progressive movements” (18). Because “the rise of the nation in the nineteenth century, even where it happened against colonial rule, produced its own archives, and along the way, its own areas of deep silence” (11), radical antislavery became one of the movements “that cannot be contained within the ideologies that became hegemonic in the nineteenth century” (16 ). She discusses a number of texts, from the notebook of José Antonio Aponte and the socalled primitive murals of early Cuba to the indigenist literature of the ­Dominican Republic, to make the case that while these cultural forms have not been easily assimilated into national cultural histories, and in some cases have been systematically excluded, “we need to understand more fully which thoughts were erased or suppressed before any of the canonical formulations of modernity came into being” (33). Her chapter on the Cuban poet Plácido is perhaps most explicit in unpacking his understanding of individual liberty and national sovereignty as not necessarily coincident, and in fact sometimes at odds. Taking seriously Plácido’s a­pparently anomalous poetic practice shows how “Modern national cultures on the periphery came about through the suppression of precisely those projects and practices Plácido represents. Plácido is a reminder of the time when Creole culture was in the process of gestation  —  a reminder that things could have developed differently. National teleologies never take kindly to this realization” (80).

10  Introduction For the nationalist movements that would emerge in the Caribbean in the twentieth century, the Haitian Revolution is no longer silenced precisely because of the ways it could be made to fit into the teleological stories emphasizing independence as the resolution to the story of slavery and colonialism. Yet the reality of twentieth-century anticolonial movements becomes more complicated when their contemporaneity with the occupation of Haiti is acknowledged. The importance of Communist ideology and institutional support, often written out of the story of n ­ ational emergence in the Anglophone Caribbean, becomes e­specially visible: ­Caribbean radicals developed an important tradition of anticolonial critique by thinking through the Communist analysis of the occupation of Haiti. Furthermore, Haitian history was available as a raw material to the writers of this period, at least in part, because of the circulation of narratives of Haiti due to the occupation. What the ­Caribbean itself has taken to be the region’s authentic culture frequently closely resembles  —  and in some cases, can be shown to have grown d ­ irectly from  —  the primitivist imperial and touristic representations that developed from the occupation of Haiti. While many of these Caribbean authors challenged and deconstructed these exoticizing discourses, the close relationship of U.S. imperialist narratives to the founding texts of Caribbean literature challenges ideas about autonomy and authenticity central to this literary tradition. The occupation itself is so unthinkable to nationalist teleology and the political, cultural, and scholarly projects it would beget that this context has had to be disavowed.

Remembering the Occupation In light of how little the occupation of Haiti is remembered today, it will be useful to establish the basic historical outlines of this event before the rest of this book examines its influence on activists and writers from the Caribbean. On July 28, 1915, more than three hundred U.S. Marines landed in Haiti, ostensibly to stabilize the political situation and “preserve peace” on the island (“Haiti Is Put” 1). When President Woodrow Wilson announced the rationale for the incursion, he focused on the brutal murder of Haitian president Guillaume Sam that occurred in late July 1915. But in fact, plans had long been in the works for an occupation of Haiti: as early as 1914, the United States had already drafted an announcement of the military action with only the date left blank (Schmidt 64 – 65). Despite initially framing the operation as a targeted effort to restore stability, U.S. military forces would remain in Haiti for almost two decades.

11  Introduction From 1915 to 1934, then, the United State engaged in a grand nationbuilding experiment in Haiti. Without having to worry about respecting local political, social, or economic relations, U.S. representatives in Haiti were able to socially engineer their vision of a utopia. The main areas of this transformation were the political system and the economy, especially finance and agriculture. Upon arrival, the marines dissolved Haiti’s existing political institutions. In the place of the Haitian army, a new gendarmerie was created that would operate as Haiti’s state during the occupation. A new Haitian president was chosen by the occupying forces, and despite initial confusion over who was in charge, U.S. ­civilian officials and Haitian government officials  —  whose salaries were withheld whenever they failed to comply with U.S. instructions  —  quickly learned to defer to the marines. The gendarmerie was able to wield virtually unlimited, unchecked power on the island. Thousands of Haitians were killed to establish and maintain this power. As the occupation dragged on, marines trained Haitians to serve in the gendarmerie, with the goal of having local forces take over this national guard after the occupation. During the shorter occupation of the Dominican Republic, the United States built a similar militarized police force and left behind just as powerful an institution with Rafael Trujillo at its head. In Haiti, the U.S.-­created gendarmerie would eventually set the stage for François ­Duvalier’s tonton macoutes.7 The economic transformation of Haiti had been the initial goal of the occupation and was much more carefully planned than the ­haphazard ­political reorganization. Decades before the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were established, Haiti in the 1910s and 1920s experienced structural adjustment by military force. The National City Bank of New York  —  the name by which it is known in the twenty-first century is Citigroup  —  had advised Woodrow Wilson’s government on Haiti policy leading up to the occupation (Schmidt 48–52); having recently acquired the Banque Nationale d’Haiti and having been awarded the contract to build Haiti’s railroad, National City Bank had a vested interest in Haitian affairs and worked hard to get the United Sates to send troops to ensure the bank’s investments (37–38, 60). The occupation allowed U.S. officials with the help of National City Bank to rewrite the Haitian constitution, even when the major sticking point, the elimination of the clause in ­Haiti’s original constitution forbidding foreigners from owning Haitian land, required the dissolution of the Haitian assembly in order to implement it. National City Bank could restructure Haiti’s n ­ ational debt, taking a nice commission on the refinancing while r­ eceiving assurances from

12  Introduction the U.S. government that military force would back the loan if necessary (162– 63). The occupation gave National City Bank uncontested control of Haiti’s purse strings, including the customhouses, ports, and the newly created position of acting financial advisor to oversee the country’s budget. National City could therefore make sure that Haitian revenues were diverted almost entirely away from the nation’s public sector and toward servicing the debt, turning the entire country into a de facto vassal of the bank. Without government investment in the public sector, the only significant public works performed during the occupation, the building of a modern highway system suitable for transporting military equipment and personnel to every corner of the island in case they were needed for pacification purposes, had to be performed by unpaid labor (100 –102). Haitians were thus conscripted into road construction chain gangs in a process one of the most famous U.S. critics of the occupation, James Weldon Johnson, likened to “the African slave raids of past centuries” (“Self-Determining” 668). Alongside National City Bank’s financial arrangements, modernizing Haitian agriculture became a major goal of the occupation. Vocational education was emphasized at the expense of the traditional public education system: a decade into the occupation, student-to-teacher ratios in the public schools were 70 to 1, and public school teachers were paid four dollars to six dollars per month while vocational school teachers made thirty dollars per month (Schmidt 182–83). Instituting vocational education was only one way in which the emphasis on agricultural modernization promoted greater inequality on the island. The peasant-based subsistence farming on the island was seen as the primary obstacle to modernization, and the occupation attempted to expropriate peasant land in order to consolidate large, plantation-style holdings oriented toward export (Castor 91–101). Hans Schmidt describes the economic ­rationale behind the occupation: American hopes for uplifting Haiti had been based largely on the expectation that American private investors would finance and direct economic development. This expectation, involving as it did the ideology of free-enterprise capitalism, assumed that investors would be drawn to Haiti by the prospect of extracting greater profits than could be obtained elsewhere and that their activities would engender residual economic benefits for Haiti. Americans would bring economic progress to Haiti as an attendant feature of United States economic imperialism, since American entrepreneurs would coincidentally help build up Haiti while they were exploiting investment opportunities. (168)

13  Introduction The island became ground zero for the implementation of trickle-down economics (what would later, remarkably, be nicknamed voodoo economics), a place where bankers and big business could put into practice their ideas for economic development without having to worry about changes in economic policy from pesky elections disrupting the triumphant march of the free market. The ideology guiding this reorganization was based on the premise that creating favorable conditions for big business would enrich U.S. entrepreneurs and have the secondary effect of helping Haiti. Only the first of these outcomes was achieved. Greed, it turned out, was not good for Haiti. Today’s Haiti, then, is a creation of the United States. As Díaz’s comparisons between present and past imply, we’ll be able to judge the success of the latest round of nation building when Iraq and Afghanistan  —  site of the think tank–inspired free-market experimentation Naomi Klein ­describes in The Shock Doctrine (434 – 42)  —  can look back decades from now and find themselves the paragons of political stability and economic prosperity that Haiti has become a century after the United States was able to implement the utopian economic and social policies dreamed up in Wall Street boardrooms.8 The century that followed the disastrous occupation of Haiti shows how amnesia makes U.S. imperialism possible. In the first part of the twentieth century, the United States remade places like Haiti and the ­Dominican ­Republic  —  as well as Cuba, the Philippines, Panama, N ­ icaragua, and Honduras   —   then learned the lessons of colonialism’s folly, changed course to the Good Neighbor policy of the 1930s, and stayed out of this kind of cynical foreign meddling while the memory of the debacle in Haiti was still fresh in mind. After the implementation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, the 1950s saw the United States back in the business of toppling elected governments in places like G ­ uatemala, Iran, and the Congo. That round of adventurism ended with a d ­ isastrous ­attempt to occupy and remake an even farther-off land, creating a Vietnam Syndrome in which the U.S. public wouldn’t support such ­heavy-handed colonialism. A generation later  —  after laying the g­ roundwork in ­Grenada and Central America  —  regime change was back on the agenda in the form of the Bush Doctrine.9 The aftermath of the moments when the ugly realities of U.S. imperialism can no longer be submerged has provided the only respite in U.S. foreign policy from reckless military adventurism on behalf of too-big-to-fail financial monopolies. Remembering the lessons of the occupation of Haiti can combat the amnesia that enables imperialism. At the same time, attending to the projects that arose in

14  Introduction opposition to the occupation shows how empire’s domination was never total. Throughout the occupation, Haitians resisted, and as the following chapters will explore, many other Caribbean people supported their resistance. As Greg Grandin puts it in his history of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, “­Democracy, social and economic justice, and political liberalization have never been achieved through an embrace of empire but rather through resistance to its command” (222).

Scholarly Silences The national teleologies and narrow conceptions of modernity that Trouillot and Fischer describe as complicit in Haiti’s silencing reappear even in intellectual traditions that conceive of themselves as contesting those dominant narratives. Postcolonial studies and African diaspora studies, two of the fields that inspire my own project, both position themselves as antidotes to Eurocentric versions of the past; they share a refusal to respect imposed national boundaries and an insistence on approaching colonial resistance or black experience as transnational. Undoing the silences surrounding the Haitian Revolution has been generative to both fields; in fact, both claim The Black Jacobins as a precursor or founding text. Yet the occupation of Haiti remains a telling blind spot for postcolonialism and African diaspora studies. The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies edited by John Hawley mentions the Haitian Revolution a number of times  —  including in entries on Carpentier, Césaire, and James  —  but contains no mention of the occupation. Similarly, the two volume Pan-African Encyclopedia edited by Zekeh Gbotokuma includes the entry “Black Slave Revolt in Haiti” and another, “Black Fear, 19th Century,” that addresses the influence of the Haitian Revolution; and even includes Toussaint Louverture in the entry “Black /African Makers of the Millennium.” Again, there is no mention in the encyclopedia of the occupation of Haiti. Despite the ostensible transnationalism of postcolonialism and African diaspora studies, the inability to engage with the occupation shows how these approaches share an investment in the categories of modernity complicit with national teleologies. Many factors contribute to the silencing of the occupation in these fields that should be so well-suited to approaching this event. These include a shared vision of world history where the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are seen to be dominated by European (especially British) colonialism, with U.S. imperialism thus viewed as only relevant after World War II; a strained relationship with Communism, and therefore to the Communist International (Comintern)–sponsored figures that I identify in chapters 2 and

15  Introduction 6 as central to opposition to the occupation of Haiti; and perhaps most importantly, what I will suggest in chapter 1 is a desire to hang onto the romance of revolutionary overcoming offered by the Haitian Revolution that the occupation threatens to undermine or undo. Postcolonial studies is on the one hand wildly transnational and comparative, and yet when defining its object of study frequently returns to the reassuring coherence that European colonialism  —  especially British empire  —  offers. For example, Elleke Boehmer begins her Colonial and Postcolonial Literature by admitting that she must “begin by drawing limits” to focus only on “literature written in English” (1), and then ­zeroes in even further: “It is on the British Empire that our attention will be focused” (1). When examining Africa and India, the boundaries Boehmer has drawn hold up; but when she turns to the Caribbean, she cannot avoid including Francophone writers like Césaire and Fanon in her study. It is as if the material itself resists even the most rigorous attempts to try to make a postcolonial approach line up with just one imperial history. Yet trying to draw these kinds of lines leads to generalizations about postcolonialism that a comparative approach  —  and in particular, the history of Haiti  —  immediately calls into question. After making language and the experience of British colonialism defining factors, she curiously “exclude[s ]” the United States from her account “because it won independence long before other colonial places” (4), a statement that Haiti’s 1804 independence quickly disproves. Later, when discussing the rise of “anti-colonial nationalist feelings” after World War I, she cites only one predecessor, noting that “in 1775, the War of Independence of the thirteen American states had established the groundwork for national movements to come” (101). Fischer’s work on Simón Bolívar, to take just one example, suggests how from the beginning nationalisms in the decolonizing world could look to Haiti as an alternative model ( Fischer, “Bolívar”). Haiti proves an awkward fit for postcolonial studies. Many critics entirely avoid using the vocabulary of postcolonialism to discuss Haiti: as Martin Munro puts it, “Haitian literature does not easily fit into any of the existing generalizing discourses of Caribbean culture” (36 ).10 Others describe Haiti as postcolonial beginning in 1804 ( Brickhouse 417; Nesbitt, Voicing 128). Thinking of Haiti’s postcoloniality only in terms of its independence from France leads to the silencing of U.S. imperialism and the occupation. The frequent reliance on this teleology in postcolonial studies can lead to a reading of U.S. empire as primarily a late twentieth-century phenomenon. Edward Said’s Orientalism, ever aware of the United States as an

16  Introduction imperial power, nonetheless emphasizes “the period of American ascendancy after World War II” (3– 4). In Said’s reading, “from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did” (4). While Said makes these observations in relation to “the Orient,” the influence of his work in postcolonial studies more broadly has meant the global application of this view of the United States as the post–World War II successor to European colonialism. Events like the occupation of Haiti make such a view untenable in the context of the Americas. More broadly comparative work such as Robert Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction should be better equipped to engage with the full scope of U.S. empire. Young, whose work on anticolonialism’s connections to international Communism anticipates my findings in chapter 2, “concentrate[s ] for the most part on the three dominant forms [of imperialism]  —  those of Britain, France and the United States  —  not because they were dominant but also because they provided the key foundational model of the different forms of colonialism and imperialism” (31). As attentive as Young wants to be to these specific forms of domination, U.S. empire frequently presses the limits of his conceptual framework. Postcolonialism begins with chapters defining and differentiating colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism. For example, in discussing Latin America, he defines “American imperialism” as a “style” distinct from traditional European empire: “Many of the old-style imperialists, for whom imperialism had offered an inspiring and transcendent alternative to the contemporary world of utilitarian economics, regretted the shift towards the new-style American imperialism, which the British had in fact already been practicing themselves in South America for a century” (41). American imperialism defined this way appears indistinguishable from what Young elsewhere calls neocolonialism, where “the ruling class constitutes an elite that operates in complicity with the needs of international capital for its own benefit” and “effective international (i.e. US) control is maintained by economic means . . . supplemented by military force” (45– 46 ). It is not clear if the occupation of Haiti would thus be best viewed as colonialism, imperialism, or neocolonialism. Despite Young’s desire not to overlook U.S. empire, it remains a blind spot. For example, in his list of places that experienced U.S. imperialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he includes Alaska, the Aleutian and Midway Islands, American Samoa, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Hawaiian and Wake Islands, the Virgin Islands, Nicara-

17  Introduction gua, Panama, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic (42). The occupation of Haiti, strangely, is forgotten. African diaspora studies has tended toward more engagement with the occupation. Substantial research exists on the influence of the occupation on African Americans, as in the aforementioned scholarship of Michael Dash, Mary Renda, and Jeff Karem. The connections uncovered by these scholars may help explain why the occupation appears to be more present in general studies in this field. For example, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, includes a thorough entry on Haiti with a substantial discussion of the occupation. This balance, however, is unusual. More frequently, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia or the Haitian Revolution overshadows the occupation in African diaspora studies, sometimes even rendering it invisible. In Africana Studies: A Survey of Africa and the African Diaspora, both of those subjects get substantial treatment, while the occupation is unmentioned. The Haitian Revolution appears in the chapter about slavery and the chapter about abolition, while the chapter “The Caribbean: From Emancipation to Independence” covers Haiti’s history in a discussion of emancipation (“In Haiti, the activities of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dessalines and Henri Christophe led the way” [Azevedo 153]), not to return to Haiti until the present: “In Grenada and Haiti, for much of their twentieth century experience, they have had governments not necessarily dedicated to improving their situation” (156 ). Olisanwuche Esedebe’s Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776 –1991, in a detailed discussion of the pan-African congresses of the 1920s, cannot help but notice the frequent demands at these conferences for “recognition of the sovereign status of Haiti, Abyssinia, and ­Liberia” (65) or “continued respect for the sovereignty of Abyssinia, Haiti, and ­Liberia” (70). Yet why pan-Africanists in the 1920s would be so ­concerned about threats to these nominally independent nations is not addressed. My chapter on Padmore in particular will show how for black activists in this period, the occupation of Haiti became closely linked to the status of Liberia and Abyssinia as symbols of black sovereignty under threat. While Esedebe does not directly explore why Haiti keeps coming up at these conferences, his next chapter is titled “The Impact of the Abyssinia Crisis and World War II.” Ironically, the preference in both postcolonial and African diaspora studies to give so much prominence to the invasion of Abyssinia in the development of interwar anti-imperialist discourse suggests continued investment in a version

18  Introduction of the world in which European actions remain central. The invasion of Abyssinia received much more attention in Europe than the occupation of Haiti and remains ­important in standard versions of European history as a key step on the road to World War II. The tendency of the invasion of Abyssinia to overshadow the occupation of Haiti is surpassed only by the preference for the glorious story of the Haitian Revolution. The recent volume From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution puts Haiti at the forefront of the black diaspora. “Haiti, I’m Sorry,” an essay by two of the volume’s editors, Michael West and William Martin, directly takes on the occupation: In the early twentieth century, Haiti and the legacy of the Haitian Revolution dramatically reappeared in black internationalism. The cause was the U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915, followed by a generation-long military occupation lasting until 1934. Historically and symbolically, this violent repudiation of Haitian sovereignty constituted a payback for the revolution against slavery, white supremacy, and colonialism over a century earlier. As such, it amounted to Jefferson’s revenge. Accordingly, Haiti and the Haitian Revolution became an important, if not fully appreciated, trope in the black international renaissance, political and cultural, that followed World War I. Since the aggression emanated from the United States, the cause of ‘bleeding Haiti’ became especially dear to African Americans. . . . African American activists, writers, and artists swung into action, protesting the occupation of Haiti in multiple forms, including demonstrations, commissions of investigations, essays, books, paintings, plays, and poems. (98)

West and Martin thus give the occupation a place of prominence in their genealogy of black internationalism, mentioning Countee Cullen and Aimé Césaire as among those inspired by opposition to the occupation. Yet this discussion of the occupation ends with slippage between the revolution and the occupation that eventually gives way to reinscribing the former’s primacy. After mentioning Cullen and Césaire, the section ends: “The great irony is that the historical narrators of the black international, who began to emerge around the same time, failed to take a cue from the literary figures. . . . The greater body of pan-African historical scholarship would pass over in silence an epic moment in the making of the black international. It remains for the reconstituted field of African Diaspora studies to correct the record and affirm the black international majesty that was the Haitian Revolution” (100). As this passage begins, it is unclear what has been “silenced”; the preceding discussion had been

19  Introduction focused on the occupation. But it quickly becomes apparent that West and Martin are concerned with the silencing of the Haitian Revolution. The occupation recedes into the background, important only because of how it points back to the “epic” revolution. Diasporic movement and cultural exchange substantially influenced Caribbean politics and literature during the years between 1915 and 1950; foregrounding the discourses about the occupation of Haiti produces a new sense of the contours of this internationalism. This book moves through a variety of geographical sites to explore the ideas and images about Haiti and the Caribbean produced as a result of the occupation. I examine how Harlem in particular became a site where black and white U.S. citizens as well as Caribbean immigrants responded to the occupation and the representations of Haiti it produced, including Eugene O’Neill’s first major Broadway hit, The Emperor Jones (1920); book club selections like John Vandercook’s Black Majesty (1928) and William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929); the best-selling pulp fiction stories of Arthur Burks; or Hollywood films like White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). African Americans such as James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, May Miller, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, along with West Indians like Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey, Arturo Schomburg, and Eulalie Spence participated in the ­negotiations taking place in Harlem that created discourses and counterdiscourses about the Caribbean justifying and opposing the occupation. Harlem’s Renaissance thus becomes an important relay through which Caribbean anticolonialism was refracted, even as Harlem itself was shaped by its interaction with Caribbean people and cultures. From there, subsequent chapters trace the circulation of these discourses and counterdiscourses through the travels of Caribbean people and U.S. culture back into the Caribbean to places like Jamaica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad. Finally, the book shows how the occupation resonates as far away as Paris, Moscow, Germany, London, Liberia, and Ghana, by examining the movements of writers and activists from the Harlem scene and their interactions with other figures like C. L. R. James, George P ­ admore, Alejo Carpentier, Luis Palés Matos, George Lamming, and Jean Rhys. My first chapter examines C. L. R. James’s work on Haitian history in order to theorize the silencing of the occupation in his writing and in subsequent scholarly engagements with James. Suggesting that James might have written about the Haitian Revolution in response to the o ­ ccupation

20  Introduction recasts how we understand the anticolonial narrative. James’s most ­famous engagement with Haiti, The Black Jacobins, becomes less a story of independence and national liberation initiating a utopian future; instead, it must be seen as an anxious response to the way the occupation of Haiti and the rise of U.S. imperialism threatened any such teleology. The occupation of Haiti stands at the onset of Caribbean anticolonialism, inspiring, initiating, and enabling it even as Haiti’s loss of sovereignty would hang as a shadow over the discourses of decolonization that followed. This chapter makes the case that is central to the larger book: the occupation of Haiti is an undeniable context for work from 1915 to 1950, and acknowledging the importance of this event requires new understandings of the canons of Caribbean, postcolonial, and African diaspora studies. Chapter 2 uses the occupation of Haiti to offer insight into how West Indians in the United States participated in the social movements of the 1910s and 1920s. Scholars have argued that West Indians in New York found their blackness when moving from places where they were not part of a minority group to the more racially polarized United States. Yet the less frequently told story is how these migrants who had grown up subjects of European empires also began to understand the workings of imperialism better through seeing U.S. actions in Haiti. The role of ­National City Bank in Haiti’s occupation led West Indians like Cyril Briggs and Richard B. Moore to see political independence as an insufficient solution to imperialist domination. Their turn to Communism reveals how that movement’s economic critique appeared to be a more effective response. As much as Caribbean radicals in the United States were shaped by the debates surrounding Haiti and U.S. imperialism, they used the prominence that Haiti gained among African Americans and anticapitalists during the 1920s in particular to influence the New Negro and Communist movements. The version of anticolonialism developed by these radicals in response to U.S. imperialism in Haiti would become widely circulated through the participation of Briggs and Moore in ­Comintern networks as well as by subsequent Communists like the Trinidadians George Padmore and Claudia Jones. Chapter 3 looks at how the fiction of Claude McKay and Eric Walrond demonstrates West Indians fashioning Caribbean identities in the context of U.S. discourses about Haiti. In McKay’s first two novels, the character that 1920s reviewers and contemporary critics have read as a stand-in for the author, the only major Caribbean character in Home to Harlem (1928) and the main character in Banjo (1929), is a Haitian. The ­chapter

21  Introduction examines the circumstances that led this Jamaican author to imagine his own alter ego as Haitian. Walrond’s short stories, meanwhile, show a Guyana-born, Barbados- and Panama-raised West Indian finding his literary voice through tales centered on what the stories name as voodoo. Examining how McKay and Walrond arrive at Caribbeanness through Haiti shows the impact that U.S.-circulated primitivist discourses about the exotic Caribbean Other had on West Indians themselves. Chapter 4 goes into greater depth about the ways gender inflects the discourses surrounding the occupation of Haiti, examining two spaces where West Indian women were able to have a voice for debating and critiquing imperialism: the Universal Negro Improvement Association ( UNIA) and the theater. The chapter begins with a discussion of the UNIA leader Marcus Garvey as representative of a patriarchal vision of Haiti and of pan-Africanism in order to further show the contours of that masculinist discourse. Yet Garvey’s UNIA, despite its advocacy of traditional gender roles, in fact became a space for black women to organize around issues of gender and contribute to pan-Africanism more broadly. Examining the contributions of Amy Jacques Garvey to the UNIA and comparing her engagements with occupied Haiti to those of her husband demonstrate the intriguing space for women offered by Garvey’s organization. The second half of the chapter turns to how, during the 1920s and 1930s, black women in the United States authored, directed, and produced plays depicting an array of black experiences; among these were a number of plays about Haiti and the discourses surrounding it. Nevisborn Eulalie Spence was part of this theater scene. Examining Spence’s play Her (1927) in the context of the plays of this period as well as the occupation shows the playwright examining the interplay between U.S. imperialism, primitivist exoticism, and gender oppression. Chapter 5 investigates the impact of the occupation in the Spanishspeaking Caribbean, focusing especially on the Cuban Alejo Carpentier. Uses of Haiti by writers from the Spanish-speaking islands are particularly complicated: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico inhabited parallel statuses to occupied Haiti as victims of U.S. imperialism, even as these writers participated in the mining of Haitian culture that characterized North American writing of the 1920s and 1930s. Carpentier’s prologue to his historical novel about the Haitian Revolution, The Kingdom of This World (1949), is credited with the earliest theorization of Latin American magical realism as indigenous regional aesthetic. Yet the sources of Carpentier’s vision of Haiti are inextricable from the occupation. Carpentier’s first novel, Écue-Yamba-O (1933), links its exploration

22  Introduction of African culture in Cuba to the increasing presence of Haitian migrant laborers brought to Cuba because of the occupation. Carpentier’s vision of Haiti also came from the exotic version of Caribbean culture produced during the occupation, especially one of the best-known travelogues by a U.S. visitor to Haiti, William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929), which Carpentier admired. Seabrook’s narrative about Haiti was a best seller in the United States and did more than any other text to cement stereotypes of Haitian religious practice (as voodoo) in the U.S. imagination. Tracing that influence by analyzing Carpentier’s early writings shows how the sensationalized images circulated by North Americans as a result of the occupation of Haiti shaped how Caribbean writers represented Caribbean reality in canonical works like The Kingdom of This World. Chapter 6 argues that even as George Padmore’s writings and activism have been understood as responding to British colonialism, this Trinidadian activist in fact began his career writing against U.S. imperialism, especially in Haiti. The anticolonial pan-Africanism promoted and disseminated by Padmore continued into the decolonization period to bear substantial marks of his theorizing of imperialism as the common project of finance capitalism and white supremacy best seen in Haiti. Reading Padmore against this context suggests the ways that his influence on intellectuals and leaders including C. L. R. James, Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, St. Clair Drake, Eric Williams, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kwame ­Nkrumah is inseparable from his early analysis of the occupation of Haiti. Into the 1950s as Padmore worked with Nkrumah in Ghana, he continued to articulate the ideas about the threat to postcolonial sovereignty developed in response to the occupation of Haiti. My conclusion examines how the representation of Caribbean culture during the “boom” years of the 1950s and 1960s remains haunted by images of the Caribbean created during the occupation. George ­Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960) and Season of Adventure (1960) both open with a Haitian ceremony of souls; scholars have regarded these scenes as part of the region’s burgeoning nationalism during this period as ­Lamming turns away from European culture to represent authentic folk practices. We might imagine that cultural exchanges within the ­Caribbean region led the Barbadian Lamming to look to a neighboring island for inspiration. Instead, Lamming points to the decision of a U.S. magazine to send him to visit other islands as a travel writer as what first led him to Haiti. Maya Deren, the U.S. filmmaker who traveled to Haiti in the 1940s to document religious practices, helped prepare his trip and put him in touch with intellectuals and artists in Haiti, plac-

23  Introduction ing Lamming into an intriguing lineage set in motion by the occupation. Similarly, I close by examining Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966 ), to place its r­epresentation of the Caribbean into the context of images circulated in North American films that drew on the imaginary of the occupation. Films about zombies became popular in the United States after the publication of Seabrook’s The Magic Island, with the Haitianset White Zombie initiating the genre in 1932. I Walked with a Zombie was one of the most successful of these films and sets up tropes about the region that Rhys’s novel follows. Examining these influences sheds light on how Caribbean responses to European discourse continued, long after the occupation, to take detours through North American culture industries that arose alongside U.S. imperialism. These many resonances demonstrate how the occupation remains undead, its impact continuing to be felt not only in Haiti, but throughout the Caribbean, the United States, and the world.

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

C. L. R. James wrote the most important English-language history of the Haitian Revolution  —  and arguably the most important book of international anticolonialism from the first half of the twentieth century  —  as a text very much in dialogue with its 1930s context. As David Scott puts it: “What makes The Black Jacobins the exemplary and lasting work of historical criticism that it is, is the self-­consciousness with which James connects the story of Toussaint Louverture to the vital stories of his  —  that is James’s  —  time” (Conscripts 10). Scott alludes to James’s frequent discussion of his motivation for writing The Black ­Jacobins as a desire to prophesize what James calls in a preface to the 1963 edition the “coming emancipation of Africa” (vii). The best-informed scholars of James, including Scott, Robert Hill, and Anthony Bogues, cite the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and this threat to the sovereignty of the only African nation not under European control as the crucial motivation for The Black Jacobins; in Grant Farred’s words, “The Black Jacobins was conceived as an extended critique of the imperialist Italian invasion of Abyssinia” (115).1 That invasion and the International African Friends of Ethiopia (  later reconfigured as the International ­ African Service ­Bureau, or IASB) that James helped form in response were undoubtedly crucial to his political development. But the Abyssinia crisis began at the end of 1934; James says that he carried out his research on Haiti for six months, beginning in 1933.2 The final product that would become The Black ­Jacobins was certainly composed with the invasion of Abyssinia in mind, but this event occurred too late to be credited for the book’s conception. The catalyst for James’s initial interest in the Haitian Revolution, then, remains a mystery that pointing to the Abyssinia crisis cannot solve. Why did James want to write about Haiti in particular  —  not Africa, not his native Trinidad  —  in the early 1930s?

26  American Imperialism’s Undead We know that James had begun to think about Haiti in Trinidad before moving to London in 1932, that he undertook research in the Paris archives in 1933, and that his findings would be dramatized in the play Toussaint L’Ouverture (written in 1934 and performed in 1936 ) and then published in the extraordinary history The Black Jacobins in 1938. Yet the origins of James’s interest in Haiti remain surprisingly cloudy. James himself is especially elusive about what set in motion this research: “I had decided  —  God only knows why, I don’t; and I rather doubt if even He would too  —  that I would write a history of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Why? I don’t know. . . . I had made up my mind, for no other than a literary reason, that when I reached England I would settle down to write a history of Toussaint L’Ouverture” (“How I Wrote The Black Jacobins” 67). Stuart Hall similarly frames James’s interest in Haiti as something of a mystery: “What I don’t know is precisely when James began to be interested in Haiti. It doesn’t figure in his earlier writing. And yet very shortly after he comes to England, in 1932, he travels to Paris to immerse himself in the archives, almost as if it’s one of the reasons for his coming to Europe in the first place. He must have been thinking about it; he must have known about it” (18). James, Scott, Farred, and Hall all address the act of ­contextualization, even as they call it into question. Scott, Farred, and Hall insist on the “self-consciousness” with which James constructed The Black J­ acobins, while James expresses less certainty about his motivations. Scholars and critics may confidently insist on which are the “vital stories” that frame the writer’s context, the things the text itself shows that the writer “must have known about.” But what about the stories the text silences? What about the mysteries that careful archival reconstruction can’t solve, the things Hall admits we “don’t know precisely”? What do we do when a historical event seems so obviously to have influenced a writer  —  to have laid the foundations for that writer to arrive at his topic of i­ nvestigation  —  but the writer himself avoids virtually any mention of this event, and in fact, almost obsessively offers other explanations? How can we find evidence of causality when all we have is absence? Sometimes so much has been written about an event  —  or a text  —  that it seems like all questions about it have been answered; sometimes the most obvious and essential questions have not yet been asked. Finding answers may not always be possible, but looking for them can open up new ways of seeing. I want to hazard an explanation for James’s interest in Haiti for which I have been able to find no proof. But perhaps, as postcolonial studies teaches us, this absence  —  what Michel-Rolph Trouillot might call this

27  C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti “archival silence”  —  is the story. Interrogating such a silence requires methodological creativity and flexibility. When James first began to think about Haiti, the fears that would later be evoked by the threat to ­Abyssinian sovereignty had already been realized in the Caribbean. From 1915 to 1934  —  the years during which James began work on his history of the Haitian Revolution  —  Haiti, the second nation in the Americas to have successfully overthrown colonial domination, was occupied by the United States. My hypothesis is twofold: first, that James’s interest in Haiti was mediated by that occupation, making The Black Jacobins part of the international fascination with all things Haitian sparked by U.S.-disseminated narratives of Haiti;3 and second, that the silence about this context (and repeated preference to point to Africa as the book’s inspiration) reflects just how threatening the occupation was to the ­vision of anticolonialism that animates The Black Jacobins. Scholars of anticolonialism and pan-Africanism have not adequately engaged with this ambiguous event, an occupation that lasted for almost two decades and significantly shaped the visions of imperialism and resistance for those who lived through it. A fuller understanding of the contexts of texts like The Black Jacobins must account for how the U.S. occupation of Haiti stands at the outset of pan-African anticolonialism, inspiring, initiating, and e­ nabling it even as Haiti’s loss of sovereignty would hang as a shadow over all of the discourses of decolonization that followed. Writing about absence presents obvious challenges, but as Sibylle Fischer shows in Modernity Disavowed, it is not impossible. Fischer examines how the successful Haitian Revolution haunted nineteenth-­century planter discourse: [Modernity Disavowed ] started as a study of nineteenth-century Caribbean literatures and the beginnings of national cultures. Eventually I came to feel that at the core of many literary texts and literary and cultural histories there is a certain mystery: a suspended contradiction, an unexpected flight of fantasy where one might have expected a reckoning with reality, an aesthetic judgment too harsh to be taken at face value, or a failure to deal with what we know to have been the main issues of concern. I came to think that there were more, and more complex, connections between these odd moments and the “horrors of Saint Domingue” than the cursory references to the fears of the Creole population in most literary histories suggested. To be sure, the fear of a repetition of the events in Haiti led to denials of their transcendence and the suppression of any information relating to them. But silence and fear are not beyond interrogation. . . . [ T ]he impact of an event that is experienced

28  American Imperialism’s Undead as antagonistic or even traumatic cannot be measured merely by looking at explicit statements. (ix–x)

In Fischer’s work, the Haitian Revolution becomes the silent, silenced center of the nineteenth-century Americas. That silence began to be filled in the twentieth century, especially by works like The Black Jacobins. James’s history contains a different silence at its center. The radical historian’s desire to make this story from Haiti’s past relevant to his present has been amply noted: the 1938 preface to The Black Jacobins references the Spanish Civil War and the Russian Revolution, and allusions to the coming decolonization of Africa appear throughout the text. Furthermore, The Black Jacobins is exemplary in its attentiveness to the struggles of blacks against dehumanization, inequality, and oppression. His descriptions of the situation facing those who would become Haitian revolutionaries deliberately evoke the white supremacy of his day: “The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings” ( James, Black Jacobins [1938] 5). Yet despite James’s attention to the contemporary resonances of his story, his only mention of occupied Haiti comes in a single paragraph, five pages from the end of the 1938 edition, which is edited out of the 1963 reprint. The 1938 edition of The Black Jacobins includes a description of how “in 1915 . . . America pounced on Haiti” but that because “the tradition of independence was too strong . . . the American marines had to evacuate the country” (311). Even this reference downplays the impact of the occupation and presents it as a momentary threat quickly overcome; James further casts this event as part of the past rather than his present by incorrectly giving 1931 rather than 1934 as the end date of the occupation. But this single paragraph lets us know that James could not help but be aware of the uncertain status of Haitian independence in his own lifetime, even if most of his energies are spent diverting attention away from that reality. The U.S. occupation of Haiti was, from a global marketing standpoint, the best and worst thing to happen to Haitian culture. The occupation brought Haiti and its culture to the forefront of U.S. consciousness, with Broadway plays, best-selling travel narratives, and zombie movies all circulating images of Haiti  —  frequently represented in exotic and ­racist ways  —  throughout the United States during the 1920s and 1930s.

29  C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti This omnipresence of Haiti, well documented in Mary Renda’s T ­ aking Haiti, was not limited to any one group: black and white ­audiences alike ­responded  —  though often in different ways  —  to all things Haitian. Harlem Renaissance luminaries like James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Haiti during the occupation and wrote about their experiences. Renda describes how for these African Americans, “discussions of Haitian history and culture” provided hope of “unsettling . . . hegemonic interpretations of American identity” (264). Representations of Haiti implicitly justifying the foreign intervention as well as counternarratives disputing the dominant versions circulated widely during this period and helped define perceptions of the Caribbean in the United States and beyond. In the context of this national obsession with Haiti, West Indians in the United States found themselves mediating their own identities and experiences as Caribbean people through these images of Haiti. The Jamaican Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1930), which I discuss in more detail in chapter 3, feature black characters who are mostly non-Caribbean, with the exception of Ray, a Haitian, who is one of the few characters to appear in both novels. McKay moved to the United States in 1912; he was in Harlem during a period in which black intellectuals there were actively debating the U.S. military presence in Haiti, and in fact, Home to Harlem includes commentary on both the Haitian Revolution and the U.S. occupation. One of the other major West Indian intellectual figures in the United States during this time ­period, George Padmore  —  who would become one of James’s closest collaborators while The Black Jacobins was being written, and who will be the subject of my sixth chapter  —  similarly found his attention drawn to Haiti. ­Padmore regularly references the U.S. occupation in his writing and would publish the pamphlet Haiti, an American Slave C ­ olony in 1931. James’s The Black Jacobins thus fits into an international surge in interest in Haiti sparked by the occupation, especially among people of the African ­diaspora. Yet unlike McKay or Padmore, James, so concerned with the ­lessons of Haitian history for his present context, has surprisingly little to say about contemporary Haiti. It would be one thing if James had simply ignored the present status of Haiti, which by the time The Black Jacobins was first published in 1938 was no longer occupied by the United States (though neither was Haiti totally autonomous, as a treaty and constitution ratified during the occupation allowed the United States to maintain control of Haitian finances and foreign affairs until the National City Bank of New York collected

30  American Imperialism’s Undead in full the debt payments that it had forced Haiti to accept during the occupation). But like the anxious disavowals Fischer notices characterizing planters’ responses to the Haitian Revolution, James at times seems to be deliberately writing around the specter of the occupation. One of his first published essays, from a 1931 issue of the Beacon, is positioned as a refutation of an earlier article on black inferiority yet opens with a strange discussion of Japan’s occupation by U.S. Marines. The essay begins by mentioning the article to which James is responding, then states: Perhaps before going any further it should be just as well to take a glance at certain aspects of the history of the subject. Gobineau at once springs to mind. It was in the year 1853 that Gobineau published the first volume of his famous work, On the Inequality of Human Races. . . . Doubtless Gobineau as a student of race and culture was very interested in the accounts brought back by Commodore Perry of that backward people, the Japanese, whom the Commodore first in 1853 and again in 1854 visited and brought once more into contact with Western civilization. The Japanese at this time were still a mediaeval people who, living out of touch with Europe, had apparently remained stationary for three hundred years  —  a living proof of Gobineau’s theory. Gobineau unfortunately died sometime in the seventies, but some of those very Marines who in 1854 marched through the streets of this backward country must have been alive in 1905 to see Japan, having mastered with amazing quickness and completeness the culture and organization of Europe, administer such a beating to one of the most powerful of Western nations that her power has ever since been one of the cardinal factors in any consideration of world affairs. No nation in history has ever done what Japan did in those fifty short years. So much for the capacity to absorb. (6 )

James brings up Japan to argue that while its occupation was used in the mid-nineteenth century as evidence of Japanese inferiority, the fifty years since then had seen Japan thoroughly disprove this idea. Unmentioned but lurking behind this story of marine occupation must be Haiti; the fact that James moves from marines in Japan to later in the essay invoke Toussaint Louverture and James Weldon Johnson as proofs of black achievement further amplifies this haunting effect. James even attests to Johnson’s accomplishments by quoting from the Nation, the publication that had famously featured Johnson’s 1920 articles opposing the U.S. mission in Haiti. To not directly name what was still an ongoing occupation in the face of all of these signifiers associated with it  —  U.S. Marines, Toussaint, Johnson, the Nation  —  suggests an almost exaggerated avoidance of the topic.

31  C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti This same tendency to auspiciously write around the occupation occurs in the rare instances where James does address the contemporary situation in Haiti. James’s first public presentation of his research on the Haitian Revolution in his play Toussaint L’Ouverture ( performed in London in March 1936, a little more than a year after the occupation ended in August 1934) includes this author’s note in the playbill: The independence so hardly won has been maintained. The former French colony of San Domingo, to-day Haiti, is a member of the League of Nations, and Colonel Nemours, its representative, a man of colour, presided over the eighth assembly of the League. The closest and most cordial relationship exists to-day between white France and coloured San Domingo. The French take a deep interest in a people whose language, cultural traditions and aspirations are entirely French. The Haitians look on France as their spiritual home and many of them fought in the French army during the war of 1914 –1918. The play was conceived four years ago and was completely finished by the autumn of 1934. (45)

The play, in other words, was “completely finished” while Haiti was still under U.S. military control, and before the Walwal incident in November 1934 prompted Emperor Haile Selassie to go to the League of Nations in January 1935 to protest Italian aggression. James does not mention ­Abyssinia as context but instead emphasizes Haiti’s uninterrupted freedom as well as its current status as equal member in the world of nations. The evidence James offers of Haiti’s continuous independence actually speaks to the nation’s embattled status. Haiti’s admission to the League of Nations came in 1920, at the height of occupation. This seemingly paradoxical situation, in which Haiti could be recognized as an independent nation-state even as it was clearly not sovereign, would become evidence of the League’s bankruptcy for a generation of anticolonial activists discussed in chapter 2 and would force a reconsideration of political independence as a sufficient goal for national liberation. James was well aware of the League’s limitations, and it was by no means an institution he would ordinarily admire. Pamphlets and leaflets produced during the Abyssinia crisis by the Independent Labour Party of which James was a member (and a primary propagandist on Abyssinia) routinely emphasized that “The League of Nations . . . is not an instrument for peace but is dominated by capitalist governments.”4 In World Revolution in 1937, James would write of “the Abyssinia question stripping to rags the drapery of the League of Nations” (12). Haiti in the 1920s had been this same sort of test case for critics of the League.

32  American Imperialism’s Undead Alfred Nemours (whom James credits in the foreword to the 1980 edition of The Black Jacobins as the person who “explained the whole [ Revolution] to me in great detail” [v]) served as vice president to the League’s assembly in 1927, while Haiti was still under U.S. rule. Nemours had been a member of the Conseil d’Etat, the body appointed by successive U.S.-aligned presidents that replaced the democratically elected legislature dissolved at the outset of the occupation because of its refusal to act as a rubber stamp for U.S. decisions (Supplice 62). A loyal member of the pro-occupation Borno administration, Nemours wrote a 1926 book Les Borno dans l’histoire d’Haïti about the heroic participation of the president’s ancestors in the Haitian Revolution. Nemours was even called in 1930 to testify in favor of continuing the U.S. military presence in the aftermath of the Aux Cayes massacre ( Heinl and Heinl 485). Nemours’s prestigious position at the League of Nations is therefore hardly incontrovertible proof of Haiti’s independence, and if anything suggests that his career advancement owed to his acceptance of the nonsovereign status quo. Once again, James invokes signifiers of the occupation, in this case not only avoiding naming it but also presenting an overstated performance of how fully Haitian independence has been preserved that surely speaks to an underlying anxiety. Along with this emphasis on the unbroken nature of Haitian independence, the assertions that Haiti is “entirely French” and that “Haitians look on France as their spiritual home” seem equally out of place, unusually Europhilic as preface to a play about how the French were driven out of Haiti. The emphasis on the Caribbean as an extension of Europe could be read as an attempt to deflect attention from what by the 1930s had become the obvious rise of U.S. power in the region. Other members of the Beacon group with whom James collaborated in Trinidad certainly saw the U.S. presence as a threat: Jean De Boissiere, writing in the Beacon in November 1933, describes a situation in which “Cuba, as the whole world knows, although technically free, is under the complete political domination of the United States. Economically, she is absolutely owned by American finance” (299), precisely the way that Haiti was repeatedly described by anti-imperialists after James Weldon Johnson’s articles revealed the central role of National City Bank in directing the occupation.5 At face value, the preface to Toussaint L’Ouverture seems a strange set of assertions; these assertions make more sense when understood as avoidances of the very concerns being expressed by James’s contemporaries. This is still not definitive proof that James had the occupation on his mind when he began researching the Haitian Revolution. The u ­ npublished

33  C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti autobiographical writings that James worked on later in his life and his subsequent interviews  —  which are frequently contradictory and like any retroactive explanations, contain the potential for unreliability  —  ­mention his interest in pursuing research on Haiti as motivated by current events, but not those in Haiti. As he puts it in the foreword to the 1980 reprint: “The Black Jacobins was first published in England in 1938, but I had written about the subject before I left Trinidad in 1932. . . . I was tired of reading and hearing about Africans being persecuted and oppressed in Africa, in the Middle Passage, in the U.S.A. and all over the Caribbean. I made up my mind that I would write a book in which Africans or people of African descent instead of constantly being the object of other peoples’ exploitation and ferocity would themselves be taking action on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs” (v). The U.S. occupation of Haiti would have been another of these stories about “Africans being persecuted and oppressed” that James wanted to respond against but avoid reproducing. The many references in The Black Jacobins to the coming African revolution or even the parallels James draws between the Haitian and Russian Revolutions can make it seem as though his focus was elsewhere, that he had made the kind of “detour” that Edouard Glissant finds in Frantz Fanon’s participation in the Algerian independence struggle.6 But James is undoubtedly invested in thinking about the Caribbean throughout this period. He contributed regularly to the London-based periodical the Keys from 1933 to 1936, publishing on Abyssinia and Africa but also articles like “West Indies Self-Government.” The first issue of the Keys, from July 1933, includes a report on the “First Weekend Conference of the League of Coloured Peoples” at which James gave a lecture about Captain Cipriani, the Trinidadian pro-autonomy leader about whom James published a book during this period. The brief description of James’s lecture explains that he focused especially on the West I­ ndies’ “internal” divisions “based on varying shades of complexion” and his a­ rgument about the “definite need of a West Indian consciousness” (“Conference Report” 5); these divisions are precisely the issues James explores in The Black Jacobins. Yet there is no mention that James, during this lecture from early 1933, discussed Haiti, which was at that moment negotiating the withdrawal of U.S. forces while black and mulatto elites jockeyed for control of the new government. The Keys, however, might not be the best place to see where contemporary U.S.-Haitian relations would have made their mark on James’s consciousness. The Keys is itself almost entirely silent on Haiti, ­suggesting

34  American Imperialism’s Undead that the occupation was much less an issue for the black community in London than it was in Harlem. The end of the U.S. occupation passes in August 1934 virtually unacknowledged, though the October–December 1934 issue of the Keys does contain an article comparing the state of public health and education in Africa and Haiti. The article never ­directly names the end of U.S. occupation as its context, but it takes for granted that readers will be aware of the recent U.S. presence: there is mention that health services are “now manned only by natives of the country” and the assertion that “as for education, where the Americans did not collaborate, there are probably more and better schools above the e­ lementary in little Hayti than in whole middle Africa” ( Barlovatz 38). Without knowledge of the occupation, these statements make little sense; the fact that explanation of this context seems unnecessary to the author suggests how much the occupation would have defined Haiti’s status in the mid-1930s. Any relatively well-informed person in England would have known about the occupation of Haiti. The Times of London ran a series of articles in December 1929, the period of the Aux Cayes massacre that finally shifted world opinion against the occupation, as well as six stories in March and April 1930 as a U.S. commission was trying to negotiate an end to the military operation. The coverage of the massacre was even more extensive in the Manchester Guardian, which throughout December 1929 ran headlines such as “Martial Law in Haiti: Many Injured in Riots,” “U.S. Shooting in Haiti,” and “Oppression in Haiti.” James covered cricket for the Manchester Guardian upon his arrival in England: in fact, a few days after the Guardian ran the article “U.S. Marines to Withdraw from Haiti” on August 9, 1933, a series of James’s articles on cricket appeared in the August 14 to 18 issues. The Times of London is one of the newspapers that James mentions reading while still living in Trinidad.7 In the essay “Discovering Literature in Trinidad: the 1930s,” James lists a number of periodicals that came “to my house, on my subscription” (237), well before he had begun his research on the Haitian Revolution. Many of these publications contained coverage of the occupation. The only publication James mentions receiving from the United States was the New Republic, which published articles against the occupation.8 As early as 1922, an article detailed “the hatred that exists on both sides, the ‘grand fossé,’ (the great ditch  —  a Haitian phrase) between the American military and the Haitians” (Angell 107). A New Republic article from 1929 advocates for the end to occupation by ­concluding, “no one can say whether or not the Haitians will be able to govern themselves until they have been given a real and untrammeled ­opportunity”

35  C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti (“Misrepresenting” 59). The front page of the April 9, 1930, issue trumpets the beginning of a gradual U.S. withdrawal. The fact that James’s 1931 essay “The Intelligence of the Negro” quotes from an editorial in a May 1931 issue of the Nation suggests that he likely read the July 15, 1931, editorial in the Nation titled “Haiti Still a Problem.” To note that James read these publications, and that these publications contained news of the U.S. occupation, is not the same thing as proving that James decided to write about Haiti based on this news. Susan Buck-Morss uses a similarly speculative methodology to address another silence, that of the contribution of the Haitian Revolution to modernity and Western philosophy. She looks at Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, developed in a series of lectures in Jena from 1803 to 1806, and then notices that the newspaper Hegel was regularly reading in this period frequently ran articles on the events in Saint-Domingue. Buck-Morss concludes: “We are left with only two alternatives: either Hegel was the blindest of all the blind philosophers of freedom in Enlightenment Europe, surpassing Locke and Rousseau by far in his ability to block out reality right in front of his nose (the print right in front of his face at the breakfast table); or Hegel knew  —  knew about real slaves revolting successfully against real masters, and he elaborated his dialectic of lordship and bondage deliberately within this contemporary context” (50). To argue about how much James knew of the bondage Haitians experienced under U.S. rule from 1915 to 1934 requires similar assumptions about what James might have read and how he might have responded to it during the period when he was turning his focus toward Haitian history. But considering how uncommon it was for the Times of London or the New Republic to cover news from the Caribbean, it is hard to believe that James would not have carefully read these articles about Haiti.9 The discussions taking place around the League of Coloured Peoples or in mainstream publications form only a small part of James’s context. The Paris where James carried out his research was a major center for the black diaspora of the time, and as I discuss in my fifth chapter, the city was home to a number of figures who wrote about occupied Haiti. The cafés and salons of Paris would have been alive with discussion of Haiti thanks to Alejo Carpentier and William Seabrook as well as a number of Francophone Caribbean intellectuals including the Martinicans ­Paulette and Jane Nardal, Aimé Césaire, and René Ménil. The Nardals’ journal, La Revue du Monde Noir, cofounded with the Haitian Léo ­Sajous, included anti-occupation writing by Jean Price-Mars. Although James only records his gratitude to Nemours as one of his guides to the

36  American Imperialism’s Undead Paris a­ rchives, occupied Haiti would have been an important topic to any ­Caribbean community James encountered there. Much more is known about how in London, James connected to a network of black thinkers that extended in profound ways to the United States and the Harlem scene. Most obvious is James’s relationship with Paul Robeson, who would star in James’s play Toussaint L’Ouverture in 1936. Robeson forms a crucial link to the North American fascination with Haitian history and culture during the years of occupation. In 1925, Robeson played Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones, a role he reprised in the 1933 film. The Emperor Jones follows an African American’s fall from power on what the playbill describes as “an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by white marines” (2). The subtext of U.S. occupation in The Emperor Jones is therefore not subtle, and it is hard to imagine James not being familiar with the play or seeing the film, which opened in London in March 1934 (while James was writing his play) and was reviewed in the Times. James suggests in an interview that he wrote Toussaint L’Ouverture to create a good role for Robeson: “Paul did not ask me for any play but Paul needed a play. Nobody used to write any plays. He could play Othello and that was the end of it. . . . It was not the Abyssinian crisis that was at the back of that play. Behind that play was Paul Robeson.”10 In addition to Robeson, the actor who played Macoya, Rufus Fennell, “who was probably a black American, visited Haiti in the early twentieth century, and then at some point later ( possibly in the late 1930s) wrote an unpublished screenplay, intended as a vehicle for Paul Robeson, titled The Black Prophet, set in early-twentieth-century Haiti and warning of U.S. neocolonialism” ( Høgsbjerg, “Black Jacobinism”). Robeson’s biographers speculate that “perhaps during rehearsals [for Toussaint L’Ouverture] Robeson and James talked about the situation in Ethiopia” ( Boyle and Bunie 341). Considering Robeson’s long-standing interest in Haiti  —  which Nicole King documents as early as 1926, though she does not connect this interest to the occupation (21)  —  we can only wonder how much this play about the Haitian Revolution would have sparked conversations between James, Robeson, Fennell, and the other participants about the more recent struggle for sovereignty Haiti was undergoing in the mid-1930s. While James was not in the United States during the occupation p ­ eriod, then, he was certainly in conversation with other black thinkers who had been shaped by the American fascination with Haiti. James collaborated on the International African Service Bureau with George Padmore and Amy Ashwood Garvey, both important figures in 1920s Harlem.

37  C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti James credits Padmore in particular with shifting his political worldview ­toward the focus on international imperialism that would undergird The Black Jacobins; as James puts it: “I started the Trotskyist movement in European terms. Then Padmore came in. He said he was a Marxist, but what about the colonial question? What about Africa?”11 Padmore’s own analysis of international imperialism was crystalized during the time he spent in the United States from 1924 to 1929, when debates about the role of U.S. empire were especially focused on Haiti. In chapter 6, I go into more detail about how Padmore’s understanding of colonialism was refracted through the U.S. occupation of Haiti. I mention Padmore here to briefly highlight the influence his vision of anticolonialism would have had on James while he was researching and writing about Haiti. James and Padmore were childhood friends in Trinidad and then reconnected in London in 1933, the same year that James began his ­research in the Paris archives.12 Soon after their reunion, Padmore moved permanently to London, where he and James began working together ­especially closely in 1935. The years in which James completed The Black ­Jacobins were the height of his collaboration with Padmore. When James describes writing A History of Negro Revolt, published the same year as Black Jacobins, he makes it clear how much Padmore shaped his political imagination: “Raymond Postgate, then editing the Fact series, wanted A History of Negro Revolt. . . . He naturally asked George to write it. George was otherwise occupied so he recommended me to P ­ ostgate. I wrote the book, George bringing his great knowledge of A ­ frica to bear. We had a marvelous time putting in a number of provocative statements which we knew would be objected to” (“Notes” [1972 ] 37). James makes the process sound close to coauthorship, and indeed, A History of Negro Revolt overlaps in many ways with Padmore’s earlier The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers. Yet Padmore’s text contains two extensive sections on the occupation of Haiti, one in the chapter “Under the Yoke of Yankee Imperialism” and another under “The Awakening of Negro Toilers.” Robin Kelley notes that “the obvious influence Padmore’s Life and Struggles had on the writing of” James’s book makes it “all the more surprising” that A History of Negro Revolt is marked by “the absence of modern Haiti” ( Introduction 17). Kelley puts it well: “A movement of workers and peasants together, confronted by a well-armed contingent of American marines, would have worked wonderfully in A History of Negro Revolt” (17). Even before seeing Padmore again and working with him so closely, James was likely aware of Padmore’s writing in the Negro Worker. ­Looking

38  American Imperialism’s Undead back on the 1930s, James describes how important the Negro Worker was to “the consciousness among blacks that they were part of an international movement” (“Notes” [1992 ] 290). James mentions “Uriah Butler and the workers of the oil-fields nourishing themselves on illicit copies of Padmore’s paper” (290). The Negro Worker must have had some influence in the Trinidad that James left in February 1932; the May 1932 issue carries a note about the Trinidadian government ­banning the distribution of the newspaper. In an interview published in 1984, James says that he didn’t read the Negro Worker in Trinidad, but “by the time I arrived in London I knew some West Indians who were taking all the literature they could” (MARHO 268). If this means that James began reading the Negro Worker while living with Learie Constantine in 1932, he must have noticed the banner that the newspaper utilized when ­Padmore became editor in mid-1931. The image, which I reproduce and discuss in chapter 6, features a muscular black man breaking the chains on a globe, with only four geographical spaces named: the United States, ­Africa, Cuba, and Haiti. My chapter on Padmore presents a more detailed close reading of the Negro Worker to show the prominent place the newspaper gave to the occupation. For now, two examples from that periodical point to the specific lessons James might have taken from it. For example, in the article “Hands Off Liberia” from 1931, Padmore writes: “It is important for every Negro worker to take note that, whenever the Americans and other white capitalists have some dirty task to perform in connection with Negro countries like Haiti and Liberia, they always secure the services of some black lickspittle who is supposed to be a ‘big’ leader of his race, pay him a few dollars and give him some petty office and thereby get him to do the job for them” (7). When, in act 1, scene 4 of James’s 1936 play, the British general Maitland offers Toussaint one million francs and the ­opportunity to become a figurehead in restoring slavery, Padmore’s analysis of the U.S. occupation rings through ( James, Toussaint 75). One of the last issues of the Negro Worker edited by Padmore ­includes an article titled “A Wave of Terror Is Sweeping over Haiti.” The ­article ends by directly invoking the legacy of the Haitian Revolution as a ­response to contemporary U.S. domination: “Down with American imperialism! Down with the Haitian traitors! Long live the spirit of ­Toussaint Louverture! Long live the independence of the Haitian people!” (16 ). Did James read these words in early 1933, and did they inspire him to travel to Paris to carry out research on a history of the Haitian Revolution when the cricket season ended that year? At the very least, we can see

39  C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti this article as evidence that another Trinidadian was creating a narrative in which Haiti’s twentieth-century loss of sovereignty could be combatted by going back to the past and recuperating Haiti’s revolutionary tradition. David Scott persuasively analyzes the 1938 Black Jacobins as what he calls a “vindicationist narrative” (Conscripts 55) meant to respond to the idea that blacks around the world weren’t capable of, or even interested in, self-government; the history of the Haitian Revolution becomes in James’s retelling a powerful argument that people of the African diaspora have long desired and been willing to fight for freedom and independence. It was in this context of vindicating the race, as the assertion of grand historical accomplishments meant to counter stereotypes, that African American writers in the United States also turned during the 1930s to “Haitian history . . . to reflect not only the assertion of race pride but also, simultaneously, the possibility of revolutionary change” ( Renda 278). If the U.S. occupation of Haiti is such an obvious context for the world out of which The Black Jacobins emerged, what are we then to make of the silence about this context that dominates James’s text itself, his own subsequent discussions of the text, and the critical engagements with the text ever since? For African Americans in the United States like James Weldon Johnson, the occupation of Haiti by racist white American ­marines could easily be imagined as part of the same struggle against lynching and Jim Crow taking place in “occupied” southern states. But the loss of sovereignty by the most important beacon of black nationhood in the Americas fit exceptionally poorly into the framework of anticolonial nationalism that The Black Jacobins would help to define; taking the occupation into account would have virtually undermined that discourse’s basic assumptions. If, in Scott’s definition, anticolonial ­romance “depended upon a certain (utopian) horizon toward which the emancipationist history is imagined to be moving” (Conscripts 8), then the idea that an independent nation once established might a century later be reenslaved fundamentally undoes anticolonialism’s teleology. Farred reads Black Jacobins similarly, describing how “James established the independent Haiti as a precedent for Ghana and Kenya and Trinidad. At a juncture where colonialist discourse premised itself upon the inability of the colonized to rule themselves, James created through Toussaint a critique of that discourse: Haiti represented an enabling moment in the history of resistance to colonialism because it culminated in the establishment of the postcolonial state” (243). Even while I show in my subsequent chapters how occupied Haiti was regarded by other C ­ aribbean people as a potential negative precedent for Ghana and Liberia and Jamaica, James

40  American Imperialism’s Undead appears to regard the Haitian Revolution as too important a demonstration that colonized people can overthrow their oppressors for him to fully engage with the idea that the formerly colonized can be colonized again. Ras Makonnen, one of James’s collaborators on the IASB, says about his own intellectual development as a British West Indian: “When you started digging into your history you took pride in Haiti in rather the same way you did with the Ashanti and their great military history. . . . In a way also, the past record of Haiti was rather more admirable than the present, as we looked across to that island in the 1920s. It seemed as if they had taken on the tendency of the Spaniards of having a revolution every three or six months, and deposing their leaders” (60). Makonnen gives a sense of why Haitian history would have been more attractive than the Haitian present, even if, remarkably, he does not name the U.S. role in the political chaos of the 1920s.13 Though James’s explicit discussions of the origins of The Black ­Jacobins may be silent on the U.S. occupation, when James talks more broadly about the contexts for the emergence of anticolonial nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s in the appendix to the 1963 edition of the text, he points to U.S. military actions in Haiti as a key part of this era. The appendix breaks West Indian history “between Toussaint L’Ouverture and Fidel Castro” into “three periods: I. The Nineteenth Century; II. Between the Wars; III. After World War II” (392). James’s discussion of that second period  —  the period in which The Black Jacobins was written  —  begins: “Before World War I Haiti began to write another chapter in the record of the West Indian struggle for national independence. Claiming the need to recover debts and restore order, the Marines . . . invaded Haiti in 1913. The whole nation resisted. A national strike was organized and led by the literary intellectuals who had discovered the Africanness of their peasants as a means of national identity” (395). The version of the occupation is very similar to that seen in the final pages of the 1938 edition, in which it is a momentary invasion rather than a new colonization (and James once again gets the dates of the occupation wrong). Nonetheless, the 1963 appendix comes closer to acknowledging the occupation as part of James’s original context by crediting resistance to the occupation as inspiration for négritude. As he puts it: “In 1913 the ceaseless battering from foreign pens was reinforced by the bayonets of American Marines. Haiti had to find a national rallying-point. They looked for it where it can only be found, at home, more precisely, in their own backyard. They discovered what is known today as Negritude” (394). James goes on to discuss Jean Price-Mars’s Ainsi parla l’oncle from

41  C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti 1926 as part of the “substitution of Africa for France” that started “long before the marines left Haiti” (395). The appendix moves immediately from the occupation to “two black West Indians [who] using the ink of Negritude wrote their names imperishably on the front pages of the history of our time”: Marcus Garvey and George Padmore (397). The section on the intellectual scene between the wars finishes with the publication of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, which James notes was published one year after The Black Jacobins (402). Knowing James’s close relationship to Padmore and his admiration for Césaire, James is implicitly positioning his own work within this intellectual context, as part of the unintended fruits of the U.S. occupation. Yet after this 1963 appendix, the story that James would subsequently promote of the origins of The Black Jacobins is of the coming African decolonization as the book’s only context, which scholars have followed in emphasizing the Abyssinia crisis. By the 1970s and 1980s, James had clearly settled on this version, spending much time and energy working on an autobiography and giving interviews that return over and over to this origin myth. In the 1971 lecture “How I Wrote The Black ­Jacobins,” James tells his audience that “I had in mind writing about the San D ­ omingo Revolution as the preparation for the revolution that George Padmore and all of us were interested in, that is, the revolution in Africa” (72), and then later, “It was written about Africa. It wasn’t written about the Caribbean” (73). Emphasizing this narrative allows James to conclude that “many in Africa read it, and it passed about among them and it contributed towards helping those who were taking part in the African revolution to understand what the movements of the masses was, how a revolution went. That is why I wrote the book, and that is the purpose that the book achieved” (73). This makes a good story, with The Black Jacobins appearing in 1938 at the onset of the wave of decolonization that by the 1960s had clearly swept the globe. The story has the added benefit of undoubtedly containing substantial truth. But as I’ve suggested, the origins of the book appear to have been messier than this retrospective account suggests: the first edition’s references to Franco and Stalin, not to mention the brief mention of the occupation of Haiti, suggest that James’s original focus was not only Africa. James’s retroactive emphasis on Africa, whether in the 1971 lectures, in interviews, or in his unpublished autobiographical writing, appears more proof of anticolonialism’s anxious response to the way the occupation of Haiti and the rise of U.S. imperialism throw into doubt the teleology of independence and national consolidation initiating a utopian future.

42  American Imperialism’s Undead Foregrounding the U.S. occupation of Haiti reframes how we understand James’s anticolonialism. In Conscripts of Modernity, Scott argues that James’s historical context of the 1930s, when he could look forward to a romantic and redeeming anticolonial revolution that would sweep away inequality and injustice, is “not [a moment] that we can inhabit today” (45). Reading The Black Jacobins only in relation to an ineluctable African revolution to come makes the text seem foreign to us, we contemporary intellectuals who no longer believe in this romantic teleology. Understanding the U.S. occupation of Haiti as central to James’s 1930s problem-space   —   not instead of Abyssinia, but in addition to it  —  shows just how mixed a moment he inhabited, and how ambivalent and tenuous the narrative of anticolonial overcoming must have been, even to James. Haitian history becomes neither a romance of utopian overcoming nor a tragedy of unrealized potential: the abolition of slavery or the establishment of statehood is neither end nor beginning. The Haiti of James’s day was still in the middle of history, once again, more than one hundred years after Dessalines declared independence, struggling with ­international domination and exploitation. During the 1930s, just as James was finishing the script for Toussaint L’Ouverture, Haitians were achieving a second independence that the protests of the late 1920s ­enabled; by the time The Black Jacobins was published, it had become clear that a renewed set of social movements, culminating in the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Lescot government in 1946, would be needed to further establish Haiti’s political and economic sovereignty. That James could craft such a convincing and inspiring anticolonial ­romance even in such an uncertain moment, a moment in unexpected ways so much like our own, may be the most important lesson of The Black Jacobins for our own seemingly tragic world in which U.S. foreign policy and predatory multinational institutions can make the end of ­imperialism seem like a lost horizon. This chapter began by calling attention to the gaps in our knowledge about James’s motivations for writing about Haiti, with James suggesting that his motives are opaque even to him. The conception of The Black ­Jacobins must still be considered a mystery, in Fischer’s sense; the ­origins of Caribbean anticolonialism in the U.S. occupation of Haiti cannot quite be spoken, or must be replaced by a repeatedly retold story that casts African decolonization as the real point of departure. Reading in terms of the other context I have suggested here would mean ­seeing The Black ­Jacobins not only as a precursor to the d ­ ecolonization struggles that would follow, but also in relation to its own ­heterogeneous present in

43  C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti which the future of freedom was always already under threat. If The Black ­Jacobins is able to tell a story of utopian romance, it is only able to do so by auspiciously omitting its own origins in the ­antiprogressive  —  even tragic  —  loss of sovereignty that defined the experience of Haiti ­during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. The story of how the rise of anticolonial ­ writing  —  by James, but also by Padmore, McKay, C ­ ésaire, and ­others  —  was filtered through relationships between the United States and Haiti has not been told, and uncovering it will reshape understandings of the history of d ­ ecolonization.

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

The anticolonial and nationalist movements that brought about decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean began to take shape during the 1920s and 1930s, thus making them contemporary to the ­occupation. Haiti has played an inspirational role in pan-Africanism and anticolonialism since the nineteenth century, and Haitians such as Baron de Vastey, Anténor Firmin, and Benito Sylvain made important contributions to discourses about race and imperialism.1 In this chapter, I will argue that the key turn these intellectual movements would take during the years between World Wars I and II was to connect the c­ ritique of ­political domination to economic exploitation. In making this case, I follow ­Robert Young’s argument about the institutional importance of the Communist International (Comintern) in supporting nascent anticolonial movements (10, 125). I add to Young’s work my own observation that the political imaginaries of the Caribbean activists who would become vital theorists of decolonization were shaped in response to the occupation of Haiti, marking the anticolonial discourses they helped develop with the presence of U.S. imperialism. The adoption of a Leninist framework that understood ­international inequality as the result of monopoly capitalism was central to the inter­war redefinition of anticolonialism by ­Caribbean thinkers. Analyzing the occupation  —  and in particular, the role of U.S. finance capitalism in ­engineering the intervention  —  forced these radicals to question ­political independence as the goal of anticolonial agitation and led them to see international Communism as an ideology better able to ­critique and combat the economic exploitation at the heart of imperialism. The occupation of Haiti inspired a variety of important political projects of this period that can easily be overlooked or misunderstood if read through the lens of what Gary Wilder calls “the erroneous assumption that anticolonialism must be oriented toward national ­independence” (20).

45  Harlem and Haiti Foregrounding the occupation of Haiti also offers insight into how West Indians in the United States participated in, were influenced by, and also influenced the social movements of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. This chapter focuses on Harlem as a major center for this global anticolonial Left and one of the crucial places where this movement came directly into contact with discourses surrounding the occupation of Haiti. Examining the writings of West Indians in Harlem shows how this group of migrants who had grown up subjects of European empires began to understand the workings of imperialism better through seeing U.S. actions in Haiti. In addition, as much as Caribbean radicals in the United States were shaped by the debates surrounding Haiti and U.S. imperialism, they used the prominence that Haiti gained among African Americans and critics of capitalism during the 1920s in particular to influence the New Negro and Communist movements. The occupation of Haiti offered ­Caribbean intellectuals an opportunity to make African Americans engage with imperialism and to make Communists engage with race. This chapter therefore demonstrates how anticolonialism, the New Negro movement, and international Communism developed ideologically and institutionally through a dialogue with one another, a dialogue that often pivoted on the occupation of Haiti.

The African Blood Brotherhood and the Occupation During the 1910s and 1920s, international Communism, the New Negro movement (often also called the Harlem Renaissance), and anticolonialism flourished alongside one another in the United States, with West Indians acting as important bridges between these movements. The only black founding member of the U.S. Communist Party, Otto Huiswoud, was born in Dutch Guiana (now Suriname) and married to a politically active Guyanese woman, Hermina Dumont Huiswoud. Cyril V. Briggs, born in Nevis, founded the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) in 1919, which became the first black organization affiliated with the Communist Party in the United States. The ABB’s leadership included Richard B. Moore ( born in Barbados), W. A. Domingo (from Jamaica), and Grace Campbell (a U.S.-born woman of Jamaican descent). Briggs, Moore, and Campbell would go on to play central roles in the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), the group within the U.S. Communist Party that the Trinidadian George Padmore would join in 1927. International Communism would connect them with blacks from throughout the diaspora, including Henry Rosemond, “a US-based activist of Haitian origin” who became a member of the ANLC before returning to Haiti to found a

46  American Imperialism’s Undead branch of the League Against Imperialism there (Adi, Pan-Africanism 302).2 These West Indian radicals published prolifically during the 1920s, founding or contributing to publications including the Negro World (the Garvey movement’s organ that Domingo edited from 1918 to 1919), the Messenger (where Domingo worked as a contributing editor from 1919 to 1920), the Crusader (edited by Briggs), the Emancipator (edited by Moore), and a series of ANLC-affiliated publications such as the Negro Champion, the Liberator, and the Harlem Liberator (all three of which Briggs edited at various times). Through these publications, we can see how West Indians in Harlem were inspired to anticolonialism through the example of Haiti, rallied to the defense of Haitian sovereignty, and generally located themselves intellectually vis-à-vis the discourses ­surrounding Haiti that dominated U.S. views on the Caribbean during the 1920s. Even among the scholars who recognize the importance of these West Indian radicals in establishing the anticolonialist discourses that would later lead to decolonization, the ways they engaged with the occupation of Haiti have not been systematically addressed. This chapter builds on work about these radicals by Robert Hill, Winston James, Minkah Makalani, Joyce Moore Turner, Louis Parascandola, and Mark Solomon. This scholarship is dominated by two main debates: first, about the ways in which these West Indians were radicalized by their experiences in the United States; and second, about the relationship of this group to the Communist Party. Each of these conversations explores the influences on these activists and the roots of their ideology. Examining the group’s engagement with the occupation of Haiti offers an approach to these questions that complicates and reframes existing scholarship, showing the influences on Caribbean anticolonialism to have been part of a complex process of cross-fertilization, and foregrounding the contributions Caribbean people made to the movements in which they participated. Scholarship seeking to understand how West Indians became radicalized in the United States usually focuses on how they achieved a different racial consciousness because of the experience of U.S. racism and white supremacy. Caribbean people, coming from places with complex shadebased racial system, found in the United States a stark binary in which they were defined as Negro and oppressed on that basis ( Parascandola, introduction to “Look” 14; W. James 110). I want to supplement that scholarship by looking at how these West Indians in the United States redefined their understanding of not just of race but also of colonialism, especially through analysis of and opposition to the occupation of Haiti. Rather than focusing on only one aspect of influence  —  the ways U.S. ­racial

47  Harlem and Haiti frameworks shaped the racial identity of Caribbean ­immigrants  —  I want to consider the ideas about imperialism brought by these ­transnational subjects and how they became clarified and refined through interaction with U.S. ideologies. In addition to encountering U.S. ideas about race, West Indians in the United States also came into contact with international ­Communism. Scholars have therefore debated how much influence Communist thought had on these Caribbean thinkers. Because the ABB was an underground organization, there is much uncertainty about when ABB members became Communists and how that conversion happened. The ABB was first announced in an October 1919 issue of the Crusader, and some historians have thought of the group as a black auxiliary to the U.S. Communist Party (called at the time the Workers Party). The evidence suggests, though, that the ABB was initially an independent organization and that Briggs, Campbell, and Moore did not become Communists until the summer of 1921.3 Scholars have noted that Briggs in particular credited the Comintern’s critique of imperialism emerging from Lenin’s “Theses on National and Colonial Questions” adopted at the Second Comintern Congress in July 1920 as motivating him to join the party. But scholars have not commented on the timing of the ABB conversion to Communism a few months after James Weldon Johnson’s August 1920 articles about the occupation of Haiti. While the “Theses on National and Colonial Questions” allowed colonial subjects like Briggs to see the Comintern as an ally in the fight for national liberation, Lenin’s theorizing of the role of finance capitalism in international exploitation in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism must have seemed especially compelling with Johnson uncovering National City Bank’s control of U.S. foreign policy. Briggs and his colleagues were clearly influenced by Johnson’s analysis of U.S. empire, and I will show that they became Communists with that understanding of international relations in mind. The ABB’s intellectual development therefore demonstrates the complexity of diasporic influence, with the writings on Haiti by the African American Johnson along with the Communist theorization of imperialism’s relationship to capitalism helping to crystalize the group’s ideology. Ignoring the occupation of Haiti or placing it only in the background risks downplaying the pivotal role of opposition to U.S. imperialism in the development of anticolonialism and how these West Indian radicals shaped international Communism. The African Blood Brotherhood was a vanguardist organization that positioned itself as translator between the black working class and a r­ adical

48  American Imperialism’s Undead Left dominated by whites. The group’s members saw themselves as a voice from the margins, never quite belonging to the African American community or the Communist International. The occupation of Haiti provided an entry point for speaking to both of these groups and thus became a key site of cross-fertilization between them: talking about the occupation helped the ABB remind African Americans of the transnational nature of black struggles, while it also allowed them to demonstrate to white activists the interplay between race and the imperialism these Communists purportedly opposed. Although most of the ABB grew up in Caribbean colonies under European rule, these British and Dutch subjects came to their anticapitalist critique of empire through analysis of U.S. imperialism in Haiti. Cyril Briggs was, with Grace Campbell, the driving force behind the African Blood Brotherhood, founding the Crusader newspaper that would become the group’s organ. Because his intellectual development is so well-documented through his extensive writings, I want to begin by examining Briggs’s writing in order to think through the development of his anticolonialist ideology and his move toward Communism. Keeping the occupation in mind reveals Briggs’s shift from conceiving the problem facing Haiti and the rest of the colonial world as primarily a political one of a lack of democracy and representative government to a broader ­critique of the economic exploitation and inequality that he eventually came to see international Communism as better equipped to oppose. From the beginning of the occupation, Briggs viewed the presence of U.S. troops in Haiti as an unacceptable assault on black sovereignty. Within the first months of the invasion of Haiti in 1915, Briggs published articles opposing the occupation in the Colored American Review, which he edited. At the time, few African Americans took a public p ­ osition against the occupation. Brenda Gayle Plummer, looking at African American r­ esponses to the occupation, notes that “the landing of Marines in Haiti in the summer of 1915 made little initial impression on blacks” (“Afro-American” 125). W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a letter to the president in A ­ ugust 1915 insisting that the United States offer reassurance that while “it is our privilege as a nation to rescue [ Haiti ] from her worst self . . . we have no designs on the political independence of the island and no desire to exploit it ruthlessly for the sake of business interests here” (­Correspondence 1:212); similarly, the Crisis argued in November 1915 that the United States should “help Haiti rid herself of thieves and not try to fasten American thieves on her” (qtd. in Plummer, “AfroAmerican” 131). Aside from Du Bois’s careful attempt to support the

49  Harlem and Haiti occupation but steer it toward humanitarian ends, the most outspoken responses were more unequivocally in favor of the invasion; for example, “Booker T. Washington believed the Haitians a backward people in need of discipline and enlightenment. Unimpressed by the refinement of the Haitian elite, Washington felt that the Caribbean nation’s economic stagnation and political violence owed much to its neglect of sound industrial education” ( Plummer, “Afro-American” 125). Press coverage of the U.S. military action in Haiti expressing opinions like Washington’s clearly concerned Briggs: the second issue of the Colored American Review includes a summary of various newspaper articles about Haiti and ends by asking if “even the most placid American Negro would stand for this last insult to the colored race, this last straw added to the immeasurable burden of the black man” (“Duplicating” 6 ). The support for the invasion of Haiti by an African American, “ever oppressed under his own Flag, yet ever loyal to said Flag,” appears particularly galling to Briggs. “Injecting Kultur into Hayti,” from the third issue of the Colored American Review, begins by directly opposing Washington: “Taking up four columns of more or less valuable space in the New York Age, Dr. Booker T. Washington seeks in a roundabout way to justify the ‘Belgiuming’ of Hayti” (“Injecting” 6 ). Briggs spends the article mocking Washington’s views on Haiti, sarcastically suggesting, “Isn’t American Kultur just what the Haytians should have, even if it be forced down their throats in like manner as the Kaiser administered German Kultur to the Belgians” (6 ). Briggs’s invocation of Belgium here and in the article “Duplicating Belgium in Hayti?” is not, as Makalani reads it, to “equate U.S. barbarity with Belgian imperialism” (37); Briggs actually makes his comparison to the German invasion of Belgium that marked the first major military campaign of World War I. By equating the United States to Germany and placing Haiti in the position of Belgium, Briggs seeks to remind his readers of Haiti’s status as equal in the world of nations and to therefore emphasize Haiti’s loss of sovereignty as no less significant than that of a European state. Coupled with this critique of the U.S. violation of international law, Briggs uses the occasion to remind readers of Haitian history: in both his response to Washington as well as his article on the occupation from the second issue of the Colored American Review, Briggs brings up the Haitian Revolution as necessary context. In the October 15 article, he mentions that “Haiti has many enemies in whose minds live vividly the revolution of the Haytians under Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines, and other great Negroes” (“Duplicating” 6 ). He therefore implies that

50  American Imperialism’s Undead the antipathy much of the U.S. press feels for Haiti stems from this history. But he also suggests that this history might offer a warning to those formulating U.S. foreign policy: “The Wilson Administration will do well to remember Toussaint L’Ouverture and that glorious period of Negro victories over the best troops in Europe and the flower of Britain” (“­Duplicating” 6 ). Although Briggs’s warning alludes to the power of the Haitian people to oppose the occupation, evidence of the vanguardism that would emerge more obviously in the ABB appears here as well. His November 1 article closes by arguing that “the United States can be compelled” to treat Haiti as an equal, but “there are only two ways to bring this about. Some powerful nation like Japan may intervene to furnish the United States with the necessary excitement, or if the ten million colored citizens in this country wish to see Haiti left alone they can demand it. But the overgrown bully will not otherwise let the small boy alone” (“­Injecting” 6 ). Briggs turns Haiti into a child needing its African American big brothers to intervene and stick up for it, ultimately infantilizing Haiti in ways resembling the paternalist discourse Mary Renda identifies as typical in U.S. understandings of the occupation and that I will discuss in more detail in chapter 4. In these early articles in the Colored American Review, then, Briggs ­establishes some of the central parameters of the anti-occupation discourse that would also structure his early writing on other forms of black oppression. Throughout Briggs’s early analyses of the occupation, he would emphasize the political aspect, that Haiti is a sovereign state that has been illegally occupied, in violation of international law. He would also use the occasion of the occupation to commemorate Haiti’s epic history, especially through evoking the names of Toussaint and Dessalines as exemplars of heroic black masculine leadership. And finally, he would make the occupation a rallying cry for U.S. blacks as the vanguard of the black diaspora to get involved in freeing their brothers from bondage. After leaving the Colored American Review, Briggs worked for the Amsterdam News before launching the Crusader in September 1918. The Crusader would become the organ of the African Blood Brotherhood (first identifying itself this way in June 1921) and by the end of its existence in early 1922 had become clearly allied with Communism. I want to suggest that opposition to the U.S. occupation of Haiti was crucial in leading Briggs and his colleagues toward Communism, which can be seen both by the timing of this conversion as well as in the evolution of their analysis of the occupation. In particular, I will make the case that the 1920 articles in the Nation by James Weldon Johnson led Briggs and

51  Harlem and Haiti the other members of the ABB toward seeing the occupation not only as a political issue of colonialism but as a complex intertwining of economics and international relations that Communism ultimately offered the best lens for understanding. Briggs’s initial writings on Haiti from the Crusader continue to consider the occupation through the same framework developed in the Colored American Review. In the earliest issues of the Crusader, Briggs ­relies especially on the idea of self-determination for arguing against the ­occupation, but crucially, it is the concept as articulated by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, rather than Lenin, that Briggs invokes. The first article in the first issue shows Briggs quoting Wilson, that “governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed,” to advocate for African independence (“Africa” [1918 ] 1). The April 1919 issue calls Wilson “a discredited man” because he “promised that the world is no longer to consist of great empires” but “declined to push home that ­opportunity in the face of an opposing minority of reactionaries and imperialists” (“Discredited” 8– 9). The June 1919 issue begins by reproducing “an imaginary conversation between the President, the Kaiser, Venizelos and a Dominican revolutionist in the March Metropolitan” in which Wilson is taken to task for preaching that “no nation shall seek to extend its own policy over any other nation or people, but that every people shall be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and the powerful,” even as “you prepared to attack Haiti without being willing to listen to any cooperation of any sort with any other ­nation whatsoever” (“What” 3). Briggs clearly relishes the Metropolitan’s uncovering of Wilson’s hypocritical abandonment of “international law, as laid down by an international court” in the case of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua (“What” 3). Briggs would return to these ideas, as in the October 1919 articles “Attention of the League of Nation” and “Self-Determination in Practice,” which again quote Wilson’s words to denounce his own actions and those of European powers in Africa. The solution often presented in these issues is self-determination: “government of the Negro by the Negro and for the Negro in a black man’s country” (“Why” 11). While there are thus numerous appearances of Haiti in the ­Crusader during 1919 and early 1920, attention is more often on Africa, ­particularly Liberia; in my discussion of George Padmore in chapter 6, I will return to the ways that Liberia and Haiti were often linked together and played a parallel role in black discourses about imperialism and ­sovereignty.

52  American Imperialism’s Undead Briggs’s focus on Liberia derives from his support at this time for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association ( UNIA); throughout 1919, Briggs frequently advocates for sending thousands of African Americans to Liberia to settle there and eventually muster an immense army that can free all of the continent. Haiti often appears in these articles but only as a less desirable alternative for emigration than Liberia because of its isolation from the larger African population Briggs seeks to free. Briggs’s short story “The Ray of Fear,” published in the February and April 1920 issues of the Crusader, fictionalizes this plan, only briefly mentioning “the precedent set by the United States in the case of the Dominican and Haitian Republics, and by France and England in the many instances of their unholy and unprovoked aggression against various African and Asiatic States,” as context and justification for the race war the story imagines (18). The issues of the Crusader show that, as late as the first half of 1920, Haiti was no longer at the top of Briggs’s concerns as it had been at the beginning of the occupation in 1915. The publication of James Weldon Johnson’s articles on the occupation in the Nation would shift Briggs’s focus, not only back to Haiti but also to the role of finance capitalism in the occupation. Johnson  —  himself the son of a Bahamian woman whose father left Haiti in 18024  —  had traveled to Haiti in 1920 on behalf of the NAACP, and in response, conceived a scathing critique of the U.S. mission there. Back in the United States, Johnson met with Republican presidential candidate Warren Harding, who “could not conceal his delight” and regarded Johnson’s findings in Haiti “as a gift right off the ­Christmas tree” ( Johnson, “Along” 533). The Democratic vice-­presidential candidate, Franklin Roosevelt, had just bragged to the New York Times in ­August 1920 that “I wrote Haiti’s Constitution myself, and, if I do say it, I think it is a pretty good constitution” (qtd. in Schmidt 118). Thus, Johnson’s articles on the occupation in the Nation and the Crisis in ­August and September 1920 appeared just as Harding was giving campaign speeches against the Wilson administration’s hypocrisy and mismanagement in Haiti. Haiti became a campaign issue in the fall of 1920, and Johnson’s writings became widely influential.5 Johnson’s analysis appears to have been a turning point in how West Indian radicals would conceive of the occupation, but to understand the multiple roots of their anticolonialism, it is worth remembering how much later Johnson came to his opposition than Briggs. Johnson’s first responses to the occupation in 1915 were tentative and contrast with Briggs’s assured opposition. It may be the case that, in John Lowney’s

53  Harlem and Haiti words, “the investigative articles that James Weldon Johnson wrote for The Nation and The Crisis had the greatest impact on African American public awareness of Haiti” (418). But Johnson’s articles were not the originating point of anti-occupation writing.6 The issue of influence is especially complicated because there are interesting resonances between Johnson’s 1920 articles and Briggs’s earliest writings on the occupation. The most suggestive comes from the concluding paragraph of Johnson’s first article in the series, where he compares the occupation to “Germany’s rape of Belgium” ( Johnson, “Self-Determining” 666 ). Briggs’s evocation of Germany’s 1914 invasion of Belgium seems timely in his 1915 article, but it is hard to imagine this analogy would have come readily to mind in July 1920, almost two years after Germany’s defeat and the conclusion of World War I. The uniqueness of this comparison suggests that Johnson may have been familiar with Briggs’s early writings against the occupation and had them in mind while writing his own articles, even as Johnson transforms the paternalism of Haiti as “small boy” in Briggs’s original formulation into Haiti as helpless rape victim. The comparison appears again in an unsigned July 1921 editorial of the Messenger about Haiti lamenting “our misdeeds and our debauchery of Haiti, more shameless and inexcusable than the German rape of Belgium” (“Haitian” 209), suggesting that Briggs’s framing of the occupation, via Johnson’s sexualized amplification, continued to echo in the analyses of U.S. imperialism that followed. To add further to the cross-fertilization that shaped this dialogue, in Johnson’s autobiography he credits George Sylvain of Haiti’s Union ­Patriotique with providing “a good deal of information about Haiti, and about American misrule, which he knew I was going to make use of in the United States to the interest of the Haitians” (“Along” 518). This means that a Haitian passing information on to an African American ended up inspiring a number of Anglophone West Indians to develop a political project that, as my sixth chapter will show, the Trinidadian George Padmore would employ in the decolonization of Africa. While Johnson did not write his critique of U.S. imperialism as a ­Communist  —  in fact, he had served in the U.S. diplomatic corps as consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua during the Theodore Roosevelt and Taft ­administrations  —  what sets apart his analysis of the problems in Haiti from the earlier writing of Briggs and others is how similar Johnson’s approach is to Lenin’s critique of finance capital in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. While Johnson is critical of the ­atrocities committed by the marine-controlled constabulary and the mix of ­incompetence

54  American Imperialism’s Undead and e­ xploitation on the part of the U.S. civilian managers, he makes it clear that these military and government representatives “are in reality working for great financial interests in this country, although Uncle Sam and Haiti pay their salaries” ( Johnson, “Self-Determining” 675). ­Johnson builds a case for understanding “the Occupation of Haiti as the instrument by which the National City Bank is striving to complete the riveting, double-locking and bolting of its financial control of the island” (677). He shows the long-term designs the National City Bank of New York had on Haiti before the occupation, the bank executives who assumed positions of power in the occupation, and the various benefits U.S. finance accrued through forcing treaties and a new constitution on Haiti. At the end of the first five years of the occupation, the National City Bank controlled the National Railroad of Haiti, the Banque Nationale d’Haiti, and Haitian customs, monetary, and trade policy, developments that Johnson shows were desired before the occupation but could never be imposed without dissolving the Haitian assembly and selecting a president more amenable to international finance. The end result is National City’s profits based on loans guaranteed by U.S. military might. Certainly, the racism and brutality of the occupation  —  especially the forced labor of the corvée, where Haitians were conscripted by occupying forces into infrastructure projects such as the building of highways  —  are topics that outrage Johnson, but his primary focus is on how “American supervision turned out to be a military tyranny supporting a program of economic exploitation” (673). Lenin had described imperialism as the reality that “as long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will never be utilized for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists; it will be used for the purpose of increasing those profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries. In these backward countries profits are usually high, for capital is scarce, the price of land is relatively low, wages are low, raw materials are cheap” (63); these international inequalities mean that “the premier place among foreign investments is held by those placed in politically dependent or closely allied countries. Great Britain grants loans to Egypt, Japan, China and South America. Her navy plays here the part of bailiff in case of necessity” (101). This theory of imperialism as territorial domination in the service of greater returns for wealthy investors would have seemed all too familiar in light of what Johnson found in Haiti. Johnson’s articles became rallying cries for the West Indian radicals. ­Hubert Harrison was one of the first to pick up Johnson’s critique. H ­ arrison

55  Harlem and Haiti was not a member of the ABB or Workers Party, but he was an important inspiration to people like Briggs, Campbell, Domingo, ­Dumont H ­ uiswoud, Huiswoud, and Moore. Slightly older than the ABB group, Harrison had come to New York from St. Croix (then part of the Danish Virgin Islands) and joined the Socialist Party of New York in 1911. He worked as an associate editor of the Masses before leaving to form his own group, the Liberty League, and edit a variety of black newspapers. As early as 1919, in the first issue of the New Negro he edited, Harrison used the examples of Haiti and the Virgin Islands to show the international nature of the “color line,” comparing the U.S. role in those places to that of Britain in its colonies and Belgium in the Congo (99). Johnson’s articles seem to inspire Harrison to deepen that critique. In 1920, he became editor of the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s Negro World, where in the latter half of that year, he would publish a series of articles on the occupation of Haiti. The first, “Help Wanted for Hayti,” places the occupation into the context of “Ireland, India and Egypt” as “living proofs that the world has been lied to” by U.S., British, and French leaders. He asks readers to write Congress “concerning the atrocity perpetrated at Port au Prince last week” (235), an allusion to the increased violence in Haiti that formed part of the context for Johnson’s trip. A few weeks later, Harrison follows up with “The Cracker in the Caribbean,” directly referencing Johnson’s article in the Nation to call his readers’ attention to “the bloody rape of the republics of Hayti and Santo Domingo” (236 ). Harrison emphasizes the illegality of the occupation and complains that “we black people are not manly enough to get up even a petition on behalf of our brothers in Hayti” (237). Picking up on Johnson’s vision of Haiti as violated victim, Harrison ties African American masculinity to the ability to defend its feminized kin. Finally, in “Hands across the Sea” from September 1921, published after Johnson’s full series had appeared, Harrison connects his critique of U.S. foreign policy to established Socialist theorizing; the article opens: “The most dangerous phase of developed capitalism is that of imperialism” (238). He goes on to explain how pursuit of markets and profits leads to conquest and domination, arguing that while patriotism may lead us to overlook exploitation at home, “the case of Hayti and the present plight of the Haytian people helps us to see the aims of our own American imperialists in the white light of pitiless publicity” (239). In arguing that U.S. citizens might understand capitalism better when observing its operations abroad  —  the argument that colonialism is capitalism laid bare, which Aimé Césaire would repeat in Discours sur le colonialisme in 1950  —  Harrison suggests how British

56  American Imperialism’s Undead subjects like the ABB group or Padmore (or even a Danish subject like Harrison) might have been able to look more objectively at the precise functioning of U.S. imperialism and then bring that knowledge back to analysis of the empire that had formed them. While Harrison had been a Socialist before the occupation of Haiti and never became a Communist, the West Indians from the ABB who became affiliated with the Communist Party did so while the occupation of Haiti was forcing into the U.S. public sphere discussions about the i­ nterrelation of race, capitalist expansion, and colonialism. To what e­ xtent these West Indians came to their Leninist position on finance capitalism’s role in foreign domination through seeing the part banking interests played in the occupation of Haiti remains conjecture. Solomon points to the violence against blacks in the United States during the summer of 1919 as “pivotal for the fusion of black radicals and Communists” (8); but he also notes that “there is little doubt that Briggs joined the [Communist] Party in mid-1921” (9), placing Briggs’s conversion in the immediate aftermath of Johnson’s articles on Haiti rather than that of the 1919 Red Summer. As Solomon and Makalani note, Briggs credited his decision to become a Communist to the Comintern’s policy on colonialism: “My interest in Communism was inspired by the national policy of the Russian Bolsheviks and the anti-imperialist orientation of the Soviet state birthed by the October Revolution. I was at the time more interested, as you will gather, in the national liberation revolution than in the social revolution.”7 Briggs’s editorials in the Crusader throughout 1921 became more explicitly aligned with Communism, so that by December 1921, he could write: “Of all the great powers Soviet Russia is the only power that deals fairly with weaker nations and peoples. She is the only power that has no skeleton of murderous subjugation and wrongdoing in her national closet  —  no spectre of a brutally oppressed Ireland or Haiti” (“Stand” 8). Briggs obviously had the occupation in mind at the same time that the Leninist position on national liberation was convincing him to formally join the Communist Party. There is also no doubt that among Briggs and his peers, Johnson’s coverage of Wall Street’s role in U.S. empire proved extremely influential. As early as November 1919, Briggs had credited the Nation for its coverage of U.S. imperialism, as in the announcement in the Crusader that read: “We heartily commend and thank The Nation of New York for its editorial note on the Santo Domingo situation in its issue of October 6, 1919, which note we here reprint for the benefit of our readers” and then reprinted an article about the overthrow of the Dominican government

57  Harlem and Haiti and the subsequent lack of freedom of assembly and press in that country (“American Imperialism” 29). The Nation’s coverage of the Dominican Republic apparently reminded Briggs to foreground Haiti in that issue, with the article “Self-Determination in Haiti and Santo Domingo” criticizing Wilson once again for “following his now time-worn practice of saying one thing and meaning the other” and “impos[ ing ] his rule by American bayonets and machine guns upon the peoples of the republics of Haiti and Santo Domingo” (“Self-Determination” 10). By September 1920, the Crusader contains the announcement titled “About Haiti” that “The Nation ( New York) is running a series of articles by James W ­ eldon Johnson, giving the results of his recent investigations in the Black ­Republic” (30). The article “American Kultur in Haiti” from October 1920 is largely a series of quotes from Johnson’s coverage (12–14). Briggs was not the only member of the ABB who sought to point his readers to Johnson’s articles. Domingo, who was at this point a contributing editor to the Messenger, uses the October 1920 issue to simply cover Johnson’s coverage: “From all accounts it seems that the National City Bank of New York is the government of Haiti. James Weldon Johnson is running in the Nation a series of articles which are illuminating in regard to the conditions in Haiti. The Nation is well worth reading at all times and we wish our readers would follow this entire series as a means of getting better acquainted with that journal” (“Haiti” 100). The Crusader and the Messenger would both increase coverage of the occupation after the appearance of Johnson’s articles. The D ­ ecember 1920 issue of the Crusader includes a letter to the editor from a U.S. Marine describing atrocities committed in Haiti as well as an article that reads: “Never had cant and hypocrisy so much trouble and so many set-backs in their efforts to convince the world that murder is being done with the best possible intentions as have beset the American naval ­authorities in their efforts to whitewash the bloody record of the United States ­Marine Corps in the Republic of Haiti” (“In Haiti” 10). In the Messenger, meanwhile, mentions of Haiti began to appear in virtually any discussion of i­nternational imperialism. The August 1920 article on Mexico warns that “from the trend of the development of American financial imperialism, Mexico will soon become our second Haiti” (“Mexican” 64), while the September 1920 article “Africa for the Africans” argues against a politics organized solely around race by asking, “Does the ignorant, deluded and patriotic dirt-eating cracker of Georgia benefit from the presence of American Marines in Haiti? Does the proud imperial Englishman who flounders in the filth of White Chapel benefit

58  American Imperialism’s Undead from the enslavement of the despoiled Zulu?” (“Africa” [1920] 84). No, the article responds, which is why class solidarity should be the priority: “Those who benefit are not the majority of England, America or Japan: they are the small group of financiers who have investments in Haiti, South Africa and Korea” (84). Domingo pens the article “Will Bolshevism Free America?” in the same issue of the Messenger, which concludes by urging that “­Bolshevism  —  Socialism  —  is the only weapon that can be used by Negroes effectively to clip the claws of the British lion and the talons of the American eagle in Africa, the British West I­ndies, Haiti, the Southern States and at the same time reach the monsters’ heart (they have a common one) in London, Paris, New York, Tokio [sic] and Warsaw” (“Will Bolshevism” 86 ). D ­ omingo, Briggs, and Harrison thus explicitly picked up Johnson’s critique while making their case for Communism’s relevance to black struggles. The central ideas Johnson articulated  —  that Wall Street and big finance were the driving forces of U.S. ­imperialism  —  would reappear in black Communists’ opposition to U.S. foreign policy throughout the 1920s as well as in George Padmore’s ­writings in Negro Worker in the 1930s, not only on Haiti but on Liberia as well.

The Occupation and Black Communism With the explosion of Haiti-related discourse circulating in the United States after the 1920 presidential election   —   my subsequent chapters will engage with just a few of many possible examples, from Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones to popular travel narratives to the rise of the zombie movie — the Harlem-based West Indians can be seen consistently using the occupation of Haiti to press their agenda in the various venues in which they participated. One of the best examples of West Indian Communists seeking to use the occupation to radicalize more mainstream African American groups is in the Negro Sanhedrin in 1924. The idea behind the Sanhedrin was to promote cooperation between disparate ­African American organizations: a 1923 organizational meeting preceding the Sanhedrin included Domingo representing the African Blood Brotherhood (with Briggs, Campbell, Moore, and Huiswoud also in attendance); George Schuyler, the Friends for Negro Freedom; James Weldon J­ ohnson, the NAACP; and Kelly Miller, the National Race Congress. Miller, the most conservative leader in the group, managed to take control of organizing the meeting from Briggs, creating much acrimony.8 When the Sanhedrin was finally held in Chicago in 1924, the ABB members were in attendance but excluded from speaking (Solomon 31). The

59  Harlem and Haiti ABB, however, upon seeing the absence of labor issues in the conference’s program, worked in advance of the Sanhedrin with African American representatives of the Workers Party (WP) “to draft a pair of resolutions intended to bring these issues up for discussion” (Makalani 112). ­Comintern records show that while the ABB and WP both sought to place on the Sanhedrin’s agenda proposals against lynching and the KKK, and in support of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the main difference in the ABB’s proposal was interest in Liberia and “Independence of Insular Possessions.” The ABB proposals give a sense of their investment in the issue of U.S. imperialism: Whereas the right of self-determination for all nations first established by the American Revolution against Great Britain, is now acknowledged by all men, even those who violate and evade it; and whereas any violation of such right is an act of crime on the part of any statesman or government; and . . . Whereas the peoples of Haiti, Sandomingo, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii Islands, and Porto Rico are now by violence and crime and oppression being denied their right of self-determination by the United States Government; therefore be it resolved that this conference sends its fraternal greetings and encouragement to the peoples of the insular possessions of the United States who are struggling for their independence; and that we endorse their brave fight and promise them all possible aid; and be it further resolved that any permanent directing body that may be chosen by this Conference stands instructed to enter in communications and to establish relations with all representative of those struggling peoples so as to make our help to them a vital reality.9

Makalani describes the ABB’s resolution as “focused on lynching and the Klan” and the WP’s as concerned with “housing, education, unions, and organizing black tenant farmers and sharecroppers” (112). I would suggest that what truly sets the ABB’s proposals apart is their focus on international inequality. U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean was clearly a top priority for ABB members, and they seem to have thought that trying to force the more conservative Sanhedrin leaders to deal with this issue would help the ABB win the rank-and-file attendees of the conference to their side. The ABB’s effort to push African American organizations to pay attention to U.S. imperialism was one area of their activism; their work within the Communist Party to foreground that issue was equally important. The Comintern frequently pressed national parties ­including the Workers Party in the United States to pay attention to race and ­imperialism — ­Comintern

60  American Imperialism’s Undead documents on the “Negro Question” often refer to U.S. imperialism in Haiti and Puerto Rico — but as scholars of African American participation in the Communist movement note, U.S. Communists were repeatedly reprimanded for their “failure to follow Comintern directives” on these issues (Makalani 151). As early as 1923 the Comintern Executive Committee placed the occupation of Haiti alongside lynching in the United States as injustices to be opposed; Haiti is listed with Egypt, India, Ireland, Santo Domingo, and South America as examples of capitalist imperialism.10 ABB members who insisted on having policies regarding racial equality recognized by the U.S. party were often met with hostility: for example, Huiswoud was censured by the WP for fighting with a Texan over the place of race in the party platform at a 1924 convention (Turner 115). The occupation of Haiti offered West Indian activists a more secure position to force white Communists to pay attention to ­issues of racial injustice. As long as imperialism was important to the Comintern, Briggs and his associates were able to make Haiti a central part of how that issue was framed to address race. The African Blood Brotherhood was an underground organization and had been founded before its association with Communism; by the middle of the 1920s, the Comintern began to consider more overt organizing of African Americans by a group fully within the party. By late 1924, the idea of an American Negro Labor Congress was being discussed, and the ANLC was launched in October 1925. Moore and Huiswoud were both on the Resolutions Committee for the Congress, and perhaps not surprisingly, the first two resolutions were about Liberia and Haiti, ahead of those about the KKK, the “Negro and Organized Labor,” lynching, and another separate resolution on imperialism.11 Opposition to the occupation was foundational to the ANLC from the beginning, so much so that the image they adopted for their letterhead and publication, Negro Champion, prominently features Haiti (see figure 1). Makalani describes this image, also used by Padmore for the banner of the newspaper he edited: “The imagery that would soon represent the ITUCNW, primarily in its journal, Negro Worker, was a familiar one, having first been used in the ANLC; a muscular, virile black worker in overalls, emerging out of the United States, breaking the chains of slavery and oppression that held down blacks not only there but also in the Caribbean and Africa. (Alluding to American empire, the image highlighted ‘Dixie,’ Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Liberia)” (165). Makalani goes on to discuss the problematic vanguardism implied by the portrayal of the black worker rising out of the United States to

61  Harlem and Haiti

Figure 1. Cover illustration, American Negro Labor Congress: A Call to Action, 1925. (Courtesy of Tobias Higbie)

free Africa — arguably, the worker is rising as much from a transatlantic space as from the United States, complicating the question of who the ANLC is positioning as vanguard — but I want to focus on what he puts in ­parentheses here. The ANLC, in formulating this image, is creating a pan-African community connected by U.S. imperialism, and one in which the Caribbean — and Haiti in particular — is at the center. My sixth chapter will discuss how Padmore alters this image for the Negro Worker to make it even more centered on U.S. empire; the borrowing of the ANLC’s imagery shows continuity between the anticolonial pan-Africanism that Padmore would disseminate during the 1930s and the brand of black Communism developed by Harlem radicals during the 1920s in response to the occupation of Haiti. The ANLC focus on Haiti travelled internationally in ways that preceded Padmore, who joined the group in 1927. That year, Moore attended the International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism in Brussels, where the League against Imperialism ( LAI ) was founded. The congress was chaired by Lamine Senghor of the Comité

62  American Imperialism’s Undead de Défense de la Race Nègre, and participants included the president of the African National Congress, the Independent Labour Party’s Fenner Brockway, along with leading Chinese, Japanese, and Indian anticolonialists like Sen Katayama, M. N. Roy, and Jawaharlal Nehru (Turner 146; Makalani 138–39). Carlos Deambrosis Martins of Haiti’s Union Patriotique addressed the congress about the U.S. occupation and participated in the Committee on the Negro Question, where Moore acted as secretary (Turner 146; Makalani 141– 42). Moore introduced a “Resolution on the Negro Question” that offered an impressive synthesis of the history of black oppression beginning with the slave trade and continuing through the scramble for Africa, before arriving at a present dominated by imperialism: “Today in a vast continent of 11,500,000 square miles only two small states, Abyssinia and Liberia, are accounted independent. The former is now menaced by the Anglo-Italian pact, and the latter with its customs and constabulary in the hands of American officials, and a great concession granted to a Wall Street corporation, can no longer be considered free” (Turner and Turner 145). Moore frames Liberia as a new Haiti, suffering the assaults on sovereignty Johnson had identified. After brief mentions of Kenya and Sudan, a larger section on South A ­ frica, and a protest against lynching and segregation in the United States, the resolution closes in the Caribbean: Haiti, established by Toussaint Louverture and his fellow-slaves by the first successful slave revolution in history, is now crushed and subjugated by the marines of that very power which proclaimed “the war for democracy.” More than 3,000 Haitians have been murdered and large numbers enslaved for the building of military roads under the corvée system. They have been despoiled of their lands and liberties, and imprisonment and torture is the lot of all who dare to speak for their freedoms. . . . For the Republic of Haiti, Cuba, Santo Domingo and for the peoples of Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands, we must demand complete political and economic independence and the immediate withdrawal of all imperialist troops. For the other Caribbean colonies, we must likewise demand and obtain self-government. The Confederation of the British West Indies should be achieved and the Union of all these people ­accomplished. (146  )

The occupation of Haiti becomes one of the primary ways that the LAI’s Committee on the Negro Question analyzes imperialism. As importantly, that committee sees the occupation as a way to convince their comrades to prioritize the struggles of blacks. Makalani describes how, throughout most of the conference, “European and Asian radicals still did not seem

63  Harlem and Haiti to see race as a central aspect of imperialism” (142). Moore’s a­ ddress ­introducing this resolution tied international imperialism to “the theory of the supremacy of the white race” (Turner and Turner 143) and reminded his audience that “even in the most progressive groups of the labor movement we are treated as inferiors” (144). The Brussels congress, a key early moment in anticolonialism that “laid the basis for the orientation of many post-war anti-colonial movements,” (Young 176 ), became another space where the occupation of Haiti gave a voice to black radicals as they sought to contribute to international Communism. Moore also used LAI opposition to the occupation to promote the organization to a black audience back home, publishing the resolution in the Crisis after he returned to the United States. Briggs, Moore, and the rest of the group that joined the Communist Party and helped form the ANLC would continue to place the occupation at the center of their activism. Briggs became editor of the ANLC’s newspaper, Negro Champion, with Padmore contributing articles beginning in spring 1928 and becoming assistant editor in September 1928.12 From its inception, Negro Champion covered events in Haiti. One early issue features the front-page headline “Haitians Riot When Election Is Forced by U.S.”13 The article details the reelection of Louis Borno, with former Haitian chargé d’affaires Percival Thoby recounting protests against the rigged elections. While the ANLC’s publications like Negro Champion aimed to reach a black audience, the group’s members also published in official party venues like the Daily Worker and the Communist aimed at the white working class. Again, the dual dynamic emerges in which the group seeks to keep Haiti on the agenda and then takes advantage of events in Haiti that bring the occupation to mainstream attention in order to expand their influence within international Communism. In the May 1929 issue of the Communist, the WP’s “Theoretical Magazine for the Discussions of Revolutionary Problems,” Briggs published a profile of Toussaint L ­ ouverture that begins by describing how “the imperialist ideology of white supremacy, by playing to the vanity of the undeveloped white workers, enables imperialists to carry out their policy of aggression and oppression abroad and working-class disruption at home” (250). After offering this theory of the need to address racial discrimination in a Socialist project, he presents a history of slave resistance and then identifies the “gigantic conspiracy of silence . . . maintained by the bourgeois writers as to the achievements and revolutionary traditions of the Negro peoples” (251). The Haitian Revolution becomes the prime example of this silencing. Briggs focuses

64  American Imperialism’s Undead especially on “the self-emancipated slaves[ ’ ] . . . blunder of limiting the revolutionary demands to the abolition of slavery” without including “a demand for the land” (252), suggesting the need for not only a political but an economic restructuring as part of the revolutionary project. The article ends by reminding readers of contemporary Haiti: “We must see to it that [ Toussaint’s] memory is not wrapped in spices in the vaults of the bourgeoisie but is kept green and fresh as a tradition of struggle and an inspiration for the present struggle against the master class. For the full emancipation of the Negro masses in the U.S.! For the liberation of Haiti from the heels of United States Marines!” (254). The occupation of Haiti frequently figured in other articles about imperialism published in the Communist, such as the editor Bertram Wolfe’s “Latin America and the Colonial Question” from October 1928. But the appearance of Haiti was often used as a passing example. It was only with the uprising in Haiti at the end of 1929, and the extensive coverage of it that Briggs spearheaded, that publications like the Communist began to give Haiti a place of prominence in its descriptions of imperialism. The 1929 unrest in Haiti began with student strikes in October at the U.S.-run agricultural school, and harnessed much of the anger and frustration on the island due to the disastrous economic conditions and postponement of legislative elections. By November, even the announcement by ­President Borno that he would not seek a third term was not enough to defuse the situation. A general strike roiled the island, and in early December, the U.S. high commissioner and head of the g­ endarmerie, John Russell, requested more marines and declared martial law (Schmidt 196 – 99). The Liberator, the successor to the Negro Champion also edited by Briggs, featured front-page coverage of Haiti in almost every issue from December 1929 into January 1930. On December 6, 1929, hundreds of Haitians demonstrating against the occupation in the town of Aux Cayes were fired on by marines. More than twenty Haitians were killed and dozens wounded (Schmidt 199 –200). The Liberator ran front-page headlines including “Back the Haitian Mass Revolt” ( December 14), “ANLC Rallies Masses to Haitian Revolt” ( December 21), and “­Haitians Killed in Hundreds by Marine Tools of U.S. Imperialism” ( December 28). One article ends by imploring: “Negro Workers! White Workers! Show your solidarity with the heroic Haitian masses! Demand the withdrawal of American marines and complete independence for Haiti! Demand the ­return of land to the peasants! Demand the abrogation of the unequal

65  Harlem and Haiti treaties imposed upon the Haitian people by American imperialism! Down with American imperialism! Down with its slimy tool, Louis Borno! Long live the heroic workers and peasants of Haiti!” (“Calls” 2).14 The ­Liberator announced protests and organizing meetings to be held in Brooklyn and Harlem as the massacre became a recruiting tool for the ANLC. These demonstrations would have international reverberations; for example, the Cuban Diario de la Marina featured a front-page article about the Communist-led protests in the United States.15 By early 1930, the Liberator could report that a “Friends of Haiti” ­conference had been held, that a resolution demanding the end of the occupation had been passed, and that nine Haitians had joined the ANLC (“­Demand” 3). Margaret S­ tevens notes that it was in the midst of this agitation that the Daily Worker announced the 1930 conference that would lead to the founding of the International Trade Union ­ Committee of Negro Workers that would become Padmore’s institutional base within the Comintern (102–3). Energized by the Haitian uprising, the Liberator continued to offer regular reports on the occupation throughout 1930 and into 1931. ­Hermina Dumont Huiswoud provided a firsthand account of Haiti in March 1930, emphasizing the immense demonstrations taking place against the marines’ presence, including one “composed wholly of Haitian women” held “in front of the hotel where the [ Hoover] Commission is basking itself.” ( Dumont 3). Dumont Huiswoud and her husband had travelled to Haiti on an “extensive tour of the Caribbean . . . holding mass meetings and organizing committees” in Jamaica, Cuba, Colombia, Curaçao, Trinidad, British and Dutch Guiana, and Barbados in addition to Haiti (Turner 153).16 As late as June 15, 1932, the Liberator was still keeping the focus on Haiti, including a profile of Toussaint in that issue that concludes: “Together with the white and Negro workers in the United States the Haitian people will obtain liberation — this time a final liberation. Capitalism, which breeds exploitation and slavery, will be ­destroyed in the process” (Marcy 5). As the Liberator made the strikes, riots, and massacre in Haiti a frontpage story, the Communist began to use the occupation to lead its own analyses of imperialism. The January 1930 issue begins with “Notes of the Month,” which describes the economic crisis worldwide before turning to its implications: “ ‘The general crisis of the world capitalist system finds most striking expression at the present time in colonial and semicolonial rebellions and revolutions.’ This estimate of the Sixth World

66  American Imperialism’s Undead Congress is emphasized by the events of the day in India, the ‘pearl’ of the British Imperialism crown, and in Haiti, outpost of Latin-American resistance to U.S. imperialism” (“Notes” [ January] 5). The article goes on to describe “demonstrations organized in New York and Washington by the Communist Party” in opposition to the occupation; in addition to their “profound effects in Latin-America countries, and in Haiti especially, encouraging and stimulating their resistance to imperialist oppression,” the demonstrations, “with their mass character and their militant struggle with the police sent to break them up, witnessed the deepening bolshevik unity and political maturity of the C.P.U.S.A. The workers and peasants of Latin America, in alliance with the revolutionary workers of the United States, are mobilizing for serious struggle against American imperialism” (“Notes” [ January] 6 ). Haiti would appear in issues of the Communist throughout 1930 as evidence that “the revolutionary upsurge of the toiling masses is also definitely being shown in the colonial and semi-colonial countries,” now linked not only to U.S. imperialism in Latin America, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines but also to national liberation struggles in India and Ireland (“Notes” [May] 392). West Indian activism inspired by the occupation can thus be seen to be influencing broader Communist thought. With the occupation creating renewed interest in the Negro question on the part of U.S. Communists, the Communist published important theorizations by black radicals in these months. January 1930 includes James Ford’s “The Negro and the Struggle against Imperialism”; February 1930 features Otto Huiswoud’s “World Aspects of the Negro ­Question.” Ford devotes considerable space to Haiti; I’ll return to his article during my discussion of McKay in chapter 3. Huiswoud, meanwhile, describes “the reign of terror instituted by the Wall Street Government” (140) in Haiti as well as the “recent strikes, culminating in a revolt against imperialist exploitation and oppression” (141). The three paragraphs he spends on Haiti are more space than is devoted to any individual country other than the United States, though in a curious archival silencing, the abridged r­ eprint of the essay in Parascandola’s Look for Me All around You omits the section on Haiti entirely. This omission suggests how the accepted story of Communist agitating against imperialism tends to edit the ­occupation of Haiti out of the narrative. Nonetheless, the archives show that events taking place in Haiti gave the ANLC group a stronger voice within the Communist Party. The occupation offered the opportunity to put i­ssues of race and imperialism on the agenda of American Communists, not to mention boost their recruiting among blacks in the

67  Harlem and Haiti United States. The ANLC helped create the international backlash against the occupation that would force the U.S. troop withdrawal in 1934. The activism of these black Communists inspired by the occupation of Haiti would directly influence other key players in the development of anticolonial politics and Caribbean literature. Two of these figures, Claude McKay and George Padmore, will be central to my third and sixth chapters. The other Caribbean person to become an important participant in the U.S. Communist Party following Briggs, Campbell, ­Dumont Huiswoud, Huiswoud, and Moore was Claudia Jones, the ­Trinidad-born activist who came to the United States as a child in the 1920s, joined the Communist Party in 1936, and was eventually deported to England in 1955 in the wake of the McCarthy era. Carole Boyce D ­ avies and Monica Jardine compare Jones’s and Aimé Césaire’s attention to U.S. imperialism ( his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism calls “American domination — the only domination from which one never recovers” [ 77 ]) to Frantz Fanon’s exclusive focus on European colonialism. Boyce Davies and Jardine credit Jones as a major theorist of the dangers of decolonization in the face of U.S. imperialism; they describe her 1958 essay “American ­Imperialism and the British West Indies” as “one of the first to literally name ‘­American imperialism’ (as its title identifies) for what it is” (161). Calling her “one of the first” suggests the typical Anglophone Caribbean studies e­ rasure of critiques of U.S. empire from the first half of the twentieth ­century. While Boyce Davies and Jardine argue that Jones and Césaire were unusually ahead of their time, it might make more sense to think of the critique of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean as belonging to an earlier era and as something lost by the passage to national independence after World War II. Jones and Césaire might be better seen as part of an earlier g­ eneration that came of age during the occupation of Haiti (­Césaire was born in 1913, Jones in 1915) and was influenced by ­Comintern thinkers like Briggs and Moore, making them more attuned to U.S. imperialism than the later generation of Fanon (who was born in 1925). The lessons of the occupation of Haiti may help explain why this generation of activists were doubtful of political independence as the solution to international domination and exploitation. Jones supported West Indian federation during the 1950s, while Césaire became an architect of the Francophone islands’ transition from colonies to departments of France. In the process, they followed many of the ABB members who were critical of bourgeois nationalism and explored alternative ways of

68  American Imperialism’s Undead conceiving local sovereignty and self-determination. Richard B. Moore, for example, also became an advocate of federation. Nationalist histories often look suspiciously at the West Indies Federation as a plan hatched by the British to deny true independence to the region, or see West Indian proponents of the plan as pragmatists seeking to use the Federation as a stepping-stone to the full freedom ensured by the nation-state. Indeed, if political independence is seen as the measure of freedom, Moore’s descriptions of federation can seem contradictory. For example, in one 1953 speech, Moore defines federation as “the union of sovereign, independent states” (Turner and Turner 287–88), then describes his vision that “the Caribbean people would enjoy the status of a self-governing Dominion within the British Commonwealth of Nations” (288). It would be easy to see this apparent contradiction as product of an overly cautious approach that can’t quite make the demand for national independence or as evidence that Moore is trying not to scare Great Britain by stating his real demands. But we might also read these contradictions as not only Moore’s, but as the contradictions that define postcoloniality: speaking during the Cold War, Moore may simply be aware that political independence will not be absolute, that without the transformation of international economic institutions, newly formed nations will remain enmeshed in global power structures that constrict and control.17 During this same moment, as Gary Wilder and Yarimar Bonilla describe, the French ­Antilles and Puerto Rico were redefining their relationships with France and the United States, choosing arrangements other than the nation-state. The realities of Haiti’s precarious nationhood would have been fresh in the minds of Jones, Moore, Césaire, and the other political thinkers who had lived through the U.S. occupation and sought to imagine “an anticipated future characterized by something other than the search for sovereignty” ( Bonilla xiv). Moore’s American Committee for West ­Indian Federation expresses deep concern about how “99-year leases” for U.S. naval bases in Cuba and elsewhere render apparently independent nation-states nonsovereign (Turner and Turner 284) even as the group’s demands focus more on poverty, low wages, labor conditions, and civil liberties than on governing structures and the form the state will take. Certainly, this group seeks “freedom for Caribbean peoples” and “self-government and independence for the African, Asian, and other ­colonial and semi-colonial peoples striving to be free” (286 ), but political independence is not imagined to be the guarantor of that freedom. West Indian federation, which became so appealing to internationalists

69  Harlem and Haiti like Moore, Jones, James, and Padmore, came to be seen as a solution to the challenges of navigating decolonization in an imperial era whose dangers were never more visible than in Haiti’s occupation. These kinds of alternative projects make clear that the history of post–World War II decolonization can only be properly understood in light of the multiple influences explored in this chapter: African American, Communist, pan-Caribbean. The occupation of Haiti helps make visible these internationalist aspects of Caribbean anticolonialism that stories of national emergence can often obscure.

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

Caribbean identity was reshaped by interactions with the images and narratives circulated because of the U.S. occupation of Haiti. Chapter 2 discussed how a group of Caribbean migrants in the United States redefined their understandings of coloniality and i­mperialism through analysis of and opposition to the U.S. occupation of Haiti. ­Caribbean people in the United States also renegotiated their identity in terms of race. More than one hundred thousand Caribbean people migrated to the United States between 1900 and 1930. Scholars such as Winston James and Louis Parascandola explain how these immigrants arrived from the Caribbean — where people of African descent made up the majority of the population and the presence of a significant brown middle class meant that race was not understood in binary terms — and suddenly found themselves defined as black, regardless of their shade or previous social positioning ( Parascandola, introduction to “Look” 14; W. James 110). The occupation of Haiti helped shape the forms of transnational blackness available for these Caribbean people. Examining the fiction of Claude McKay and Eric Walrond reveals the complicated routes created by Caribbean disidentification with U.S. discourses about race. Caribbean people coming to the United States brought with them distinct versions of racial identity emphasizing shade and the interplay between race and social class. Michelle Stephens argues, following Louis Chude-Sokei, that these forms of West Indian blackness were “literally unrecognizable” to a U.S. audience and were therefore reshaped in response to U.S. demands. Stephens concludes that “Caribbean immigrants in Harlem during the 1920s were forced to assume African American racial identities as the only recognizable way of being black” (Stephens, “All Look Alike” 57–58). Chude-Sokei, looking at the Bahamian Bert

71  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean Williams’s use of blackface, emphasizes the “appropriat[ ion]” of African Americanness “ ‘in order to construct a mask’ . . . to be recognized in the United States” (qtd. in Stephens, “All Look Alike” 58). José Esteban Muñoz discusses a similar kind of masking, defining as disidentification a “processes of identification” in which “subjects . . . are hailed by more than one minority identity component” (8). For Muñoz, the result of disidentification is the need to “read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject. . . . It is the reworking of those energies that do not elide the ‘harmful’ or contradictory components of identity” (12). This kind of disidentification would have been experienced by West Indians in the United States seeking to forge a black identity. The versions of blackness available for disidentification by West Indians like McKay and Walrond were not only the mask of African Americanness. Discourses about non–African American forms of blackness that circulated in the United States during the 1920s become particularly visible when we expand our frame to include the cultures and identities the United States was encountering through its imperialist adventures.1 Distinct versions of Caribbeanness became recognizable in the United States through travel narratives, fiction, drama, and eventually film inspired by the occupation of Haiti. Scholarship on McKay and Walrond frequently identifies primitivism as one of the primary discourses influencing their writing.2 I want to emphasize the ways the primitivism with which they engaged was shaped by the occupation of Haiti. The first half of the chapter discusses McKay’s novels to show the Jamaican author imagining his own identity not only in relationship to African Americanness, but through a Haitian character. The second half then turns to ­Walrond’s short stories to situate the forms of primitive blackness associated with Haiti that these Caribbean subjects navigated. Once James Weldon Johnson’s articles in the Nation and the 1920 presidential election had placed Haiti at the front of U.S. consciousness, the 1920s saw an explosion of Haiti-related discourse that presented a view of blackness related to but distinct from African Americanness. ­Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones premiered in New York’s Greenwich Village on November 1, 1920, and became the playwright’s first hit, necessitating the move to a larger theater on Broadway. The play juxtaposed its African American protagonist with the superstitious primitivism of a Caribbean island meant to evoke Haiti. In 1924, the former ­marine Arthur J. Burks placed a string of stories about Haiti in the fantasy and horror magazine Weird Tales. Burks quickly became one of

72  American Imperialism’s Undead the most popular pulp writers in the United States. I will explore how Caribbean blackness is represented in his stories in my discussion of Walrond. William Seabrook, the famous adventure-travel writer, went to Haiti and wrote The Magic Island about the religious practices he had witnessed; The Magic Island became the Literary Guild’s monthly book selection in January 1929, and influenced Alejo Carpentier, as I will discuss in chapter 5. Following this popularization of voodoo as a collection of colonial fantasies about Haitian religion, the 1930s saw the rise of zombie movies, beginning in 1932 with White Zombie, which was set in Haiti. Langston Hughes travelled to Haiti in 1931, William Faulkner used Haiti as site of originary trauma in Absalom! Absalom! (1936 ), and Zora Neale H ­ urston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in Haiti. Scholarship examining U.S. representations of Haiti such as Michael Dash’s Haiti and the United States, chapter 2 of Jeff Karem’s The Purloined Islands, and the second half of Mary Renda’s Taking Haiti shows how the island became an object of fascination not only for blacks in Harlem but for people throughout the United States. The fiction of McKay and Walrond demonstrates the ways West Indians fashioned Caribbean identities in the context of these U.S. discourses about Haiti. In McKay’s first two novels, the character that 1920s reviewers and subsequent critics have read as a stand-in for the author, the only major Caribbean character in Home to Harlem and the main character in Banjo, is a Haitian. The occupation and the narratives it inspired form the context in which this Jamaican author imagined his own alter ego as Haitian. Walrond’s short stories, meanwhile, show this Guyanaborn, Barbados- and Panama-raised West Indian finding his literary voice through publications centered on what the stories call voodoo. Examining how McKay and Walrond arrive at Caribbeanness through Haiti shows the impact that U.S.-circulated primitivist discourses about the exotic Caribbean Other had on West Indians themselves.

Claude McKay, West Indianness, and Occupied Haiti In The Practice of Diaspora, Brent Hayes Edwards begins with a series of “questions about the role of outer-national sites even in texts that are putatively the canonical literature of ‘Harlem’ ” (4). His questions include why Berlin is such a pivotal setting for James Weldon Johnson’s The ­Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man or why Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun ends in Paris. Edwards suggests that in asking new questions, readers of Harlem Renaissance texts will arrive at a new understanding of its canon, an understanding that recognizes what he calls the ­décalage —the

73  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean “changing core of difference” or “disarticulation” (14) — at the center of diasporic identity. As much as the Harlem Renaissance may have been about claiming a concrete space within the U.S. nation, its articulations of blackness are at every moment intersected by the international influences, hierarchies, and discontinuities that define diaspora. “Black modern expression” for Edwards “is shaped to a significant degree” by “the ‘necessary misrecognitions’ of diasporic discourse” (6 ), and therefore “the cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation” (7). Diasporic articulation necessarily produces disarticulation: “points of misunderstanding, bad faith, unhappy translation” (14). This kind of décalage is what is lost and gained by Claude McKay when translating his West Indian identity into a U.S. context. In this chapter, I show how McKay’s work reveals décalage through the Haitianness that the process of translation introduces. Few texts are as important to consolidating Harlem as the center of the 1920s New Negro movement as McKay’s Home to Harlem. The novel tells the story of the African American Jake coming back to Harlem after serving in World War I — that formative, radicalizing moment that Chad Williams describes when African Americans who had served their country returned to second-class citizenship within it — and therefore becomes about the challenges of finding and claiming a home for blacks in the United States. The focus on Jake in the first half of Home to Harlem lends support to a reading of the novel as an exploration of the “mask” of African American identity and community on the part of a West ­Indian author. Yet the second part of the novel shifts dramatically to juxtapose Jake and his African Americanness with Ray, the character readers are invited to consider as a double for McKay, a translation of the real author into fictional character. Like McKay, Ray is a Caribbean person among African Americans; he is an intellectual, incisive and ­articulate in his analysis of the black experience in the United States and internationally; he is queer (Maiwald 842); and he is a writer. Reviews from the time of the novel’s publication suggest that McKay’s contemporary audience read Ray as the author. The Oklahoman, for example, writes: “Ray, who is a writer, serves as the author’s mouthpiece in setting forth his views on the relationships, virtues and failings of the great races of mankind, and this character has so much in common with Claude McKay that we are forced to think his role autobiographical.”3 Similarly, the Louisville Journal review states that “in Ray, the educated Haytian Negro, it is impossible not to see the author’s prototype and to feel that he voices his ideas.”4 Scholars continue to read Ray as this

74  American Imperialism’s Undead stand-in. Gary Holcomb calls Ray “the novel’s most autobiographical version of McKay himself” (“Diaspora” 722), while Kotti Sree Ramesh and Kandula Nirupa Rani see Ray as “not only McKay’s spokesperson but also an autobiographical representation” (99). McKay’s biographer, Wayne Cooper, identifies substantial passages of “pure autobiography” in Ray’s reflections and anecdotes (254 –55). In spite of these parallels, there is an obvious and significant difference between McKay and Ray: the author was born in Jamaica, while his character is from Haiti. My goal here is not to read Ray as McKay’s mouthpiece; there is a difference between an author and his creations. Nonetheless, the autobiographical resemblance is undeniable, and the kind of identification with a difference McKay feels toward Ray raises productive questions about the author’s own negotiations with the versions of Caribbeanness available in the United States during this period. Why does McKay, a West Indian who lived in the United States for much of the 1910s and 1920s, when translating his Caribbean identity into the Harlem of the novel, imagine that identity as Haitian? Very little of the criticism about the novel asks why Ray is Haitian, and even the critics who do — John Lowney, Michelle Stephens, Jeff Karem, and Robert Philipson, for example — frame the question ­somewhat differently than I have. These scholars speak to the question of why McKay chooses to use a Haitian character in his novel. Philipson argues that “constructing Ray with a Haitian national identity allowed McKay to educate his American readers about a few heroic episodes of Black history” (151). This reading focuses on Ray’s lesson about the Haitian Revolution. The pivotal scene comes when Jake has just met Ray, whom he initially thinks of as a “monkey-chaser” (134). But after Ray begins to tell Jake about the heroic history of his island, Jake’s mind is suddenly opened to the realities of the black diaspora: Jake sat like an eager boy and learned many facts about Hayti before the train reached Pittsburgh. He learned that the universal spirit of the French Revolution had reached and lifted up the slaves far away in that remote island; that Black Hayti’s independence was more dramatic and picturesque than the United States’ independence. . . . Jake felt like one passing through a dream, vivid in rich, varied colors. It was revelation beautiful in his mind. That brief account of an island of savage black people, who fought for collective liberty and was struggling to create a culture of their own. A romance of the race, just down there by Panama. How strange! Jake was very American in spirit and shared a little of that comfortable American contempt for poor foreigners.

75  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean And as an American Negro he looked askew at foreigners. Africa was jungle, and Africans bush niggers, cannibals. And West Indians were monkey-chasers. But now he felt like a boy who stands with the map of the world in colors before him, and feels wonder at the world. (131, 134)

This scene from Home to Harlem presents Caribbean people pushing the New Negro movement toward an internationalized vision.5 The novel shows the transformation of Jake’s worldview through interactions with the diaspora. The expanding consciousness that comes through his conversation with Ray is mirrored in changes in Jake’s language for articulating the world, as when he begins to use the word “bumbole” after hearing it used by a West Indian woman (130). The lesson offered to this African American character is not only about diasporic diversity and black transnationalism, but also about international imperialism. After opening Jake’s eyes to the greatness of Haitian history, Ray tells him: “Maybe you don’t know that during the World War Uncle Sam grabbed Hayti” (138). The novel thus suggests that ­African Americans are in need of reminders of their connectedness to other black people throughout the world as well as the forms of domination and exploitation that nationalist pride, or just comfortable complacency, make possible.6 McKay uses his West Indian character to serve as this haunting reminder of the hierarchies and cleavages within the black community that Edwards foregrounds as the practice of diaspora, and that become especially visible when blackness is placed into international ­context. W. A. Domingo’s essay “Gift of the Black Tropics,” included in Alain Locke’s 1925 New Negro collection, makes a similar argument about the role of West Indians in the internationalization of the New Negro movement: “Just as the West Indian has been a sort of leaven in the American loaf, so the American Negro is beginning to play a reciprocal role in the life of the foreign Negro communities, as for instance, the recent championing of the rights of Haiti and Liberia and the Virgin Islands, as well as the growing resentment of the treatment of natives in the African colonial dependencies” (348). Domingo points to the impact of West Indian migrants on the African Americans with whom they interacted: the internationalization of the black community in the United States and a corresponding expansion of black concerns outward from an insular U.S. focus. Domingo names opposition to the occupation of Haiti specifically and U.S. imperialism in general as part of what the West Indian community in the United States has taught its neighbors, though as my second chapter describes in tracing the critique of the occupation through

76  American Imperialism’s Undead the interactions between James Weldon Johnson and Cyril Briggs, these influences are more complex than Domingo’s formulation suggests. Domingo also focuses on how West Indians themselves were impacted by this migration. Domingo’s essay may be the first to popularize the argument that Caribbean people achieved a consciousness about inequality and persecution based on a biologically defined idea of race when confronted with U.S. white supremacy. Domingo writes that “Forming a racial majority in their own countries and not being accustomed to discrimination expressly felt as racial, [ West Indians] rebel against the ‘color line’ as they find it in America. . . . For this reason the West Indian has thrown himself so wholeheartedly into the fight against lynching, discrimination and other disabilities from which Negroes in America suffer” (347). While West Indians therefore felt pressure to conform to a binary conception of race in which they would be Negro, the way McKay imagines black identity in Home to Harlem shows that African Americanness was not the only way that identity could be conceived. Philipson, Lowney, Karem, and Stephens are no doubt right in arguing for Ray’s pedagogical role in the novel and how he allows McKay to include lessons about the transnationalism of blackness and the complicity of U.S. citizens in imperialist adventures. But the author’s choice to disidentify with this Haitian character speaks to a more personal issue. The presence of Ray in Home to Harlem — and again in McKay’s next novel, Banjo — suggests a specific décalage in McKay’s own relationship to blackness, this Jamaican writer who has chosen a Haitian character as his authorial shadow. Ray contrasts his Caribbean pride with how “he used to feel condescendingly sorry for those poor African natives; superior to ten millions of suppressed Yankee ‘coons’ ” (McKay, Home 155). Chude-Sokei contextualizes this passage from Home to Harlem in terms of “McKay’s own admission [ in My Green Hills of Jamaica] that the first African Americans he had ever seen while still in Jamaica were (or seemed to be) ‘coons’ ” (Last “Darky” 239). Yet also notable here is Ray’s use of the past tense to indicate that his condescending sense of superiority was premised on “how proud he was to be the son of a free nation” (McKay, Home 155). Ray can understand Jake’s suppressed status better now that the sense of Caribbean exceptionalism created by Haiti’s heroic historical accomplishments has been challenged: “Now he was just one of them,” Ray realizes (155). A Jamaican like McKay might turn to Haiti as a source of pride in Caribbean independence, even as Haiti under imperial rule makes possible a new vision of solidarity with its colonized neighbors.

77  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean Lowney, who places McKay’s choice to insert Ray into Jake’s story within the context of the U.S. occupation, suggests that demographic realities make Ray’s inclusion all the more overtly pedagogical: “While Haitians comprised a small minority of Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, McKay’s exposure of the devastating impact of the American invasion of Haiti underscored the necessity for a renewed counterhegemonic pan-Africanist solidarity” (415). For Lowney, the reasons for Ray’s inclusion cannot be verisimilitude and thus must speak to an intention on the author’s part to bring in this specific lesson. Again, as a response to the question Lowney is asking — why include a Haitian character in a novel about Harlem? — this answer is insightful. Yet it still does not address the question of why McKay makes his own narrative double a Haitian. Answering this question requires contextualization of the kind Lowney points toward, but in terms not only of demographic reality but also of discursive specters. As I argued throughout chapter 2 and will argue again here, while Haitians may not have been large in number in the New York of the 1920s where McKay sets his novel, Haiti and Haitian culture took on an exaggerated importance in the United States during the occupation. The contours of precisely how a Jamaican might come to imagine Caribbean identity as Haitian become more visible when comparing the way Ray is figured in Home to Harlem to the character when he reappears in Banjo. If in the United States, the West Indian author disidentifies with Haitianness, Banjo suggests the uniqueness of that context. In Banjo, Ray is even more central to the plot of the novel. But he is not as Haitian as he had been in Home to Harlem. Edwards describes the difference between Ray’s role in the two novels this way: “In Home to Harlem, Ray adopts the position of exile . . . in Banjo, Ray’s sense of nationalist privilege has vanished” (205– 6 ). In Edwards’s reading, Ray embodies the ideology of vagabondage in Banjo, an internationalism more fully disconnected from national belonging and nostalgia than the exile identity in Home. Intriguingly, something else happens to McKay’s West Indian alter ego in the translation from Harlem to Marseilles: he goes from being Haitian to Jamaican. This is a suggestive switch in a novel that, as Bridget Chalk shows, is so invested in exploring the “logic of the passport system” that seeks to codify national belonging to a single site (368). There are only two times in Banjo in which Ray is identified as Haitian, and in neither case does this happen because Ray asserts the identity; in both cases he is named by others as belonging to Haiti. The first time, when his friends are talking about having eaten kuyah, one asks, “You eat it in Haiti,

78  American Imperialism’s Undead too?”; Ray replies, “Sure. And I ate it in Jamaica. I was there for two years when I was a kid. We had a little revolution and the President that was ousted was exiled to Jamaica with his entourage. My father was among them and that was how I happened to go” (McKay, Banjo 138). Ray asserts his belonging to the diasporic group not through his Haitianness but through the time he has spent in Jamaica. If in the United States, McKay imagines Ray’s Caribbeanness in a context overdetermined by images produced by Haiti’s occupation, setting Banjo outside the United States allows the author to create a West Indian identity that is not necessarily Haitian. McKay’s career offers no definite answer as to a moment when Haiti’s occupation became important to him. We can speculate that the time McKay spent as a member of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) in 1921 and 1922, just as the group was working through Johnson’s critique of the occupation and merging with the Communist Party, likely contributed to McKay’s own interest in Haiti.7 McKay came to the United States in 1912, and ended up living in Harlem beginning in 1914. He was in London from late 1919 to early 1921, meaning that he was not in the United States during the period when the Johnson’s articles appeared in the Nation and Crisis. Johnson’s articles and the occupation in general seemed to have little influence on the groups with which McKay worked in England. The Independent Labour Party ( ILP), the Socialist party with which C. L. R. James and George Padmore collaborated during the 1930s, exhibited little interest in the occupation during the time McKay was in London. McKay helped edit Workers’ Dreadnought, the news­ paper run by the suffragette and Socialist Sylvia Pankhurst, who would later become an outspoken opponent of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and would move to Addis Ababa after World War II. Workers’ Dreadnought contained significant international coverage of imperialism, but primarily about the British empire; while McKay worked on the paper, the focus was especially India and Egypt. U.S. imperialism was sometimes mentioned, particularly with regard to Wall Street meddling in Mexico, but Workers’ Dreadnought was not concerned with Haiti, suggesting the low profile of the occupation in England during the early 1920s. Upon returning to the United States in 1921, McKay joined the ABB and worked for the Greenwich Village–based Liberator, eventually serving as editor. The white Socialists involved in that publication (not to be confused with the Harlem-based Communist newspaper of the same name that appeared at the end of the 1920s) showed little interest in Haiti before McKay’s arrival. The only article on the ­occupation — “­Americanizing

79  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean Haiti” by Martha Foley — appeared in March 1922, while the regular editor was in Europe and McKay presumably had more editorial responsibilities. McKay remained in the United States until he traveled to the Soviet Union at the end of 1922 to attend the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, then traveled throughout Europe before settling in France to write Home to Harlem and Banjo (which he completed in Barcelona). As my second chapter discussed, the Communists and black r­ adicals who were one of McKay’s most important communities during the 1920s formed much of their understanding of the Caribbean and African dias­ pora through analysis of the occupation of Haiti. As one example, I want to return to James Ford’s article “The Negro and the Struggle against ­Imperialism” from the January 1930 issue of the Communist. Ford was at the time the head of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro ­Workers that Padmore would take over the next year. Ford’s a­ rticle begins with a survey of the conditions in different parts of the black diaspora, ­divided into sections that address each geographical area. The section titled “West Indies” is completely devoted to describing the situation in Haiti. The section reads in its entirety: The West Indies are typically an agricultural country. It is the biggest market place for the export of goods from America than any of the Latin and Central American countries. The whole of Haiti is under the iron hand of American marines. The Independence of Haiti, gained by the overthrow of the French domination during the Haitian Revolution, has been completely nullified by American marines; the people are garroted and ruled, in addition to the ­marines, by a fake illegal president who is nothing but a tool of American imperialism. The country, in spite of its natural richness, is in poverty, the like of which has never been seen since the days before the Haitian Revolution. (28)

The rest of the essay moves away from sections based on geography to address specific issues facing black people throughout the world. The Caribbean comes up again in the section “Forced Labour”: “Here [ in the West Indies] we find the same kind of ‘community’ improvement resorted to: natives at the point of U.S. marine bayonets are forced to build roads without compensation; natives are conscripted for work on the Cuban sugar plantations” (29). The focus here is on the corvée in Haiti and what Padmore would call the “black ivory trade” bringing Haitians migrant labor to Cuba. For the African American Ford, in other words, the West Indies basically means Haiti, the Caribbean locale that the occupation had made most visible in U.S. public discourse. The black Communists

80  American Imperialism’s Undead with whom McKay worked were by no means the only Americans to share this understanding of the Caribbean. McKay also worked closely with white American Socialists and Communists — according to Makalani, McKay introduced white recruiters from the Communist Party to members of the ABB and thus helped f­acilitate their alliance with organized Communism (84) — and these white leftists could be even more reductionist in how they understood the Caribbean. Max Eastman, a close friend of McKay’s throughout the 1920s, wrote in the “Biographical Note” preceding the Selected Poems of Claude McKay that “in feature and expression he strangely resembled a portrait of King Christopher of Haiti that was published many years ago in the London Illustrated News” (7). That Eastman could only see his Jamaicaborn friend as resembling the Haitian leader shows how thoroughly U.S. ­visions of the Caribbean were translated through the discourse surrounding Haiti. Henri Christophe in particular became one of the most popular emblems of Haitian history and identity circulating in the United States during the occupation. While Briggs in his earliest writings against the occupation in 1915 had mentioned T ­ oussaint and D ­ essalines as representatives of a h ­ eroic history of liberation, James Weldon J­ ohnson’s 1920 article in Crisis about visiting the ruins of Christophe’s citadel established the king as an alternative genealogy. Renda shows how Johnson positions Christophe as a “founding father” whose citadel “stood as a monument to a proud Haitian paternity” and therefore challenged the U.S. paternalist rhetoric that positioned Haiti as orphan (193). Writing by white Americans during the 1920s also preferred to focus on Christophe, but as an example of the pathology of black leadership. O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones recycles the story of Christophe’s suicide by silver bullet to tell a story about the fall of a tyrannical black dictator. In my discussion of Walrond later in this chapter, I will show how the pulp fiction writer Arthur Burks also uses Christophe’s story to portray the dangerous exotic superstition of the Caribbean. These fictional works focused on Haiti as land of voodoo and the outré. John ­Vandercook’s biography of Christophe, Black Majesty, presented a less sensational version of the king but one that became no less popular among U.S. readers.8 Vandercook’s biography in fact was released within weeks of Home to Harlem, and newspapers frequently ran reviews comparing the two books.9 The reception of McKay’s novel thus became explicitly bound up in responses to the occupation of Haiti. Letters between McKay and his literary agent, William Aspenwall Bradley, show how

81  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean aware McKay was of Vandercook’s alternative version of the Caribbean. Bradley writes: “The attacks of a portion of the Negro press [on Home to Harlem] were to be foreseen but cannot do you any real harm. Of course they would prefer Black Majesty which is, as you say, grandiloquently romantic — about as false a portrayal, I fancy, of Roi Christophe, as it would be possible to make, though it is a picturesque little book and not too badly written, with all the charm of novelty as to subject, etc.”10 If Ford’s article shows an African American reading Haiti as a stand-in for the entire Caribbean, Eastman’s view of McKay as Christophe points to just how much the lens formed by responses to the occupation shaped how Caribbean people in the United States were viewed. Reviews of McKay’s work make especially clear how U.S. society sought to interpellate him into the primitivist discourse surrounding Haiti. Home to Harlem in particular was extremely popular — it is frequently described as the United States’ first best-selling novel by a black author — and widely reviewed. Reviewers in the United States emphasized the exoticism of McKay’s novel. For example, the Houston PostDispatch writes: “The dark heart of Harlem throbs through passionate pages like the primitive beat of an African tom-tom. . . . It is civilized — yet savage, and reading McKay’s volume one sees the veneer swept away. . . . It is quite fitting that Claude McKay, who was born in a little thatched house of two rooms in Jamaica and whose family lived in Madagascar when they were still free, should be the author.”11 Alongside the emphasis on Harlem’s primitivism, McKay’s Caribbean background is constructed as virtually African.12 By invoking this Africanness, reviews imply what T. S. Matthews in the New Republic stated, that this was a novel of the “ ‘jungle nigger’ in the jungle city” (qtd. in Tillery 89). Home to Harlem frequently engages with these readings of black savagery. At the beginning of a fight between two women “who had decided to fight with their clothes off,” it is first perceived as “an old custom, perhaps a survival of African tribalism . . . imported from some remote West Indian hillside into a New York back yard” (McKay, Home 308– 9). By the end of the scene, however, the intelligence of this mode of fighting is explained: it “saves you’ clothes being ripped into ribbons” (310). The kind of low behavior — frequently associated in the novel with West Indian women — that led W. E. B. Du Bois to write that “reading [Home to Harlem] makes me want to take a bath” (“Browsing” 202) also allows McKay to complicate stereotypes of primitivism. Jake, too, when forced into a fight, contextualizes his response not as proof of black savagery

82  American Imperialism’s Undead but as socially produced: he resents how “Brest, London, and his America” have turned him into someone “moved by the same savage emotions as those vile, vicious, villainous white men” (McKay, Home 328). Ray’s Haitianness in particular confounds reviewers and their understanding of the Caribbean. The review in the Buffalo Courier describes Ray this way: “Contrasted with [ Jake] is the scholarly Ray, waiter on a Pullman dining-car, where Jake, wearying of his post-war job of roustabout on the West Street docks, has shipped as second cook. Ray, descendant of a proud rebel family in Hayti, has picked up culture as well as discontent in the North, and it is easy to identify him with the a­ uthor himself in his mental gropings and his disgust with the hoi-polloi of negro life in the States.”13 This review first distinguishes Haiti from “the North” as the place where Ray has picked up culture and been radicalized; in rendering Haiti not North and therefore part of a broadly defined South, the island is othered yet domesticated, understood through the same lens as the legacy of slavery in U.S. history. But the last part of the passage contrasts Ray with African Americans from “the States”; Haiti is and isn’t to be understood within the U.S. framework, the occupation making the island simultaneously foreign and domestic. For these reviewers, Ray can be a problem because of his inability to fit into their idea of blackness. The New York Times review, otherwise glowing, finds Ray unconvincing: “It is when McKay begins talking about Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence that he is vague, that he seems to be glossing over. . . . Ray has aspirations to create art in words; but why, how and to what purpose Ray was startled by the aspect of Joyce’s words is not explained by McKay. The talent of this negro writer is not for analysis or ideas, not for the essay; it is for dramatic depiction of rude, boisterous and Nietzschean lives. And it is not a strained, half-hearted or skimpy talent, but one that is eminently worth more play than one novel.”14 These reviews suggest the multiple reasons that Ray’s identity — as an artist, an intellectual, a melancholy exile, a critic of masculinism; in a word, as a modern — cannot be fully assimilated to dominant versions of blackness in the United States 15 I want to end my discussion of McKay by noting how much more exoticizing the reviews become when McKay’s material is Caribbean, to set the stage for the kind of responses Walrond’s representations of the Caribbean also elicited. McKay’s third novel, Banana Bottom, set in J­ amaica, features a very minor subplot about obeah, barely even a subplot, in fact, but really just a few mentions that position Caribbean religious practice as folklore and compare the obeahman’s manipulation of belief for

83  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean profit with the institutionalization of Christianity. This character appears twice — briefly — in the more than three-hundred-page novel. Kentucky’s Lexington Leader titles its review “McKay’s Novel Reveals Wierd [sic] West Indian Rites.” In fact, only the last paragraph of the review has anything to do with the headline: “Especially interesting are McKay’s descriptions of the native witchcraft as practiced by the Obeahman: the tea-meetings and religious gatherings of the natives, and the rich, exotic customs of the island.”16 The review in the Milwaukee Journal also mentions how “McKay draws a careful picture of his people and . . . their dark cultists, the Obeahmen. . . . The novel is more interesting as a source book than as a narrative, due perhaps to the fact that the major theme is only a black girl’s growth in wisdom when something more colorful was expected from the scene and characters.”17 The implication here is that the story of an Afro-Caribbean girl is naturally uninteresting, unless “dark cultists” can somehow be included. The kind of stories that U.S. readers expected to come from the Caribbean was clearly informed by what they had heard about Haiti, and writers like McKay and Walrond produced their work — and their own identities — in response to these expectations. In making his primary Caribbean character a modern intellectual and in seeking to carve out that space for himself, McKay shortcircuits the primitivist expectations created by dominant narratives about the region.

Eric Walrond and the Discourse of the Exotic On April 7, 1923, Joseph Mirault sent a letter to the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s newspaper, the Negro World. Published under the headline “Voodooism in Haiti,” Mirault’s letter objected to the representation of Haiti in African American newspapers. As he puts it, stories about Haiti so frequently return to representations of bizarre religious practices “because, as you know, and as everybody knows, the American Occupation to justify its presence in Haiti has to carry out that kind of propaganda to make the world believe that we are still in a state of savagery” (10). Mirault, the New York correspondent for the Union Patriotique’s Le Courier Haïtien ( Plummer, “Afro-American” 138), thus identifies the role of ideology in imperialism, foreshadowing Edward Said’s Orientalism or Mary Renda’s theorization of discourse as a “military technology” (15). Mirault was undoubtedly correct in his assessment; as the historian Kate Ramsey shows, marines testifying at U.S. Senate hearings in 1921 included among the justifications for military intervention, the fact that “voudauxism was rampant” in Haiti (130).

84  American Imperialism’s Undead Eric Walrond’s first published short story set in the Caribbean, “I Am an American,” appears in the same issue of the Negro World as Mirault’s letter. Just as McKay turned to a Haitian character to translate himself into the U.S. setting of Home to Harlem, Walrond’s earliest fiction shows the West Indian finding his voice by entering into and contesting the discourse inspired by U.S. imperialism. The presence of U.S. imperialist discourse in Walrond’s work appears most dramatically in the appropriation of images associated with Haiti in “The Voodoo’s Revenge,” the story that helped established his reputation by winning third prize in the 1925 Opportunity literary contest.18 Whereas the majority of Walrond’s stories before his 1926 collection Tropic Death were set in the United States, his first attempts to write fiction about the Caribbean reveal a writer struggling against an exoticizing discourse. An intertextual reading of these early stories will show the contours of the U.S. discourse about the Caribbean, defined especially in U.S. responses to the occupation of Haiti, that Walrond entered and contested. While McKay is clearly connected to Haiti through his use of Ray in Home to Harlem and Banjo, the influence of the occupation on Walrond is less obvious. None of Walrond’s stories are set in Haiti, nor do they feature recognizably Haitian characters. Walrond did not publish fiction or nonfiction about Haitian history to nearly the extent that some of his peers did. Yet Walrond, who spent most of the 1920s in New York and established himself as a writer during that period, was as embedded as McKay or the members of the African Blood Brotherhood in the networks created by fascination with Haiti and opposition to occupation. In particular, Walrond’s writings reflect his engagement with discourses of primitivism and exoticism profoundly shaped by the occupation. Examining Walrond in light of U.S. imperialist discourse shows how the occupation impacted writers who were not explicitly writing about Haiti. Walrond’s relationship to U.S. discourses about the Caribbean can be seen in his participation in Opportunity, the National Urban League’s journal. Before coming to the United States, Walrond was born in what is today Guyana, and raised in Barbados and Panama. He arrived in New York in 1918 and lived there for ten years. Before becoming business manager of Opportunity in 1925, Walrond had acquired extensive and diverse journalistic experience: he had reported for the Star & Herald in Panama, worked for the Garveyite Negro World, and written about ­African American life in periodicals like the New Republic and Vanity Fair. Walrond’s increased role in the editorial direction of Opportunity led to an internationalization of its content. Launched in 1923, the

85  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean j­ournal’s earliest issues focus on black experience in the United States, the only exception being occasional features on African art. Walrond’s story “A Cholo Romance” in the June 1924 issue is one of the first inclusions of the Caribbean in the journal. In October 1924, W. A. Domingo contributes an article about the implications of changes in U.S. immigration policy for West Indians, and the November issue follows up with an editorial “Our Antillean Neighbors” on the same subject. Up to this point, then, the journal is interested only in West Indians in the United States. Beginning in April 1925, with the editorial “Our Caribbean Possessions” about the Virgin Islands, the sense of U.S.-Caribbean relations as structured only around immigration — that the concern is Caribbean people coming to the United States, not U.S. military and economic representatives going to the Caribbean — changes. This article appeared just as Walrond “was instrumental in obtaining” substantial financial contributions by Casper Holstein ( Parascandola, introduction to Winds 24), an immigrant from the Virgin Islands with an active interest in his homeland whose success as a numbers banker allowed him to support the journal including sponsoring the Opportunity literary contest. In the July 1925 issue, Walrond’s third-prize story, “The Voodoo’s Revenge,” appeared, along with the journal’s first article about the occupation of Haiti. By 1926, Walrond was actively shaping the editorial vision, assisting with a special Caribbean issue in November that included Domingo’s criticism of U.S. brutality in Puerto Rico and Haiti, an article by Holstein on the Virgin Islands, and a review of Blair Niles’s primitivist Black Haiti: A Biography of Africa’s Eldest Daughter. Opportunity’s more transnational vision of black experience thus develops alongside a growing engagement with U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean. Walrond published the landmark short-story collection Tropic Death in 1926, which Sterling Brown places alongside Jean Toomer’s Cane as “the brilliant high marks in fiction” of the period (qtd. in Davis, “There” 80). Following the success of Tropic Death, Walrond won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 that allowed him to travel throughout the Caribbean. His application for the Guggenheim had identified his goal as writing fiction about the Caribbean that incorporated “a considerable amount of legends, folk tales, peasant songs, and voodoo myths abounding in the region” (qtd. in Ramchand, “Writer” 32); one of his recommendation letters came from the sensationalizing chronicler of Haitian religion ­William Seabrook ( Davis, Eric Walrond 217), and he spent three months of the fellowship period in Haiti. Walrond considered writing two nonfiction books about Haiti, including one on the occupation ( Parascandola,

86  American Imperialism’s Undead introduction to Winds 31; Davis, Eric Walrond 226 –28). After traveling in the Caribbean, Walrond moved to Paris and eventually London, where he worked with Marcus Garvey on the newspaper Black Man. Even into the 1940s in England, his journalism reflects the early shaping influence of U.S. imperialism, as in the article “The Men of Cibao” in which Walrond wonders if “the peasant masses of Indo-China and Indonesia” will replicate the success of the “guerrilla peasantry” of Hispaniola who made the occupations of the Dominican Republic and Haiti a campaign of “costly futility” (54). Walrond’s fiction consistently explores the ambiguities surrounding the supernatural, in the process engaging with primitivism as an exoticizing discourse. Robert Bone picks up on the references Walrond makes in the 1923 essay “El Africano” to a list of writers who Bone reads as ­Walrond’s “composite portrait of the ideal literary man” (186 ). The occasion for this essay, which Bone doesn’t mention, is an exhibition of paintings by the African American artist Henry Tanner at the New York Public Library’s 135th Street branch; the subjects of these paintings include Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, and Toussaint Louverture. Bone focuses instead on the writers Walrond mentions in the article: Balzac, Pierre Loti, Lafcadio Hearn, Joseph Conrad, and Guy de Maupassant. Of these, Bone calls Loti and Hearn “the writers who supplied [ Walrond ] with an animating myth” (186 ). Bone describes Loti and Hearn as “late Romantic[s]”: Loti, a French naval officer whose “career took him to every corner of the French empire,” wrote novels “utilizing as their settings the exotic lands that he had seen” while Hearn, “in imitation of Loti, . . . abandoned his American materials in order to exploit the exotic cultures of the French Antilles and Japan” (188–89). The primitivism of these writers, according to Bone, “provided Walrond with the unifying concept for a book of Gothic tales” (193). Bone points the way to an intertextual reading of Walrond’s work. He makes the case for Hearn’s (and by extension, Loti’s) influence on Walrond by noting that “something of a Hearn revival was in progress during Walrond’s apprentice years,” that “from 1915 onward, a number of evaluative essays [on Hearn] had appeared” followed by republication of Hearn’s books from 1922 to 1924 (186 ). Why, one might wonder, the sudden interest starting in 1915 in Hearn’s writings from the 1870s and 1880s? Hearn’s best-known book was Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), and he also wrote the novel Youma: The Story of a West Indian Slave (1890), set in Martinique during the period in which the Haitian Revolution led to the abolition of slavery throughout the French

87  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean islands. One of the other publications by Hearn to be reprinted in this period, Gombo Zhèbes: Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs (1885), collected sayings from New Orleans and Martinique (two of the places Hearn lived for significant periods) as well as Guadeloupe, Mauritius, French Guyana, and Haiti. Hearn wrote about the supernatural — ghosts, witchcraft, and what he called voudoo — in these locales. The revived interest that began in 1915 for this exoticizing documenter of the French West Indies occurred in precisely the same years that U.S. military operations in Haiti trained public attention on that region. If Walrond’s engagement with Hearn was therefore an indirect consequence of the occupation, an essay by Parascandola, Bone, and Wade points to another source of Walrond’s encounter with this primitivist tradition: his relationship with Edna Worthley Underwood, who “reinforced [ Walrond’s] own romantic tendencies, introducing him to such writers as Pierre Loti and Lafcadio Hearn” ( Parascandola et al. 157). Underwood, born in Maine, raised in Kansas, and an accomplished poet, novelist, and translator, helped Walrond break into the New York literary scene, connecting him to editors at the New Republic and Forbes Magazine and serving as one of the judges (another was James Weldon Johnson) for Opportunity’s 1925 literary contest that recognized ­Walrond’s story “The Voodoo’s Revenge” (154 –55). Underwood encouraged Walrond to write “of his life in the context of the tropics” (156 ), recommending, “Go back to your people — your race — in the tropics and be one of them” (155). Parascandola, Bone, and Wade suggest that Underwood’s investment in Walrond’s career was motivated by self-interest, since she had just written a novel about Pushkin that she expected Walrond to promote in the black press. Her attention to Walrond should also be contextualized as part of her broader interest in the region, including her publication of The Poets of Haiti, 1782–1934 (1934), which features poetry in translation by more than three dozen Haitians, including Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Oswald Durand, and former president Louis Borno. She saw in black writing “the heart of Africa . . . always rich in song, rich in emotion, and that means energy, a creative principle: all fiery gifts of the sun, and now for centuries reinforced with toil, suffering, deprivation — emotion” (qtd. in Wade 15). The Hearn revival and Underwood’s desire for a West Indian protégé are equally inseparable from the larger U.S. fascination during the 1920s with their most exotic imperial possession. “The Voodoo’s Revenge” was the story that helped make Walrond’s name as a fiction writer, earning him recognition in the Opportunity

88  American Imperialism’s Undead literary contest where Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Spunk” was awarded second prize and Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues” won in the poetry category. It is from the earliest group of Walrond’s stories set in Panama, along with “The Godless City,” “A Cholo Romance,” “The Silver King” and “The Stolen Necklace” from 1924. Up to that point, Walrond’s writing had been almost entirely set in the United States, with the exception of the Cuban setting of the 1923 story “I Am an American.”19 “The Voodoo’s Revenge,” which Underwood supported for the Opportunity prize, shows Walrond engaging with precisely how the U.S. imaginary conceived of the Caribbean.20 “The Voodoo’s Revenge” explores the culture of the “French ­Creoles” (Walrond, Winds 94) in Panama, including snippets of the “voodoo melody” of these “silent old witch-worshipping seamen” (95). The story ­focuses especially on “one of these patois men” (96 ), Nestor Villaine, who “live[d ] as an obeah man” on the outskirts of Aspinwall (what is today Colón). Villaine has withdrawn from society after serving sixty days in prison for being caught fighting in the street. “Up in the hills” (96 ), among the French Creole–speaking community, Villaine plots revenge against the politician who has sentenced him. To fulfill his plan, Villaine contacts Sambola, the servant of Mr. Newbold, an associate of the politician who is now governor. Villaine provides Sambola with poison to give to the governor, who is to be a guest at Mr. Newbold’s house. The plan works, and the governor is killed. The story ends with this mysterious description: No one ever got to the bottom of it. Not even the enterprising reports of the fictional press — not one of them ever thought of linking the governor’s death with the finding a few days later of a Negro’s shark bitten body fished up out of the black lagoon. . . . Yet Sambola, as meek as before, continued to serve liquers on Friday evenings to the members of Mr. Newbold’s Chess Club. Only sometimes a strange, smoky gleam would creep into his eyes. . . . There were those who couldn’t help but compare it with that cat-like light they had often seen in the eyes of the old grouchy trader, Nestor Villaine. As a matter of fact, folk ofttimes, for no reason that they could explain, referred to Sambola as Nestor Villaine. (103)

Critics have not devoted significant attention to this story: Bone categorizes it as part of Walrond’s “apprentice fiction” and Parascandola follows this judgment by placing it in the section “Apprentice Work” in the Walrond reader he edits. Perhaps because of this suggestion that it does not represent Walrond’s fully developed aesthetic — even though “The

89  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean Voodoo’s Revenge” was published in the same year as two of the stories collected in Tropic Death — little has been written about the story.21 How to read this ending to the story poses a particular challenge. Bone, in one of the few published analyses of “The Voodoo’s Revenge,” treats the story in six sentences, summarizing the climax: “[ Villaine] hires a young St. Lucian to kill the Governor by poisoning. The youth is then disposed of in order to conceal the crime” (185). It is possible that this is what has happened: that Villaine has disposed of Sambola, taken his place, and that the employer is oblivious that his servant is not the same person as before. But the story leaves open the possibility of a reading that understands what has happened as supernatural: that Villaine has actually occupied the body of Sambola, and that the corpse that has been found is the body Villaine had been in and has now discarded. In taking the theme of stolen identity through disguise and physical transformation and placing it into this exotic Caribbean context, “The Voodoo’s Revenge” evokes the discourse surrounding the U.S. occupation of Haiti. U.S. audiences were fascinated with the Caribbean as a place where lines between good and evil, logic and the supernatural, white and black, self and Other potentially became blurred. The story of the murder of the Caco leader Charlemagne Péralte was one of the most notable appropriations by U.S. dominant discourse of the blurring of these oppositions. Péralte had led the largest and most organized armed opposition to the occupation and “at one point . . . organized a provisional government in the north” of Haiti “and vowed to drive the Americans into the sea with his several thousand troops” (Schmidt 102). He was killed in 1919 by “two marines, disguised as blacks who sneaked into his camp at night and shot him” (102). The marines were lauded as heroes in the United States, receiving Congressional Medals of Honor, and the story of how they accomplished their mission by passing for Haitians captivated the U.S. public. The occupation’s success, this incident suggested, depended on the ability of U.S. Marines to become Haitian, both in the sense of the legal fiction concocted by the United States to put its own military men in charge of a supposedly Haitian gendarmerie but also, and more dangerously, for a white supremacist sense of racial separation, in the sense of U.S. representatives in Haiti learning to think and act like the population they were called upon to rule.22 One of the more sensationalized versions of Péralte’s assassination that illustrates these tensions is the short story “Voodoo” by Arthur J. Burks. Starting in 1924, Burks placed a string of stories about Haiti in the fantasy and horror magazine Weird Tales. Burks, a marine who had served in

90  American Imperialism’s Undead Haiti, became an immensely popular writer, his stories selling so well that by 1928, he was able to retire from the Marine Corps and devote himself to writing full-time.23 “Voodoo,” published in Weird Tales in December 1924, describes the young marine Rodney Davis, who, after learning of his best friend’s death at the hands of the Cacos, volunteers to go after their leader. To accomplish his mission, Davis spends six months learning “Haitian patois” (121), then “grimy from studied failure to bathe, every inch of his skin dyed ebony, lips thickened with injections of paraffin” (122), he sets off for the rebels’ camp. He arrives at a devilish ceremony where a “priestess of the serpent” with “the face of a beast” writhes and undulates, “express[ ing ] the lowest meaning of sensuality” (123). After she has torn off her clothes and “f[allen] to the ground at last, as if taken suddenly with epilepsy” (123), the Caco leader appears to lead the frenzied mass of “human beasts” (122) in the ritual sacrifice of “a nude girl of sixteen or so, black as midnight, so stupefied with some sort of drug that she knew not whither she went nor cared” (124). After watching the girl have her throat slit, the black-faced marine “came to his feet with a leap that carried him atop the monster, this beast in human guise that murdered children; who had children by whatsoever woman he desired and attended none of them; who had even offered some of these children, on occasion, as sacrifices to the serpent. The devotees were too far gone in their beastliness to notice what took place” (125). The story ends with “Davis report[ ing ] back to his commanding officer, who would have had him thrown out of the office as a dirty nigger, had the C.O. not heard English words on the black man’s lips” (125). The story thus concludes with the leader of the Cacos disposed of and justice served. This ending reveals the Caco leader was also a “distinguished senator” (125) leading a double life as a respectable citizen; this revelation unveils the atavism at the heart of Caribbean culture, typical of stories about the occupation ranging from Burks’s to the better-known ones by Paul Morand that I discuss in chapter 5 and that Walrond would criticize in his nonfiction.24 The plot of “Voodoo” — of injustice, plotting, disguise, and revenge — sets out precisely the trajectory that Walrond’s “The Voodoo’s Revenge” would follow. I have no evidence that Walrond read Burks’s story, published the year before his own. Lest we think of Burks’s brand of pulp fiction as below the stylized literary work of Walrond, it is worth noting that Walrond had in 1924 placed two stories in a similar pulp journal, Argosy All-Story Weekly, which published the Tarzan-author Edgar Rice ­Burroughs ( Parascandola et. al. 153; Davis, Eric Walrond 83). ­Walrond even alludes to this lowbrow literary tradition in “The Voodoo’s ­Revenge,”

91  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean when Mr. Newbold approves of Sambola’s obedience, thinking “he never smoked or whistled or stayed out late at nights or read ‘Old Sleuth,’ ‘Dick Turpin,’ or ‘Dead Wood Dick’ ” (101). Bone mentions these references in a footnote, citing them as evidence that “during adolescence [ Walrond ] was an avid reader of Victorian boys’ fiction” (173).25 While the stories mentioned are from the nineteenth century, calling them Victorian obscures how U.S.-centric these references are: Old Sleuth was a detective created by the Brooklynite Harlan Halsey and popular in dime novels from the 1880s and 1890s; Dick Turpin, an English outlaw from the eighteenth century, was also popularized in U.S. dime novels in the late nineteenth century; Deadwood Dick appeared in dime novels about the U.S. West published between 1877 and 1897.26 Bone reads the references as evidence of the sources of the “Gothic mold” in which Walrond casts his story; we might also interpret these clues as pointing toward the discourse about nonwhites that the U.S. pulp fiction tradition promoted during the nineteenth century and that Burks would directly tie to Haiti during the 1920s.27 The discourse about the Caribbean that came in response to the occupation of Haiti and that Burks’s “Voodoo” helps establish is an exotic othering that translates the Caribbean into an irrational, overly sexualized eruption into the U.S.-led modernity of global capitalism’s instrumental reason. Occupation forces frequently conflated those they identified as voodoo practitioners with the Caco resistance they were seeking to eradicate. Burks’s story ends by showing that even apparently respectable Haitians turn out to be atavistic at heart: the senator is secretly a voodoo priest and as such a primary threat to the rationalized society the United States seeks to impose on the island. While Bone reads Walrond’s fiction as replicating this discourse — “express[ ing ] the primitive and atavistic features of his heritage” (173) — the details of “The Voodoo’s Revenge” suggest that it seeks to complicate the oppositions that Bone depends on and makes clearest when he asks: “Was [ Walrond ] African or European; Anglo-Saxon or Hispanic; West Indian or North American?” (173). The world of “The Voodoo’s Revenge” shows the futility of assigning its characters to binary categories. The “voodoo” at the center of the story, Nestor Villaine, is first introduced as the “obeah man” of the hills, outside society and at one with nature. Even this early description suggests the element of performance in Villaine’s identity: after calling him “a robust son of the soil,” the passage continues, “it had been a comparatively easy thing for him to get in, jabber a few mouthfuls of broken French, and live as an obeah man” (Walrond, Winds 96 ). Villaine is not

92  American Imperialism’s Undead even a Kreyol speaker; he is only passing as a “voodoo.” In fact, he is “a native of Anguilla who had come to the isthmus as a ‘contract laborer’ to dig the canal” (97). While Villaine “grew to be a stern son of the jungle” (96 ), he is actually the former editor of the Aspinwall Voice, whose newspaper “came to be known as the Liberal Party’s keenest weapon of satire” (98). The fight that led to his imprisonment came as he defended that party, further emphasizing Villaine’s status as participant in the n ­ ation’s modern political discourse. If Villaine’s withdrawal from society and turn to voodoo thus could be used as evidence of the same atavism that reveals Burks’s senator to be involved in human sacrifice, the story complicates its vision of Latin American modernity by making the governor’s friend, Mr. Newbold, “a mulatto” as well as “a cosmopolitan” (100). As “manager of the West Indian Telegraph Company,” Mr. Newbold, born in the Cayman Islands and married to “a dark brown woman from one of the islands” (100), undermines any sense of Caribbean people as naturally associated with superstition and premodern ways. Villaine has chosen to disidentify with backwardness for strategic reasons, as an avenue toward advancing his goals. By telling a story like Burks’s from the perspective of the villainous “voodoo,” Walrond translates that worldview, humanizing and legitimizing it in the process. Whether or not we decide that Walrond is responding directly to “Voodoo” with “The Voodoo’s Revenge” — Walrond’s title is certainly suggestive if we want to imagine him writing back to Burks — Burks’s writing is representative of the discourse about the Caribbean that structured how West Indians like Walrond would have been seen by a U.S. audience in the 1920s. Renda defines this “process by which discourses shape human actors” as “cultural conscription” (17), a formulation echoing David Scott’s reading of modernity’s conscripts. For Renda, discourse is “a constellation of meanings, images, ideas, and values that helped to shape and direct” actions and identities during the occupation (15). The primitivist discourse disseminated through narratives about Haiti would thus not only have shaped how audiences read Walrond, but how the Caribbean writer understood himself. Like Muñoz’s argument about disidentification as a “mode of dealing with dominant ideology . . . that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it” (11), for Renda and Scott, the process of conscription is never total. Individuals in Renda’s story are constantly “shaping the discourse even as it shaped them” (17), operating within the parameters of discourse and never fully defined by it.28 Seeing the Jamaican McKay imagining his

93  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean narrative double as Haitian or the Guyanese Walrond finding his authorial voice through stories of voodoo offers a hint of how powerfully the U.S. discourses about the Caribbean during the 1920s would have been shaped in response to that period’s imperialist adventures. That “The Voodoo’s Revenge” names its setting as Aspinwall points to the story’s positioning within U.S. discourse: while the local Spanishspeaking population referred to the city as Colón, U.S. residents called it Aspinwall, after the powerful railroad magnate. The group of Englishspeaking migrants to which Walrond belonged found themselves between these discursive frames, frequently compelled by military force to follow the dominant logic imposed by the United States even as their common subjugation at the hands of U.S. imperialism offered Afro-Caribbean and Central American people possibilities for solidarity. Walrond’s story “Subjection” from Tropic Death best illustrates the overwhelming power of the dominant discourse.29 The story begins with a West Indian working on the canal talking back to a U.S. Marine who has beaten another worker; it ends with that marine silencing this challenge to discursive monopoly with three bullets. The last line of the story makes clear that the worker’s attempts at discursive disruption have been folded back into the dominant narrative: “In the Canal Records, the Q.M. at Toro Point took occasion to extol the virtues of the Department which kept the number of casualties in the recent native labor uprising down to one” (159). “Subjection” shows the most extreme example of discourse’s power as murder becomes recoded in the official record as law enforcement; many of Walrond’s other stories depict characters finding more flexibility to operate within dominant structures. One of Walrond’s other pre–Tropic Death stories set in Panama, “The Godless City,” features a similar engagement with the discourse about Haiti. The story contrasts West Indian legends and “voodoo songs” (Winds 164), represented by Zeek, “last of that tribe of black vikings, the Maroons of Jamaica” (162), with a modernizing U.S. presence represented by Captain Wingate, who relegates Zeek’s worldview to “the old days before Uncle Sam got here” and insists “now things are different” (163). The story features some of the same sensationalized accounts that Burks’s propagated: for example, Baptiste, “the chief of the obeah idolators,” is said to have, according to the legends afloat, in the early days of the construction of the Panama Canal, . . . received a red-hot summons from his master “On High” which ordered him to make a sacrifice and make it at once. A cup of blood!

94  American Imperialism’s Undead Several days later a Negress, one of the town’s water-carriers, missed her curly-haired little boy. And at the next midnight caucus of the obeah men, Baptiste, solemn, his eyes bulging out of their sockets, plucked the boy’s heart out of his bosom; a hand, with a white cup in it (so the legend ran), was there ready to receive it! (164)

Certainly, this story is every bit as sensational as Burks’s human sacrifices; the difference is that Walrond’s story twice calls attention to its own possible fictitiousness, emphasizing that it is a legend and as such, likely embellished if not invented. Walrond therefore locates his story in the realm of discourse, so that when, in the end, Zeek’s prophecies of the city’s destruction by fire are fulfilled, the reader is left in the same uncertain position as at the end of “The Voodoo’s Revenge,” caught between reading the story as affirming a West Indian logic that defies scientific reason (and therefore potentially confirms the view of the Caribbean as primitive) or understanding the fantastic elements as a performance of the exoticist discourse expected of the Caribbean storyteller. Walrond’s stories consistently occupy this fraught space of simultaneous self-­exoticism and critique. Walrond’s first stories set outside of the United States thus show the author finding his voice by engaging with the discourse surrounding the island most prominent in the U.S. popular imaginary of the 1920s. While in Tropic Death, Caribbean religious beliefs and the supernatural are no longer called voodoo as they are in the earlier stories, there are continuities between the early engagement with the discourses surrounding v­ oodoo and the collection’s exploration of the representation of the ­supernatural in stories like “The Black Pin” and “The Vampire Bat.” The latter in particular ties this representation to larger issues of imperialism. The story opens with a planter, “solid pillar of the Crown,” returning to Barbados after serving the empire in the Boer War (242). The story rapidly undermines any sense of homecoming by d ­ emonstrating how foreign he is to a landscape haunted by duppies, soucouyants, and a ­history of “the blacks at Arise, one of [ his father’s] estates . . . burn[ ing ] and pilfer[ ing ] the old sugar mill” (243). As he treks across the island back to his home, he goes from confidently dismissing what he sees as the “tommyrot” of Afro-­Caribbean belief in the supernatural (245) to fear of the “legend[s], rooted deep in the tropic earth” (250) and “the island’s depraved nigger curses” (251). This proud rationalist and servant of empire ultimately dies, his body found “with a perforation pecked in its forehead, . . . utterly white and bloodless” (252). The story closes

95  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean s­ uggesting that the deserted black baby he had encountered on the road and brought home with him had turned itself into a vampire bat to suck him dry. Contained in this folk explanation appears a critique of the planter’s paternalism: his presumption that he is suited and entitled to care for the child he finds, coupled with total ignorance of the intricacies of the landscape he believes himself entitled to rule, leads to his downfall when what he perceives as a helpless charge turns out to be a powerful parasite. As Karem suggests in his reading of “The White Snake” from Tropic Death, the implication here, too, seems to be a warning to colonial power about “the tropics . . . as a self-regulating system” in which attempts at domination face “natural” justice (Purloined 166 ). This interplay of the natural and supernatural is figured especially through the image of the snake in Tropic Death. Snakes were a central part of the U.S. representation of Haiti. Burks’s stories show the U.S. obsession with Haitian spirituality as snake worship. In the religious ceremony in “Voodoo,” the “priestess of the serpent” is described as “weaving here and there like an upright serpent, undulated into the terrible spirit of the dance” (123), while the Caco leader disguises his identity by wearing “a mask fashioned after a serpent’s head,” making him, when he commits human sacrifice, “a butcher in the guise of a serpent” (124). “Thus Spake the Prophetess,” Burks’s 1924 story of Guillaume Sam that narrates the events leading up to the U.S. intervention in order to show the chaos the marines were called on to stop, begins: “Since the Black Republic won its freedom from the French it has been ruled by a line of tyrants and monsters, until the timely intervention of Uncle Sam. . . . The tale of Toussaint is a tale of beastly lust, brute aggrandizement, freedom from restraint for men with the passions of wild animals, the strength of the savage, and the bloodlust of followers of the green serpent” (136 ). This passage shows how the threat of radical antislavery, negated by a dehumanizing discourse on primitive superstition, directly justifies the o ­ ccupation. The relationship of this atavism to the heroes of the ­revolution as well as the ruling classes is again articulated in Burks’s story “­Luisma’s Return” (1924), which centers on Henri Christophe, “the greatest monster in all history” (126 ). Christophe takes the wife of one of his generals as a concubine, then directs this general, Luisma, to march at the head of his troops off a cliff. The troops fall to their death, and at this point the story takes a supernatural turn. Luisma, who has fallen over the cliff, reappears: “like a great black serpent with a broken back, the red-visaged apparition slithered up and over the edge. Its eyes were staring fixedly at the face of the emperor. Atop the precipice at last,

96  American Imperialism’s Undead the jelly-like creature crawled toward Christophe and the Envoy, leaving a snaky red trail in its wake, dragging the crushed legs, dangling red things. ‘I have come back, monster,’ babbled the thing. ‘Surely you know that Luisma could not die unavenged!’ ” (133). Christophe, haunted by the image of this man turned into a “snake with a broken back” (134), kills himself with a silver bullet later that night. Throughout Burks’s stories, then, worship of “the green serpent” is used to emphasize depravity and evil; not only do these Haitians corrupt Christianity by following the Satanic tempter, but they show their bestial animality by taking on the characteristics of the snake. Walrond’s stories frequently feature this kind of dehumanization, as in “The Yellow One” when a fight between an African American and Caribbean person working on a banana boat turns one into “a snarling jungle beast” and the other “a tiger cat” (208). That story frames the conflict within the context of imperialist discourse: not only is the rivalry between these men about racial hierarchy and their relationship to the “yellow” mulatress of the story’s title, but the African American from Florida calls his rival “Porto Rico” despite the fact that he is from Cuba. This complex annexing of the man’s Latin identity to one more fully possessed by U.S. domination demonstrates how imperialism inflects the discursive mechanisms of even its subjects. The story ends with the African American seeing the Cuban as a “snake” (209). “The White Snake” shows Walrond fully engaging with this discourse of snakes and dehumanization’s blurring of the lines of human and beast. The story is among Walrond’s most disturbing, ending with a mother, Seenie, waking up to nurse her child and only later realizing that instead a snake has attached itself to her. The story plays with the idea of Seenie as an uncivilized and therefore bad mother who is reaping the fruits of uncontrolled lust, only to socioeconomically contextualize that reading of her. The infant is called “a little heathen” (191), and descriptions of him imply barbarity: “His puny body, which the obeah midwife had despaired of so, had flecks of porridge, and hardened bread swobbed in tea, on it. He had a scrawny neck. It had its base in a hollow-sounding delta. A stack of bluey veins, loosely tied in a clot of skin, connecting a hairless cocoanut to a brown, belegged pumpkin. The navel string, prematurely plucked, hung like a ripe yellow cashew. Bandy, spindling legs jutted out, to either side, from beneath a rigidly upright little body” (188–89). Even as the passage begins by evoking squalor, it shifts immediately to emphasize Seenie’s motherly feelings: “As a sort of aftermath to a night of studied rest, Seenie was dizzy, drowsy but she made sure of

97  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean one ­eternal thing — Water Spout had to be fed. Feeding him was her one active passion. It was the least, she felt, she could do by him. Her ways may have been bad, her soul in doubtful retrospect, but Water Spout had to eat — hossah, cane licker, green peas, anything” (189). The story’s tragic ending comes from Seenie’s unending quest to feed her child amid the poverty she inhabits. Snake imagery throughout the story foreshadows the ending. Seenie obsesses over snakes, an obsession tied directly to her concern over feeding her child when “snaky cords tightened in her brain” (192). The snakes become emblems of atavism; the respectable brown constable’s niece reminds Seenie not to plant carrots because “ ‘anyt’ing what gwine gaddah too much bush . . . will bring de snakes’ ” (196 ). This equation of snakes, backwardness (represented by “bush”), and the Guyanese landscape echoes the first sentence of the story describing the setting as the banks of “the eeliest street-stream in Bordeaux” (185). Yet in setting the story on a Guyanese estate named Bordeaux, Walrond challenges the construction of West Indian otherness. This naming, after one of the ­European centers of the transatlantic slave trade, serves the same purpose as the socioeconomic contextualization, reminding the reader that the reason this site of backwardness is named after a French town, like the reason for Caribbean poverty, is the deliberate exploitation of the colonies. The snakes in the story continue this deconstruction of exotic Caribbean otherness. The respectable characters see the threat of snakes invading society: the constable’s niece finds a snake under her writing desk (197), and the governor’s soirée is ruined by a snake in the chandelier (198). The climactic scene, in which Seenie in a half-awake state nurses what she thinks is her child, emphasizes the effects of this discourse on her: “Cycles of the day sped through Seenie’s head. There was a fugitive line between them and the half-realized happenings in a dream” (204). These memories, of hard work and the “golden rancor” of the constable’s niece (204), create her inability to recognize the parasite that has taken the place of her son. When she snaps out of her delirium, she is able to cast off the snake and save her child. The story ends with a colonial policeman discovering the aftermath: “Some six hours later he returned, dragging on the coral road to the sea the fresh dead body of a bloaty milk-fed snake the sheen of a moon in May” (208). It turns out that the snake is not the threat of barbarism or encroaching blackness; the snake is white. As Karem reads the conclusion, “in the context of [the infant] possibly representing the future of her country ( British Guiana), this may suggest the dangerous possibility of diverting one’s elemental nutrition

98  American Imperialism’s Undead away from the black child and towards the white invader” (Purloined 166 ). The story as allegory of imperialism contains in the snake’s death a warning to “white invaders . . . who threaten to steal the produce and future of the region” (166 ).30 In reversing the equation of snake worship and Caribbean heathenism contained in the discourse surrounding the occupation of Haiti, Walrond challenges the dehumanization of the region while pointing to the larger structures of imperialist racism. McKay and Walrond were important contributors to the Harlem ­ enaissance as well as innovators in the Caribbean literary ­tradition. R Because neither author fits easily into either of those nationalist traditions  —  and particularly, because their disidentification with the discourses of U.S. imperialism is so central to their work and has been so unthinkable to the critical fields that might engage with them — their writing has been overlooked or simplified. Banana Bottom makes a convenient foundation to a modern Caribbean literary tradition: Kenneth Ramchand’s The West Indian Novel and Its Background titles his chapter on the prehistory of the West Indian novel “The Road to Banana Bottom” as if arrival there is the beginning of the tradition (239). By contrast, the internationalism of Home to Harlem and Banjo makes them a more complicated place to root a tradition. Transnational readings of the black diaspora, by contrast, may readily engage with those novels, but Ray’s Haitianness still cannot be explained without foregrounding the occupation of Haiti. Walrond, meanwhile, has been even more overlooked than McKay. That he wrote from outside of the region does not preclude his inclusion in a Caribbean canon so identified with exile and migration. Instead, it would seem that setting so many of his stories in Panama and focusing on U.S. rather than British empire has made him difficult for ­Caribbean studies to assimilate. At the same time, Karem argues, Walrond’s stories that more overtly represented the U.S. foreign presence were omitted from Alain Locke’s influential New Negro anthology and subsequent anthologies because they might have “run the risk of inflecting The New Negro with too radical a critique of U.S. imperialism” (Purloined 167). Disavowing U.S. imperialism as part of the story of Caribbean or African American literature has made these writers in some ways unreadable. The authors discussed in this chapter spent formative years living in the United States and were clearly shaped by the debates and depictions of Haiti that the occupation engendered. McKay’s and Walrond’s narratives as well as the networks they helped create and participate in ­circulated

99  McKay, Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean to other Caribbean people within and outside the region. McKay ­became especially influential for Francophone writers; as Wayne Cooper notes, “Banjo quickly became a bible of inspiration to such young black literary aspirants as Léopold Sedar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Damas. . . . Joseph Zobel remembered in La Rue Cases Nègres that Banjo also aroused much discussion in Martinique” (259). Another intriguing link back to the region is Edna Underwood, Walrond’s mentor and the translator of Haitian poetry who would, during the 1930s, participate in one of the Caribbean’s more important pre–World War II literary institutions, the literary magazine West Indian Review. Ivy B ­ axter describes the ­Jamaica-based journal as “one of the strongest forces in the direction of the Caribbean cultural exchange” (qtd. in Wade 3); it was a place where West Indian readers in the 1930s encountered McKay, ­Walrond, Roger Mais, Alfred Mendes, and Nicolás Guillén. ­Although oriented toward an Anglophone audience, the journal gave Haiti a place of prominence: the inaugural issue features a picture of Henri ­Christophe’s citadel on its cover; the first article in that issue is about the end of the occupation; and work by Haitians like Jacques Roumain, Léon Laleau, and ­Maurice ­Casséus appears throughout the 1930s.31 Carl Wade notes the predominance of what he calls “Gothic narratives” (10) in West ­Indian ­Review. This penchant for the gothic, most explicitly in stories like ­Louise ­Malabre’s “Voodoo Drums,” places the journal’s promotion of a locally produced Caribbean literature into the same discursive networks surrounding the occupation of Haiti that Walrond’s writing entered.32 The overlaps and connections between Anglophone Caribbean literary production and U.S. discourse about Haiti can be seen not only in the work of McKay and Walrond but in the islands as well. The most famous gothic Caribbean tale of this period, the Jamaican H. G. De Lisser’s The White Witch of Rosehall (1929), explicitly links its supernatural exoticism to Haiti, revealing the tale’s eponymous witch to have Haitian origins. Leah Rosenberg points to how the novel “foregrounds and links voodoo, exotic sexuality, and the revolution,” thus making De Lisser’s representation “characteristic of . . . U.S. accounts” produced during the occupation (87). As editor of Jamaica’s largest newspaper, the Gleaner, De Lisser would have been well aware of Haiti’s cachet.33 De Lisser’s novel, West Indian Review, or the rise of négritude shows U.S. primitivism returning to the region and becoming inextricably linked to the rise of modern Caribbean literature. While the primitivist discourse promoted in Burks’s stories depicts Caribbean people as savage beasts, chapter 5 will turn to William Seabrook’s romanticization of Haitian culture as an

100  American Imperialism’s Undead alternative primitivist tradition from which Caribbean authors like Alejo Carpentier — and later, George Lamming — drew. As Carole Sweeney argues, what she calls “modernist primitivism” of the 1920s and 1930s was a “multivalent aesthetic and cultural phenomenon” (4) inhabited by writers and artists from different subject positions and put to different uses. The occupation of Haiti helps show the role of U.S. culture industries in forming and disseminating primitivist representations, and offers a reminder of the relationship of U.S. imperialism to this discourse. Caribbean literature and identity passed through these circuits, and the disidentifications that followed crucially shaped emerging nationalisms and visions of racialized selves.

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

The discourses surrounding the U.S. occupation of Haiti frequently deployed explicitly gendered language. Mary Renda’s Taking Haiti focuses especially on how U.S. justifications for the occupation depended on a paternalistic vision of Haitians as infantilized or feminized and U.S. Marines as father figures seeking to protect their charges while sometimes needing to impose discipline. I want to supplement Renda’s focus on U.S. gendered discourses about the occupation to show how opposition articulated by Caribbean people also relied on visions of masculinity and feminization. Justification for the occupation was frequently couched in terms of Caribbean people’s rationality and capacity for selfdetermination, while opposition mobilized visions of masculine militancy and strength. The repeated recourse to understanding Haiti’s occupation as a rape, discussed in chapter 2 through the writings of James Weldon Johnson, Hubert Harrison, and the Messenger, shows how male defenders of Haitian autonomy constructed the nation’s violation in gendered terms. These constructions of Haiti as feminized positioned diasporic men as agents in determining the fate of the black nation. At the same time, the centrality of gender opened up space for women to engage with the occupation and its surrounding colonial and anticolonial discourses. This chapter examines two transnational sites where Caribbean women were able to have a voice for debating or critiquing imperialism and Haiti: the Universal Negro Improvement Association ( UNIA) and the theater. The chapter begins with a discussion of the UNIA leader Marcus Garvey as representative of a patriarchal, Great Man vision of pan-Africanism in order to show the contours of this masculinist discourse that emphasized unity through submission to gendered hierarchy. Yet Garvey’s UNIA, despite its advocacy of traditional gender roles, meant to mimic the structures of European imperial nationalism,1 in fact became a space

102  American Imperialism’s Undead for black women to organize around issues of gender and contribute to an internationalist pan-Africanism more broadly. The contributions of Amy Jacques Garvey to the UNIA demonstrate the intriguing diasporic space for women offered by Garvey’s organization. Comparing Jacques ­Garvey’s engagements with occupied Haiti to those of her husband shows her exploring a political project that anticipates Erica Edwards’s critique of the Great Man version of history’s view “that freedom is best achieved under the direction of a single charismatic leader” (xv).2 As politically active as Garvey’s second wife may have been in opposing U.S. imperialism, his first wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey, participated in a second major area of Caribbean women’s engagement with the occupation: the theater. During the 1920s and 1930s, black women in the United States authored, directed, and produced plays depicting an array of black experiences.3 Among these were a number of plays about Haiti. Caribbean women such as the Jamaica-born Ashwood Garvey and the Nevis-born Eulalie Spence, both of whom worked in New York during the 1920s, were part of this theater scene. Examining Spence’s play Her in the context of the plays of this period as well as the occupation shows the playwright examining the interplay between U.S. imperialism, primitivist exoticism, and gender oppression. These creative engagements contest potential aspirations to construct or remember anticolonialism and pan-Africanism as masculinist monologues. This chapter therefore inserts Caribbean women like Amy Jacques Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, and Eulalie Spence as well as a number of African American women into a historiography that can tend to be overly male-centered. If, as my introduction discussed, the nationalist archival record contains silences about the occupation of Haiti, at least as significant a silencing effect of the archive is on women’s voices. I have relied largely on print sources in reconstructing this intellectual and literary history; the limitation of this approach is clear when one imagines the contributions women made to thinking about the occupation that were not in print. Ashwood Garvey’s work as a dramatist is a perfect example. Ashwood Garvey wrote and staged at least three plays in Harlem during the 1920s. The scripts of these plays have been lost, although biographies by Tony Martin and Lionel Yard provide plot summaries of the first two, Hey! Hey! and Brown Sugar. The third, performed at the Lafayette Theater during late November 1927, was titled Black Magic. Without the script and with very few reviews, none of which give details of the plot, the title remains the only clue to make us wonder how this play by a Jamaican whose grandmother was Haitian may have tapped into the

103  Gendering the Occupation f­ascination with black exotic spirituality so popular during the occupation.4 Examining the plays about Haiti from this time period written by African American women and understanding Spence’s Her as evidence of Caribbean women’s engagement with U.S. imperialism may be the closest we can come to reconstructing the kind of intervention Ashwood Garvey’s lost play might have made.

Gender, Haiti, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association The different responses of Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey to Haiti shed light on the gender politics of the UNIA and how these two leaders of the organization engaged with the occupation through gendered ideologies. The Garveyite ideology was undeniably masculinist; as Robin Kelley puts it, “the UNIA was very conservative when it came to gender. . . . It promoted Victorian mores, the patriarchal family, and the idea that women’s primary roles centered on caregiving, domesticity, and race building by way of reproduction and education” (Freedom 27). Yet in spite of this ideology, the actual operations of the UNIA allowed women to play important roles, and these women developed a practice that could mitigate or even challenge the organization’s dominant views on gender. Barbara Bair describes how “many women accepted [the organization’s] gender definitions and their attending roles, but others rebelled against them, creating modified positions of authority for themselves and reconstructing the prevailing views of womanhood and manhood in the process” (155). In particular, each chapter of the UNIA — of which there were thousands at the movement’s height — elected a male and female president, and the organization’s hierarchy included one leadership spot reserved for a woman. While these positions were meant to be subordinate to those of the men, women like Henrietta Vinton Davis, Amy Jacques Garvey, and Maymie De Mena at various times virtually ran the operations of the UNIA, especially after Marcus Garvey’s imprisonment and deportation. The UNIA became a place where black women throughout the diaspora were able to gain experience in politics and organizing: in addition to Ashwood Garvey and Jacques Garvey, Una Marson, Amy Bailey, and many other Caribbean women took advantage of this space and went on to make important intellectual and artistic contributions even after they stopped working with the UNIA.5 The UNIA had a complicated relationship with occupied Haiti, and the difficulties the occupation posed to Garveyism help shed light on Marcus Garvey’s gender ideology. When Cyril Briggs broke with Garvey

104  American Imperialism’s Undead and began attacking him in the pages of the Crusader in 1921, one of the many criticisms included the accusation that Garvey “has not denounced the continued presence and savage acts of United States Marines in Haiti” (“Garvey Shows” 1257). Garvey’s silence on the occupation is especially surprising because of the key roles Haitians played in the organization. The UNIA representative at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, sent to advocate for black representation in the soon-to-be-formed League of N ­ ations, was a young Haitian named Eliézer Cadet, who had risen through the organization’s ranks after the Negro World “published a letter from [Cadet] contending that blacks in the United States had been deliberately deceived about the alleged benefits deriving from America’s occupation of Haiti” (Garvey, Garvey and UNIA ­Papers 11:120).6 ­Another Haitian, Elie Garcia, became the UNIA’s auditor-­general and was sent to Liberia in 1921 to help Garvey plan for colonization of the continent (Grant 279). The UNIA also had a small but significant presence in occupied Haiti. The arrival of the Black Star Line’s first ship, the SS Y ­ armouth, in Port-au-Prince’s harbor in 1920 helped generate enthusiasm for the group, and Sudre Dartiguenave, the first of the client presidents to serve under the occupation, “sent a representative to the founding meeting of the Haitian branch of the UNIA” (Garvey, G ­ arvey and UNIA Papers 11:ccxx). According to Brenda Gayle Plummer, UNIA activity in Haiti remained limited: “Garveyism cared little for regional and national particularisms, particularly if they stood in the way of a larger unity. As a consequence most Haitians, in their insistence on uniqueness and exclusivity, did not warmly embrace it” (Haiti and the United States 125). Garvey’s focus on heroic, masculine black leadership meant that he more often preferred to talk about the triumphs of the Haitian Revolution than the challenges of occupied Haiti. In a 1919 speech Garvey compared himself to Toussaint as a leader whom “they did not like . . . because he had initiative” and who “was able to inspire the other men of his country to carry on the work until Haiti was made a free country” just as “today we have inspired not one, not two, but hundreds of thousands to carry out the work even if they imprison one or kill one” (“­Address” 200). A 1923 article from the Negro World makes explicit the lineage Garvey’s speech suggests; the article “Hon. Wm. Sherrill Names Greatest Men of the Negro Race” focuses on four heroes — Toussaint, Frederick ­Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Garvey — concluding that G ­ arvey is the greatest because he has taken “leadership of Negroes not only in Hayti, or in America, but throughout the world” (2). Like C. L. R.

105  Gendering the Occupation James — and despite their significant ideological differences and personal dislike for one another — Garvey seems to share the desire to focus on the revolution rather than the occupation in order to hold onto what Haiti represents in terms of black nation-state sovereignty. In Garvey’s case, the implications of the masculine heroism of focusing on Haiti’s founding fathers become all the more explicit. As late as November 1921, after West Indians like Briggs had internalized James Weldon Johnson’s critique of the occupation as deliberate economic exploitation on behalf of National City Bank, Garvey could still see the tragedy as the fact that, as he put it in the speech “The Negro Faces the World,” “Haiti for years has been in revolution with itself” and that as a result, “the American Government went down there and brought about an orderly administration of affairs, so that now there is no more conflict in Haiti among the Haitians, no more civil wars or ­revolutions in Haiti” (Garvey and UNIA Papers 4:186 ). Garvey’s imperial vision of leadership saw the lack of unity and discipline on the part of the Haitian people as what made the occupation possible. In a 1924 speech, Garvey argued “there is no law but power” and gave the example that “Haiti is weak and America has overrun her shores with American marines” (ibid. 5:518). Garvey would make the same case against ­Emperor Haile Selassie in Blackman during the 1930s, that “the Emperor of Abyssinia allowed himself to be conquered” (“Italy’s Conquest?” 4) and that “Abyssinia has invited her own trouble, by not adhering to a positive racial nationality” (“Unpreparedness” 7). Garvey blames Haile Selassie as he had Haiti, for “unpreparedness” and failure to listen to the UNIA message, as the reason for Italian success in conquering Ethiopia (qtd. in Grant 440). The emphasis on the need for masculine strength in a world of competing predatory empires shaped Garvey’s vision of the UNIA as a weapon of self-defense. The group’s militarized African Legions best embodied this vision: they “personified the prestige and purpose associated with independent black manhood. They represented the ideas of power and dominance and the military might necessary to achieve and maintain Negro manhood” ( Bair 158). Yet this “militant nationalism of the African Legions” was also what Garvey in the 1930s would proudly speak of as what made the UNIA “the first Fascists” (158). The problem, as Bair describes it, was that “Garvey’s paradigm of black manhood, with its complements of power, pride, and economic success, was the standard white paradigm of power turned inside out” (158). This conception of power meant that Garvey could write columns like “The Negro as Colonizer!,” where he

106  American Imperialism’s Undead argues that “the only Negroes of the West Indies who proved good colonists were the Negroes of Haiti under Toussaint L’Ouverture” because “they were able to wrest Santo Domingo from the grip of the French and the Spanish, but outside of them, the millions of Negroes who came into the Western Hemisphere fell preys [sic] to the white man’s colonizing ­superiority” (15). Garvey’s vision of sovereignty is imperialist nationalism, so that the founding fathers of Haiti are heroic only as black Napoleons, whereas the aspirations of the Haitian masses disappear from the story. When, in 1937, Garvey criticized the labor strikes in Trinidad by saying that “ ‘Trinidad workers’ . . . should not ‘risk their employment for the sake of these agitators in London who have nothing to lose’ ” (qtd. in Grant 443), he betrays a view of history in which great men (the “agitators,” by which he means C. L. R. James and George Padmore) are the cause of the strikes, rather than laboring conditions or the agency of the strikers themselves. This Great Man conception of history helps explain why Garvey had such trouble engaging with the occupation. At the August 1921 UNIA convention, the Communist Rose Pastor Stokes spoke out against foreign domination in Africa, also using the occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic as examples of capitalism’s search for markets and profit driving imperialist expansion. Garvey responded to the speech of what he mockingly called this “Soviet professor” by stating that “the ­Soviets . . . are seeking, I understand from you, freedom from their ­capitalistic oppressors. We are seeking freedom in Africa” (Garvey, ­Garvey and UNIA Papers 4:681). Garvey thus ignores her critiques of the occupation of Haiti. It would be more than a year later that Garvey would begin presenting his own UNIA loan system as a way for blacks to take their money away from big commercial banks, since, as he put it, “Wall Street has gone down to Haiti and taken control of the government of Haiti” (1055). Creating alternative black capitalist enterprises becomes a strategy for short-circuiting white supremacist international policy. G ­ arvey’s alternative project thus tries to imagine a mode of undermining the ­occupation that works within the existing economic system. Garvey came to more explicitly oppose the occupation, but only after the African Blood Brotherhood had criticized his silence, after letters to the editor published in the Negro World by Haitian readers like Joseph Mirault urged the UNIA to change its views on the U.S. mission, and after a Haitian delegation attended the 1924 UNIA convention “to a­ ssist in bringing about independence” (Garvey, Garvey and UNIA ­Papers 5:764). In the aftermath of the 1924 convention, Garvey’s speeches began

107  Gendering the Occupation to more regularly reference the situation in Haiti, often as a warning to Liberia. Even when Garvey finally did take action against the occupation, it was through expressing solidarity with the Haitian political leadership: during the 1924 convention, Garvey sent a letter of support to President Borno expressing “deep sympathy with the indignation of the people of Haiti in the matter of the rape of the country through a forcible occupation by an alien race” (Garvey, Garvey and UNIA Papers 5:642). Garvey, who had been elected provisional president of Africa at the UNIA’s convention in 1920, clearly saw himself as a peer of Borno and preferred to operate through diplomatic channels with Haiti’s highest-ranking black official; along with his message to Borno, he also sent greetings to the premiers of Egypt and France, U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, the empress of Ethiopia, Italian head of state Benito Mussolini, Pope Pius XI, and Mahatma Gandhi. The reality was that Borno was at best powerless and at worst complicit with the U.S. regime, a fact other critics of the occupation in the Liberator and the Negro Worker recognized when they called Borno a “tool” of U.S. imperialism (“Calls” 2; Alexander 18). When UNIA representatives in Haiti tried to promote a “Haitian Independence Day” demonstration just after Garvey had sent his letter, the Borno government sided with U.S. officials in discrediting the event ( Plummer, Haiti and the United States 123). Garvey’s choice to address Borno contrasts with the focus other West Indian radicals would train on ordinary Haitians as primary victims of the occupation and potential agents for bringing about its end. When Amy Jacques Garvey sought to construct an oppositional discourse to the occupation of Haiti, she did so not at the level of the state, but by establishing connection with nonelite women in the i­sland. From February 1924 to June 1927, Jacques Garvey edited a section of the Negro World titled “Our Women and What They Think.” Jacques Garvey turned this “women’s page” into a place for discussions of p ­ olitical and international affairs — including discussions of occupied Haiti — ­frequently but not always in terms of how these issues intersected with more strictly defined women’s concerns. Teresa Zackodnik describes “Our Women and What They Think” as a “collage column” that juxtaposed “one or two editorials penned by Jacques Garvey, articles written by readers and UNIA women; readers’ letters to ‘Our Letterbox,’ household tips and recipes, and advertisements for such products as the Madame Bess Corset Company’s ‘Reducing Girdle’ [as well as] recirculated news stories on such topics as ‘Filipino Women in Public Life,’ ‘Egyptian Civilization,’ the 1924 Emigrant Laborer’s Act in the West Indies, and women’s rights

108  American Imperialism’s Undead in Estonia, Japan, Turkey, Russia, Poland, and China” (445). ­Zackodnik focuses on how this juxtaposition allowed Jacques Garvey to forge a powerful “feminist black internationalism” (438). Including letters to the editor and other contributions by female readers — Zackodnik counts thirty-three different women contributing articles, not to mention the many women whose letters were published (448) — created a sense of diasporic womanhood as polyphonic and dispersed. I want to turn attention to how Jacques Garvey’s inclusion of multiple voices and perspectives articulates a political project contrasting with her husband’s emphasis on centralization and unison, thus implying a critique of the Great Man vision of history. The collage technique allowed Jacques Garvey to bring in various voices about the occupation, beginning with her reprinting of an article from the Nation in September 1924. She therefore follows the strategy employed by Briggs and Domingo in 1920 when they used their editorial roles at the Crusader and the Messenger to reproduce parts of James Weldon Johnson’s articles about the occupation or simply to instruct their readers to find the original articles in the Nation. The article that Jacques Garvey chooses to reprint, though, is not one of Johnson’s, but is itself something of a collage: while it begins with the journalist from the Nation analyzing how “the juggernaut of American imperialism is rolling on, crushing the life of the proud Negro republic, and the American people are unaware of the bitter crimes being committed in their names,” almost half of the article is taken up by a letter of protest written by Haitian senators (“Is America” 13). Reprinting this particular article thus allows Jacques Garvey to bring Haitian voices into the pages of the Negro World. While the Haitian senators from the Nation article may represent the views of elite Haitian men, Jacques Garvey would in 1925 run c­ olumns in two issues written by Theodora Holly. Holly was the daughter of the U.S.-born James Theodore Holly, who had emigrated to Haiti in 1861 and become a citizen there. Theodora Holly’s articles in the Negro World focus on “heroic women of Haiti” (“Heroic” 7), the “modern Haitian woman,” and the “charm and distinction” of “the Haitian girl” (“Haitian” 7). There is certainly still an element of simply inverting ­Garvey’s emphasis on great men. This is most obvious in the first article, which establishes a lineage from Anacaona through Madame Toussaint ­Louverture and Madame Dessalines to “Haytian women of the present day” who are “inherently the same, barring an added culture and intellectual development” (“Heroic” 7). Even the second article, in c­ elebrating

109  Gendering the Occupation the ­beauties and talents of girls from “the better classes,” still emphasizes their “dislike for certain professions or avocations, which they consider more befitting to the stronger sex” (“Haitian” 7). Yet through the ­appeal to the modernity of Haitian women — even in terms of their strict adherence to gender roles, which in a Victorian worldview would have been further evidence of how civilized they were — Holly challenges the primitivist r­ ationale for the occupation.7 Holly would go from these columns on Jacques Garvey’s page to editing the French section of the Negro World, which frequently appeared directly facing the women’s page. The French-language section — which sometimes shared the page with a Spanish-language section — makes clear that the UNIA newspaper sought to include Haitians and other readers of French in their international community. That effort appeared to be successful, as letters to the editor frequently arrived from Haitian readers, again allowing ordinary Haitians to have a voice in the n ­ ewspaper’s pages. The French section included translations of articles from elsewhere in the paper as well as specific news unique to this section, often from Haiti. The French section frequently used articles from the Courier Haïtien, one of Haiti’s main anti-occupation newspapers, as well as contributions by Georges Sylvain, leader of the Union Patriotique. Jacques Garvey’s women’s page and the adjoining French section thus gave ample space to Haitian voices critical of the occupation. Holly’s role as editor of the French section, the French page’s frequent use of translated materials from the women’s page, and the location of these two sections alongside each other in the newspaper create the sense of these pages working in tandem to broaden the kinds of voices represented in the Negro World. Ula Yvette Taylor describes Jacques Garvey’s approach as “community feminism,” which she defines as “a term that names the territory that Jacques Garvey was carving out — a territory that allowed her to join feminism and nationalism in a single coherent, consistent framework” (2). Taylor adds that part of this “community feminism” meant “­encourag[ ing ] women to educate themselves and to perform as both helpmates and leaders in their communities” (2). I would add that Jacques Garvey’s collage technique in “Our Women and What They Think” suggests another aspect of her ideological contribution that the term “community feminism” seems helpful for describing: the ways that Jacques Garvey seeks not to position herself as a singular leader or spokesperson but works as a facilitator for others to participate.8 This strategy led Jacques Garvey to take on precisely the kind of unglamorous work devalued by nationalist models of history that focus on great men:

110  American Imperialism’s Undead those versions of history make it hard to see Jacques Garvey as anything more than a helpmate to her charismatic husband. Yet Jacques Garvey’s achievements show how these kinds of activities are crucial to movement building and anticipate more collaborative and democratic forms of ­social relations. Literary and intellectual history is frequently unkind to these types of contributions. The men whose writings I examine in other chapters are too frequently imagined as lonely geniuses. But all of them worked closely with women, whose roles were often to coordinate or support and make writing possible, even when they did not publish themselves. Certainly, there is no African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) without Grace Campbell or International African Service Bureau ( IASB) without Amy Ashwood Garvey. Irma Watkins-Owens describes women as “key organizers behind the more public performances of male colleagues” (Blood 108) and makes clear how important women were to the West Indian radicals who came to the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century: In 1900 Hubert Harrison, later a radical intellectual and leader among Caribbean anticolonialists and known to Harlem audiences as the black Socrates, joined his wage-earning older sister in New York after the death of his father. Nevis native Cyril Briggs, editor of the radical journal Crusader, joined his mother in New York in 1905 after completing his secondary education. W. A. Domingo, a Harlem importer and the well-known radical activist founder of the Jamaica Progressive league, arrived in Boston in 1910, where he joined a sister who ran a boardinghouse for Jamaicans. Richard B. Moore, the Harlem radical intellectual from Barbados, came with his widowed stepmother, Elizabeth Moore, who joined a wage-earning sister on the upper West Side of Manhattan in 1909. (“Early” 26 )

Women paved the way for these immigrants to come to the United States, to have already existing social and professional networks, and to become dynamic forces in radical politics. When this group of radicals founded the ABB, Grace Campbell was one of the first members, and C ­ ampbell also joined the Communist Party along with Briggs and Moore. ­Campbell was the Socialist Party candidate for the New York State Assembly in 1919 and 1920, and Watkins-Owens cites “an FBI informant’s report” that describes Campbell as “a prime mover of the African Blood Brother­ hood” (Blood 103). She was clearly one of the leaders of this group, even if she left little behind in the written record. Moore’s daughter, Joyce Moore Turner, would become one of the primary documenters of the

111  Gendering the Occupation West Indian radicals in Harlem during this period, keeping alive and passing on Moore’s remembrances and legacy to future generations; the history that she helped preserve makes possible projects like my own. Amy Jacques Garvey is also one of many wives who were partners shaping their husbands’ thoughts on a range of issues. Guyana-born ­Hermina Dumont Huiswoud, whose husband, Otto Huiswoud, was the first black member of the Communist Party, was politically active, contributed to radical newspapers during the 1920s and 1930s, and wrote literary works including poetry and drama. Her creative work can be found among her papers in the Tamiment Library and Robert F. W ­ agner Labor Archives at New York University, even if she did not ­publish much during her lifetime. Reading the letters from Langston Hughes to D ­ umont Huiswoud in the Tamiment collection, many of which discuss their common friendship with Nicolás Guillén and Jacques Roumain, it is clear that she was admired by those in her political circle and regarded as a dynamic, important contributor. These letters also reveal that she was the person who gave Hughes a copy of “the book by Alejo Carpentier” in early 1947, while Hughes was working on the libretto for his opera about the Haitian Revolution, Troubled Island.9 Dumont Huiswoud certainly seems to fit Taylor’s definition of community feminist. C. L. R. James and George Padmore were both especially well known for having talented female companions who collaborated with them in every aspect of their work: during this time period, these women included, in James’s case, Constance Webb, and in Padmore’s, Nancy ­Cunard and Dorothy Pizer. Raj Chetty, in the presentation “Can a Mulatta Be a Black Jacobin?: James, Feminism, and the Place of Collaboration,” makes the case that James should be regarded less as an individual author and more as something like the author-function that names the group of activists with whom he was collaborating at any given moment.10 It would seem that Padmore or the ABB members would be just as well understood this way. Women were always members of the groups to which these men belonged, and in many cases women were the literal “writers” who transcribed the articles and books that bore the names of their more prominent male partners. The exploitation and erasure of these women’s contributions demonstrate the dark side of the sacrifice inherent in the community feminist role.11 When James and Padmore worked together in London, it was at the Florence Mills social club run by Amy Ashwood Garvey; she is credited with helping found the International African Friends of Ethiopia, which evolved into the IASB, and the high regard in which she was held is clear

112  American Imperialism’s Undead by her position as cochair (alongside W. E. B. Du Bois) at the 1945 Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester that I discuss in the last section of chapter 6. Amy Jacques Garvey also helped organize that conference, corresponding with Padmore and Du Bois about the planning, advocating among other things for the involvement of more representatives from Africa. But Jacques Garvey herself was unable to attend because of financial reasons (Taylor 171), showing again the inequalities that can impact who is able to inscribe him- or herself into the historical record. If Jacques Garvey’s contributions to decolonization have been marginalized because of material circumstances, it is worth again remembering that Ashwood Garvey, in addition to her political work with the UNIA in the United States and then the IASB in London, made another, different kind of contribution to the discourses of anticolonialism and black nationalism: her work as a playwright. While the whereabouts and contents of her scripts may be unknown, we can turn to plays from the 1920s and 1930s that do survive to see how other black women engaged with Haiti and the discourses surrounding it.

Eulalie Spence and the Domestic Ghosts of U.S. Imperialism In 1925, W. E. B. Du Bois and Regina Anderson founded the Krigwa Players theater group in order to create, in Du Bois’s words, “a real Negro theater” ( Du Bois, “Krigwa Players” 134). Performing in the basement of the 135th Street public library in Harlem, Krigwa featured work by a number of playwrights. The breakout star of the group was Eulalie Spence, a Nevis-born woman who had come to the United States as a child and studied at the National Ethiopian Art Theatre School in New York. She joined Krigwa after her play Foreign Mail finished second in the Crisis literary contest in 1926. Her plays would receive many awards the following year: The Hunch won second prize and The Starter shared third in the Opportunity literary contest that had launched the careers of Eric Walrond, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes, while in the 1927 Crisis contest Undertow finished second and Hot Stuff third. Spence’s Foreign Mail and Her headlined Krigwa’s second season in January 1927, but it was her play Fool’s Errand that would prove the group’s biggest success as well as its downfall. Fool’s Errand won the 1927 S­ amuel French prize for original playwriting, earning a twohundred-dollar prize. When Du Bois chose to spend the prize money on the theater’s expenses rather than sharing it with the playwright, Spence left Krigwa, and the group never recovered.

113  Gendering the Occupation Krigwa was just one of a number of promising efforts during the 1920s to create a black dramatic tradition in the United States. These ­efforts explicitly positioned themselves as responses to the simplifying and frequently racist representations of blacks circulated in plays written and produced by white Americans. While minstrelsy had established a long tradition of presenting African Americans as buffoons and caricatures, this period began to see more serious plays about black characters by white playwrights. Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones was the most influential of these plays. Sterling Brown speaks to how the play established a template for serious theater about blacks, beginning his discussion of the rise of the New Negro movement in the 1920s by saying “the decade was ushered in by Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920)” (204).12 The Emperor Jones is a play about black masculinity and leadership, appearing to parody the era’s most publicly visible representative of that tradition — Marcus Garvey — in the pomp and performativity of its title character.13 With Garveyism as one inspiration, The Emperor Jones established its influential vision of black masculine leadership as absurd and even pathological by also drawing on the imagery and ideology surrounding occupied Haiti.14 First produced just weeks after James Weldon Johnson’s “Self-Determining Haiti” articles in the Nation centered U.S. attention on the occupation, the playbill describes the setting as “an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by white marines” (2). O’Neill recounts the idea for the play coming from “a story current in Haiti concerning the late President Sam. . . . Sam had said they’d never get him with a lead bullet; that he would get himself first with a silver one” (qtd. in Renda 197). O’Neill attributes the story behind his play to Haiti, even as he attaches the myth to the contemporary moment of occupation when President Sam’s overthrow gave the United States a pretext to send in marines to stabilize the political situation, rather than the revolutionary leader usually associated with the story of the silver bullet, Henri Christophe. The play’s “emperor” therefore offers a vision of black masculinity based on a combination of Garvey and Haiti, yet one that diverts attention away from the triumphs of the founding fathers of the revolution Garvey preferred to invoke and instead foregrounds the contemporary moment to ridicule the perceived failures of black sovereignty. The African American and Caribbean reception to the version of black masculinity presented in The Emperor Jones was mixed.15 On the one hand, the play reinforced stereotypes about black primitivism and atavism, showing black men to be unsuitable for leadership through the descent

114  American Imperialism’s Undead into savagery of the play’s apparently civilized protagonist as the ghosts of black culture appear on the stage to haunt him. Many responses therefore emphasized the danger of this type of portrayal: “A writer of The New York World calls attention to the fact that Charles Gilpin’s play, The Emperor Jones, is very harmful to our people and says that it leaves an impression that the prejudiced South is prompting in various other ways. It is in the order of Birth of a Nation so far as the impression referred is concerned” (qtd. in Hill and Hatch 227). At the same time, as this article’s description of the play as “Charles Gilpin’s” suggests, The Emperor Jones starred an African American in the title role, marking a major break from the usual representation of blacks onstage in the United States. As Nathan Huggins puts it, “the remarkable thing was that Negro performers were getting an unprecedented chance to do respectable serious drama in downtown theaters” (298) in an age when minstrelsy and blackface were the norm. Claude McKay, writing in the Liberator, captures this ambivalence. Rather than reviewing the play, he focuses almost entirely on Gilpin: “For Gilpin did not only play the part, he made a play. . . . Gilpin unstintedly throws his big human personality into it, and saves the play from becoming a mere comic grotesque.” For McKay, the tragedy is that Gilpin, this “young, striving American Negro,” has “no legitimate place in the American theater” (“Black Star” 25). The Emperor Jones thus opened up a public space for the black masculinity represented by Gilpin (and later Paul Robeson, who succeeded Gilpin in playing Brutus Jones). But as McKay describes, that space was clearly limited in terms of its proximity to stereotype and its availability to only a small number of black male actors. Black playwrights would seek to expand that space, often through plays that engaged with Haiti.16 Dramatic works by African Americans performed during this time period included Clarence Cameron White and John Frederick Matheus’s ­Tambour (1929) and Ouanga (1932), both set in Haiti. The Haitian ­Revolution in particular became an important vehicle for African American playwrights to explore alternative visions of blackness, most famously in Langston Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti (1936 ) and Troubled Island (1949) as well as Leslie Pinckney Hill’s Toussaint Louverture (1928). While Hughes and Hill — like Marcus Garvey, James Weldon ­Johnson, C. L. R. James, and most other black men of the period — focused especially on the heroic masculinity of Haiti’s founding fathers, African American women like Helen Webb Harris and May Miller wrote historical dramas that presented revisionary histories of the revolution focused on women’s contributions. Harris’s Genifrede (1922) imagines a fictional

115  Gendering the Occupation daughter for Toussaint and makes her a lover of Moïse, the revolutionary leader Toussaint would eventually have executed. In Christophe’s Daughters (1935), Miller similarly seeks to insert women into the story of the revolution, centering the play on two of the king’s daughters as they face the mob encroaching on the royal palace. Miller’s play in particular echoes The Emperor Jones directly, beginning with its stage direction describing “a massive throne chair” at the center of the stage and noting “in the distance, the constant rumbling of drums is heard” (166 ). O’Neill’s play similarly opened in a room “bare of furniture with the exception of one huge chair . . . very apparently the Emperor’s throne” (3), and had famously used “the steady thump of a tom-tom” to create its atmosphere. The first character onstage in The Emperor Jones is “a native negro woman” speaking like a stereotype: “Him Emperor — great ­Father. . . . Me old woman. Me left only. Now me go too” (4). Miller’s play rewrites this servant woman to humanize her. Whereas the “native negro woman” in The Emperor Jones is never named (and is the only woman to appear in O’Neill’s play), the servant in Christophe’s Daughters is identified as Marie. In both cases, the servant exits the play to save herself from the mob coming to overthrow the sovereign, but whereas The Emperor Jones’s servant seems untrustworthy for trying to do so secretly, Marie explains in full sentences: “I love my king. He was ever good to me. But my Claude, he has gone, and where he is, I must go” (Miller 168). Women drive the action in Christophe’s Daughters, with the king appearing onstage only as a dying body supported by his wife and daughter. The women leave the stage together carrying “Christophe’s heavy body,” described as “their burden” (175). King Christophe’s absent presence becomes metaphor for Miller’s relationship to The ­Emperor Jones: even when the patriarchal presence is marginalized from the main action of Christophe’s Daughters, its haunting weight threatens to stifle the dutiful daughters’ attempts to establish their own individuality. Eulalie Spence’s most successful plays were not set in the Caribbean like The Emperor Jones, Genifrede, and Christophe’s Daughters. Aside from Fool’s Errand, which takes place in a rural, apparently U.S. setting, Spence’s published plays maintained Harlem settings and featured characters identified only as Harlemites.17 Nonetheless, Spence’s plays inhabited a context saturated by the discourses about exoticism and imperialism foregrounded in plays like The Emperor Jones. Spence’s play Her in particular can be seen responding to that discourse. W ­ illiam Clarke, reviewing Her in New York Age, invoked the playwright of The Emperor Jones while describing Spence’s play as “a ghost story . . . ­written with

116  American Imperialism’s Undead such skill that it rose to the heights of a three act tragedy that might have been written by Eugene O’Neill” (6 ). Spence herself had described O’Neill as one of her models in a 1927 letter to Alain Locke,18 and would in 1929 direct O’Neill’s play Before Breakfast for the Dunbar Garden Players ( Peterson 231). O’Neill was one of the judges for the Crisis playwriting contest that recognized Spence (and the actor who played B ­ rutus Jones after Charles Gilpin, Paul Robeson, was one of the judges for ­Opportunity [ Perkins 5 ]). The New York Age reviewer was inclined to see Spence’s plays not only in relation to O’Neill, but to an exotic non-U.S. discourse. The review continues that “the one criticism that might be made of [Spence’s plays] ‘Her’ and ‘Foreign Mail’ is that they were more Latin-American in theme and treatment than Negro” and goes on to compare her plays to the “real Negro play” of another Krigwa playwright, “W. J. Jefferson of Philadelphia” (Clarke 6 ). Spence’s efforts to participate in building this Negro theater are thus challenged by her Caribbeanness; her insistence on Harlem locations for her plays and avoidance of exoticist tropes aside from the ghosts of Her must be seen in this context. When Spence’s script for The Hunch — a play about playing the numbers in Harlem without any identifiably Caribbean characters — was published in Carolina ­Magazine in 1927, it was next to “Drawings from ‘Emperor Jones’ ” by Aaron Douglas. Spence’s plays were clearly received in a context in which the occupation of Haiti had helped create certain expectations about the ­Caribbean and a Caribbean playwright. In writing what reviewers saw as a “ghost story,” Spence engages with the ideas of blackness and the gothic I discussed in relation to Eric Walrond in chapter 3. A number of black female playwrights from the 1920s and 1930s wrote and staged plays that featured the supernatural, frequently alluding to an alternative black folk system of beliefs that exceeded rationalism. One of the few scholarly works on this cohort of playwrights, Taylor Hagood’s Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers, focuses on the representation of the supernatural as a defining aspect of these plays. Samuel C ­ hristian calls this group of works “black folk voodoo plays” and discusses Her along with works such as Miller’s Christophe’s Daughters, Thelma ­Myrtle Duncan’s Black Magic (1931), and Shirley Graham Du Bois’s Tom-Tom (1932). Christian’s labeling emphasizes how the ­representation of spirituality and belief in these works was connected to visions of exotic primitivism, even if he does not put what he calls these “voodoo plays” into the context of Haiti or the occupation.

117  Gendering the Occupation The plot of Her is at first straightforward. The play opens in an apartment where the entire action will take place; like many of Spence’s plays, this single indoor setting suggests a focus on domesticity even as the idea of this private sphere as isolated from the outside will be completely undermined as the plot develops. The couple who lives there, Martha and Pete, are discussing another couple coming to look at the apartment above them. The landlord, John Kinney, has left Martha in charge of showing the vacant apartment because he no longer comes to the building; Martha believes this is because the apartment is haunted by “Her.” The first surprise comes when Kinney arrives at the building, having decided to disprove Martha’s beliefs by showing the apartment himself. The prospective tenants arrive and see the apartment without incident, but when Kinney has to go back to the haunted apartment by himself, he fails to return, and strange noises are heard. Martha goes to check on him, and the play ends with her breathlessly returning to report that the ghost has gotten ahold of the landlord. That straightforward plot description omits one important detail of the story: the identity of the ghost. The story of Her, narrated by ­Martha to the apartment hunters while Kinney has gone back upstairs, ties the play’s haunting directly to inequalities and violences created by the inter­ play between domesticity and imperialism. The play thus explores “the breakdown of the boundaries between internal and external spaces, between the domestic and the foreign” that Amy Kaplan describes in “Manifest Domesticity” (600). The first thing Martha reveals about Her is that she “was one of these here Philippine gals. John Kinney met her when he was soljerin’ in them parts” (Spence 139). Her is never given a proper name and thus becomes a stand-in for a range of victims of U.S. imperial activities in places like the Philippines, Nicaragua, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. Her as the harvest of U.S. empire is what haunts this domestic space and this play. Her victimization is particularly gendered: Martha continues to tell Her’s story, of this woman, “jes’ a little wild bird, caught an’ put in a cage in a dark room” (139). Kinney has promised Her a room of her own, but when he changes his mind and decides to rent it because “he needed the money real bad ter pay some bills” (139), Her comes to the apartment she thinks should be hers and hangs herself. The play is therefore about space, who gets to occupy it, and how its occupation is defined along national and gender lines. The play links those issues from its opening stage directions, which suggest that “to describe [the setting ], we must describe Martha — old, black Martha”

118  American Imperialism’s Undead (132). Martha thus becomes represented by and representative of the physical space where the action of the entire play unfolds, a space described as “no modern living room, this” (132). The room’s nonmodernity is demonstrated by the “cheap prints on the wall — religious, every one of them — and her odd tables and cast off chairs — hand me down from the ‘white folks’ ” from whom she “takes in washing” (132). Religious belief, blackness, and nonmodernity become connected, even as the lack of modernity is also defined as relational and existing on the margins of and defined by its dependent relationship to white economic power. The opening stage directions also foreground the marital relationship between Martha and Pete. Martha “takes care of Pete, her husband — crippled and an idler for more than fifteen years” (132). Throughout the play, Pete’s dependence on Martha is repeatedly emphasized, from the first moments when she interrupts him pondering a magazine article about “cripple fellers — how they’s learned to make money” to tell him “yuh ain’t got no business thinkin’ — ’bout sech trash” (133). Not only does Martha’s response suggest that she is satisfied with the status quo in which she is breadwinner and Pete her dependent, but the pause in the middle of Martha’s line (represented on the page by the long dash) allows the audience to at first hear her telling him that she’ll do the thinking for both of them. When later in the play, Martha announces that “Ah’m thinkin’ ’tis time we did quit” this apartment, Pete can only add, “Ah thinks same’s you does, Martha” (138). The opening scene thus establishes the themes of the play: (capitalist) modernity versus ( black) superstition alongside gender roles and challenges to them. Having begun by setting up Martha and Pete’s relationship as a reversal of gender roles, the play becomes a story of three couples: Martha and Pete, Alice and Sam (the couple who have come to look at the haunted apartment), and John Kinney and Her. The little we learn of Alice and Sam’s relationship suggests its adherence to traditional gender roles: Sam handles the couple’s finances, paying the deposit on the apartment (138), while Alice does little more than express fear of the ghost and end the play with a “piercing scream” (140). Kinney’s treatment of Her shows the dark side of this gendered relationship. Her is not initially dependent on Kinney: “she had plenty money,” and it is only a year after their marriage that he brings her back to the United States (139). When Kinney “quits the army, then, an goes inter real estate,” he does so with the initial capital provided by Her: “he told Her he’s goin’ buy her a beautiful house — an’ he takes her money. . . . He buys this apartment house. She wanted him ter fix up one uv these floors so’s she could have some

119  Gendering the Occupation place ter breathe in. But he figgered on the rent from them apartments, an’ he wouldn’t let her have one” (139). She eventually comes to “see through him” but also becomes “scared . . . uv that husban’ uv hers” (139). ­Martha’s story makes clear that her death is only the culmination of this psychological violence inflicted on Her by her husband. Her is largely a play about gender solidarity, between the men as well as the women. Pete’s deference to Martha begins to be undermined when Kinney arrives. Kinney questions Martha’s belief in the ghost upstairs, asking Pete if he can corroborate its presence. Pete responds: “Ah ain’t never heard nothin’ ” (135) and then later tells Martha “I reckon [ Kinney]’s right ’bout goin’ up thar. A Man ain’t got no right actin’ so scared bout nothin’ ” (137). The play thus aligns the men with a rationalist doubt in the supernatural that Her represents and Martha readily believes. The male solidarity is counterbalanced by Martha’s desire to risk her ability to stay in the building to save Alice from taking the haunted apartment: “It’s that girl Ah’m thinkin’ uv. . . . She’s got a sweet face. Ah took ter her right off. She ain’t a bit older than she was when she come here. They ain’t goin’ have no happiness up thar” (137). ­Martha’s ability to see Her echoed in Alice suggests possibilities for a female solidarity that go beyond race and challenge imperial divisions. Relaying Her’s story to Alice and Sam shows Martha’s desire to keep the African American couple from replaying the domestic script created by the imperial encounter. While Her’s identity is clearly defined by Martha — Her is named as “Philippine” and thus “a furriner” (139) — Kinney’s is ambiguous. In a play where the characters are racially marked — Martha as “black,” Alice as “brown,” and Sam as “somewhat browner” — the stage directions only describe Kinney as having a “yellow face” (136 ). Hagood notes that “most readers have understood [ Kinney] to be a white man, and it is true that he does not speak any dialect”; he goes on to argue that the character “might even be passing” (79). The original production of Her by the Krigwa Players cast Charles Burroughs, an African American, as Kinney (Macki 102), though a reviewer of a more recent production describes the character as “the white landlord,” suggesting the range of interpretations for this character.19 In a play so careful about race and color, ­Kinney’s identity as “yellow” and the racial indeterminacy this term implies allows him to function in two ways within the play: first, as a stand in for U.S. imperialism; and, second, as an allusion to a history of African American participation in empire. Kinney self-identifies only as “a man of business” (136 ), and his pursuit of profit and possession regardless

120  American Imperialism’s Undead of human toll makes him the play’s embodiment of colonial capitalism. The play’s ghost — Martha tells us “yuh kin call it conscience, or yuh kin call it her!” (134) — offers a haunting reminder of the real costs of the business Kinney represents. His entrepreneurial venture depends on the capital he gets from Her, even as he seeks to erase these origins. Alongside this allegory of U.S. capitalism’s questionable beginnings, in locating Kinney’s overseas experience in the Pacific, Spence reminds her audience of the African American soldiers who fought on behalf of U.S. empire to quash the Philippine independence movement from 1899 to 1902.20 The play shows African Americans themselves to be haunted by complicity in imperialist expansion. The play therefore connects gendered and national struggles over space, showing the penetration of the foreign into the domestic sphere, the ghosts at home that imperialism abroad creates. Her’s framing of these issues through the supernatural points to the imperialist ­exoticism popularized in the United States as voodoo during the 1920s, and when we keep in mind the plays by Spence’s contemporaries — O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Harris’s Genifrede, and Miller’s Christophe’s ­Daughters —Her’s allusions to military operations in the Philippines can be understood in relation to the occupation of Haiti. For the audience of the Krigwa production in 1927, the haunting effect of Haiti could only have been multiplied by the decision to cast Spence’s sister, Doralyne, in the title role. Casting an Afro-Caribbean woman as the play’s central victim of U.S. imperialism shifts that narrative into the Caribbean, evoking the ongoing imperial adventures in that region where a character like Her would have been more likely to resemble women like Spence or her sister. This racial cross-dressing, with a black woman playing the Philippine war bride, suggests the national and gender solidarities the play seeks to construct. Her becomes more readily assimilated to the black female community of the play, even if that community remains tenuous because of color and colonial hierarchies. Despite the acclaim that she received in the 1920s, Eulalie Spence has been virtually forgotten in African American or Caribbean literary histories, erased like Amy Jacques Garvey from Great Man versions of history. Yet Spence created an important legacy, one not only reducible to the artistic creations she left behind. Spence was also a teacher for three ­decades in the New York public school system. As a drama coach and drama club advisor, Spence mentored many students who went on to careers in theater. Joseph Papp, who would found the Public Theater and bring

121  Gendering the Occupation plays like Miguel Piñero’s Short Eyes and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Committed Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf to the stage, frequently talked about Spence’s influence on his love of ­theater.21 ­Spence’s legacy as teacher may not be as heroic as that of artist, but keeping in mind Taylor’s idea of Jacques Garvey as c­ ommunity feminist reminds us of the gender element in prioritizing individual achievement over collaboration and helping others. While plays like Amy Ashwood Garvey’s Black Magic may be lost to history, the writings left behind — by Jacques Garvey in the Negro World or by Helen Webb Harris, May Miller, and Eulalie Spence in their drama — show the ways black women engaged with the occupation of Haiti. Contesting the gendered discourse justifying the occupation allowed these women to establish alternative communities and solidarities that would help shape Caribbean feminism, pan-Africanism, anticolonialism, and literature in the ­twentieth century.

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

The prologue to the Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s novel The Kingdom of This World, which theorizes a regional aesthetic that he calls marvelous realism and would bring Latin American literature to the attention of the world as magical realism, locates the birth of that tradition in post-occupation Haiti. “Near the end of 1943, I was lucky enough to visit Henri Christophe’s kingdom,” the prologue to the novel begins (“On the Marvelous” 84). Not only does Carpentier thus retrace the pilgrimage to Haiti carried out by so many intellectuals and artists, black and white, during the occupation, he represents his motivations and his findings similarly. The prologue continues: “After having felt the undeniable spell of the lands of Haiti, after having found magical warnings along the red roads of the Central Meseta, after having heard the drums of Petro and Rada, I was moved to set this recently experienced marvelous reality beside the tiresome pretension of creating the marvelous that has characterized certain European literatures over the past thirty years” (84). Carpentier here seeks to distance his novel from surrealist romanticization of non-Western cultures. Yet this white Cuban author’s turn to Haiti as the way out of an exhausted modern culture mirrors the move made as early as 1929 by William Seabrook in The Magic Island and as late as 1945 by André Breton. Reading Carpentier’s work in the context of this occupation-produced fascination with Haiti shows another d ­ imension of the impact of U.S. imperialism on Caribbean culture of this period. Carpentier’s works from the 1940s and 1950s, especially The Kingdom of This World, have become classics of Latin American and Caribbean literature, even as his first novel, Écue-Yamba-O, has been much less well received. I want to suggest that reading these two novels against the backdrop of the occupation of Haiti can help us rethink both of them. ÉcueYamba-O is frequently credited as the most fully ­developed ­novelistic

123  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti exemplar of the 1920s movements known as negrismo and afroantillanismo that sought to recenter Hispanic Caribbean literature around Afro-Caribbean cultural contributions. At the same time, n ­ egrismo and afroantillanismo are often criticized for enacting an overly romanticizing primitivism, with Écue-Yamba-O in particular seen as reflecting a naïve ethnographic view of Afro-Cuban culture from which the author later sought to distance himself.1 There is much value to this critique, and I will not assert that Écue-Yamba-O offers authentic depictions of Afro-Caribbean peoples and cultures. Yet by showing Haitians and AfroCubans caught up in the exploitative labor networks created by U.S. imperialism in both Haiti and Cuba, their cultures become a vehicle for the novel’s larger critique of U.S.-dominated multinational capitalism in the Caribbean. Écue-Yamba-O therefore contextualizes ­apparently primitivistic cultures within the socioeconomic realities of U.S. empire — showing them to be not pre- or unmodern, but produced by modernity — more fully than Carpentier’s more celebrated later work. While The Kingdom of This World is less concerned with its contemporary context of U.S. imperialism, Carpentier’s second novel emerges even more directly out of the discourses circulated by the occupation of Haiti. The second half of this chapter will show that the surrealist idealization of the Other as well as the Caribbean affirmation of African roots arise as responses to the occupation of Haiti and that both perspectives are reproduced in The Kingdom of This World. Marvelous realism can thus be read as a synthesis of two different responses to the occupation: on the one hand, the exoticizing vision of Haiti produced by writers like Seabrook; on the other hand, Haitian efforts to oppose the occupation through cultural movements like indigénisme. Carpentier’s foundational novels of contemporary Hispanic Caribbean — and more generally, Latin American — literature thus appear as another by-product of the occupation of Haiti, continuing to process and circulate the realities and narratives produced by U.S. empire.

“¡El Bongó, Antídoto de Wall Street!”: Carpentier’s Écue-Yamba-O Carpentier’s earliest writings from the 1920s and 1930s are shaped by the flows of people and commodities set in motion by the expansion of U.S. capitalism in the Caribbean. While his first novel, Écue-Yamba-O, was completed in Paris, it was initially drafted in 1927 during C ­ arpentier’s imprisonment by the U.S.-client president Gerardo Machado. This dual context means that Écue-Yamba-O stylistically bears marks of the

124  American Imperialism’s Undead s­ urrealism Carpentier encountered while living in Paris beginning in 1928, particularly through its use of collage ( Birkenmaier 54, Emery 28–29). The novel’s content, meanwhile, suggests the Cuban frame of its initial composition, as Stephen Park argues by contextualizing Écue-Yamba-O in terms of debates taking place in Cuba about black criminality, immigration, and eugenics. I would add that this context included awareness of the occupation of Haiti, most obviously in terms of the ways that it was impacting Cuba through bringing huge numbers of Haitian workers to work in Cuban sugarcane fields. Cuban newspapers whipped up hysteria about this migration: the most popular newspaper, Diario de la Marina, ran articles about immigrants from other islands as “undesirable people” (gente no deseable [“Baturrillo” 2]), “decrying their presence as a lethal blow to the whitening ideal and a step toward the ‘Africanization’ of Cuba” (de la Fuente 47). Alongside this dominant discourse, with which Écue-Yamba-O d ­ irectly engages, Haitian migrants in Cuba created alternative ­institutions, including branches of the anti-occupation Union Patriotique (Casey 64 – 68). The presence of these migrants helped shape how the occupation was part of Cuban consciousness. As early as September 1920, Diario de la Marina featured articles about James Weldon Johnson’s critique of the occupation.2 By September 21, 1920, the debate about the occupation had spilled onto the front page. News of the occupation continued to appear periodically in the paper, with sporadic sensational headlines like “2,500 Haitianos muertos desde la ocupación americano.”3 A Cuban interested in news of Haiti would have seen consistent coverage throughout 1922 about the U.S. Senate commission investigating the occupation. The December 1929 uprisings in Haiti produced headlines in Diario de la Marina for much of the month, including a number of front-page ­stories featuring Port-au-Prince bylines that expressed revulsion at Haitian deaths and criticism of the occupation.4 This sympathy for what Haitians were experiencing may seem surprising in a newspaper rightly considered “conservative” (  Kutzinski 146 ), that generally favored U.S. business interests, and that frequently deployed hostile and even racist rhetoric against Haitians immigrants. What the anti-occupation coverage may point to is how even for the wealthy Cuban elite whose viewpoints Diario represented, fear of imperial threats to political sovereignty lay just below the surface of openness to U.S. trade. That the Cuban elite might have seen in Haiti’s occupation a threat to their own homeland’s political status becomes clearer when Diario’s coverage is contrasted with the trivialization of the 1929

125  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti uprising in newspapers of other islands still under colonial control. The Trinidad Guardian or Puerto Rico’s El Mundo, for example, rarely mentioned the occupation. When the events of December 1929 forced these publications to cover the occupation, these stories were brief, buried deep inside the paper, and emphasized the restoration of law and order more than the uprisings.5 Unlike Diario, these colonial newspapers were much readier to side with the United States than to see solidarity with their Haitian neighbors. Carpentier had left Cuba by 1929, but he would have read Diario de la Marina and therefore seen its coverage of the occupation earlier in the ­decade, and he continued to contribute to the newspaper even after he had moved to Paris. Diario’s coverage of the occupation is especially noteworthy because the newspaper was a crucial institution for the negrismo and afroantillanismo movements, especially with the weekly “Ideales de una raza” page that ran between 1928 and 1931. Writers like Nicolás Guillén, Luis Palés Matos, Ramón Guirao, and ­Carpentier published in “Ideales,” through which “accounts of black artistic achievement for the first time became a regular feature in the Diario de la Marina” and therefore in Cuba’s mainstream press ( Kutzinski 146 ). A week before its coverage of the 1929 uprising in Haiti began, Diario’s cultural supplement had published Guillén’s “Señorita Consuelo Serra,” a reminder of the fact that Diario’s increasing interest in Afro-Caribbean culture, often refracted through Haiti (most obviously in the work of Palés Matos and Carpentier), arose alongside the circulation of images and narratives of Haiti set in motion by the occupation.6 Écue-Yamba-O undoubtedly belongs to the sociopolitical context of the occupation and its accompanying cultural flows. Much more than The Kingdom of This World or Carpentier’s later novels, Écue-Yamba-O is about U.S. imperialism in Cuba and throughout the region. The novel opens in sugarcane fields dominated by U.S. companies, tracing the process by which black peasants like the Cué family have been muscled out of their landholdings and turned into tenant farmers by foreign monopolies. Menegildo Cué, the novel’s protagonist, lives and works in these exploitative conditions. The novel’s plot turns on his romantic relationship with a Haitian migrant worker, Longina; a fight with her husband leads Menegildo to stab him and be imprisoned in Havana. In the city, he is initiated into the ñáñigo secret society and participates in Afro-Caribbean religious ceremonies. The novel ends with Menegildo becoming a murder victim of the city’s violence and Longina returning to the countryside to give birth to their child.

126  American Imperialism’s Undead The presence of Haitians in Écue-Yamba-O is a reminder — typical of Carpentier’s writing — that Cuba’s Afro-Caribbean culture has long and important links to Haiti. One of the destinations for slaveholders fleeing the Haitian Revolution was Cuba, an exodus represented in The Kingdom of This World. While these planters often were forced to leave without their property, some were able to bring enslaved people with them. If the conflict in Saint-Domingue during the 1790s thus led to a small but significant influx of black people to Cuba, the success of the enslaved in permanently ending slavery in Saint-Domingue and ­establishing the independent state of Haiti created another demographic shift in the nineteenth century. With what had been the most productive sugar colony in the world ostracized from the global economy and no ­longer participating in the transatlantic slave trade, Cuba stepped in and ­became the ­region’s major producer of sugar and importer of Africans after the Haitian Revolution. In the thirty-five years before 1807, Cuba had imported approximately 119,000 African slaves (Curtin 35); in the forty years after, the number of Africans brought to Cuba was more than 200,000 and possibly closer to 350,000 (Curtin 39; Kutzinski 18). The population of enslaved people and free people of color in Cuba thus grew from 138,742 in 1791 to 603,046 in 1861 (Murray 136 ). By the time slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1886, there were still a substantial number of people on the island who had been born in Africa. Just as the fall of the Saint-Domingue sugar economy transformed Cuba demographically, Cuban culture during the nineteenth century was haunted by the specter of Haiti ( Ferrer; Fischer, Modernity). While the Haitian Revolution’s tradition of radical antislavery influenced the development of Cuban slavery and abolitionism, the Cuban wars of independence beginning in the 1860s frequently received logistical support from the Haitian government, and Cuban freedom fighters often sought refuge in Haiti (Casey 56 – 62). If the Haitian Revolution and an independent Haiti shaped nineteenth century Cuba, U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean — including the occupation of Haiti — defined Cuba during the twentieth century. It is this reality that Écue-Yamba-O seeks to engage. The United States took possession of Cuba after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and while Cuba became nominally independent after a brief occupation lasting from 1899 to 1902, U.S. companies seized control of most of the island’s economy during those years. William Van Horne, whose business partner Russell Alger had been U.S. secretary of war during the occupation of Cuba, obtained rights to build a railroad that became an investment vehicle for

127  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti representatives of J. P. Morgan and Chase National Bank ( Zanetti and García 215–16 ). United Fruit Company acquired substantial landholdings in Cuba, while the Cuban sugar industry became largely owned by U.S. companies such as the Cuban American Sugar Company; by 1927, 82 percent of sugar production in Cuba was from U.S.-owned mills ( ­Kutzinski 136 ). These companies had come to Cuba seeking cheap labor, and when the U.S. occupation of Haiti began in 1915, the economic benefits of imperialism became clear. As the U.S. occupation’s attempts at consolidating landholdings to modernize Haitian agriculture led to the displacement of peasants from their family plots, this surplus labor was essentially sold to the U.S. sugar corporations operating in Cuba; Valerie Kaussen cites one of the highest-ranking U.S. occupation officials concluding that “the greatest asset of Haiti is its cheap labor” (xi).7 More than two hundred thousand Haitians arrived in Cuba between 1915 and 1929 (Castor 98), driving down wages and reinforcing the island’s racial divisions. Sugar companies controlled this system of seasonal labor with support from the U.S. government: Alejandro de la Fuente details how in 1918, when the Haitian government tried to stop migration to Cuba because of concerns over the unsanitary conditions of migrant workers, “Havana asked for the intervention of the U.S. State Department,” which forced this prohibition to be lifted (102). George Padmore in my sixth chapter describes these Haitians migrants as victims of what he calls the “black ivory trade” (“American Imperialism” 109). Carpentier was a vocal critic of these processes and the complicity of Cuban political leaders in them. In 1924, Gerardo Machado, “a former sugar mill owner committed to U.S. business interests” ( Luis-Brown 167), was elected Cuban president; after he amended the constitution to extend his term, protests erupted, and many of his opponents were jailed. Among these was Carpentier, who spent seven months in prison after signing onto a declaration by the Grupo Minorista published in the journal Social. In Écue-Yamba-O, when Menegildo is arrested, the novel remarks ironically on Carpentier’s own experience: “They did not accuse him — by chance — of spreading communist propaganda or of threatening the security of the state.”8 This aside suggests Carpentier’s cynicism about the tendency of the Machado regime to use the excuse of “state security” and label almost anyone a Communist in order to justify its incarceration of critics or those it deemed undesirable.9 The commentary on the Cuban state’s unjust penal system is only part of Écue-Yamba-O’s broader critique of Cuba’s corruption by imperialist forces. The narrator later laments the political and economic elites who

128  American Imperialism’s Undead “claimed a democratic spirit . . . until the time when they could start selling the republic to the highest bidder.”10 The novel mocks the language of international finance: “Mortgaged in its adolescence, the ‘island of cork’ had become a long sugar factory unable to float.”11 Écue-Yamba-O here references the book Cuba: La isla de corcho, written by President Machado’s cousin, Luis Machado y Ortega, who would become head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Cuba, Cuban ambassador to the United States during the Batista era, and an executive director of the World Bank. The novel’s phrasing also invokes the irony that Cuba is sinking so that loans can be floated; the passage ends by describing “Cuban workers and peasants, exploited by Yankee ingenuity, vanquished by the importation of cane cutters at low cost, deceived by the world, betrayed by the authorities, bursting with misery.”12 The profits of international finance and the suffering of local workers are outcomes of the same process. The reference to the importation of braceros as part of the way Yankee imperialism exploits Cuban workers places the setting of the novel into a broader regional perspective. On the one hand, Écue-Yamba-O reproduces much of the discourse about Haitians and Jamaicans in Cuba from this time period by describing them as part of the unwelcome outside forces encroaching on Cubanía. Caribbean people from other islands are listed among the groups “invading” Cuba in the opening pages of the novel, with Haitians in particular labeled as a “plague.”13 Elsewhere, Menegildo sees these foreign blacks as “animals and savages.”14 Emily Maguire cites Elzbieta Sklodowska to argue that the fear Haitians produce in Écue-Yamba-O derives from “their history (the slave uprising that became the Haitian Revolution)” (Maguire 80). Keeping in mind the occupation, though, opens up the possibility that Haitians in the novel do not represent only the revolutionary tradition. Sklodowska’s reading of Haitians in Écue-Yamba-O being seen as the Kristevan abject is only one factor complicating their equation with revolutionary resistance (87–88). Sklodowska carefully contextualizes the novel’s representation of Haitians in light of the migrations produced by the occupation, although she does not explore the issues of threatened Caribbean sovereignty that focusing especially on the occupation allows me to highlight. As much as Écue-Yamba-O includes these anti-Haitian sentiments, it places them in the mind of a character who sees this group as ­economic rivals. Carpentier’s nonfiction from this period, such as the 1929 “Lettre des Antilles” published in the French avant-garde journal Bifur, ­describes this reality of rural Afro-Cubans working alongside “blacks from J­ amaica

129  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti and Haiti, imported, in the true sense of the work . . . by American companies” and led to “regard each other as enemies.”15 The xenophobia Menegildo expresses in Écue-Yamba-O is undermined by his later relationship with Longina and the novel’s closing with the birth of a new Menegildo who will be half-Haitian. The novel describes the n ­ ewborn as a “rorro negro” (196 ). Defining the baby’s identity not through the ­nation but through blackness suggests the imagining of transnational identity as a way of overcoming the intraracial conflicts that earlier led to the death of Longina’s husband and Menegildo’s imprisonment. Carpentier’s fiction and nonfiction from this period seeks to avoid the problems of primitivism by emphasizing the role of global capitalism in producing the conditions of the supposedly premodern. Écue-Yamba-O thus historicizes its exploration of the experience of Caribbean blacks in Cuba, even as it echoes the primitivist desire to use that experience to both protest against the instrumentalization of life under imperialism as well as search for an alternative. Écue-Yamba-O opens by describing a world in which the rationalization of sugar production has transformed everything on the island, beginning with the landscape: “Angular, simple lines like the figure of a theorem, the block of Central San Lucio stood in the center of a wide valley bordered by a ridge of blue hills. The old man, Usebio Cué, had seen the steel, sheet metal and concrete grow like fungus on the old mills’ ruins, watching year after year, with a sort of admiring awe, the factory’s conquests of space.”16 The opening chapters continue by describing the economic and cultural processes put in place by the arrival of U.S. capital. On the one hand, the consolidation of land for large-scale sugar production leads to what de la Fuente calls the “proletarianization of the Afro-Cuban peasantry (106 ).17 In Écue, peasants like Usebio Cué become “asexual, almost mechanical.”18 At the same time, the new arrivals from Haiti and Jamaica bring “los bongoes” (19) and “el África” (20), reinvigorating Cuban culture. The novel posits this Afro-Caribbean culture as a response to materialist enslavement through its alternative rhythm and geometry, opposing the organic circles of the ñáñigo ceremonies to the rationalizing rectangles of the railroad and the prison.19 Despite Carpentier’s efforts to foreground this historicizing gesture and therefore avoid romanticizing primitivism, Écue-Yamba-O has still been criticized as a naïve or inauthentic version of Afro-Caribbean culture. One of the novel’s earliest critics, Juan Marinello, described the “central crack” in the novel as its tension between presenting Afro-­ Caribbean culture from the inside or from the outside (qtd. in P. Miller

130  American Imperialism’s Undead 32). This tension plays out most obviously in the distance between the characters’ Afro-Cuban speech and its narrator’s formal Spanish. Following ­Marinello, more recent readers like Jeremy Cass see “its principal character’s unconvincing Afro-Cubanness” (317) as a general failure “to present the Afro-Cuban subject authentically” (319). I do not necessarily disagree that Carpentier fails to meet this standard, but the standard itself is problematic, and it is not clear that critics’ expectations of what would be “authentic” are any better. Cass contrasts the ability of The Kingdom of This World to present characters with a “­worldview . . . ­entrenched in the African” (317) with Écue’s overemphasis on “syncretism” r­esulting in “privileging the non-African manifestations of [santería’s] religious ­figures” (319) and therefore “a fundamentally western framework” (317). In my discussion of The Kingdom of This World later in this chapter, I will turn to the implications of presenting the Caribbean as fully “African,” a primitivist romanticization of Africa as outside of an exhausted or corrupt modernity. For now, I want to focus on how C ­ arpentier’s double vision, seeing Caribbean culture as syncretic, need not be read only as a failure to understand Cuba on its own terms. In Écue-Yamba-O or “Lettre des Antilles,” attention to the socioeconomic context producing syncretism is the only way to avoid exoticizing primitivism. “Lettre” begins by reciting the romantic views expressed “when one speaks of Negroes” before contrasting how “one almost always ignores their power of adaptation to new contexts, their ability to transform on the spot, to create new traditions”; the rest of the article documents AfroCaribbean religious practice.20 The chants in Écue-Yamba-O accompanying the santería ceremony — “Where was the saint born? Over there in Guinea!” — are not presented as atavism but creative adaptability.21 At the same time, Afro-Caribbean syncretism is not seen as mimicry, as the novel makes clear through contrast with the Cuban elite who listen to Jack Hylton (68) and adopt the latest English slang (69). Creative adaptation is distinguished from cultural imperialism: “Orange-crush had become an instrument of imperialism, like the memory of Roosevelt or Lindbergh’s plane . . . ! Only blacks like Menegildo, Longina, Salome, and her offspring zealously preserved Antillean character and tradition. The bongo, antidote to Wall Street! . . . No hot dogs with Mayeya saints!”22 Afro-Caribbean culture is thus positioned as both syncretic and authentic: rather than timeless or pure, the Africanness of Caribbean culture becomes visible only when contrasted to the commercialized culture around it.

131  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti Attending to syncretism within its socioeconomic context allows ­ arpentier to engage with a context of imperialism in which even the C desire to find an African culture outside of foreign contamination mirrors the anthropological search for the primitive driven by modern malaise. The Lost Steps, the novel Carpentier wrote after Kingdom, in particular explores this problematic, opening with its narrator in a northern city expressing the idea of the Western world’s exhaustion and imagining traveling into the interior of South America as a source of renewal. As my section on The Kingdom of This World will explore, Carpentier would encounter various versions of this primitivist impulse while in Paris, including through contact with writers inspired by occupied Haiti like William Seabrook. Écue-Yamba-O suggests that Carpentier sees the foregrounding of sociopolitical context as the way to incorporate AfroCaribbean culture into his vision of the nation without reproducing the exoticism of the surrealists. The avant-gardists with whom Carpentier worked in Cuba were developing a similar project with regard to simultaneous celebration of Afro-Cuban culture coupled with anti-imperialist critique. As ­Francine Masiello describes, the journal Revista de Avance, whose editors included Carpentier, Marinello, Jorge Mañach, Martí Casanovas, and Francisco Ichaso (and later, after Carpentier left the group, Felix Lizaso and José Z. Tallet), sought to occupy a space of marginality from which to analyze and oppose mainstream Cuban culture. Blackness provided one way of articulating that otherness: “Avance members often underscored the African legacy in Cuban life, using it as a tool for denouncing foreign interference in local affairs” (6 ). Avance’s investigations of Afro-Caribbean religious practices  —  like Carpentier’s in Écue-Yamba-O — ­responded ­directly to both the geopolitical context of U.S. imperialism that led to an increasing presence of Haitians in Cuba during the 1910s and 1920s, while also more generally belonging to the broader international interest in exotic black spirituality promoted by the U.S. culture industry’s obsession with Haiti and what became known as voodoo. The international context for the Cuban exploration of African roots is perhaps most obvious in Avance’s June 1929 article “Moda y modo negros” by Pedro Marco, which notes that “North America and Europe demand, incessantly, black things” ( Norteamérica y Europa píden, incesantemente, cosas de negro [181]). Avance became an important bridge to international modernism, including that of the United States, publishing reprints of work by a number of figures Masiello describes as “dissident modernists in the United

132  American Imperialism’s Undead States” (18). On the one hand, these writers were often those whose work could be used to reinforce the primitivist lens of Avance. In fact, the U.S. writers to have work featured or reviewed included many of those influenced by the occupation of Haiti, such as Countee Cullen, ­Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, and John Vandercook. The sources of this Cuban primitivist pursuit of the Other therefore connected with similar currents within the United States that the occupation of Haiti helped focalize. At the same time, the “dissident modernists” featured in Avance also reinforced the journal’s critique of U.S. capitalism and imperialism; translations of or articles about John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, and H. L. Mencken were published alongside editorials advocating for Puerto Rican independence or criticizing Wall Street meddling in Nicaragua.23 While Avance’s vision of its purview as Spanish-speaking Latin America led to the omission of any explicit discussion of the occupation of Haiti, U.S. imperialism in the hemisphere was a primary concern. The many reverberations of the occupation of Haiti meant that even if the Avance editors never directly engaged with it, the occupation entered the journal in other ways. There were, of course, articles about the influx of Haitian and Jamaican cane workers, as in the October 1929 issue. But there were also echoes of U.S. discourse about Haitian culture. Poetry such as Ramón Guirao’s “Bailadora de rumba,” describing its dancer and “las serpientes / de sus brazos” (241), presents the writhing black woman possessed by the drum who becomes snakelike, thus reproducing precisely the vision from Arthur Burks’s story “Voodoo” discussed in my third chapter. In addition to these echoes of U.S. discourse, the one explicit mention of the occupation came in the translation of a French story in the January 1929 issue. That issue is the first to really give Afro-Caribbean culture a privileged place, beginning with two articles by the editors about race: first, “Raza y cultura,” praising Fernando Ortíz’s research; and then second, “La cuestión del negro.” Both editorials are about the relationship of Afro-Caribbean people to Cuban identity, further illustrating how the arrival of Haitians and Jamaicans in Cuba placed the issue of race at the front of national consciousness. Within that context, the January 1929 issue includes a story by French writer Paul Morand, translated into Spanish as “El zar negro.” Carpentier had himself translated an earlier story of Morand’s, published as “El museo Rogatkine” in Social in 1925 (Müller-Bergh 27). “El zar negro” comes from Morand’s collection Magie noire, published in France in 1928; a translation into English accompanied by Aaron Douglas’s illustrations was published in 1929 with

133  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti the support of the NAACP leader Walter White.24 The story included in Revista de Avance, the only one from the collection set in occupied Haiti, is preceded by a curious prologue. Even after explaining the decision to translate and publish Morand’s story because of “the Antillean sympathy and anti-imperialist spirit that animate it” ( la simpatía antillana y el espíritu de antimperialismo que lo animan [“El zar” 20 ]), the editors insist on the distinctiveness of Cuba: “Mr. Morand — like many other European writers — refers to American policy issues that are not his specialty. This does not mean [Avance] wants to ignore the control exercised by the United States over the American zone against which, on more than one occasion, we have pronounced. But, without denying this influence, it is good to remind Mr. Morand that Cuba, a free people with their own sovereignty, has never suffered the abject condition that Mr. Morand describes and, consequently, cannot be alluded to as a term of comparison.”25 This preface suggests the anxiety Haiti’s occupation posed for Cubans. Morand’s anti-imperialism is attractive in light of the Avance group’s concerns with U.S. power, but as in Diario de la Marina, the reality of occupation hits too close to home in a nominally independent Cuba. The inclusion of Morand’s story shows the complex dynamics of the desire to turn to Haiti as primary site for recuperating AfroCaribbean culture, considering the fear of all Haiti represents, culturally as well as geopolitically. The preface to Morand’s story is perhaps even more intriguing in what it leaves out: critique of the exoticism of Caribbean culture typical of ­Morand’s writing. The Avance editors praise the story’s “literary excellence” (excelencia literaria) without confronting the exoticizing lens it brings (“El zar” 20).26 Brent Hayes Edwards describes how ­Morand’s stories “portray a unified black world ultimately determined by its a­ tavism — the susceptibility of even the most seemingly civilized and modern black subject to revert at any moment to his or her ‘essential’ primitive nature” (163– 64). “El zar negro” contains a particularly odd version of this atavism, showing how Occide, a Haitian intellectual, turns to terrorism to oppose the occupation, then becomes a Communist tyrant who offers the island over to Soviet domination.27 Avance includes only the first half of the story, leading up to the bombing of the “American Club”; abridging the story this way actually erases much of the stranger and more complicated political commentary and focuses the excerpt around how Occide cannot resist his African nature in the face of voodoo drums. The image by Luis López Méndez chosen to accompany the story similarly emphasizes the primitivism of the protagonist, ­adopting a

134  American Imperialism’s Undead style much like that of Alexander King’s illustrations of the first edition of William Seabrook’s The Magic Island.28 In seeing Afro-Cuban culture as removed from larger historical forces, the version of Morand’s story presented in Avance fits in with the negrista poetry and art appearing elsewhere in the journal. Reading Écue-Yamba-O alongside these other forms of negrismo and afroantillanismo presented in Avance shows the unique nature of ­Carpentier’s text. Roberto González Echevarría argues that Afro-­Cubanism “was perhaps possible in media, such as music, dance, or even poetry,” whereas “the linear, temporal flow of narrative possesses a historical ­dimension that is contrary to the instantaneous, ahistorical nature” of the movement (60). That Morand’s story can only work as a fragment supports the idea of negrismo and afroantillanismo as ­better suited to imagistic and impressionistic representation. González ­Echevarría makes this claim — that the novel as a genre is incompatible with the ahistoricity of Afro-Cubanism — in order to explain what he sees as the aesthetic failure of Écue-Yamba-O. Despite all of Écue-Yamba-O’s substantial problems in its representation of Afro-Cuban culture, I do not read the novel as ahistorical. The novel deploys this culture in a more politically engaged way than other forms of primitivism like Morand’s story, or even Kingdom. David Luis-Brown seeks to distinguish between different forms of primitivism, and these distinctions seem relevant to the differences between Carpentier’s works: “While dominant primitivist discourses disavow sociopolitical relations by condensing them into broad historical stages ( primitive versus modern . . .), alternative primitivist discourses construct more explicit articulations of racialist stereotypes that reveal the cultural production of social inequality and expose the workings of empire” (150). Kingdom’s investment in the opposition between primitive and modern (if only to recode their relationship in order to value the former) thus stands in contrast with Écue’s engagement with imperialism’s production of the seemingly unmodern. Écue-Yamba-O seeks a form of primitivism that does not evade the sociopolitical contexts of the primitive. Even as Carpentier appears to have found a political solution to the problem of primitivism in Écue, his own dissatisfaction with the novel suggests the limitations of this focus on geopolitical and ­ ­ economic contexts. Écue-Yamba-O may illustrate the global forces acting on its Afro-Caribbean characters, but these characters  —  especially the ­Haitians — ­remain more the product of economic imperialist forces than unique historical actors. It would be Carpentier’s next novel that would

135  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti seek to more fully explore and appreciate the personhood of these AfroCaribbean people. If Écue-Yamba-O could not quite separate its H ­ aitian and Afro-Cuban characters from the context of the U.S. imperialism shaping them, The Kingdom of This World would ironically find its entry into its Haitian characters’ minds and worldview through the pathways laid down by the occupation.

The Magic Island and Magical Realism: Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World remains one of the great Caribbean literary works about the Haitian Revolution. The novel was one of the earliest fictional renderings of the revolution by a non-Haitian Caribbean writer. It seeks to humanize the enslaved by investing their actions with a politics: if in European versions of the event, the slaves rebel as mindless savages, The Kingdom of This World presents the enslaved as calculating and morally right in their desire for freedom. But Carpentier also attempts to avoid subsuming the aspirations of the enslaved under Enlightenment categories of liberty, equality, and fraternity; he seeks to do justice to the cosmology of the African revolutionaries by showing how non-European systems of thought and belief shaped their actions. The Kingdom of This World thus is largely focalized through an ordinary slave, Ti-Noël, beginning with his conscientization while listening to Macandal’s stories about Africa, through his participation in the Bois Caiman ceremony that initiates the slave uprising, up to his life in postrevolution Haiti under Henri Christophe and beyond. The novel repeatedly contrasts the syncretic African belief systems and cultural practices in which Ti-Noël participates with the hapless European miscomprehension of Caribbean reality on the part of planters like M. Lenormand de Mézy or French representatives like General Leclerc and his wife, Pauline Bonaparte. As much as The Kingdom of This World thus presents an ­alternative to traditionally trivializing or dehumanizing views of the revolution, critics have often criticized the novel’s pessimistic view of the event’s ­aftermath.29 I will suggest that this pessimism about independent Haiti is related to how much the novel has in common with the many versions of Haitian history published during the occupation. As my third chapter examines in my discussion of Max Eastman’s comparison of Claude McKay to Henri Christophe, the Haitian king was an object of ­fascination for U.S. writers during the occupation. The 1928 selection of John ­Vandercook’s biography of Christophe, Black Majesty, as a book-of-the-month by the

136  American Imperialism’s Undead Literary Guild demonstrates the popularity of the Haitian king in the U.S. imaginary. Carpentier’s Christophe, ensconced on his throne yet distanced from his people and haunted by their throbbing drums (Kingdom 147– 48), resembles Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones; the incredible “marvelous world . . . of Negroes” (114 –15) Ti-Noël sees represented by Sans Souci reflects the same race pride that James Weldon Johnson would express in writing about visiting the ruins of Christophe’s Citadel in the Crisis. Ostensibly, what separates The Kingdom of This World from these other works is how the author’s Caribbean perspective allows him insight into the worldview of the revolutionary actors. Yet, as I argue in my reading of the novel, its views of Haitian spirituality resemble, and appear to have roots in, narratives produced during the occupation that forged images of an invented voodoo more reflective of imperial fantasies than of actual religious practices. In December 1931, Carpentier wrote an article in the Cuban journal Carteles about the U.S. journalist and travel writer William Seabrook, calling his narrative about Haiti, The Magic Island, “one of the most beautiful books written in present times” (uno de los libros más hermosos que se escrito en tiempos actuales [“Leyes” 46 ]). In 1936 while still in Paris, Carpentier wrote the script for a documentary titled “Le vaudou” that credited Seabrook as its source.30 Critics such as Roberto González Echevarría and Michael Dash have noted Carpentier’s admiration for Seabrook; Dash describes learning this fact “with some dismay” (Other America 88), suggesting how a leading Haitianist regards Seabrook’s representation of Haitian culture. Other critics, particularly Anke ­Birkenmaier, Carlos Rincón, and Amy Fass Emery, have attended to ­Carpentier’s time in Paris working among surrealists and the avant-garde. Scholarship has not, however, connected these two facts, that C ­ arpentier was not only an admirer of Seabrook but that the two moved in the same circles while Carpentier was in Paris. Understanding Seabrook as part of the avant-garde Paris scene that Carpentier rebels against — yet in some ways replicates — in The Kingdom of This World illustrates the ambivalent relationship of the marvelous real to the forms of primitivism that grew out of the occupation of Haiti. Carpentier lived in Paris from 1928 to 1939, contributing to avantgarde publications like Bifur and Documents.31 Both of these journals had connections to U.S. writers in Paris. William Carlos Williams was on the advisory board of Bifur, and a French translation of Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” appeared in the same issue as ­Carpentier’s “Lettre des Antilles.” Documents, which was edited by Georges Bataille

137  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti and Michel Leiris, is even more closely connected to the U.S. discourse produced by the occupation of Haiti through the presence of Seabrook in the journal. Seabrook lived in France in 1930 and 1931, where, as Nella Larsen’s biographer notes, “his usual Montparnasse address became a regular stopping-place for the famous and notorious of all descriptions” ( Hutchinson, In Search 383). Seabrook had just published The Magic Island, pleasing audiences eager for tales of exotic Haiti: in the United States, this book had been the Literary Guild’s selection for January 1929, and a French translation with a preface by Morand appeared in Paris later the same year. In France, Seabrook connected with Morand, who helped Seabrook travel to French West Africa to collect material for his next book, Jungle Ways ( Zieger 746 ). Although Seabrook wanted to participate in cannibalism in Africa for that book, he was unable to find any Africans willing to help him; ironically, only after returning to Paris would he be able to acquire a corpse to cook so that he could experience this supposedly savage practice. To write Jungle Ways, Seabrook retreated to Toulon ( Zieger 737), the same seaside town near Marseilles where a few years earlier, Claude McKay had written his unpublished first novel, “Color Scheme” (Cooper 211–12). While Seabrook was in Toulon, he contributed the photograph Le Caput Mortuum to Documents, and a review of The Magic Island by Leiris appears in another issue of the journal.32 Seabrook’s desire to participate in his idea of “African” cannibalism gives a hint of the reasons for Dash’s dismay at imagining Carpentier to have been influenced by this primitivist thrill seeker. Seabrook wrote lurid, exotic tales of the places he visited. The Magic Island became one of the most famous narratives about Haiti published during the occupation, cementing ideas about voodoo in the U.S. imaginary and setting the stage for the rise of zombie movies in the 1930s. Bataille, Leiris, and other avant-gardists (including Carpentier) would have been drawn to The Magic Island because of its celebration of the irrational as well as its willingness to transgress the mores of Western civilization. The Magic Island details outlandish cultural practices in Haiti, especially voodoo rituals that include Seabrook’s drinking of blood from a sacrificed goat (69). The Magic Island casts itself as an appreciation of Haitians’ organic connection to the natural world, particularly a vitality frequently understood in terms of male sexuality: Seabrook contrasts the “curious male shame” of “civilized people” with the way in Haiti “men are sexual animals as well as women” (220). Still, as his view of Haitians as more “animal” suggests, Seabrook’s averred neutrality on the politics of the occupation — “I’m not interested in politics” (145), he asserts in

138  American Imperialism’s Undead The Magic Island — is undermined by the ways the book’s view of nonwhite people implicitly supports the U.S. presence.33 Seabrook repeatedly infantilizes Haitians, seeing them as “naïve, simple, harmless children” (91) possessing “elementary emotional psychology” (257). Mary Renda shows how the idea of Haitians as children was central to the justification of the occupation as a mission to provide paternalistic guidance for an orphaned nation (254). Infantilizing Haitians also reinforced the view of them as savages, expressed explicitly by Seabrook in certain moments: “The mass of the populace, possessing childlike traits often naïve and lovable as well as laughable, have also a powerful underlying streak of primitive, atavistic savagery” (276 ). If Seabrook’s prose frequently shuttled between sympathetic renderings of Haitians and these kinds of racist caricatures, the illustrations by Alexander King sided almost entirely with the emphasis on savagery (Twa, “Black Magic” 143– 46 ). In addition to representing Haitians in ways that dovetailed with discourses supporting the occupation, Seabrook’s focus on the primitive leaves him unable to see what is modern in Haiti, therefore erasing the impact of the occupation and his own complicity in it. The narrative opens with a foreword describing the traveler arriving to see looming above “a great mass of mountains . . . , fantastic and mysterious” (3). This opening description acknowledges a “more modern” Haiti as well as the historicity of a past of slavery and revolution; but after quickly glossing that history, the foreword ends by describing how “as night fell” the modern city and its history “faded to vagueness and disappeared. Only the jungle mountains remained, dark, mysterious; and from their slopes came presently far out across the water the steady boom of ­Voodoo drums” (4). Haitians can only be this primitive Other: as Seabrook opines, a “barefooted peasant in overalls” is “himself,” but in a uniform, “what was he now?” (151). Carpentier’s version of Cubans and Haitians in Écue-Yamba-O therefore presents a contrast, in which the Caribbean is not a premodern space outside history but a capitalist periphery integrally linked to global finance and multinational corporations through predatory relationships. While Seabrook’s narrative notes the occasions when he crosses paths with bank managers or hears stories about the Haitian American Sugar Company’s use of zombies in its production (95), he prefers to focus on the Haiti supposedly untouched by this modernity, the places where “strangers never came” (30). The irony of his own presence as product of occupation is unexplored, precisely the lack of self-analysis Carpentier would parody in The Lost Steps.

139  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti Carpentier’s admiration for Seabrook shows his connections to this primitivist romanticization of the Caribbean inspired by the occupation of Haiti that circulated in Paris during the early 1930s. At the same time, another important discussion about the occupation was taking place in Paris, though there is no evidence that Carpentier was connected to it: this conversation revolved around La Revue du Monde Noir, edited by ­Martinican Paulette Nardal and Haitian Léo Sajous and published throughout 1931. While Seabrook was working with the French surrealists editing Documents, Nardal and Sajous were publishing a variety of perspectives about Haiti, including those of Haitian critics of the occupation like Jean Price-Mars. The first issue of La Revue features Price-Mars’s “Le ­Problème du travail en Haïti,” which identifies the problems of poverty and unemployment and the failure of U.S. representatives — “the high commissioner, the financial advisor, the technicians, the experts of every category” (15) — to have any plan for Haitian economic success. ­Instead, “as tax collectors their only preoccupation has been to perfect the methods of revenue collection without ever concerning themselves about the paying capacity of those taxed; so that now in spite of all, the payment of taxes is decreasing proportionally, the budget deficits are increasing and in all social strata poverty is spreading in alarming magnitude” (16 ).34 Price-Mars understands well the problem of a political regime primarily designed to collect debt for international finance capitalism. It is also worth noting that since La Revue published English translations alongside their articles, we can see that while the original French foregrounds the occupation by including the subtitle “L’occupation militaire américaine et la production agricole,” the English translation omits that subheading and includes the discussion of the role of the U.S. in Haiti’s economy only under the heading “Coffee Policy.” In light of the aggressive efforts by U.S. authorities to censor criticism of the occupation, the omission of explicit invocation of the occupation in the English translation suggests that the Paris-based editors may have envisioned readers in places under U.S. control, whether that meant Haiti or Harlem. While Price-Mars contributes to La Revue in his political capacity — he is listed in the table of contents of the issue as Sénateur Price-Mars — his presence in the journal is also a reminder of the aesthetic movement he championed during the 1920s, indigénisme, and its strategic deployment as an anti-occupation discourse. Price-Mars was a vocal critic of the occupation and its apologists, and in Une étape de l’évolution Haïtienne (1929), he criticized Seabrook for his exoticizing representations. Price-Mars’s Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928) was the most influential Haitian intellectual work

140  American Imperialism’s Undead of the 1920s, and scholars like Dash have argued for its reclaiming of ­African roots as an implicit nationalist assertion of identity against U.S. domination.35 Valerie Kaussen explains how in the context of U.S. censorship, indigénisme “gives veiled expression to an ongoing struggle of subaltern Haitians against the American colonizer” (40). The work of Price-Mars and the indigénistes inspired by him offers a parallel example to the Hispanophone desire to find a Caribbean culture outside imperialist commercialization and contamination expressed in negrismo and afroantillanismo. Looking to La Revue du Monde Noir alongside the surrealists publishing in Documents and Bifur also offers an alternative genealogy for the marvelous real, even if Carpentier does not appear to connect with this lineage until his 1943 trip to Haiti. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting in N ­ egritude Women and Brent Hayes Edwards in chapter 3 of The Practice of Diaspora make a case for La Revue, along with the literary ­salons hosted by Paulette Nardal and her sisters, as a crucial context for the range of Francophone Caribbean intellectual practices developing in Paris in the 1930s, négritude being the most famous. The Nardal ­sisters worked with and influenced a variety of writers and intellectuals, including the Martinican writers who would later publish the journal Tropiques in the 1940s, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and René Ménil. Martinicans like the Nardals or the Tropiques group were very interested in Haiti, with Aimé Césaire famously calling Haiti “where négritude rose for the first time” in his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (15). Ménil, who contributed to La Revue du Monde Noir, went on to publish an article titled “Introduction au Merveilleux” in Tropiques in October 1941. The version of the marvelous real Carpentier develops after his 1943 trip to Haiti appears to draw from Ménil’s; Carlos Rincón points to Pierre Mabille, a French surrealist who accompanied Carpentier in Haiti and who also published in Tropiques, as a potential link between Carpentier and Ménil (117). The Kingdom of This World can be read as the collision of these two discourses; Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, for example, sees “Carpentier stand[ ing ] in that slightly ambiguous terrain between Price-Mars and Seabrook — committed on the one hand to an alternative depiction of Haitian history that emphasizes the people’s enduring faith in Vodou and the lwas, yet not unwilling to fetishize aspects of that faith in his quest for the magic-realist unveiling of that history required by the new literature he envisioned” (“Haitian Revolution” 118). Intriguingly, both of these influences grow out of responses to the occupation of Haiti: on the one

141  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti hand, Seabrook’s exoticizing vision that ultimately justified, even as it lamented, the occupation; on the other hand, the indigéniste efforts to oppose the occupation passed from Price-Mars, through the Nardals, to Ménil and Césaire. Yet even these two lineages are not so easy to separate. In the third issue of La Revue du Monde Noir, a glowing review of Seabrook’s The Magic Island appears; it is written by René Ménil. Ménil repeats Seabrook’s vision of Haiti as “the magic island where life breathes in the very depths of a nature,” and further celebrates the author as the one whose “mind and love . . . impart life to that inert substance and to those black men” (“L’Ile” 26 ). Ménil sees Seabrook as able to achieve total communion with Haitian culture by surrendering himself to his unconscious: he is “a man who, in his sleep, does not defend himself against any dream, he stores up the images, complete or broken, builds them into a whole with loving care, without concerning himself with the silly laughter of the civilized man who is awake” (27). The extent to which this review of The Magic Island accepts Seabrook’s visions of voodoo calls attention to how Ménil’s own ideas of the marvelous, written a decade later, tend to reproduce not only Seabrook’s romanticization but also his simplification of black culture. When Ménil writes that “the land of the marvelous is the most stunning revenge that we have — at the level of subjective reality — against a life that, however little we are inclined to joke about it, depresses us to the extent that it is in thrall to practical reason” (“Introduction” 91), he echoes Seabrook’s desire to use Haitian spirituality as an antidote to Western modernity’s instrumentalization, a formula the world-weary narrator of Carpentier’s The Lost Steps repeats. Even Seabrook’s infantilization of the primitive appears here, with Ménil seeing “the child, our master of marvels” as the one who “knows more than anyone the magical power” of the marvelous (91). The roots of Carpentier’s own visions of the marvelous real thus emerge from this tangled web of exoticist versions of Haiti produced during the occupation. The way Carpentier himself theorizes the marvelous real ­reproduces some of these earlier narratives. Where Ménil declares that “it is not by means of ruses of the intelligence that we can gain entrance to the world of marvels” (92), Carpentier similarly seeks to distinguish “the ­marvelous, manufactured by tricks of prestidigitation” from the real marvelousness of the Caribbean (“On the Marvelous” 85). He finds this reality most readily embodied in Haiti, and it is when Carpentier explains the distinctiveness of Haitian culture that he appears to most resemble Seabrook. Most obviously, Carpentier in the prologue to The Kingdom of This

142  American Imperialism’s Undead World draws comparisons to premodern medieval Europe to make the case for appreciation of the marvelous as something modern civilizations have lost: “certain phrases of Rutilio about men transformed into wolves from The Labors of Persiles and Segismunda turn out to be prodigiously trustworthy because in Cervantes’ time, it was believed that people could suffer from lupine mania. Another example is the trip a character makes from Tuscany to Norway on a witch’s blanket. Marco Polo allowed that certain birds flew while carrying elephants in their claws. Even ­Luther saw a demon face to face and threw an inkwell at its head” (86 ).36 Seabrook had earlier used the same method in seeking to normalize the practice of Haitian voodoo by noting similar beliefs in the European past: “These [ Haitian] tales ran closely parallel not only with those of the ­negroes in Georgia and the Carolinas, but with the mediaeval folklore of white Europe” (97). Seabrook repeats this strategy a number of times, sometimes referencing the Middle Ages and other times classical Rome or Greece (39, 41). In each case, the comparison serves to show that Haiti is not monstrous, but simply a place where a deep religious faith imbues people with a premodern worldview: “Forget the details and see only, if you can, that here a sacred flame was burning before sincerely worshiped household gods, just as such flames have burned not only for Louis’ savage forebears in the Congo jungle, but before the Lares and Penates of ancient Rome, and still burn today before household shrines in every so-called heathen land and in a few archaic Christian ones where religion is an intimate vital element of daily life” (22). Carpentier in his prologue similarly declares that “the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith” (“On the Marvelous” 86 ). The Kingdom of This World clearly depicts this worldview, in which the enslaved do not subscribe to modern notions of rationality in their understanding of the phenomena around them. Macandal’s shape-­shifting, from lizard to moth to dog and back to man (41– 43), is narrated as something the enslaved take for granted. Macandal’s abilities are contrasted with descriptions of planter society that constantly emphasize its modernity: the local newspapers available “for the enlightenment of . . . educated customers” (10) as well as the importance of the theater emphasize Cap-Français as a city making “remarkable progress” (57). As radically different as the Enlightened and premodern worldviews may be, as in The Magic Island, The Kingdom of This World draws comparisons to the superstitious beliefs of the European past. The novel describes Macandal’s transformations in the chapter “The Metamorphoses,” evoking classical European myth through this title. Moving to Rome with

143  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti S­ oliman in the last section allows the novel to foreground the history of European art’s inspiration in marvelous stories of sex between women and swans or women and bulls. Even if now, amid European statues, Soliman encounters “a white, cold, motionless world,” this artwork is a reminder of another, past Europe infused by mythological belief (164). Macandal’s transformations as well as these statues evoke the fine line between humanity and animal central to the novel’s representation of an organic, premodern worldview shared by contemporary Haiti and classical Europe. The Kingdom of This World opens with such a blurring, in which Ti Noël notices that “only a wooden wall separated” the butcher and barber shops, so that “alongside the pale calves’ heads, heads of white men were served on the same tablecloth” (11). Seeing the common animality of masters and their property is part of what makes revolution imaginable. Yet the examples of Macandal or of the statues Soliman encounters are also of hybridity. Another chapter title from Kingdom, “The Daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë,” subtly evokes the same kind of hybridity: while the ostensible reference is to the lines from Racine’s Phèdre recited in the chapter ( Paravisini-Gebert, Literature 29), another story involving Pasiphaë is of her mothering the Minotaur after being impregnated by a bull.37 Derek Walcott in “Goats and Monkeys” (1965) uses the story of Pasiphaë to reference ideas about the monstrousness of miscegenation; The Kingdom of This World keeps these connotations at the margins but allows all of these references to create echoes between Haitian cosmology and classical European mythology. The “Negress [who] gave birth to a child with a wild boar’s face” (42) or the “extraordinary animals that had had human offspring” (25) show the Haiti of The Kingdom of This World to be a place like ancient Europe — not quite contemporaneous, certainly not modern — where the lines between human and animal, scientific and supernatural are unclear. My discussion of Walrond in chapter 3 examined the implications of locating explorations of animality in the Caribbean, specifically in terms of the imagery of snakes Walrond uses in a number of his stories. Seabrook and Carpentier also draw on this imagery of snakes, further connecting The Kingdom of This World to the discourses about Haiti circulating during the occupation. If Arthur Burks’s stories demonstrated the U.S. insistence on seeing voodoo as snake worship, Seabrook reproduces this understanding. While Seabrook puts in the mouth of an upper-class Haitian a description of his countrymen as “superstitious savages . . . heathen, pagan, snake-worshiping, idolaters” (107), The Magic Island repeatedly mentions “Damballa, the ancient African Serpent god” (34),

144  American Imperialism’s Undead calling him “almighty Jove of the Voodoo pantheon” (55), and features Haitians praying to “Papa Legba, Maîtresse Ezilée and the Serpent” (53). Seabrook even replicates Burks’s tendency to see Haitians themselves as taking on snakelike qualities when he describes “Maman Célie, hissing like a snake” (59). Carpentier’s novel is replete with references to snakes. On the one hand, The Kingdom of This World attributes to planters the view that “some of the Negroes were snake-worshippers” (78), identifying this belief as central to the slave owners’ inability to understand the revolution’s success: “Possibly [the slaves] had been carrying on the rites of this religion right under his nose for years and years. . . . But could a civilized person have been expected to concern himself with the savage beliefs of people who worshipped a snake?” (79). Yet even as The Kingdom of This World thus pokes fun at how little planters understand the complexity of the religious practice of the enslaved, the inspirational stories of ­Africa told by Macandal come close to reproducing the same understanding; T ­ i-Noël hears not only of “King Da, the incarnation of the Serpent, which is the eternal beginning, never ending” (13), but also of how “in the holy city of Whidah, the Cobra is worshipped, the mystical representation of the eternal world” (20). Kingdom’s relationship to The Magic Island and the occupation of Haiti thus demonstrates the problem with affirming otherness as a weapon in the battle against Enlightenment and the West. Haitians ­become premodern resources, noble savages, even at the height of their participation in what Trouillet, Fischer, and Nesbitt argue for as a quintessentially modern event. The Kingdom of This World includes a parody of this primitivist search for otherness in Pauline Bonaparte’s (sexualized ) desire to ­partake of Haitian culture. The pseudo-religious ceremony in which she ­participates is described using the stereotypes of voodoo promoted during the occupation: “One morning the horrified French maids came upon the Negro [ Soliman] circling in a strange dance around Pauline, who was kneeling on the floor with her hair hanging loose. Soliman, wearing only a belt from which a white handkerchief hung as a cachesex, his neck adorned with blue and red beads, was hopping around like a bird and brandishing a rusty machete. Both were uttering deep groans which, as though wrenched from inside, sounded like the baying of dogs when the moon is full. A decapitated rooster was still fluttering amid scattered grains of corn” (100). This scene suggests the potential in The Kingdom of This World for a critique of the exoticizing turn to Haiti for premodern spirituality that led Seabrook there. Soliman, who

145  Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti has concocted this ritual to fulfill Pauline Bonaparte’s fantasies about Caribbean culture — ­fantasies that visitors to Haiti, including in many ways Carpentier, would continue to harbor into the twentieth century and ­beyond — ­manages to ­establish some, however circumscribed, power over his mistress through this performance. Nonetheless, for the author seeking to do the same, the problem faced in Écue-Yamba-O remains: representing Afro-­ Caribbean beliefs and practices  —  especially highly commodified ones like Haitian ­religion — in ways that preserve the distinct opacity of their unassimilability to outside value systems without presenting them as exotically primitive. Écue-Yamba-O suggests that if inequalities and hierarchies make it impossible to represent the Other ethically, the only solution is to change the rules of the game: the novel thus points to identifying and opposing imperialism as the root cause of exploitation and inequality as the only possible response. The Kingdom of This World produces a more coherent aesthetic through the confidence with which it presents its version of Afro-­Caribbean beliefs as if from within; but the traces of occupation discourse in this aesthetic remain as reminders of its troubled roots. Because the U.S. presence in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico was so much more overt than in other parts of the region, even before the occupation of Haiti, Hispanic Caribbean studies is less likely to adhere to the narrative dominating postcolonial and Anglophone Caribbean studies, of European empire giving way to U.S. imperialism after World War II. Nonetheless, the importance of the occupation of Haiti to Hispanophone writers remains largely unexplored. Carpentier was not the only foundational literary figure from the Hispanic Caribbean to use images and stories of Haiti to establish blackness as central to Caribbean identity. I therefore hope that my rereadings of his work point to how examining other Hispanophone writers in light of the occupation can lead to productive engagements. Puerto Ricans in particular, as at once U.S. citizens and victims of U.S. imperialism, had a complicated relationship with Haiti’s occupation. Renda discusses Pedro del Valle, a middle-class Puerto Rican who served as a U.S. Marine in Haiti (61– 62).38 My preface mentions Arturo Schomburg as a Puerto Rican intellectual using occupied Haiti as a way of thinking about Caribbean history and identity. Another Puerto Rican who engaged with Haiti during this period is the writer most often cited along with Carpentier as a pioneer of negrismo and afroantillanismo, the poet Luis Palés Matos.39 As Victor Figueroa describes, Palés Matos

146  American Imperialism’s Undead was the first celebrated Puerto Rican writer who “considered the African presence in the Caribbean to be fundamental, and foundational” (87). In Palés Matos’s work, that presence comes primarily via Haiti: “ ‘Africa’ can only be contemplated through the lens of (and for Palés Matos it remains symbolically inextricable from) ‘Haiti’ and all it represents, with its misery and revolt” (88). As I have suggested throughout this book, Haiti may have represented “revolt” for Caribbean writers of the 1920s and 1930s, but it also represented the new kind of U.S. imperialism that the Hispanic islands were already experiencing. Examining how resemblances between writing from the United States during the 1920s and the representation of, for example, ­Christophe in the poetry of Palés Matos — one of whose poems that mentions Haiti is in fact titled “Majestad negra” as if in translation of the 1928 ­Vandercook biography of Christophe, Black Majesty — helps place ­negrismo and ­afroantillanismo into the broader context of hemispheric events and ­ oetry through ­cultural networks.40 Palés Matos’s contemporaries saw his p the lens of Seabrook ( Blanco 29) and O’Neill (Arce 37). The circulating discourses that made images of Haiti available to Palés Matos and conditioned how he would be read were crucially shaped by the occupation. My reading of Carpentier suggests how similar rereadings of Hispanophone writers like Palés Matos would need to account for the ways in which literary and cultural engagements with Haiti from this time ­period were complex mediations of multiple forms of imperialism and exoticization. The full dimensions of the networks from which ­negrismo, ­afroantillanismo, and magical realism emerged cannot be u ­ nderstood without keeping the occupation of Haiti in mind.

6 Haiti Goes Global George Padmore and Pan-African Anticolonialism

This book is about the blind spots that overlooking the U.S. occupation of Haiti produces in our visions of the Caribbean, of panAfricanism, and of anticolonialism. When George Padmore’s engagement with the occupation is forgotten, we risk failing to understand a crucial context for his anticolonial pan-Africanism, an ideology that profoundly impacted decolonization and nation building throughout the post–World War II period. Padmore’s publications and organizing — ­especially via the International African Service Bureau ( IASB) and the 1945 Pan-­African Congress in Manchester, England  —  directly influenced the People’s ­National Party ( PNP) in Jamaica, the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in Ghana, the Kenya African National Union ( KANU ), and indirectly shaped many other independence struggles throughout the world. The pan-Africanism represented by the IASB and Manchester Congress is generally understood in relation to British and French empire as well as the rise of fascism and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Attending to Padmore’s concern with the U.S. occupation of Haiti offers a reminder of U.S. imperialism as an overlooked context for understanding the origins of pan-Africanism and anticolonialism. Padmore’s earliest writings — his first articulations of ­anticolonialism — are framed through opposition to U.S. more than British empire. ­Padmore appears frequently in discussions of West Indian radicals in the United States, and the way his politicization in the United States must have shaped Padmore’s worldview is often mentioned. James Hooker’s biography of Padmore notes his activism as a student at Fisk and ­Howard (5–7), while Minkah Makalani sketches out some of Padmore’s earliest connections to the Harlem radical scene (150). Leslie James, who has carried out perhaps the most extensive research on Padmore’s activities during this period, concludes that “what Padmore experienced while in

148  American Imperialism’s Undead the United States propelled him into politics and activism and stands as a critical trace upon his life” (“What” 50). Yet none of these histories make a convincing case for how exactly we might understand that trace, for the precise ways in which Padmore’s politicization in the United States shaped his ideology. The reason, I suggest, is that overlooking the centrality of the U.S. occupation of Haiti to the Harlem radicals’ understanding of imperialism blinds us to the imprint that event made on Padmore’s own writings and thought. Padmore would become a major voice in steering anticolonialism toward a critique of the complicity of imperial governments and finance capitalism in exploiting dominated peoples, a process he witnessed especially acutely in the occupation of Haiti. While in the United States, Padmore worked closely with West Indian Communists such as Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, Grace Campbell, and Otto Huiswoud. My second chapter explored how central the occupation of Haiti was to the version of anticolonialism articulated in their writings and activism. It seems likely that Padmore’s focus on Haiti in his own writings from the early 1930s comes from reading the work of these comrades and participating in their discussions about the occupation. I want to be careful not to imply that anticolonialism was made in the U.S.A. What I am arguing, then, is not that West Indian radicals would not have come to oppose imperialism without spending time in the United States; many Caribbean people who never left home became politicized and had plenty of reasons to oppose colonial oppression. That Padmore named his daughter Blyden (after pan-Africanist Edward Blyden) while still in Trinidad demonstrates that he did not go to the United States uninterested in race or internationalism. But the specific form of the radicalism of the African Blood Brotherhood or of Padmore bears marks of the experience of their U.S. residence. Their views on imperialism were shaped through dialogue with the groups with which they worked in the United States. Examining Padmore’s work on Haiti — as well as the continuities between Padmore’s thought and that of the West Indian radicals discussed in chapter 2 — shows how much of his analysis of imperialism came in response to U.S. empire.

Positioning Padmore George Padmore was, along with W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus G ­ arvey, one of the most important pan-Africanists of the first half of the twentieth century. Padmore was, aside from Mahatma Gandhi, perhaps the most influential Anglophone anticolonialist of this period. P ­ admore mentored an entire generation of African and Caribbean leaders, most directly and

149  Haiti Goes Global ­notably Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and Eric W ­ illiams, and collaborated closely with pan-Africanists like Du Bois, Ras M ­ akonnen, C. L. R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Richard Wright, and St. Clair Drake. The ideas about anticolonialism developed by Padmore had extraordinary influence in the decolonization era. Numerous African n ­ ationalist leaders consulted with Padmore, and even Jawaharlal Nehru met with Padmore on the eve of Indian independence (Teelucksingh 15), showing Padmore’s broad international connections and cachet. ­Padmore became best known as a critic of British empire, writing scathing critiques of British colonialism during the late 1930s and early 1940s, but scholars have overlooked how Padmore arrived at his understandings of imperialism and anticolonialism through reading and writing about U.S. foreign policy. Padmore’s time in the United States during the occupation of Haiti shaped his understandings of the threat to postcolonial sovereignty — he would see the potential for another Haiti repeated first in Liberia, then Ethiopia and Guyana, and finally in Ghana — as well as the anticolonial ideology that he did so much to disseminate. Padmore was born in Trinidad in 1903 and came to the United States in December 1924, spending a few months in New York before beginning his studies at Fisk University in Tennessee in the fall of 1925.1 He joined the Communist Party in the United States in 1927 while living in New York and studying at Howard University in Washington, D.C., working especially with the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), the group that included Briggs, Moore, Campbell, and Huiswoud and was focused on organizing black workers. By late 1929, Padmore’s successes in the United States led to his selection to travel to Moscow; while there, he was elected to the Moscow City Soviet. Padmore was chosen to organize the International Conference of Negro Workers held in Hamburg in 1930 and traveled in West Africa recruiting delegates for that meeting. Padmore was later stationed in Germany by the Red International of Labor Unions ( RILU or Profintern) to head their Negro Bureau (which would become known as the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, or ITUCNW) and edit the group’s newspaper, the Negro Worker. ­Padmore’s editorship was first interrupted by his arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis in 1933, followed by his deportation from Germany. The same year — at age thirty — Padmore broke with the ­Communist International (Comintern) over its policy of rapprochement with British and French imperialism, and found himself in 1934 denounced in the pages of the Negro Worker by his former comrades. Relocating to London, ­Padmore began working with James, Ashwood ­Garvey, ­Makonnen,

150  American Imperialism’s Undead and others in demonstrations against the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. In 1937, this group formed the IASB and, after James left for the United States in 1938, reconfigured itself during World War II as the driving force behind the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Many of the major actors in the post–World War II decolonization of the British empire attended this conference, and Padmore himself would become a key advisor to one of the most dynamic African leaders to emerge from the Congress, Ghanaian Kwame Nkrumah. Despite his extraordinary influence in shaping the course of the twentieth century, Padmore is less remembered than Du Bois, Gandhi, or even James, not to mention the political leaders like Nkrumah, Kenyatta, ­Williams, or Nehru, who would become known as fathers of postcolonial nations. The reason for this omission stems, I think, from some of the same sources as the omission of the U.S. occupation of Haiti in histories of anticolonialism. First among these is the teleological story of nationalism discussed in my introduction, in which the history of the nation is remembered in the postcolonial world as a progression of figures and events leading up to independence. Padmore, like Frantz Fanon, made his greatest achievements in places other than the nation of his birth. This transnationalism makes Padmore an awkward fit in the story of either Trinidad and Tobago’s or Ghana’s decolonization. Furthermore, Padmore paid little attention to the questions of culture and identity that allowed Fanon to be recuperated by postcolonial, postnationalist critics like Homi Bhabha in the 1980s and 1990s. Padmore’s approach was more straightforwardly Communist, making him unpalatable to postMarxist postcolonialisms or West Indian nationalist versions of history that culminate in Westminster parliamentary democracies. The British colonies that became independent during the 1960s and 1970s did so during the Cold War. The expulsion of the “Four H’s” ( Richard Hart, Ken and Frank Hill, and Arthur Henry) from the PNP in Jamaica in 1952, the overturning and imprisonment of Cheddi Jagan’s socialist People’s Progressive Party ( PPP) government in 1953, or Eric Williams’s break with C. L. R. James in Trinidad and Tobago during the early 1960s showed how even the appearance of Communist influence in the decolonization process during the Cold War would be violently purged. As a result, the Communist contribution to anticolonialism was thoroughly expunged from these nationalist histories. Scholars who do recognize Padmore’s importance — more often panAfricanists than nationalists — have generally chosen to downplay or dismiss Padmore’s Communism, considering it a youthful mistake he is

151  Haiti Goes Global supposed to have rejected in his later turn to pan-Africanism. Toward the end of his life, Padmore himself promoted this understanding in his 1956 book Pan-Africanism or Communism?: “facing the exigencies of independence politics on the Cold War terrain, he became virulently antiCommunist” (Von Eschen 182), even if, as late as 1946 in How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire, Padmore was still writing in defense of the Soviet Union. Padmore’s work while a Communist is thus often overlooked or simplified. Rupert Lewis, in the introduction to George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary, dismisses Padmore’s 1931 Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers as “represent[ ing ] the thinking of the Comintern” (xviii), while Jerome Teelucksingh similarly sees Padmore’s writings from that period as unrepresentative of his beliefs because they “can be traced to [ Padmore’s] involvement with the Comintern” (16 ).2 There are a number of problems with dismissing what Padmore wrote while working as editor of the Negro Worker and head of the Profintern’s Negro Bureau as not representative of his true beliefs. As I will discuss below, Padmore himself, upon his split with the party, wrote explicitly about the ways that while a Communist he actually took more radical positions on U.S. imperialism and race relations than members of the CP-USA or the Comintern, and that he in fact pushed the CP-USA in particular to take account of the U.S. role in Liberia.3 Minkah Makalani and Anthony Bogues present a more nuanced version of Padmore’s relationship to Communism, arguing that rather than a passive recipient of ­ideology, he was an active shaper of it. In Bogues’s estimation, “Padmore’s political fingerprints profoundly shaped” the official positions on Africa and colonialism produced by the Comintern and RILU (“C. L. R. James” 184), a reading that reflects more closely my findings in this chapter. When pan-Africanists have engaged with Padmore’s work during his time as a communist, it has generally been to discuss his early interest in Africa. In Padmore’s earliest work, Africa seems to primarily mean Liberia and Ethiopia. Rodney Worrell’s article “George Padmore: Pan-­ Africanist Par Excellence” is especially helpful for presenting a well-­ researched and compelling pan-African understanding of Padmore. In ­addition to ­explaining the importance of the invasion of Abyssinia to black i­ntellectuals in the 1930s (30), Worrell notes that during Padmore’s time in the United States, he showed an early “ ‘preoccupation’ with ­Liberia” (23). Although Worrell is generally attentive to Padmore’s “­unorthodox approach as a communist” (25), he still makes Padmore’s move from organizing against imperialism in Liberia to becoming a Communist sound like a detour on the way to the true path of pan-­Africanism:

152  American Imperialism’s Undead “From his actions at Fisk and Howard, Padmore demonstrated that he might become a valiant Pan-African warrior. . . . However, like many intellectuals of this period, Padmore became attracted to the philosophy of socialism” (24). That “however” positions the turn to Communism as a swerve away from Padmore’s earliest commitments. I will suggest that in P ­ admore’s work on Liberia and Ethiopia, he consistently places the threats against these African nations into the context of the positions taken by black Communists vis-à-vis the occupation of Haiti.4 Padmore’s time as a Communist did not delay or deform his intellectual development but was, in fact, crucial to it. The occupation of Haiti has been overlooked in Padmore’s development, then, because of the lenses applied by nationalist and pan-Africanist approaches. On the one hand, Padmore has been forgotten; on the other, when he has been remembered it has been at the cost of downplaying how much his ideas were formed during his years as a Communist, the years during which the occupation of Haiti was ongoing. The final shortcoming I want to mention in how these approaches have shaped our vision of Padmore and of anticolonialism is the focus on Padmore’s struggle against British empire, which leads to the erasure of his formative commitments to opposing U.S. imperialism. Stories of the emergence of Anglophone West Indian or African independence have understandably unfolded as narratives of separation from British control. In addition, too often a chronology in which British empire from the first half of the twentieth century gives way to post–World War II U.S. neocolonialism flattens out the overlaps between these competing global powers.5 Padmore is read in this context as product of and opponent to British empire, but the ways his writing foreshadows Nkrumah’s theorizing of neocolonialism points to how attentive Padmore himself was to the diverse forms of U.S. imperialism. The exclusive emphasis on Padmore as antagonist of British empire may also stem from the recollection Hooker reports in his biography of Padmore: “One of the Comintern men Padmore had met during his first Moscow visit . . . soon learned that for Padmore imperialism meant British imperialism. He was uninterested in American problems; indeed, he differentiated himself from some of the black comrades who were obsessed with American questions” (21). Hooker’s 1967 book, to date the only published biography of Padmore, has been influential in shaping how subsequent scholars understand Padmore, even if Hooker himself “was known to be a CIA agent by most African American academics/ activists, who consequently would not co-operate in his research” (Adi

153  Haiti Goes Global and Sherwood, Pan-African 158).6 It is not hard to imagine this affiliation leading Hooker to downplay Padmore’s critique of U.S. imperialism. The assertion that Padmore focused exclusively on British empire ­appears throughout the scholarship following from Hooker’s biography, as when Paul Rich, for example, while glossing Padmore’s time in the United States and as a Communist, devotes his primary attention to P ­ admore’s “radical political engagement in Britain against overseas ­British imperialism” (88). Despite Hooker’s interpretations, episodes from the biography nonetheless show evidence of Padmore’s multiple commitments. One example occurs immediately after the memory of Padmore’s singular focus on British empire, where Hooker offers what appears to be contradictory evidence: “1931 was the year of Liberian-American and Liberian-League of Nations conflict. [ Padmore as] new editor and secretary of ITUCNW denounced American imperialism, saw the Firestone concession as a new phase of imperial rivalry, and rejected the Christy-Johnson-Barclay Commission’s exculpation of the rubber company’s labour policies” (21). Hooker then cites a 1941 article by Padmore: “I have always considered it my special duty to expose and denounce the misrule of the black governing classes in Haiti, Liberia, and Abyssinia, while at the same time defending these semi-colonial countries against imperialist aggression” (22). This is a strange juxtaposition, between memories of Padmore as narrowly invested in opposing British empire and Padmore’s own writings passionately articulating the evils of U.S. imperialism. Hooker does not address this contradiction; the recollections used to frame these writings may be intended to imply that Padmore only wrote about U.S. imperialism because of Comintern expectations that he would do so. I have chosen to place weight on Padmore’s writing, believing that even while a Communist, Padmore engaged with the subjects most important to him. His decisions were certainly within a circumscribed set of choices, made with audience demands in mind and shaped by instructions from above. Yet every intellectual, whether writing for a party, the market, or tenure, faces constraints to some extent or another. Padmore’s writing during the early 1930s gives a strong sense of his intellectual investments, which were at this time especially centered on Haiti and L ­ iberia. That he continued to insist on these investments after breaking with Communism, to my mind, disproves the idea his work for the Comintern contradicted his beliefs. In addition, there are important reasons to doubt the recollections Hooker recounts: beyond the obvious passage of time, the question of Padmore’s opposition to U.S. imperialism in Liberia was a central issue

154  American Imperialism’s Undead in the Communist smear campaign against him after he broke with the party.7 The letter by James Ford published by Briggs’s Crusader News Agency, articulates these charges: “Padmore’s political views and political activities around the question of Liberia were in a direction calculated to further enslave and degrade the already downtrodden masses of that country. Instead of being ‘the last stronghold of Negro freedom’ as Mr. Padmore says, Liberia is in actual fact a vassal state of American imperialism.”8 Ironically, the reading of Padmore as unaware of or uninterested in U.S. empire is precisely the charge used by Communists to justify his expulsion from the party. Padmore found the idea that he had downplayed U.S. domination of Liberia ridiculous if not offensive. In his reply to Harry Heywood, he quotes liberally from his own writings in the Negro Worker, including this passage from a 1932 issue: “The proletariat of America, especially the Negro workers, must raise the question of Liberia more sharply than they have done in the past as a political issue. They must systematically expose the policy of yankee imperialists, not only in Latin America and Haiti, but also in Liberia, which is being used as a base for exploitation and for getting further into Africa.”9 His open letter to Earl Browder suggests that Padmore certainly did not consider his writings on U.S. imperialism as the result of directives from above: “Please tell us where and when the Communist International, in the fifteen years of its existence, has ever written an article on Liberia?”10 Of course, numerous writings on Liberia were published by Communist presses and periodicals during the early 1930s; in almost every case, they were written by Padmore. He evidently saw part of his role in the party as pressing Communism to expand its focus to issues important to the black diaspora, including U.S. exploitation of Haiti and Liberia. Seeing Padmore only as a theorist of British empire, or as only interested in U.S. imperialism because of instructions from Moscow, may fit better with nationalist, anti-­Communist, or, in an unlikely congruence, Stalinist versions of history. As this chapter will demonstrate, however, this narrative does not square with the archival record.

Haiti in Moscow: Padmore at the Profintern Padmore’s writings while a Communist show how invested he was in calling attention to occupied Haiti. His first published articles upon leaving the United States and being promoted to an important role in the ­Comintern appear in the journal of the Red International of Labour Unions in 1930. The first article, “Some Shortcomings of Our T.U. Work

155  Haiti Goes Global among Negroes in U.S.,” responds directly to the task Padmore has been given, of figuring out how to recruit black workers to the Profintern’s radical trade unions; the second, published a month later in June 1930, is titled “American Imperialism and the Economic Crisis in Haiti.” While the topic of the first article suggests it may have been a writing assignment required of him, this second article seems to be what Padmore really wanted to raise awareness about. Padmore’s first official assignment while in Moscow in January 1930 had been focused on organizing black workers in South Africa ( L. James, “What” 68), suggesting that the ­Comintern was not as attentive to the uprisings happening in Haiti at the time as the ANLC in the United States had been. Padmore’s article begins by positioning itself as a response to “the recent revolt which occurred in Haiti” (“American Imperialism and the Economic Crisis” 105), the December 1929 uprising that Cyril Briggs was featuring so prominently in the Liberator. From there, Padmore’s article takes a more academic turn than Briggs’s agitating. Padmore proceeds to describe the social and economic situation in Haiti under U.S. imperialism. He does so, it would seem, because “Haiti is a typical colonial country” and can therefore help shed light on the plight of colonized people throughout the world (105). The first part of the article follows from Padmore’s title, explaining what the world economic crisis means for a Haitian economy dependent on the export of coffee, sugar, and other cash crops. Padmore goes on to discuss the history of the occupation more broadly, beginning with the one-sided treaty the United States forced the Haitian government to accept and continuing to mention details such as the seizure of gold from the Banque ­Nationale by National City Bank and the exploitative loans to which Haiti has been forced to agree. He explains that to “safeguard the investments of the bond-holders” in the United States, peasants are having their land expropriated and are being forced to work on plantations run by U.S. companies: “Nearly all the fertile lands held by the peasants, from the days of the establishment of the Republic, have been or are in the process of being appropriated by the invaders and turned into large plantations. As a consequence of this, most of the Haitians have been converted into a class of landless proletarians, who were compelled to seek employment from the foreign corporations” (107). Finally, Padmore’s article describes what he calls the “black ivory trade” in which Haitian workers are sold into conditions of virtual slavery by recruiters representing sugar companies in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico: “The General Sugar Company, the largest American concern in Cuba, used to pay 25 dollars

156  American Imperialism’s Undead for every Haitian delivered on its reservations. . . . Once in Cuba, the Haitians are led, surrounded by armed guards, to the sugar plantations and housed there in large, wooden barracks. . . . As they cannot get out of the enclosure during the entire time of their contract, they must buy all the provisions in the company stores, and usually, at the end of the crop, are indebted to the contractors” (109). Debt bondage thus functions both at a national level as well as for individual Haitian workers. Padmore concludes that “these high-handed methods of imperialist exploitation, perpetuated against the Haitians, especially the peasantry, were the underlying factors which led to recent revolt which was drowned in blood by the machine guns of the United States marines” (109). In addition to writing for the RILU journal while in Moscow, Padmore published a number of pamphlets.11 A series of four were published in Moscow in 1931: American Imperialism Enslaves Liberia; Labour Imperialism in East Africa; Africa, the Land of Forced Labour; and Haiti, an American Slave Colony.12 The pamphlets on Haiti and Liberia again reinforce the sense of Padmore’s primary focus during this period as U.S. foreign domination. The Liberia pamphlet opens: “American Finance Capital has long ago invaded Liberia. . . . Liberia seems doomed to definitely become a protectorate of the United States. Here again, we see the ruthless policy of Yankee Imperialism, which brutally exploits 12 million Negroes in the United States; maintains a military dictatorship over Haiti; and now reduces Liberia, the last independent Negro Republic in Africa, to the position of a vassal State” (American Imperialism Enslaves 1). For Padmore, the oppression of African Americans, the economic exploitation of Liberia, and military control of Haiti all fit together to tell the story of U.S. imperialism. The pamphlet on Haiti reprints much of the material Padmore included in his article from the RILU journal, particularly the description of U.S. business exploiting Haiti’s economy and forcing it into a position of dependency. It also adds material from an article Padmore published in the London-based Labour Monthly in June 1930. While the RILU article contained only a sentence about the Haitian Revolution, to explain that the Cacos “have inherited the revolutionary traditions of their ancestors” (“American Imperialism and the Economic Crisis” 105), the Labour Monthly article and subsequent pamphlet narrate Haitian history beginning with Columbus’s arrival in 1492, through the slave trade, up to a three-page description of the revolution. This section suggests the influence of the May 1929 article by Briggs in the Communist, “Negro Revolutionary Hero  —  Toussaint L’Ouverture.” The history Padmore

157  Haiti Goes Global recounts sounds similar to Briggs’s, but the most telling parallel comes when Padmore quotes the same passage from an 1861 speech by Wendell Phillips: “There never was a race that, weakened and degraded by such chattel slavery, tore off its own fetters, forged them into swords, and won its liberty on the battlefields but one, and that was the black race of San Domingo” ( Briggs, “Negro” 251; Padmore, “Revolt” 359; Padmore, Haiti 9). This passage offers evidence that Padmore, in Moscow, was shaping Comintern views on imperialism based on materials crafted in opposition to the occupation of Haiti by the West Indian radicals in the United States. Padmore’s pamphlet closes with a lengthy description of the 1929 uprising in Haiti and resultant Aux Cayes massacre that Briggs helped bring to world attention. Padmore would again reproduce this material on Haiti in The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, published in book form in London by the RILU in 1931 and compiling much of what Padmore had included in his Moscow pamphlets. Since the material is generally not new, what is notable about Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers is how prominent the book’s organization makes Haiti. Haiti is given its own section twice in Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, in the chapters “Under the Yoke of Yankee Imperialism” (where the descriptions of economic exploitation first published in the RILU journal appear) and “The Awakening of Negro Toilers” (which uses the description of the 1929 uprising and massacre from the pamphlet). While most places are grouped together in entries like “French Africa,” “the West Indies,” or “British East Africa,” the only countries that receive dedicated entries are Haiti, Liberia, San Domingo, Abyssinia, and the United States. The focus on these specific sites happens primarily in the chapter titled “Yankee Imperialism.” The discussion begins with language resembling the discourses about the occupation developed in Harlem during the 1920s: “Exclusive of the millions of Negroes who live under the direct yoke of imperialism in the United States, as well as the African and West Indian colonies, there are over 15 millions who inhabit territories that are considered independent states. For example, Haiti and San Domingo in the West Indies; Liberia and Abyssinia in Africa. However, when we examine the economic and political conditions of these countries we see that they either are, or are fast becoming, financial colonies of Yankee imperialism” (Life 64). From this frame, the chapter begins with a description of Haiti’s occupation before moving to these other places “under the domination of American finance-capital” (64). These were the sites of U.S. foreign and internal colonization that Padmore understood most thoroughly and wanted to

158  American Imperialism’s Undead champion in the early 1930s; Liberia and Abyssinia would become important flashpoints for Padmore later in the decade, and the places more readily recognized by Padmore scholars as sites of his deepest political and intellectual investments, even as his focus on Haiti has been overlooked. As prominent as actual discussion of Haiti is in The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, I want to suggest that the occupation of Haiti also ­offers the template by which Padmore analyzes exploitation in many of the colonial settings he describes. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Padmore filtered his views of Africa and other colonized places through the discourse on Haiti that he encountered in the United States. Padmore first traveled in West Africa beginning in May and June 1930 leading up to the Hamburg conference; it is likely that he had just written his article about the occupation of Haiti that would be published in RILU in June 1930 before embarking on this trip, and presumably wrote what would become the pamphlets on Liberia, East Africa, and West Africa, all published in 1931, after returning. Padmore’s views on Africa fit into the framework the Haiti article establishes. The focus throughout Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers is on the expropriation of land to ­create a dependent laboring class, the forced labor into which black people around the world are sold, debt peonage, and the other topics Padmore’s Haiti writings establish. Just as Padmore had described the uprooting of the peasantry in Haiti that forced them to work on foreign-run plantations, in Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers he emphasizes in British West A ­ frica the tendency to “expropriate the lands from the natives and to turn the peasantry into a landless class of wage earners, enslaved on the plantations of the white overlords” (27). He decries cocoa and rubber companies engaged in “human traffic” (40) in Angola and Liberia as he had the export of Haitians to Cuban sugar plantations, while condemning the corvée-like “military aspect” (33) of “compulsory labor” (31) used for railroad construction in French West Africa. When discussing the Dominican Republic, Padmore focuses on the role of the National City Bank in controlling the country’s finances (72), while in Abyssinia, he notes the U.S. companies “feverishly maneuvering for an opportunity to annex this country in order to better exploit its rich natural resources” (76 ). The exploitation of Haiti laid bare in James Weldon Johnson’s 1920 articles and further publicized by West Indian radicals in the United States provides Padmore with a prism for understanding the centrality of big business to twentieth-century imperialism throughout the world.

159  Haiti Goes Global

Haiti in Hamburg: Padmore and the Negro Worker By the end of 1931, Padmore had been put in charge of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, Profintern’s Negro Bureau, and was editing the Negro Worker. Leslie James makes the case that Padmore was especially concerned about the aesthetic appearance of the Negro Worker, particularly the image used on its first page: “Padmore showed great concern for the branding of the Negro Worker. He took care in ensuring the bulletin looked professional, and that it maintained consistent and attractive imagery that would interest its readers. . . . The image on the cover of the Negro Worker was then also applied to all ITUCNW pamphlets in order ‘to establish familiarity among the workers for our literature’ ” (“What” 73). In light of Padmore’s attention to the details of this image, it is worth noting that the banner of the Negro Worker is actually slightly different from the original ANLC image I discuss in chapter 2. If anything, the new banner gives Haiti even more centrality (see figure 2). The image used on the cover of the Negro Worker is almost identical to the ANLC image, but the geographical spaces named are fewer: the United States, Cuba, Haiti, and Africa. Rodney Worrell describes the image as “a huge African bursting his chains in the United States, West Indies, and Africa” (26 ). Yet calling the central site the West Indies, with the connotations of British empire implied in that naming, is somewhat imprecise; the banner of the Negro Worker has in fact cropped out all of the islands except for Cuba and Haiti. The emphasis is clearly on U.S. imperialism, even if our usual lenses lead us to think of Padmore’s primary site of engagement as the British empire. Indeed, even Makalani, who parenthetically notices the foregrounding of U.S. imperialism in the ANLC’s image, is unable to follow through on the implications of his own findings for our understanding of Padmore’s ideology and the radical pan-Africanist anticolonialism he disseminated. When Makalani makes the case for Padmore’s most important contributions to the international Communist movement during the early 1930s, he argues that it was Padmore’s attention to British colonialism in the Negro Worker that forced European Communists to take account of imperialism and national liberation struggles, especially in Africa: “Only with Padmore’s attention to the British empire in the middle of 1932 would Comintern orthodoxy give way to more nuanced approaches to colonialism, race, and socialist revolution” (167). I find Makalani’s reading of Padmore’s relationship to Communism especially convincing: he

Figure 2. Front page of the Negro Worker, June 1931. (Courtesy of Minkah Makalani)

161  Haiti Goes Global sees Padmore not as dupe or mouthpiece for Comintern official positions, but as someone who pushed his often resistant white American and European colleagues to see the contradictions and hypocrisies in their positions, and in the process redefined Communist thinking about imperialism. Yet I differ from Makalini’s assertion that it was “only with ­Padmore’s attention to the British empire” that the Negro Worker articulated its nuanced critique of imperialism. Padmore edited the Negro Worker continuously from the October– November 1931 issue until he broke with the Comintern; the last issue he edited was August–September 1933. The sequence of editorship and publication of the Negro Worker is somewhat confusing because the January 1931 issue, published in Hamburg and with James W. Ford as editor, calls itself volume 1, number 1, but this seems to be a relaunch following the Hamburg conference of 1930; a few copies of the news­ paper from 1928, 1929, and 1930 survive. These earliest issues appear to have been published from the Profintern offices in Moscow, sometimes edited by Ford and sometimes by Padmore. We can therefore compare the editorial priorities of a leading African American Communist to those of Padmore. While many of the pre-1931 issues are missing, from what remains, we see that Padmore’s issues place more emphasis on Haiti, and in fact, once Padmore becomes editor full-time in late 1931, Haiti occupies an important place in the newspaper and in his writings. The oldest surviving issue, from July 1928, lists Bill Dunne and J. W. Ford as editors and uses on its cover a version of the ANLC image with the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Africa visible and named. This issue shows no particular interest in Haiti: a list of “­Negroes in Industrial and Agricultural Employment,” for example, groups all of the West Indies together, while a list of liberation movements supported by the ITUCNW includes “the Chinese Revolution, . . . India, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines, Latin, Central, and South America” ( Ford, “Aims” 2). The issues Ford edited in 1931 also give Haiti little attention, with focus especially on South Africa, other African colonies, the Scottsboro case, and general articles about the activities of the RILU. Ford’s a­ rticle from February 1931, “Forced Labour and Slavery as Carried on by ­British, French and American Imperialism amongst the Negro ­Toilers — How to Fight It,” does not mention Haiti, nor do other articles about the ­Caribbean where Haiti might be expected to appear. In fact, the only attention to the occupation of Haiti during Ford’s tenure as editor is an article written by Padmore, “Imperialism in the West Indies,” from January 1931. It begins: “There are about 10 million

162  American Imperialism’s Undead Negroes in the West Indies, a small group of islands located in the Caribbean Sea, between north and south America. All except Cuba, Haiti and San Domingo are dominated by British, French, Dutch and American imperialism; while Cuba, Haiti, and San Domingo, the so-called independent Republics are, in truth and reality, economic colonies of the United States, which maintains puppet governments in each of them as well as marines in Haiti” (16 ). This opening makes sure to remind the reader that European colonialism is not the region’s only menace, that “economic colonialism” is as important to remember as formal empire. Later in the article, U.S. imperialism becomes the measuring stick for other forms of domination: “In the British colonies of Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbadoes, British imperialism is equally as brutal and ruthless as American imperialism” (17). Padmore suggests that European empire must be understood by comparison to U.S. activities in the region. The issues edited by Padmore continue to reinforce the sense that he sought to foreground the occupation of Haiti. The earliest surviving issue that lists Padmore as editor is from December 1929. The introduction to the issue, by J. Reed, surveys the uprisings occurring throughout the black world and includes this mention: “In Haiti, more recently there was an armed rising of the native workers against American Imperialism, under whose iron heel this Negro Republic has been groaning for the last 15 years” (1). The issue also features the article “Dollar Diplomacy in Haiti” by J. Wilenkin, which provides a detailed description of the machinations of U.S. financial institutions in Haiti. In his second issue as editor, Padmore’s article “The Negro Liberation Movement and the International Conference” is divided into seven sections: Revolt in South Africa, East Africa, West Africa, the Haitian Revolt, West Indian Federation, the United States, and Unifying the International Struggles. Along with the section on the West Indies, the Haiti section is the longest; it describes the Aux Cayes massacre, ending, “In short, Haiti has been turned into a slave colony under the Dictatorship of a black puppet maintained by the bayonets of the marines as the President of the Republic” (“Negro Liberation” 5). This issue also introduces an “International News Briefs” section at the end that provides short news stories from around the world: here, too, there are three paragraphs about how “­although crushed by the overwhelming military forces of the most powerful imperialist country in the world, the Haitian masses are nevertheless seething with discontent and dissatisfaction” (“International” 17). The first issue from 1931 edited by Padmore features an article by the Trinidadian Charles Alexander that places the occupation of Haiti

163  Haiti Goes Global in the context of U.S. imperialism in other parts of the region: “Cuba is not the only colony of American imperialism in the Caribbean where the Negro workers find a life of hell. In Panama the oppression and persecution is intense; in Colombia, under the domination of the United Fruit Company, they live a life of misery and torture; while in Honduras, Guatemala, and San Salvador, a vicious situation exists. In Haiti, where the American imperialists have replaced Borno with an equally servile tool, Vincent, the bloody massacres of hundreds of Haitian workers and peasants in December 1929 are still fresh in the minds of the toilers” (­Alexander 18). Padmore also includes his own article in this issue, “Hands Off Liberia,” which continues to emphasize how Liberia’s situation can be understood through remembering Haiti: “It is important for every Negro worker to take note that, whenever the Americans and other white capitalists have some dirty task to perform in connection with Negro countries like Haiti and Liberia, they always secure the services of some black lickspittle who is supposed to be a ‘big’ leader of his race, pay him a few dollars and give him some petty office and thereby get him to do the job for them” (7). In subsequent issues edited by Padmore, Haiti frequently appears. One of the last issues he edited includes the article titled “A Wave of Terror Is Sweeping over Haiti,” a phrase Padmore uses again when writing about the British empire in the Independent Labour Party ( ILP )’s Controversy a few years later (“Fascism” 94). The article describes: United States imperialism aided by the corrupt puppet Vincent government has launched a savage attack on the militant workers, in an attempt to crush their newly formed class trade union organization, the “Ligue des Ouvriers en General d’Haiti.” . . . Among other militant Haitians arrested is the well known Haitian revolutionary writer Jacques Roumain. . . . The Int. Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers once more protests against this highhanded policy of American imperialism and its black agents in Haiti. . . . We demand the immediate withdrawal of all the marines and all American military officials from Haiti. We denounce the new slave treaty recently imposed upon the Haitian people by the white imperialist rulers of the country. (“Wave” 15)

The article ends by directly invoking the legacy of the Haitian Revolution as a response to contemporary U.S. domination: “Down with American imperialism! Down with the Haitian traitors! Long live the spirit of ­Toussaint Louverture! Long live the independence of the Haitian people!” (“Wave” 16 ). The April–May 1933 issue includes news that Sergei Eisenstein will be making a film about Toussaint Louverture and

164  American Imperialism’s Undead that “Eisenstein’s picture will serve as a great inspiration to the Negro masses of the world who are today faced with the task of carrying on the militant tradition of the Great Haitian liberator if they are ever to be freed from the yoke of white imperialist oppression” (“Believe” 27). The final issue edited by Padmore includes a portrait of Toussaint on its cover and a biographical sketch of him by Harold Williams that leads into a discussion of how “Today, Haiti is once more enslaved . . . by United States ­imperialism . . . at the behest of Wall Street bankers” ( H. Williams 2). Padmore as editor of the Negro Worker, from first issue to last, found occasion to include Haiti and its contemporary struggles for freedom. As important as it may be to simply document the space Padmore gave in this Communist publication to Haiti, it is also notable how Padmore himself, in his writing in the Negro Worker, frequently uses Haiti as his measuring stick or point of comparison. As I have mentioned, almost every time Padmore writes about Liberia, he brings up Haiti as a warning. But even in thinking about other imperialisms, we can see him working through the Haitian experience. In the article “The War Is Here,” Padmore writes: Note how these Japanese imperialist robbers are carrying on the war. In Manchuria they said that they were not “making war” but simply suppressing alleged “banditry.” . . . The Japanese have learned all of the cunning ways of the European and American land grabbers. When American imperialism sends its marines into Latin America and Haiti, their excuse is, that they are not “making war” upon the natives, but simply protecting “the lives and property of their nationals.” When General Smedley Butler was overrunning Haiti with American marines, his excuse was, that he was suppressing Haitian “bandits.” By the time the marines got through, Haiti had become an American colony! Great Britain and France stole half of Africa under the same lying excuses. . . . Whenever the imperialists, whether they are Japanese, French, English, or American are out to steal peoples’ lands, they have to find some excuse to “justify” what is nothing but organized capitalist banditry. So lo and behold, they and their agents — the newspapers, the preachers, the “socialists” — tell the workers that they are not “making war” — they are merely trying to “civilize backward peoples.” (“War” 5– 6 )

Padmore arrives at this analysis of Japanese imperialism by showing its resemblance to what he already knows, in this case, first and foremost, U.S. imperialism. If we think about the Negro Worker as the place where Padmore, during the early 1930s, developed an ideology that could cut through imperialist discourse to understand the exploitative

165  Haiti Goes Global relations at the root of the supposed civilizing mission, examining the ­occupation of Haiti seems central to that process. The article on Japanese ­imperialism ends with a conclusion that encapsulates Padmore’s Marxist ­anticolonialism: But let it not be forgotten, that in the same way in which the yellow Japanese hold down other yellow peoples, white imperialist Britain holds down the white workers and peasants of Ireland, the United States, the Latin Americans, and black capitalists and landlords enslave black workers and peasants in Liberia and Haiti. Oppression knows no color line. And because of this, the Negro masses, one of the most oppressed section of humanity, must always keep in mind the class character of capitalist society and look for allies among the oppressed and exploited of all races and colours in common struggle against the oppressors and misleaders of all races and colours. (“War” 8)

Looking at Liberia and Haiti helped Padmore see first of all the role that financial institutions played in planning, lobbying in favor of, supporting, and benefitting from the ostensible policing or civilizing actions under­ taken by the great powers, in a way that British empire may not have made as visible. Similarly, Liberia and Haiti also allowed Padmore to see the complicity of local nonwhite elites benefitting from cooperation with foreign power; in the Trinidad and Tobago where Padmore grew up, such a group scarcely existed, but during the decolonization period this role would be filled by bourgeois nationalists that Padmore and other radical anticolonialists like C. L. R. James would often oppose.

Haiti and Abyssinia: Padmore and the International African Service Bureau When Padmore moved to London in 1935, he joined James, who was devoting his energies at the time to demonstrations against Italian aggression in Abyssinia. The Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 paralleled in many ways the occupation of Haiti, particularly as a threat to sovereignty for a highly charged symbol of black freedom. Yet pan-Africanist and postcolonial intellectual history has accorded the invasion of Abyssinia a much more prominent place than the occupation of Haiti has received. Robert Hill calls the invasion “the turning-point of nineteenth-century and post-war Black nationalism” that “paved the way for the emergence of an explicitly political Pan-Africanism” (“In England” 69). Robert Young credits the Abyssinia crisis with “produc[ ing ] the first instance of a global reaction by the black diaspora” that “signaled the growth of networks of centres of resistance, transforming the centre-margin relation into

166  American Imperialism’s Undead a spider’s web in which the imperial powers were increasingly entangled” (233); Young adds that “in the Caribbean it became an event through which political consciousness was engendered, and local forms of discontent with the plantation system, and through that the whole imperial system, were articulated” (234). Hill and Young are undoubtedly correct in assigning great importance to the Abyssinia crisis for laying bare the truth of the racialist double standards of the great powers toward self-­ determination and international law, and for demonstrating that the League of Nations was designed for the benefit of imperialist countries rather than to protect their victims. Yet the o ­ ccupation of Haiti had ­already proven these facts, and also generated a significant outcry among blacks throughout the world. One main difference in historiography may be that Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia fits easily into European history’s version of the twentieth century. It can appear as a key step, along with the Spanish Civil War, on the road to World War II; even better, in the history written by the winners of that war, one of the war’s losers can easily be cast as the villain in the Abyssinia invasion. The occupation of Haiti by the United States disrupts the narrative in which European world dominance only gives way to the Americans after 1945 as well as the idea of the United States as advocate for freedom and self-determination. Certainly, when Padmore looked at the threat to Abyssinia in the mid1930s, he saw occupied Haiti. In Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology from 1934, Padmore contributes the entry “Ethiopia Today,” where he writes: “The fundamental question before enlightened Abyssinians is: how can these natural resources be developed without flooding the country with rapacious foreign capitalist exploiters, and at the same time safeguarding its national independence? . . . Liberia and Haiti, before Ethiopia, also had to face this problem. The world knows what has been the result. These Republics, like many others, are today mortgaged to Wall Street bankers, and their rulers are mere puppets in the hands of powerful ­financial interests” (389). The way that political independence can be undone by debt bondage and economic domination is clearly one of the major lessons Padmore takes from the occupation of Haiti. With the invasion of Abyssinia threatening to repeat the occupation of Haiti, Padmore looked to the strategies that had been used by African Americans and West Indian radicals in the United States. Just as so much writing and activism against the occupation of Haiti focused on showing how Haiti’s heroic revolutionary history demonstrated their tradition of political independence and distinct national culture, “­Makonnen and Padmore spent ‘a good deal of time in the British Museum digging

167  Haiti Goes Global out some of the ancient history of Ethiopia’ to detail its long history, social structures, and cultural practices at rallies and forums, hoping to ‘educate English public opinion’ ” (Makonnen 114 –15, qtd. in ­Makalani 209). The successes the pan-Africanists enjoyed in using the Abyssinia crisis to shape mainstream debate also repeated events of the previous decade. Fenner Brockway, whom Marika Sherwood calls “the most prominent English anti-imperialist” of the period (163), had become editor of the ILP’s New Leader, and with the Abyssinia crisis, Brockway readily gave space to Padmore and C. L. R. James to press the British Left to oppose the illegal military action.13 Padmore would move from this entry into British radical politics to become ­active in working with ILP-affiliated publications like New Leader, Controversy, and Left; the Socialist member of Parliament and ILP-ally Stafford Cripps even wrote the foreword to Padmore’s Africa and World Peace in 1937. The invasion of ­Abyssinia gave Padmore and James a platform within the ILP and its related organizations much like the occupation of Haiti offered West ­Indians in the United States an opportunity to shape Communist thought. Indeed, when Padmore became coeditor of the ILP’s Left in 1942, one of the most obvious changes to the journal is the inclusion of a “Colonial” section as a regular feature. As important as access to mainstream British radical movements would have been for Padmore and James in creating a space for anticolonial agitation, the Abyssinia crisis also led them to collaborations with other pan-Africanists like Ras Makonnen and Amy Ashwood Garvey that would set the stage for post–World War II decolonization. James and Ashwood Garvey had formed the International African Friends of Ethiopia in 1935, and with Padmore’s arrival, that group was reconfigured as the International African Service Bureau by 1938. The IASB would continue advocacy for Abyssinian independence and expand its scope to become “the centre of anti-imperialism and the struggle for ­African emancipation in London” ( James, “Notes” 292). Between 1938 and 1939, the IASB’s International African Opinion would publish writing by James, Padmore, Jomo ­Kenyatta, Eric Williams, and, illustrating ­Padmore’s ­enduring c­ onnections to the black radicals in New York, poetry by Langston Hughes and a biographical article about Toussaint Louverture by Richard B. Moore. Demonstrably for Padmore, and likely for the other members of the IASB, the invasion of Abyssinia directly evoked the occupation of Haiti and was to be understood through that lens. Padmore’s entry in Cunard’s anthology illustrates the fear that Abyssinia will suffer the same fate as

168  American Imperialism’s Undead Haiti. Padmore was just as likely to use the analogy in the other direction, that the invasion of Abyssinia made the defense of Haiti’s precarious independence, reestablished after the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 1934, all the more important. The Africa Morning Post, where Padmore was a regular correspondent, included this press release in June 1938, under the title “Fate of Liberia and Haiti Is Analysed in Manifesto”: “ ‘The tragic fate of the Ethiopian Empire makes doubly imperative for Africans and peoples of African descent everywhere to be on guard for the protection of Haiti and Liberia, the sole remaining states which are under the rule of Africans and peoples of African descent,’ declares a manifesto issued by the International Service Bureau, an organization working in the interests of peoples of African descent.” Despite the title, the rest of the release ­focuses almost entirely on Haiti; it closes: “Recent events have made it necessary for Africans and peoples of African descent to organize themselves for the defence both of Haiti and Liberia. Thousands of H ­ aitians were killed by the soldiers and civilians of the Dominican Republic during the month of October last year. The Haitians have a great history behind them. The revolt of their enslaved ancestors is the only successful slave revolt since the Israelites left Egypt.”14 Even as Padmore’s focus became more obviously Abyssinia in particular and A ­ frica in general during the second half of the 1930s, he remained invested in Haiti and its ongoing relationship with modern imperialism. A 1944 article from the Chicago Defender, “Padmore Sees Wall St. Invasion of Liberia,” shows Padmore’s ongoing tendency to frame his understanding of Liberia through the analytical framework developed during the occupation of Haiti.

Haiti and the Haunting of National Consolidation With the end of World War II and the onset of decolonization in the 1950s Cold War context, references to the occupation of Haiti became submerged if not completely suppressed as history was molded into the form of independent postcolonial nations. As Anthony Bogues puts it when discussing C. L. R. James’s desire to write a biography of Padmore during the 1970s, looking back to moments before nationalist ­consolidation allows us to “plot . . . an alternative political history of the Caribbean and thus different possibilities” (“C. L. R. James” 198). The influence of this anticolonialist ideology developed by West Indian radicals in the shadow of the U.S. occupation haunts national emergence, most visibly via Padmore’s influence on African decolonization. The IASB developed into the Pan-African Federation that planned the 1945 Fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester and largely organized by Padmore with

169  Haiti Goes Global help from Nkrumah and Makonnen. W. E. B. Du Bois, a consistent critic of the occupation during the 1920s, had been thinking about holding a Pan-African Congress in Haiti once World War II ended, writing to Rayford Logan about the idea in 1941 ( Du Bois, Correspondence 2:283) and visiting Haiti in 1944 to look into the possibility of holding the Congress there (2:417). By 1945, Padmore was further along in planning a meeting and able to convince Du Bois to come to Manchester, allowing Padmore’s conference to claim the mantle of the previous Pan-African Congresses held by Du Bois. The second session on the third day of the Congress was titled “Ethiopia and the Black Republics,” and at this session, Du Bois, Makonnen, the South African Peter Abrahams, and other attendees spoke in support of Haiti, Ethiopia, and Liberia. The Congress passed resolutions that included “fraternal greetings to the Governments and peoples of Ethiopia, Liberia, and Haiti,” “pledges [of ] support in mobilizing world opinion among Africans and peoples of African descent in defence of their Sovereign independence,” and “vigilan[ce] against any manifestation of Imperial encroachment which may threaten their independence” (Adi and Sherwood, 1945 109). According to Nkrumah, the Manchester conference “provided the outlet for African nationalism and brought about the awakening of African political consciousness” that led to independence for Ghana twelve years later (44). Padmore’s work between his arrival in London in 1935 and the Manchester Congress in 1945 had laid the groundwork for this postwar African decolonization; as C. L. R. James describes it: “When Nkrumah arrived in London from the United States [ in 1945 ], he walked into a political milieu which for nearly ten years had been devoted to the study and documentation of the question of African emancipation in i­tself, and in relation to world politics. . . . Two years after the Manchester conference Nkrumah, armed with theory and practical experience, went to the Gold Coast, wrote out his plan and began to organize. . . . The African revolution was on its way” (“Notes” 294). Another West African leader, Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria when it became a republic in 1963, would write that “the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in 1945 marked the turning point in Pan-Africanism from a passive to an active stage” (qtd. in Padmore, History 4). Historians like Hakim Adi concur with this assessment that “the Pan-Africanism of P ­ admore and Manchester culminated . . . in the advent to power of Nkrumah and the whole process of decolonization” (“George Padmore” 89). The Manchester Congress is thus key to the story of national emergence, but even on the eve of Ghana’s independence, we can still see ­Padmore

170  American Imperialism’s Undead thinking in terms of the concepts established by anti-occupation discourse.15 Writing to Du Bois about Richard Wright’s book about Ghana, Black Power, “Padmore assured Du Bois (in a letter, December 10, 1954) that Wright had captured ‘the challenge of the barefoot masses against the black aristocracy and middle class’ ” (qtd. in Hooker 123–24). The contrast here, between the barefoot and those with shoes, was famously deployed as a way of understanding class in Haiti by Langston Hughes in “People without Shoes,” published in the New Masses in October 1931 after his visit to the occupied island. This echo of Haiti puts into context Padmore’s thinking on West Africa. In another letter to Du Bois, sent the previous week, Padmore defends careful negotiations with British power: “It is a skillful game of maneuvering and we cannot afford at this stage of the struggle to give the imperialists any excuse to intervene as in B ­ ritish Guiana. They are ready to pounce the first opportunity we give them. We are fully aware of what is going on between them and the Yanks” ( Du Bois, Correspondence 3:373–74). Manning Marable, quoting this letter (though omitting the sentence about the United States), explains that “during the period from 1945 to 1959, Padmore’s ideas largely shaped Nkrumah’s policies and tactics” (109), including the favoring of “a smooth take-over of power” over “genuine social revolution” (108). Padmore’s concern about the tenuousness of political independence in a world where Britain (at the urging of the United States) could invade British Guiana in 1953, suspend the constitution, and arrest an elected government that threatened their economic interests points back to the early lessons he had learned about the United States and Haiti.16 Later in the letter, Padmore assures Du Bois that in Kenya, “the struggle goes on” and that “it is a bloody battle but unavoidable. So was Haiti” ( Du Bois, Correspondence 3:374). This mention reads most easily as a reference to the Haitian Revolution, but the occupation hovers at the margins of their discussion. When Du Bois replies, U.S. imperialism comes to the forefront: “I understand the policy of you and Dr. Nkrumah, although I am a little afraid of it. The power of the British and especially American capital when it once gets a foothold is tremendous” (3:375).17 As Padmore and Du Bois think about post–World War II independence, the memories of Haiti’s loss of sovereignty remain in their minds. Before his death in 1959, Padmore would help shape Ghana’s future, and through his role as Nkrumah’s advisor on African affairs, the decolonization of Africa. In 1958, independent Ghana hosted a successor to the Manchester Congress, the All-African Peoples Conference, attended by many of the continent’s future leaders including Patrice Lumumba and

171  Haiti Goes Global Frantz Fanon. As Marika Sherwood notices: “Just how close Padmore was to the Conference perhaps emotionally as well as practically is illustrated by his use of a symbol from The Negro Worker that he had edited 26 years previously. The Black man, rising out of the map of Africa, rending asunder his chains, graces the initial publicity for the Conference” (Sherwood 175). The ANLC logo that had grown out of opposition to the occupation of Haiti thus framed the first pan-Africanist event in postcolonial Africa, where Nkrumah’s opening address warned: “Do not let us also forget that colonialism and imperialism may come to us yet in a different guise and not necessarily from Europe” (qtd. in Gaines 96 ). The lessons of occupied Haiti resounded throughout the decolonization era, even if we have not always listened to the echoes. As important as Padmore’s influence on Nkrumah may have been to decolonization, Ghana is only one place where we might look for events and ideas set in motion by the occupation of Haiti. The complicated routes these ideas took during this period can be seen in considering the case of Jamaica. W. A. Domingo, one of the first champions of ­Johnson’s critique of the occupation in the pages of the Messenger, was also one of the shaping forces in the 1938 founding of the PNP, considered Jamaica’s first modern political party and the group that would negotiate Jamaica’s new constitution that allowed universal suffrage and eventually, independence. Domingo by the 1930s had founded the Jamaica Progressive League in New York and was advocating for self-rule in the colony. When a group of Jamaicans led by O. T. Fairclough — who himself had been p ­ olitically 18 radicalized after spending time in occupied Haiti  — founded the political newspaper Public Opinion, Domingo participated in the debates in print that led to the decision to found a political party that would pressure the British to allow a more representative government. Domingo returned to Jamaica to work with the PNP and was imprisoned in 1941 along with a number of other Jamaican patriots for speaking out against British rule during World War II. Among those imprisoned with ­Domingo was Ken Hill, the trade union leader who would attend Padmore’s 1945 Manchester Congress as a representative of the PNP. Padmore himself became especially active in writing for the PNP’s Public Opinion throughout the 1940s — Leslie James counts seventy-three ­articles in Public Opinion attributed to Padmore between 1943 and 1952 (George Padmore 82) — showing how these figures continued to cross paths throughout the decolonization period. Just as Makalani makes Padmore “the central figure” of his book about radical black internationalism between the wars (8), Penny Von Eschen sees him as “an ideal entry point” into

172  American Imperialism’s Undead discussing anticolonialism from 1937 to 1957: “As a prolific journalist and essayist for African American, West Indian, West African, and British newspapers, [ Padmore] also facilitated communication among anticolonial activists in the United States, Britain, the Caribbean, and, in later years, West Africa” (13). These routes of ­influence and traveling theories may not fit easily into stories of nationalist emerging that stress indigeneity and authenticity. They show, however, that anticolonial nationalism emerged in the Anglophone world not just in response to British empire, but in many cases as an unanticipated by-product of U.S. empire as well.

Conclusion

My goal throughout this book has been to explore the reverberations of Haiti’s occupation to show how U.S. imperialism during the first half of the twentieth century impacted the Caribbean in ways scholars have not always acknowledged. I have therefore focused on responses to the occupation of Haiti from the years between 1915 and 1950. The echoes of the projects developed during this period mean that the occupation continues to shape the region — a revenant or zombie, reappearing unexpectedly — even decades after the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The years following the occupation were the key period for the consolidation of nationalist politics throughout the region, with the post–World War II period characterized politically by events like the Cuban Revolution, decolonization throughout the British West Indies, and the emergence of strong independence movements in Puerto Rico and the French Caribbean. In the final sections of two chapters, I gestured toward how political debates that followed the occupation period — about West Indian federation in chapter 2 and African decolonization in chapter 6 — took place with the memory of the occupation firmly in mind. These continuities appear in other locations as well, such as Cuba, where opponents of the revolution during the 1960s labelled the Afro-Cubans being championed by the Castro government as “cacos,” the Haitian rebels who fought against U.S. Marines during the occupation (Guerra 156 ). Just as the political projects of the post–World War II period bore the imprint of the occupation, Caribbean culture from this period also demonstrates the ongoing presence of the occupation in the region’s imaginary. The Caribbean literary renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s is often considered the cultural equivalent of the nationalist political moment, where writers like Alejo Carpentier, Aimé Césaire, Edouard G ­ lissant, Sam Selvon, and Derek Walcott created what came to be seen as an a­ uthentic

174  American Imperialism’s Undead Caribbean literary tradition. Yet continuities between this generation and work produced during the occupation complicate this idea of authenticity. Two of the novelists frequently considered as part of this literary emergence — one of whom challenges the otherwise overly masculine version of this nationalist moment — are George Lamming and Jean Rhys. In this conclusion, I want to consider these writers as inhabiting the intellectual networks created by the occupation of Haiti and inheriting the discourses produced during the occupation. Texts like L ­ amming’s Season of Adventure and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, usually seen as exemplars of nationalist writing breaking away from Europe to establish a uniquely Caribbean literary tradition through their rewritings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, also respond to images of the Caribbean, as site of exotic superstition and religious practice most frequently labeled as voodoo, circulated by U.S. imperialism and U.S. culture industries. The work of Lamming and Rhys — and of many other Caribbean writers — must be understood as responding not just to B ­ ritish colonialism via the English literary canon, but to U.S. imperialism embodied by the work of Eugene O’Neill, William Seabrook, and Hollywood productions like White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). The influence of the occupation shows nationalist writing at its seemingly most indigenous to be constructed from impure sources. More importantly, though, examining the ways in which Lamming’s and Rhys’s work incorporates shadows of occupation discourses into their versions of Caribbeanness demonstrates how productive entry into exoticist routes was for writers interested in critiquing and undermining imperial relationships.

George Lamming and the Voodoo Imaginary George Lamming opens two of his foundational texts of Anglophone Caribbean literature, The Pleasures of Exile (1960) and Season of Adventure (1960), with descriptions of a Haitian ceremony of souls. ­Pleasures, a collection of Lamming’s essays, is one of the most influential works in ­Caribbean and postcolonial studies: its reading of The Tempest as metaphor for colonial relations would become especially popular, and the chapter “The Occasion for Speaking” was selected to open the canon-making anthology The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.1 Lamming’s essay collection, published just as the British empire was coming apart, begins in “the republic of Haiti” (9) and contains a chapter about the Haitian Revolution; the emphasis on Haitian independence suggests a British subject engaged with the oldest Caribbean nation’s history as he

175  Conclusion imagines the ­region’s future. It is the ceremony of souls that offers The Pleasures of Exile its organizing metaphor, what Sandra Pouchet Paquet calls “a ­Caribbean cultural model for negotiating the nightmare of colonial history” (xiii).2 The Pleasures of Exile describes how “the Haitian ­peasant . . . hears, at first hand, the secrets of the dead” (9); the ceremony is a dialogue between living and dead, articulated “through the medium of the Priest” (10) and circumscribed by “the Law” (9).3 In a c­ ollection so concerned with how the Caribbean writer can establish literary ­authority — what gives him his “occasion for speaking” — the d ­ escription of this ceremony appears to be Lamming’s own invocation of the gods as a way for the author to position himself as translator of history and peasant experience for the literate possessors of power. While The Pleasures of Exile thus uses the ceremony of souls as an overture to introduce the concerns the volume will explore, Season of Adventure features even more detailed — and powerful — descriptions of the ceremony itself. The novel’s setting is an imagined island named San Cristobal that combines an amalgam of Caribbean locales: one list of places on the island includes “Half Way Tree, Gonavieve Bay, Sargasso, Petionville” (299). The island’s culture also draws on a pan-Caribbean culture where Haiti features prominently, with the ceremony of souls taking place in a tonelle and led by a Houngan even as steel drums play. The ceremony takes up the first two chapters, approximately fifty pages of the novel. Those chapters, featuring conversations between Crim and Powell about the meaning of freedom, then between Charlot and Fola about folk culture and belonging, are constantly interrupted by the sounds of the drums, the chants of the women, and the actions of the Houngan: “The music swept away [ Powell’s] voice. It seemed this music had always been there, immortal as the origin of water swinging new soundings up from the sea’s dark tomb of noise. And the women’s voices chanted the resurrection of two souls from the ocean’s deep chapel of skulls. The white skeletons had heard the call of the drums. The women grew hysterical with song. Each chant was an errand chased by the drums’ stern clap of steel. They knew the gods would come, yet danced like they would be forgotten” (19 –20). Based on a reading of Season, Gordon Rohlehr argues that “so important is this aspect of possession to Lamming, that one may say that it has become the major frame within which he explores the themes of history; the latter-day confrontation of colonizer and colonized; the question of their joint responsibility for the future growth of newly-independent former colonies” (3). Even more than The Pleasures of Exile, Season of Adventure uses the ceremony of the souls as a way of

176  American Imperialism’s Undead representing a vital and embodied Caribbean culture, connected to A ­ frica and the history of the Middle Passage but also complete and “total” ( Lamming, Season 29). Haitian religious practice offers Lamming what Supriya Nair identifies as “a local Caribbean practice . . . significantly and predominantly connected with African rituals” that has “close ties with early slave revolt and racial consciousness in Haiti” (108). We might imagine that exchanges within the Caribbean region led the Barbadian Lamming to look to a neighboring island to find signs of what The Pleasures of Exile and Season of Adventure position as a distinctively and authentically Caribbean culture. Instead, Lamming points to the decision of a U.S. magazine to send him to the region as a travel writer as what first led him to Haiti: In 1955 I went to the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship and I had an assignment from a magazine called Holiday to go through the Caribbean and to write something on it. That was my first experience of most of the territories. I’d only known Trinidad before going to England. Very slowly, I went to Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica and right down to Guyana. Those were good years because I wrote up all those places, which I sent to Holiday — who made no use of it. The article was too long and considered inappropriate. But the material became very useful because Season of Adventure was to a large extent based on all the things written up on Haiti, and that was when I discovered the Haitian ceremony of souls.4

It is intriguing to consider Holiday magazine as Lamming’s patron. The publication is, not surprisingly considering its title, almost entirely concerned with producing a touristic vision of the destinations it features. A description of Puerto Rico from a 1955 issue illustrates that inclination: “Puerto Rico, U.S.A., understands, as so few places around the world do, what the well-heeled U.S. traveler primarily wants — comfortable bed, clean, private bath, a hell of a lot of hot water, good food at a fair price, and facilities for getting his laundry done fast. Surround these ­essentials with a superb sea, add a few harp- and kidney-shaped pools, a colonial cathedral, mambo for midnight, an interesting population that talks a foreign tongue but knows what you’re asking for in English — and you’ve the makings of a going concern” ( Krauss, “Puerto Rico” 58). In spite of this baldly commercial vision, Holiday sought to include literary writers in its pages: from 1955 to 1957, just as the magazine was commissioning Lamming, it published work by John Steinbeck, Joyce Cary, V. S. ­Pritchett, Ian Fleming, Nadine Gordimer, and Paul Bowles. Historical contextualization was often important to the locations described,

177  Conclusion but always secondarily; Alan Paton’s contribution about South Africa from 1957 mentions apartheid but only in the penultimate paragraph ( Paton 121). Stories about Latin America and the Caribbean in particular ­emphasize the unique culture in ways that tend toward exoticism by offering the reader access to a premodern (and, ironically, pretourist) culture. For example, a 1955 feature on Central America describes in the subtitle: “Behind the façade of revolution, volcano and jungle, what are these turbulent republics really like? An author-diplomat gives you the fascinating story of a still-undiscovered tourist land” ( Krauss, “Central America” 34). Lamming’s trip through the Caribbean thus depended on the support of the barely veiled imperialism of the tourism industry whose development, in the case of Haiti, was closely linked to U.S. military presence in the region ( Plummer, Haiti and the United States 135). Lamming’s visit to Haiti in particular was even more directly tied to the networks created during the occupation.5 In an interview with David Scott, Lamming describes how he prepared for the trip to Haiti: “Before I went to Haiti I had asked for some addresses. There was a very well known woman who was a dancer: Maya Deren. She wrote an interesting book called Divine Horsemen. I knew Maya Deren; I had stayed in her apartment” (“Sovereignty” 163). Deren, Lamming’s broker for the visit to Haiti, was a U.S. filmmaker who spent time in Haiti between 1947 and 1954 documenting Haitian religious practices. She returned to the United States the year before Lamming’s trip and thus had up-to-date contacts that Lamming was able to use. Deren’s interest in Haiti and connections to the island developed directly from the groundwork laid by ethnography performed there as a result of the occupation. Deren worked as a personal assistant to Katherine Dunham, the African American dancer who had received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and support from Melville Herskovits to do research in Haiti in 1935. Deren also served as a research assistant to William Seabrook, whom she met while living with Max Eastman ( Pipkin 85), the friend of Claude McKay who had compared the Jamaican poet’s appearance to that of Henri Christophe. She was a friend of André Breton, the surrealist who had influenced Alejo Carpentier’s early writings and who travelled to Haiti in 1945.6 Deren made her name as an experimental filmmaker before receiving a Guggenheim award — like Walrond and Dunham before her and L ­ amming after — to document religious practices in Haiti. Divine Horsemen, the film made from the footage she shot in Haiti, shows possession and other religious rituals. Stylistically, the film is atypical of Deren’s ­otherwise

178  American Imperialism’s Undead avant-garde work: “Although superficially the film does not have much resemblance to Deren’s other films — partly because Divine Horsemen is her only documentary film . . . , Divine Horsemen is concerned with dance and body movement as an aesthetic form of communication” (Aitken 216 ). As in the negrista and afroantillanista work from Cuba described in chapter 5, it sometimes appears as if the representation of black culture and black bodies is taken to be in and of itself an avant-garde move. Moira Sullivan describes how for Deren, “blackness symbolizes the ‘abyss’ ” (211) and that “diving into the abyss was a way of symbolizing the processes involved in creativity” (212). The fetishization of the black body in Divine Horsemen and resulting decontextualization of Haitian culture create the exotic lens typical of occupation-era representations of the Caribbean. Lamming’s reliance on Deren as cultural broker for his trip to Haiti thus positions his approach to Haitian culture within the networks of the occupation. Seabrook had traveled to Haiti in the late 1920s to observe religious ceremonies and had provided guidance to those who followed. Jean Price-Mars’s criticism of The Magic Island suggested that despite Seabrook’s insistence on giving his readers the real Haiti, an ­outsider would not have been able to participate in anything but a staged ­re-­creation of spiritual practices ( Renda 250). As much as Seabrook ­emphasizes the ceremonies he attends with Maman Celie, and how they took place in remote parts of the island (anticipating Holiday magazine’s promise to tourists that they could see a culture usually unavailable to outsiders), the author’s tendency to exaggerate his exploits makes it quite possible that his informants were much less exotic. Shelley Stevens o ­ bserves that “Seabrook, Dunham, [ Zora Neale] Hurston, and Deren all relied on data recovered from observing a white man (‘Doc Reser’) turned servitor of Vodou” (17); both Dunham and Hurston include d ­ escriptions of Reser in their writings on Haiti. That Seabrook offered introductions and contacts to Dunham, Hurston, and Deren suggests that Lamming may be ­another link in a genealogy beginning with Seabrook in which each successive traveler to Haiti was able to see a performance of religious practice recreated by a hybrid figure aware of what outsiders desired. The scenes from The Pleasures of Exile and Season of Adventure must be read in this context. Reser, the former U.S. Navy pharmacist who had helped Seabrook, Dunham, Hurston, and Deren learn about and observe Haitian religious practices, lived “in the town of Pont Beudet, not far from Port-au-Prince” ( Renda 294). In The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming begins with the “ceremony of the Souls which I witnessed four years ago in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince” (9). Considering that Lamming

179  Conclusion was only in Haiti for a short period, using Deren’s contacts, it seems likely that he attended the same ceremonies that his North American predecessors had. The ceremony of the souls at the beginning of Season of Adventure is attended by one white character, Charlot Pressoir. He is the English history teacher who has brought Fola, the educated main female character who has not previously attended a ceremony of this sort ( ­giving Charlot a parallel role in Season of Adventure to Squire Gensir’s in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom). Intriguingly, Charlot takes his name from a person that Lamming explicitly credits Deren’s introductions with helping him meet: “Maya gave me about four or five addresses. One in fact carries the name of a character in Season: Charlot. Charlot Pressoir was a very well-known Haitian poet” (“Sovereignty” 163).7 In fictionalizing this contact he received from Deren as a white man and Fola’s guide to the ceremony, is Lamming encoding his own ability to attend a Haitian religious ceremony within the novel? Is Charlot’s whiteness a nod to Doc Reser? Whether or not they had the same source, Lamming’s descriptions of the ceremony of souls are much less exoticizing than Seabrook’s. The novel’s representation of the ceremony stresses not the bizarre aspects, but the ritualistic. Even when the dead speak, Lamming avoids sensationalizing the scene: “They could hear two voices: the Houngan speaking softly to identify one known dead presence in the tent. The details were ordinary as the names of streets. Then the other voice rose, barely audible at first, choked in a struggle to link its syllables; and that noise of the wind came down, nearer, more tremulous, like the suffocation of a tide breaking fretfully over firm sand, and the woman swooning behind Fola in all her guilt for being the dead man’s sister” (Season 34 –35). By contrast, Charlot’s recollections of England turn the tables and exoticize the colonial metropole: he thinks of the England he is escaping as “a kind of corpse in future argument with itself . . . passionate in incest with its past” (36 ). He sees his England, in other words, as a zombie empire refusing to accept its demise, a “live corpse” that “fathered . . . hateful intensities, whether argument turned on brutal murders in remote possessions, or the rumoured neglect of the nation’s kittens” (37). In addition to presenting England as exotic and the Caribbean as the norm, the novel critiques the motives of “romantic” Europeans like Charlot and their quest for “adventure in a foreign land” to counter “the monotonous strength of [their] own inheritance” (27). In a surprising turn, however, the primary object of this critique is not the British Charlot, but his “American friends”: Fola realizes that “their return to

180  American Imperialism’s Undead the past seemed the opposite of her visit to the tonelle” (92). Fola thus understands the assumptions of a primitivism that sees the Caribbean only as a place where a premodern world is preserved, rather than as a coterminous and creative space. This U.S. primitivism is a form of privilege: “They descended from a history that was recorded, a history which was wholly contained in their own way of looking at the world” (93); in the end, these U.S. expatriates could “return to embrace their world of m ­ onuments and important graves” (93). For Fola “the tonelle was far more personal than any monuments could ever be to an American in his mad pursuit of origins” (93). The slippage from Charlot’s romantic desire to escape the dead end of Englishness as the sun sets on the ­British empire to a North American “mad pursuit of origins” interpellates fi ­ gures like Seabrook into the discourse producing the exotic, primitive C ­ aribbean. The shift in emphasis from Charlot to his American friends also demonstrates how Season of Adventure is not solely (and perhaps not even primarily) interested in critiquing British colonialism but also in understanding the contours of the U.S. cultural and military presence in San Cristobal that is threatening to force the islanders into prostitution (197) and turn money into God (222). As much as Season of Adventure seeks to present the ceremony of souls without the sensationalizing tropes that characterize so many representations of Haitian religion, echoes of the versions of voodoo established during the occupation nonetheless appear in Lamming’s novel.8 Season of Adventure takes care never to use the label “voodoo” to name the religious and cultural practices it depicts, as if to avoid the ­connotations associated with the U.S. discourse surrounding that term.9 Yet Fola still thinks of the origins of the ceremony of souls as the “serpent cult” (93) of West Africa, the vision of voodoo seen in Arthur Burks’s stories or Seabrook’s narratives that I discussed in chapters 3 and 5. Fola has inherited this view from Charlot: “Fola was thinking about the origin of the ceremony as she had heard him discuss it. . . . This ceremony was a religious manifestation based on a serpent cult that originated on the slave coast of West Africa” (28). Yet that way of thinking is not only Charlot’s or Fola’s: snake imagery seeps into other parts of the ­narration, whether in the Houngan’s “pair of snake-skin sandals” (31–32) or when Eva imagines raw and natural sexuality as a “snake movement” in her stomach (163). Even as the novel ends, the gesture by Chiki that s­ ecretly acknowledges his unbreakable connection to Powell is “the snake-like movement in the index finger” (346 ). The snake becomes the image embodying the novel’s ambivalence about “the backward glance” (49),

181  Conclusion Fola’s shorthand for the complex relationship of African-derived tradition, an organic natural world, and a vitality ( particularly sexual ) not exhausted by European modernity. Lamming thus appears to reinhabit the problematic language that my chapter on Carpentier discussed as popularized during the occupation to exoticize the Caribbean. Just as it is “through [Charlot’s] tutelage, through a tutelage foreign to San ­Cristobal, that Fola had returned to the tonelle” (94), Lamming’s discovery of the ceremony of souls comes through the intellectual and cultural networks established in the wake of occupation. These networks therefore prove to be simultaneously restricting because of their primitivist and imperialist roots, even as they are enabling for Caribbean artists to appropriate and transform them. The imagery of Haitian religious practice which L ­ amming accesses through commodified imperial circulation never loses these contaminated origins. Yet his representation of Caribbean culture — as intact, oppositional, potentially revolutionary — is no less generative as a result.

Zombies in the Other’s Eyes: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea deploys the image of the zombie as metaphor for female subjugation. Critics such as Sandra Drake and ­Melanie Otto read the use of the zombie as marking a turn toward African and Afro-Caribbean culture in Rhys’s work. For Drake (the daughter of St. Clair Drake, a close friend of George Padmore), “the satisfactory resolution of Antoinette Cosway’s crisis of identity can come only with a satisfactory resolution of her relationship to the part of the Caribbean that is not derived from Europe — in this novel, especially the Black C ­ aribbean” (99) embodied by “the quintessentially Afro-Caribbean figure of the zombi” (99). Otto, meanwhile, argues that “Rhys’s use of the zombi . . . suggests that Rhys was a full participant in Caribbean culture” (151).10 I want to question that reading by placing the zombie not only in the context of Afro-Caribbean culture. Undoubtedly, the zombie originates in Haiti. But its proliferation owes to the interaction between that culture and the occupation. Kate Ramsey even suggests that the spread of belief in the supernatural within Haiti may have been amplified by the occupation, which devoted such resources to persecuting religious practitioners that what U.S. Marines labeled as voodoo gained increased legitimacy and power (5, 121). Whatever the extent to which U.S. antivoodoo campaigns and the proletarianization of a dispossessed peasantry helped popularize the zombie within Haiti, the availability of this figure outside

182  American Imperialism’s Undead of Haiti to writers like Rhys undoubtedly derived from the discourses emerging from the occupation that circulated this imagery. Rhys’s representation of obeah in Wide Sargasso Sea thus owes as much to international versions of Caribbeanness — and not just those created by nineteenth-century ­English texts like Jane Eyre — as it does to indigenous cultural practices. Rhys encodes this tension into her text through the male narrator’s exoticizing gaze and reliance on sensationalizing texts to interpret Caribbean reality. One of the signal accomplishments of William Seabrook’s The Magic Island was to disseminate the image of the zombie outside of Haiti. As figure 3 indicates, the word zombie scarcely appears in English-language sources before the publication of The Magic Island, yet beginning in 1929, the term becomes increasingly popular. Seabrook identifies the zombie as the “one creature I had been hearing about in Haiti, which sounded exclusively local,” and defines it as “a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a ­mechanical resemblance of life” (93). He notes how the zombie demonstrates a particularly Haitian fear, evoking “a servant or slave” because of its association with compelled labor (93). Despite this origin in the particularities of Haitian culture and historical experience, the zombie would become widely popular in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. Susan Zieger argues that the zombie’s ability to speak to the social and economic anxieties of that moment made it such a powerful icon: “The zombie’s evacuated subjectivity and anonymity — its apparent lack of personhood — combined with its injury to describe modern white life as automatism” (750). The zombie evoked the same feeling of alienation from mechanized modernity that spurred primitivism in the 1920s, but with the added context of 0.00000400% 0.00000350% 0.00000300% 0.00000250% 0.00000200% 0.00000150% 0.00000100% 0.00000050% 0.00000000%

1910 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935 1940 1945 1950

Figure 3. Zombie as percentage of all words in English-language books, 1910 –1950. ( This data obtained using Google’s Ngram viewer, searching for the word ­zombie in the English corpus between 1910 and 1950, with a smoothing of 0.)

183  Conclusion the anxiety over labor’s lack of autonomy brought on by the economic crisis of the early 1930s. This translation of the stories of Haitian zombies to the fears of U.S. audiences becomes most explicit in Hollywood’s first zombie movie, White Zombie, released in 1932. Set in Haiti and drawing on Seabrook’s story, the film first i­ntroduces zombies as local blacks trapped in factory-like sugar production before shifting to a plot involving the white male protagonist’s efforts to rescue his fiancée after she is turned into a zombie by a local sorcerer.11 As White Zombie illustrates, by the time the zombie had reached the Hollywood screen, it had become substantially gendered through tales of white women threatened by their own susceptibility to black magic.12 The development of the genre led to historical decontextualization: while the zombies described by Seabrook and those at the beginning of White Zombie were explicitly victims of the proletarianization of Haitian peasants by multinational corporations like the Haitian American Sugar Company, zombie films of the 1930s and 1940s told stories of “virginal white victim[s] menaced by black erotic rites” (Aizenberg 462). These later versions would thus maintain the anxiety about the threat imperialist expansion poses to protecting white women even as the specific socioeconomic contexts of the zombie would be downplayed. Through this commodification of the zombie, it became an icon of exotic Caribbean difference to be deployed in a range of contexts. By the second half of the twentieth century, the zombie had become detached from the Caribbean but would recuperate some of its critical edge as a vehicle for depicting the failure of contemporary ideologies and institutions in films such as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its sequels or the television series The Walking Dead.13 The 1943 I Walked with a Zombie was one of the most successful of the raft of zombie films to follow White Zombie. Set on the imaginary island of Saint Sebastian — an island that in the original script flies an American flag, as if to evoke occupied Haiti — the plot follows a young nurse who has come from Canada to the Caribbean to take care of a mysterious charge, the wife of the wealthy planter who has hired her. When the nurse finally meets her patient, she finds that the wife has been put under a spell and that as a result, the husband has locked her in a tower. The film’s producer, the renowned horror filmmaker Val ­Lewton, gave his screenwriters a copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as inspiration, and I Walked with a Zombie would be billed as “a West Indian version of Jane Eyre” ( Bansak 145). Lewton’s insistence on realism extends from the use of “black actors, not people in blackface” to

184  American Imperialism’s Undead “such accurate voodoo terms as hounfour, loa, and houngan” ( Bishop 85). During p ­ reproduction, Lewton told “his staff to gather and study as much about voodoo as possible” (85). Considering this research, the central plot twist in which the person behind the wife’s zombification turns out to be a white woman suggests that the producer may have come across H. G. De Lisser’s The White Witch of Rosehall, the best-selling Jamaican novel also about a white woman practicing voodoo, which had been written during the occupation of Haiti and published in London in 1929.14 Ramsey shows how the occupation disseminated the idea of Caribbean peasants as docile and childlike unless some outsider “stirs them up and incites them with liquor and voodoo stuff” (qtd. in Ramsey 143), as one marine testified at a Senate hearing in the United States.15 Zombie films grew out of this discourse about voodoo as vehicle for elite manipulation of Haitians who would otherwise welcome occupying forces — where, as the son-in-law of the commander of the U.S. forces in Haiti put it, “upon the sounding of the Vaudoux drum the priest can very often do about what he wants with his followers” (qtd. in Ramsey 144) — which Wide Sargasso Sea resignifies through the husband’s paranoia about ­Christophine’s influence on his wife. Judie Newman provides an excellent overview of the parallels between I Walked with a Zombie and Wide Sargasso Sea, arguing that this “internal evidence strongly suggests that Rhys had seen I Walked with a ­Zombie” (18). Yet Newman does not engage with what I discussed in chapter 3 as the disidentification or décalage created by an author from Dominica crafting a story through images of the Caribbean initiated by the occupation of Haiti. In fact, Newman collapses these differences, describing “obeah, also known as voodoo” as “the black religion of ­Jamaica, Dominica, and other West Indian islands” (16 ). Obeah may have much in common with Haitian spiritual practices, but they are not the same. This conflation shows the persistence of the problem seen in my discussion of McKay and Walrond, of Caribbean writers from throughout the region being slotted into images about Haiti created during the occupation, those produced under the rubric of voodoo being perhaps the most powerful and unavoidable. Yet neither is Rhys’s version of obeah unconnected to Haiti. In her autobiography, Rhys describes obeah as “a milder form of voodoo” (16 ), suggesting again how Caribbean people themselves refract their identity through comparison to the free-floating signifiers of voodoo (as discursive creation distinct from actual Haitian religion) circulated especially because of U.S. colonial fascination with Haiti. Rhys would have been

185  Conclusion interpellated into this discourse, giving her the language to translate her island culture (obeah) into an internationally recognized form (voodoo). At the same time, this imaginary impacted how others perceived Rhys: she notes in one letter of the English town where she lives that “half the people in this village . . . believe in black magic! . . . Not only that, but the woman next door says I am a witch!” (Letters 239). When Rhys thinks of herself in another letter as a “jumby” (which she notes “is of course a corruption of zombie used in English islands” [ 215 ]), she shows the complex routes through which her identity is translated. A character from one of Rhys’s short stories, who also warns that “you needn’t believe everything you read” (Tales 84), observes that Europeans “always mix up tropical places” (83). Interpreting Anglophone Caribbean reality through the lens of stereotypes about voodoo would be precisely this kind of “mixing up.” The products of this process are hybrid representations like the zombies and potions seen or imagined in Wide Sargasso Sea, constructed out of material from Hollywood’s version of the Caribbean as much as Haiti or Dominica. The position in Wide Sargasso Sea of Christophine, the character perceived by the white characters in the novel to be the locus of black magic, points to precisely the same kind of décalage created by disidentification with exoticizing discourses about Haiti. Because the story is narrated by Antoinette and her husband, their perceptions of Christophine as potentially nefarious “obeah woman” can be convincing, even though she herself mocks Antoinette for “believ[ ing ] in that tim-tim story about obeah” (Wide 112). Christophine’s association with Afro-­ Caribbean supernatural beliefs and practice seem inseparable from her French ­ ­Caribbean identity: while Wide Sargasso Sea is set in the British islands of Jamaica and Dominica, Christophine is from a French island, though in another intriguing displacement, she is from Martinique, not Haiti. She also bears a feminized version of the name of the Haitian king Henri Christophe, who played a central role in U.S. versions of Haiti during the occupation.16 Identifying her as French Caribbean calls to mind the array of imagery associated with Haiti that was popularized by zombie movies and occupation-era discourses. Disidentifications in Wide Sargasso Sea such as the presence of zombie mythology or Christophine’s French ­Caribbeanness place the novel’s discursive location in between not only England and its colonies but also the United States and its postcolonial markets. Rhys first mentioned working on Wide Sargasso Sea in a 1945 letter (Letters 39), only two years after I Walked with a Zombie had been

186  American Imperialism’s Undead in theaters. We can only guess how much she was inspired to write her own version of Jane Eyre in the Caribbean after seeing this film. We do know that movies were important to Rhys. In a letter from 1957, Rhys describes drafting the “film script” for a “ghost story” set in the West Indies at the same time that she is working on “the Mrs Rochester stuff” (144). In her autobiographical novels from the late 1920s and 1930s, Rhys-like protagonists frequently go out to the movies, and their views on the world are influenced by these experiences. Good Morning, Midnight even ends with its character seeing things through her “film-mind” (176 ), while in a diary, Rhys repeats a quote that “someone told me” and then follows it with the note: “Be precise. No one told you. You saw it in a film” (Smile 129). It therefore seems plausible to look for evidence that films shaped Rhys’s own imaginary. One example might be a letter to Francis Wyndham explaining how engaging with obeah in Wide Sargasso Sea caused everything to “click into place” (Letters 262). In that letter, Rhys asserts that the zombie works particularly well for her purposes because “it’s usually a woman I think” (263). Considering the extent to which zombies were associated with white women in Holly­ wood films suggests that Rhys’s knowledge of voodoo owed something to that t­ radition.17 In fact, Wide Sargasso Sea encodes this reliance on texts for interpreting the Caribbean within its narrative. Wide Sargasso Sea does not feature actual zombies created by voodoo or obeah. Instead, the novel is first, about how an outsider may wrongly perceive black magic because of expectations he or she brings that have been created by discourse about the Caribbean; and then second, how those expectations can trap Caribbean people in a narrative that dispossesses them and renders them, effectively, in the position of zombie, controlled by another. Wide Sargasso Sea is built around the problem of the distortions created by narratives about the Caribbean. The most obvious of these narratives is Brontë’s Jane Eyre, but it is by no means the only text the novel targets. In fact, while Brontë’s novel creates one monstrous identity to define Bertha Mason — that of vampire (281) — in Wide Sargasso Sea, the identity Antoinette struggles to avoid is that of zombie. Just as Jane Eyre’s labeling of Bertha as vampire creates a textual prison from which Rhys sought to free her, Wide Sargasso Sea calls attention to the textual sources that frame “zombie” as a potential identity for its characters. When the novel switches to the perspective of Antoinette’s husband, it makes clear how little he understands of what he sees and experiences. In a scene in which he wanders “lost and afraid” ( Rhys, Wide 62) in the

187  Conclusion forest and does not even recognize Baptiste, one of his servants, he also observes “bunches of flowers tied with grass” and “a little girl carrying a basket on her head” (62). His ability to process sensory input in this scene is very much in doubt, yet he jumps to the conclusion that he has found evidence of obeah: after seeing the child, he asks Baptiste, “Is there a ghost, a zombi there?” (63). Baptiste insists, “[ I ] don’t know nothing about all that foolishness” (63), but the husband is convinced that he has seen something supernatural. The novel reveals the source of this projection; when he returns home, the husband “took up the book [ he] had been reading, The Glittering Coronet of Isles it was called, and [ he] turned to the chapter ‘Obeah’ ” (64). Wide Sargasso Sea here reproduces this fictional text’s definition of the zombie; this definition has obviously put the husband on the lookout for the “sacrifices or offerings of flowers and fruit” that the book offers as potential signs of a zombie (64). The mention in this definition of poisoning as tied to zombification later frames the husband’s understanding of what Antoinette might be trying to accomplish in giving him wine that he believes has been poisoned. The source of the husband’s preconceptions about the Caribbean points to the occupation discourses that would have shaped Rhys’s own authorial context. Marina Warner and Melanie Otto argue for reading The Glittering Coronet of Isles as Rhys’s fictionalization of the writing of Lafcadio Hearn, the nineteenth-century traveler whose work I discussed in chapter 3 as experiencing a renaissance in the United States during the occupation of Haiti.18 The primitivist modernism that formed a context for the Hearn revival would have been everywhere in the Paris where Rhys resided during the 1920s, as I showed in relation to Alejo Carpentier in chapter 5. Rhys’s novel Good Morning, Midnight features an artist collecting African masks (91), and her autobiographical fiction frequently includes intellectuals in Paris fascinated by African and Caribbean difference. Just as Hearn was one author whose representations of the Caribbean became popular during the occupation, another was Paul Morand, whom Rhys would have known through the Transatlantic Review edited by Ford Madox Ford, where both Rhys and Morand published fiction.19 Perhaps because of her European residence at the height of 1920s primitivist consumption of decontextualized black culture, Rhys’s writing demonstrates a heightened sense of how these narratives create a sensationalized version of the Caribbean that West Indians themselves might nonetheless use to craft an identity recognizable to the holders of discursive power. The constant presence of looking glasses throughout Rhys’s fiction shows this process of disidentification, in which images of

188  American Imperialism’s Undead the Caribbean dominated by zombies and voodoo become the distorted mirror through which a West Indian in Europe might find island culture reflected. The final product of this disidentification, though, is not the mapping of Haitian culture onto Jamaica and Dominica. Instead, Wide ­Sargasso Sea highlights the distinctiveness of these British islands even as the novel calls attention to how outsiders miss those distinctions in creating a version of Caribbean culture that conflates various islands. The only zombies in Wide Sargasso Sea appear to be in The Glittering Coronet of Isles and the fantasies it produces in its reader. Christophine invokes the soucriant (116 ) as a point of comparison but never the zombie. The major function of zombies in the novel, then, is as evidence of the fear of Caribbean culture as threatening that is created by stories that outsiders have heard. For Rhys writing in 1940s and 1950s, those stories are the zombie films circulated after occupation as well as writings such as those of Hearn and Morand. Rhys — like McKay, Walrond, and Carpentier before her — thus arrives at her representation of Caribbeanness against but also through the images of Haiti circulated by the U.S. occupation. I make this point not to undermine the authenticity of Rhys’s writing or her identity. Reading her alongside Lamming in this conclusion is meant to show how a variety of Caribbean writers — male and female, black and white, insiders and outsiders to Afro-Caribbean folk culture — inhabited the discursive networks established during the occupation of Haiti, even as occupying these troubled spaces opened up new creative potential for Caribbean art. The discourses about the Caribbean that made the occupation possible — of the region as spiritual but therefore irrational, premodern, and therefore beautiful but also dangerous — remain intact into the twentyfirst century. As the research of Peter Hulme and others has shown, the kernel of these images of the Caribbean can be seen as early as Columbus’s arrival, but my argument throughout this book has been that their contemporary versions crystalized and became widely disseminated during the U.S. occupation of Haiti.20 Identifying and contesting these ­images remains an important part of the project of opposing imperialism whether in the form of classic territorial colonialism or contemporary postcolonial exploitation. As the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite puts it in the poem “Negus,” from the 1969 collection Islands that forms the final section of The Arrivants trilogy, “it is not enough to be semicolon, to be semicolony” (224). “Negus” ends: “Ouvri bayi pou’ moi / Ouvri bayi pou’ moi” (224). With this Kreyol invocation, Brathwaite, writing

189  Conclusion more than three decades after the end of the occupation of Haiti and only three years after the independence of his birthplace, thus formulates his critique of postcolonial domination by following Lamming and Rhys in drawing on Haitian spiritual practice as an indigenous alternative to colonial culture.21 We therefore see some of the best-known anticolonial texts of the post–World War II period returning to the impure roots of commodified Haitian culture to construct oppositional projects. Throughout this book, I have sought to show how the discourses justifying imperialism also opened up spaces for counterdiscourses by activists and writers. The anticolonialism that emerged throughout the Caribbean in the mid-twentieth century was built on yet also challenged not only the discourses of European colonialism but also U.S. imperialism. In demonstrating the influence of the occupation of Haiti beginning in the 1910s and 1920s but continuing to affect the region as a whole into the 1950s and 1960s, I am making the case for a fuller understanding of U.S. activities in the Caribbean. The occupation of Haiti is only part of the larger story of U.S. imperialism in the region, a story that has too often been silenced in Caribbean political and cultural histories. In addition to examining the impact of the U.S. presence exclusively within particular islands, taking a regional and comparative perspective can shed light on the complex political linkages and cultural flows the Caribbean as a whole experienced in response to U.S. empire. The transnational responses to U.S. imperialism created solidarities and imaginaries that continue to shape the region and that can inspire and provide models for ongoing struggles for freedom, equality, and justice.

Notes

Introduction 1.  For example, Bolland describes the 1930s as “initiat[ ing ] a new period of modern politics” throughout the region (466 ); he specifically discusses Cuba, Puerto Rico, Suriname, British Honduras, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Barbados, Antigua, British Guiana, Jamaica, and Trinidad. 2.  For discussions of the 1930s as origin point for Anglophone Caribbean literature, see Ramchand’s The West Indian Novel and Its Background; and Sander’s The Trinidad Awakening. Donnell questions this narrative in TwentiethCentury Caribbean Literature, though she reiterates its importance within Caribbean studies. Like Donnell, Dash in A History of Literature in the Caribbean calls attention to the “received ideas” about the 1930s as origin for modern Francophone Caribbean literature (407). 3.  See, for example, Dash’s discussion in Haiti and the United States (62); and Shannon’s Jean Price-Mars, the Haitian Elite and the American Occupation. 4.  Throughout this book, I will use “voodoo” to refer to the U.S. exoticized representation of Haitian religion, distinct from the actual spiritual practice i­ tself. Scholars often distinguish between voodoo as stereotype and Vodou as lived ­religion. Ramsey offers a useful discussion of how “practitioners have tended not to objectify the religion . . . saying in Kreyòl that they sèvi lwa (serve the spirits)” (6 ) instead of calling their religious practice voodoo, Vodou, Vodun, or vaudoux, names that during the nineteenth century “became appropriated by foreigners as the encompassing sign for all African-based spiritual beliefs and ritual practices in Haiti” (7). Ramsey suggests that even Vodou is therefore an imprecise label for a range of religious beliefs and practices. I have tried to avoid these labels, instead distinguishing what I usually describe as Haitian religious practices from what was translated into the United States, Europe, or other parts of the Caribbean as voodoo. 5.  While this book was in production, the Journal of Haitian Studies published an issue on the occupation. Smith’s contribution comes to conclusions similar to those I reach in examining regional newspapers in chapters 1 and 5. Smith

192  Notes to Pages 11–25 concludes that the occupation led Jamaicans to express “conflicted perceptions” about British empire and “US imperialism in the Caribbean” (“Capture Land” 183). 6.  In my introduction to Haiti and the Americas, I survey the scholarship on the hemispheric reverberations of the Haitian Revolution (5–10). 7.  Schmidt provides the most detailed history of the occupation available in English. He notes the parallels between the Haitian constabulary and Trujillo’s role in the Dominican Republic (124, 217). 8.  Klein describes a political and economic transformation not unlike what took place under the occupation of Haiti: “Iraq under [ Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority Paul ] Bremer was the logical conclusion of Chicago School theory: a public sector reduced to a minimal number of employees, mostly contract workers, living in a Halliburton city state, tasked with signing corporatefriendly laws drafted by [ U.S. consulting firm] KPMG and handing out duffle bags of cash to Western contractors protected by mercenary soldiers, themselves shielded by full legal immunity” (454 –55). 9. Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop presents a compelling argument for the ways Central America in the 1980s served “as a dress rehearsal” for post-9/11 military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan (5). His focus on the “absence of Latin America in recent discussions about the United States and its empire” is a valuable corrective (1). Puri and Scott make the case for understanding Grenada as a harbinger of a new wave of U.S. imperial activity: Puri discusses the invasion as a way “to exorcise the so-called Vietnam syndrome” (103), while Scott calls Grenada “an early — and relatively easy — ­target for the neoconservative Reagan doctrine of rolling back communism rather than coexisting with it” (Omens 133–34). 10. Chapter 1 of Glover’s Haiti Unbound makes the case for Haiti’s exclusion from postcolonial theorizing as part of the larger historical marginalization of the island. In her reading, “theorists have tended to emphasize the uniqueness of [the Haitian Revolution] and, in so doing, to place Haiti outside of discussions of regional literature and culture” (15). 1. “The Independence So Hardly Won Has Been Maintained” 1.  Hill argues for the invasion of Abyssinia as “the turning-point of nineteenthcentury and post-war Black nationalism” and James’s work as “one of the essential factors in clearly establishing the changed outlook” (“In England” 69). Similarly, Bogues describes how the invasion “galvanized black anti-colonial intellectuals and activists in England” and how agitation against the invasion “served as one of the bases for the modern black anti-colonial movement” and works like “James’s The Black Jacobins and The History of Negro Revolt” (Caliban’s 40). Scott credits the Abyssinia crisis with radicalizing James beyond the positions of the League of Coloured Peoples that he had joined upon first arriving in London: “Very importantly for James, Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia on October 3, 1935 . . . became a flashpoint for anti-imperialist and anticolonialist agitation and organization”; the invasion “altered the character and mood of black and anticolonial

193  Notes to Pages 25 –34 sentiment in Britain as well as across the black diaspora, and called into being a more radical response. C. L. R. James . . . was to be a central part of furnishing that response” (Conscripts 28). 2.  “I had decided to write that book years ago. There was no material in the Caribbean. I came to England in 1932 and there was no material in England. I went to France in 1933 and found a mass of material. I spent six months in France working on that material with great speed. There was a mass of it but one thing that happened — there were many people who had worked on that ­material before, not on S.D. particularly but on French colonialism, and some S.D. people — and their books were there” (C. L. R. James Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript L ­ ibrary, Columbia University Library in the City of New York, Box 12, Folder 14). 3.  Hall connects James to the U.S. context but not the occupation, noting that “the collective memory of the Haitian revolution itself was powerful in the twenties and thirties” (18). Hall speculates that “the Haitian revolution was a recurring motif” in Harlem Renaissance writers because “African-American history wasn’t able to provide them with an equivalent moment — with an equivalent imaginative possibility — of astonishing hope; there was no episode of the reach or scope that Haiti provided” (18). Since Hall gave this interview, Renda’s Taking Haiti has made an overwhelming case that Haiti’s availability as this kind of raw material for U.S. artists is not separable from its status as U.S. political possession. Renda mentions James and The Black Jacobins as part of this international picture (280 –81). 4.  Papers of the Independent Labour Party, London School of Economics Special Collections, leaflets and draft papers on the situation in Abyssinia after its invasion by Mussolini, ILP 7/11/ 9. 5.  Although De Boissiere introduces this context of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean, De Boissiere’s article on Cuba does not mention the occupation of Haiti, which had ended only weeks before the article was published. This absence is especially glaring since he actually brings up Haiti in the essay, contrasting the Haitian Revolution as “genuine, organised expression of the will of a people” (298) with this twentieth-century “Cuban revolt” that has been m ­ anipulated by imperial powers. De Boissiere’s anticolonial ­radicalism, like James’s, seems unable to come to terms with how the events of his own lifetime suggested the potential precariousness of Haiti’s heroic historical a­ ccomplishment. 6.  Glissant writes: “The most important example of the effect of diversion [ Détour] is the case of Frantz Fanon. A grand and intoxicating diversion” (25). 7.  James read these British and U.S. publications because of the colonial orientation of Trinidadian newspapers. The treatment of Haiti’s occupation shows the inadequacy of these local media. The Trinidad Guardian, for example, d ­ evoted most of its coverage to other parts of the British empire. When events in Haiti, such as the December 1929 uprising, made it impossible to ignore the occupation, the Guardian’s articles downplayed (to use Trouillot’s language, “trivialized”) the opposition and sided fully with the forces of law and order. Three articles about Haiti appear during December 1929, none given any real p ­ rominence. The first,

194  Notes to Pages 34 –37 headlined “Customs Officers Strike: Martial Law in Haiti,” is extremely brief, taking up only a dozen lines, and is relegated to page 9 ( December 10, 1929). The second, headlined “Haiti Uprising Quiet: Confidence Created by Prompt U.S. Action,” is slightly longer and appears on page 7 ( ­December 12, 1929). The third, “Haiti Riot under Control” ( December 14, 1929), is also on page 7 but is given more than five times more space than the first article. This series of articles therefore barely covers the uprising; substantial attention is devoted only once the threat of significant anticolonial action has passed and Guardian readers can be assured of a return to the status quo. 8.  In another essay, James mentions reading the Negro World and the Crisis during the 1920s ( Høgsbjerg, C. L. R. James 24). My second and fourth chapter note the ways the occupation of Haiti appeared in those publications. 9. Drawing parallels between James and Hegel is not an unproblematic theoretical move. There is obviously a difference between James’s silencing of something that threatens his identity as an oppressed person seeking a model to end oppression as opposed to Hegel’s silencing of something that threatens his identity as a privileged person. I hope I have been as attentive to these ­details of positioning as Fischer is when she describes, for example, how “the concept of disavowal requires us to identify what is being disavowed by whom, and for what reason. Unlike the notion of trauma, which becomes politically inert when it c­ annot properly distinguish between, for instance, a traumatized slave and a traumatizing slaveholder, disavowal does not foreclose the political by ­rushing to a­ ssign victim status to all those who find it difficult to deal with reality” (­Modernity 38). Fischer further discusses this methodology in the chapter “­Memory, Trauma, History” (138–39). 10. C. L. R. James Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library in the City of New York, Box 12, Folder 14. In other interviews, James describes the conception of Toussaint L’Ouverture differently: “The material I was working on, I thought the public should know about it. It was going to take a time to finish the book, the biography, but I could make it into a play. I wrote the play and started to circulate it, chiefly with the idea of making propaganda. I did not write the play for Paul Robeson — that I did not do” (C. L. R. James Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library in the City of New York, Box 12, Folder 13). 11.  From the interview “C. L. R. James and British Trotskyism,” available at www.marxists.org /archive / james-clr/works /1986/11/revhis-interview.htm. James repeats a similar story about Padmore’s pivotal role in his development from European Marxist to anticolonialist in his unpublished autobiographical writings. For example: “I had come to England from the Caribbean where we had no native language, no Caribbean past, and I had become a Marxist along with the other Caribbean intellectuals following the European pattern. It was Padmore who brought me back and made me understand the significance of the colonial struggle in its own right and particularly the struggle that was to begin in Africa”

195  Notes to Pages 37–52 (C.L.R. James Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library in the City of New York, Box 4, Folder 7, p. 54). 12.  There is some divergence among scholars about the precise date of the reunion between James and Padmore. Bogues describes “their fortuitous 1934 London meeting recounted by James himself” (“C.L.R. James” 188), while Padmore’s biographer, James Hooker, puts the meeting in September 1932. The evidence suggests to me that it took place in 1933, which is corroborated by Høgsbjerg’s careful tracking of James’s movements in England during this period (C. L. R. James 79). 13.  James makes a similarly strange elision of the occupation when describing his archival research in Paris: “The material was not in the Caribbean and there may have been some material in S.D. [ San Domingo] itself but it was a wild place, a dictatorship. I went there once but that was not a place to go and stay” (C. L. R. James Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library in the City of New York, Box 12, Folder 14). 2. Harlem and Haiti 1.  Bongie argues for Vastey’s The Colonial System Unveiled as possibly “the first systemic critique of colonialism ever written, certainly from the perspective of a colonized subject” (7). Nesbitt (“Afterword”) also sees Vastey as a precursor to anticolonialists like Fanon, Césaire, and Sartre. Karem (“Haiti”) discusses how Firmin and Sylvain influenced African American and Caribbean pan-­Africanists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Henry Sylvester Williams. 2.  Margaret Stevens includes further detail about Rosemond’s activities in both the American Negro Labor Congress and the Union Patriotique (94 – 99). 3.  While ABB founders Briggs, Moore, and Campbell became Communists in 1921 (unlike Domingo, who remained an unaffiliated socialist), McKay and Otto Huiswoud were Communists before joining the ABB. Turner mentions that “it has been suggested that securing members for the Workers Party was H ­ uiswoud’s motivation for joining the Brotherhood” (88), and McKay also seems to have been viewed by the Communist Party as someone who might help recruit the ABB members. According to Makalani, “over the summer of 1921, Communists began recruiting black radicals into the communist movement. Robert Minor and Rose Pastor Stokes, representing the underground and legal Communist Party factions, respectively, turned to their friend Claude McKay for introductions to Hubert Harrison, Cyril Briggs, W. A. Domingo, and other Harlem radicals” (84). Makalani dates Briggs’s membership in the Workers Party to 1921 and traces the formal affiliation of the ABB with the WP to the second half of 1923. 4. Johnson begins his autobiography by describing his grandfather’s trip from Haiti in 1802, when his ship for Cuba was diverted to Nassau and J­ ohnson’s maternal family thus established itself in the Bahamas (“Along” 135–36 ). 5. Johnson would continue to advocate on behalf of Haiti and maintain contact with Haitians throughout the 1920s. See Karem (Purloined 46 –55).

196  Notes to Pages 53 – 68 6.  In his autobiography, Johnson writes that “among my friends and acquaintances, my trip started a sort of pilgrimage to the black republic” (“Along” 524) and that “what I said and wrote was in some degree responsible for a new literary interest in Haiti” (523). To what extent Johnson overstated his participation in anti-occupation discourse in the United States is debatable. That ­Johnson exaggerates his role in Haiti’s resistance to the occupation appears more ­clear-cut. He writes that when meeting with the Haitian George Sylvain during his 1920 visit, “the plan I suggested to M. Sylvain was for organizing sentiment among the Haitians and for setting up machinery by which they could take united a­ ction. . . . He followed the suggestion, and at a mass meeting held in the theater at Port-auPrince the Union Patriotique was organized” (519). Matthew Casey cites a newspaper announcement from August 11, 1915, to show that the Union Patriotique had been in existence since the earliest days of the occupation, though Casey notes that “the organization became particularly active in 1920” (64). 7.  From Briggs’s letter to Theodore Draper, www.marxists.org / history/usa / groups/abb/1958/0317-briggs-todraper.pdf. 8.  Solomon and Makalani provide thorough discussions of the maneuvering surrounding the Sanhedrin. See Solomon (30 –33); and Makalani (109 –14). 9.  RGASPI 495/155/23, Documents from the Comintern Archives on A ­ frican Americans, Reel 1, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Sc Micro R-6762. 10.  RGASPI 495/195/3, Documents from the Comintern Archives on African Americans, Reel 1, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Sc Micro R-6762. 11.  RGASPI 495/155/35, Documents from the Comintern Archives on A ­ frican Americans, Reel 1, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Sc Micro R-6762. 12.  “Minutes of Meeting of the National Negro Committee,” September 7, 1928, CPUSA MSS/ Tamiment, reel 104, delo 1366, cited in L. James, “What” 57. 13.  “Haitians Riot When Election Is Forced by U.S.,” Negro Champion, June 1926, 1. 14.  This language is virtually echoed in the Padmore-run Negro Worker (“A Wave of Terror”). 15.  “Manifestaciones comunistas se efectuaron en Washington y N.Y.,” ­Diario de la Marina, December 15, 1929, 1. 16.  Adi describes the Huiswouds’ trip to Haiti, noting their translator was the ANLC-member Henry Rosemond (Pan-Africanism 302). 17. Gordon Lewis’s chapters “The Federal Venture: The Formative Years” and “The Federal Venture: The Road to Failure” in The Growth of the Modern West Indies provide background on the various forces acting upon the rise and fall of the West Indies Federation.

197  Notes to Pages 71–78 3. “A Romance of the Race, Just Down There by Panama” 1. While I have chosen to focus on the presence of Haitian culture in the United States, other versions of international black culture circulated in the United States during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. In his discussion of McKay, ChudeSokei points to the calypso craze as “the sound of the changing imperial power structures in the Caribbean” (Last Darky 217) during the “late teens and twenties” (221). Guridy discusses the relationship between people of African descent in the United States and Cuba. Seigel argues for the impact of Brazilian culture on U.S. notions of blackness. 2.  McCabe, reading McKay’s Home to Harlem as engaging with primitivist discourse, defines twentieth-century primitivism as a reversal of the more reductionist Victorian version: instead, “the ‘primitive’ is reconceived as superior rather than inferior to the ‘civilized’ ” even as the discourse’s “subtext may reinforce other repressive social hierarchies or the exoticizing strain of primitivism it is meant to replace” (477). Other intertextual readings of McKay, including those of Maiwald, Holcomb (“Sun”), Cloutier, and Trombold, explore his novels’ relationship with discourses of the period. 3. Oklahoman, October 6, 1929, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 9, Folder 305. 4. Louisville Journal, April 8, 1928, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 9, Folder 305. 5.  Stephens describes this as the process by which “Caribbean American intellectuals and cultural producers therefore became key figures in a series of what I call ‘black transnational’ cultural formations in the United States throughout the twentieth century, formations in which intellectuals struggled to produce . . . international political and cultural conceptions of black collective identity” (­Stephens, “Black Transnationalism” 597– 98). 6.  Karem and Stephens read this episode from Home to Harlem similarly. For Karem, “McKay confronts his U.S. readers — white and black alike — with a sense of their own parochial perspective, a view that is remedied and improved by the contribution of a West Indian intellectual, who can apprehend the United States through a lens that is less nationalistic and more international” (Purloined 177). Stephens, meanwhile, argues that Ray’s “story of racial solidarity is a transnational one because it pulls Jake out of his own nationality, both as an American and a Harlemite, and into a more internationalist imagining both of racial home and his own black masculinity” (Black Empire 152). 7.  McKay was deeply involved in the Communist movement and the African Blood Brotherhood, even if his autobiography A Long Way from Home sought to downplay his relationship with Communism. Holcomb (Claude McKay) uses the

198  Notes to Pages 78 – 82 FBI dossier on McKay as well as other archival materials to argue that McKay’s commitment to communism was more serious than he suggests in A Long Way from Home. While the FBI dossier is undoubtedly itself unreliable due to the paranoia of U.S. government agents, the archival record taken as a whole points to McKay’s substantial participation in Communist organizations during the early 1920s. 8.  When Johnson describes the “new literary interest in Haiti” that his trip and writings inspired, he names Vandercook along with Seabrook as writers who met with him and learned about Haitian history and culture from him (“Along” 352). 9.  For example, see the reviews in the Louisville Journal Courier, April 8, 1928, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, ­Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 10, Folder 319; or by George Currie, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, ­ Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 10, Folder 324. 10. William Aspenwall Bradley to Claude McKay, May 17, 1928, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 1, Folder 17. 11.  Houston Post-Dispatch, March 25, 1929, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript L ­ ibrary, Box 10, Folder 316. 12. While McKay had mentioned in an early biographical sketch that his ancestors had come to Jamaica from Madagascar, this origin story became badly misunderstood in many of the reviews. If the Houston Post-Dispatch is vague about what might be meant by the phrase his “family lived in Madagascar when they were still free,” other reviews suddenly collapsed the distance between McKay and his African past. The Hartford Courant was just one of many ­papers that describe McKay as “born in Jamaica, of Madagascan parents” (March 11, 1928, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, ­Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 10, Folder 312). On the other hand, other reviews go in the opposite direction to play up Caribbean difference. The Bismarck Tribune, for example, gives this biographical information: “He fled to America from Jamaica when the menace of being sold into slavery faced him” (March 15, 1928, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 10, Folder 312), anachronistically suggesting U.S. racial policy as more enlightened even though slavery ended in Jamaica three decades before abolition in the United States. 13.  Buffalo Courier, April 8, 1928, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 10, Folder 322. 14.  New York Times, March 11, 1928, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 10, Folder 314.

199  Notes to Pages 82 – 89 15.  Tillery writes: “Contrasting Ray with Jake, the primitive black untouched by the decay of Occidental civilization, McKay attempts to convey modern man’s rebellion against Western civilization” (85). 16.  Lexington Leader, April 2, 1933, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 9, Folder 303. 17.  Milwaukee Journal, May 27, 1933, Claude McKay Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 9, Folder 303. 18.  The Opportunity literary contest is often credited with helping solidify the sense of the New Negro cultural renaissance. See Bernard for a discussion of the role Opportunity and its literary prizes played in the Harlem Renaissance. 19. That Walrond chooses Cuba as setting for this story, his first effort to return to the Caribbean through his writing, points back to that island’s place, alongside Haiti, in the imperialist U.S. imaginary. Walrond probably visited Cuba either en route to the United States or during a 1922 trip to the Caribbean. The Ellis Island records list “Eric Wolrond” as arriving from the port of Cristobal, Canal Zone, on June 29, 1918. The ship that brought him to New York, the Zacapa, was built for the Unifruitco Steamship Company and operated a New York to Cuba to Jamaica service; the records indicate that the ship took on passengers in Kingston while Walrond was aboard, though it is not clear if it made other stops on the way to New York. Louis Parascandola and James Davis note that Walrond also traveled through the Caribbean on the SS Turrialba in 1922. ­Parascandola and Davis don’t state precisely where Walrond may have visited, but the usual routes of the Turrialba, another United Fruit Company transport, were New York to Panama and Colombia, with stops in Kingston and either Havana or Santiago. It does not appear that these ships stopped in Haiti, even though in a 1935 article published in the Spectator, Walrond implies that he visited Haiti before living in the United States. He writes that “I remember as a small boy going to Panama” and then that “from Panama I went to Hayti” (Winds 280). It is possible, though, that Walrond is conflating his childhood move to Panama with his subsequent visit to Panama as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1928, a trip that also included time spent in Haiti. 20.  Davis suggests that Walrond wrote four stories under Underwood’s guidance: “The Consul’s Clerk,” “The Godless City,” “Voodoo Vengeance” ( published as “The Voodoo’s Revenge”), and “The Wharf Rats” (Eric Walrond 86 ). 21. Dash provides a brief reading of “The Voodoo’s Revenge” that anticipates mine by seeing the story as an example of the African American tendency to use “Haitian voodoo” as “apparently synonymous with any kind of folk magic” (Haiti 56 ). While Dash sees the story as a “celebration of the supernatural” (57), I want to suggest that Walrond’s work ambivalently explores sensationalizing views of the Caribbean.

200  Notes to Pages 88 –99 22.  Renda discusses the confusion of identity created by this fiction whereby U.S. Marines would serve as officers of a supposedly Haitian gendarmerie (102–3). 23.  Renda provides background on Burks, including that he wrote “thirty-five books and over 1,200 stories” and “earn[ed ] from his writing close to $40,000 during each year of the Great Depression” (216 ). 24.  In the essay “Recent Negro Literature,” Walrond singles out “the exotic Mr. Morand” for “far-fetched and lurid” representations of black culture, particularly “a voodoo ceremony” from the story “Congo” (12). Morand traveled to Haiti during the occupation and the collection Walrond reviews in this essay, Black Magic, features stories set there, as I discuss in chapter 5. 25.  Davis’s Eric Walrond, published as I was completing this chapter, discusses Walrond’s relationship to the pulp tradition (103–5). 26. McKay’s story “When I Pounded the Pavement” from Gingertown includes a first-person narrator who joins the Jamaican constabulary alongside a friend who is a “great devourer of detective thrillers” including Deadwood Dick (207), suggesting the presence of these texts not only in U.S.-controlled Panama but also in the British West Indies. 27.  “The Voodoo’s Revenge” is not Walrond’s only story to invoke this tradition. “A Cholo Romance” features a first-person narrator who likes to “st[ i ]ck my head between the leaves of a Dick Turpin yarn” (178); the story turns on this reader’s misreading of Panamanian racial dynamics, as he initially takes his love interest to be an indigenous woman and thus cannot believe an English-speaking black man to be her father. 28.  Renda, Scott, and Muñoz develop the Foucauldian insight that “­discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but it also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it” ( Foucault 101). 29.  Frederick presents an excellent reading of “Subjection” as a clash of discourses in “Colón Man A Come” (157– 61). 30. Knadler reads the ending as the violent imposition of “patriarchal authority over the evidence and testimony of a rape trial” (179). In this reading, the “white snake” Seenie feels on her breast in the dark is in actuality “the constable and his men” who “sought to sexually attack Seenie in her hut during the night”; the snake they blame as the culprit is in this case then only an alibi for their own assault (179). 31. The editor of West Indian Review, Esther Hyman Chapman, was an ­Englishwoman who came to Jamaica from occupied Haiti and would write a play about Haiti titled The West Indian that was performed in Kingston’s Ward Theater in March 1936. 32.  Louise Malabre, “Voodoo Drums,” West Indian Review 1.11 ( July 1935): 28–32. 33.  Smith’s article details De Lisser’s writings about his visit to Haiti in 1911 (“H. G. and Haiti”). De Lisser draws even more overtly on the “sensationalist literature that made its way to the colony” of Jamaica via the U.S. occupation in

201  Notes to Pages 101–103 Zombies, the novel that appeared in the 1936–37 issue of Planter’s Punch (Smith, “Capture Land” 196). 4. Gendering the Occupation 1. I use the phrase “imperialist nationalism” to reference the tension in Garveyism discussed by Michelle Stephens in Black Empire. Stephens argues for understanding Garvey’s performance as “mirroring for the imperial world the racial and masculine features of their own imperial and state ideologies” (Black 80). For Stephens, Garveyism contains the features of “nationalism as fetish spectacle” even as it envisions “a global rather than a national imaginary” through appeal to empire as transnational construct (81). Garveyism therefore evokes the nationalism of the imperial nations of the era, becoming for Stephens a form of “African fundamentalism” that “asserted the dominance of empire as a model and ideal for black self-determined identity” (92). 2.  Erica Edwards uses Marcus Garvey among others as an example of her ­argument that “the uncritical investment in charisma as the motor of history ­ignores its limits as a model for social movements” by “reducing a heterogeneous black freedom struggle to a top-down narrative of Great Man leadership; . . . ­performing social change in the form of a fundamentally undemocratic form of authority; and . . . structuring knowledge of black political subjectivity and movement within a gendered hierarchy of political value that grants uninterrogated power to normative masculinity” (xv). 3.  For background on these playwrights, see Brown-Guillory and Hagood. The anthologies edited by Burton and Perkins contain many plays from this ­period. 4.  The longest review of Black Magic, from the West-Indian American, provides very little sense of the play’s actual plot or setting. Here is the review in its entirety: “Amy Ashwood Garvey’s third venture as an author and a producer will soon have tangible form. The script and music were finished some weeks ago. Mrs. Garvey and Mr. Manning are now hard at work training the cast. The new revue will be called ‘Black Magic’ and will have its premiere presentation at the Lafayette Theater during the week beginning November 21. ‘Black Magic’ will differ radically from the current type of revue, as did ‘Hey! Hey!’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ the last two theatrical efforts of Mrs. Garvey and Mr. ­Manning. A fascinating story runs throughout the play and all the action in the revue bears a definite relation to the unravelling of the story. This ‘connecting link’ removes the play from the type of revue usually seen and renders it more enjoyable. Beautiful dancing, hilarious comedy, sweet music, gorgeous costumes, dazzling ­scenery — all are combined in ‘Black Magic’ to make the offering one of the finest bits of entertainment ever offered to a theater audience. A splendid cast has been assembled for ‘Black Magic.’ Sam Manning will head the fun-makers, assisted by Emmett Anthony, Sam Cross, and other noted comedians. The female part of the company will be headed by Mercay Marquz, one of the most talented little ladies on the stage. A snappy chorus and the great George H. Stamper with Doe Doe

202  Notes to Pages 103 –113 Green. ‘Seventh Heaven,’ the photoplay which ran for a year on Broadway, will be presented on the same program with ‘Black Magic’ ” (“Theatrical World” 17). 5.  Bair describes how the Universal Negro Improvement Association built on “decades of black women’s charitable work” in establishing its own women’s auxiliaries (157), and how women who gained experience in the UNIA went on to future organizing (164). For specific discussions of Una Marson and Amy Bailey’s post-UNIA work, see Jarrett-Macauley’s The Life of Una Marson, 1905–1965. 6.  Grant offers a similar story, of Cadet “writ[ ing ] a letter to [the Negro World ] denouncing the mendacity of the U.S. military occupation of Haiti” (172). In his footnote explaining the occupation, Grant states that after beginning in 1915, “the temporary American occupation would last for fourteen years” (483); it in fact lasted nineteen years, this error again demonstrating how the history of the occupation has been inadequately remembered. 7.  Rosenberg explains how in this time period, a text like William P ­ ringle Livingstone’s Black Jamaica (1899) could argue that “it is usual to take the ­nature of the sex-relation as an index of the morality of a primitive people” (qtd. in Rosenberg 43– 44) so that “the high number of single working-class women [ in Jamaica] threatened middle-class claims to modernity, because English writers considered sexually and economically independent women a manifestation of the country’s primitivism and therefore its incapacity for self-rule” (43). 8.  Taylor describes these activists as “focused on assisting both the men and women in their lives — whether husbands or sisters, fathers or mothers, sons or daughters — along with initiating and participating in activities to ‘uplift’ their communities. Despite this ‘helpmate’ focus, community feminists are undeniably feminists in that their activism discerns the configuration of oppressive power relations, shatters masculinist conceptions of women as intellectually inferior, and seeks to empower women by expanding their roles and options” (64). 9.  Langston Hughes to Hermina Dumont Huiswoud, April 21, 1947, H ­ ermina Dumont Huiswoud Papers and Photographs, Tamiment Library/ Robert F. ­Wagner Labor Archives, TAM 354, Box 1, Folder 16. 10.  From Chetty’s presentation at the “Black Jacobins Revisited” conference held in Liverpool, England during October 2013. 11.  In a June 19, 1953, letter to Richard Wright’s wife, Ellen, Dorothy P ­ admore writes: “By this time perhaps your callouses are subsiding. I hope so. I don’t get callouses but split finger tips and then it becomes a painful business typing. Sometimes I think that the typewriter was invented to turn quite nice women into weary slaves. And men are so demanding, especially when ‘you type so much quicker than I!’ ” ( Richard Wright Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 103, Folder 1523). 12.  Many black artists of the time were influenced in quite direct ways by The Emperor Jones. Twa presents an excellent discussion of Aaron Douglas’s relationship to the play, noting that “Douglas, who would become the New Negro Renaissance’s leading visual artist, received one of his early career breaks

203  Notes to Pages 113 –124 by ­creating two illustrations of The Emperor Jones for Locke’s essay in Theatre Arts Monthly” (141). Langston Hughes in the 1930s wrote an anti-Hitler farce, The Em-Fuehrer Jones, that follows the structure of O’Neill’s play. 13. Hubert Harrison would call The Emperor Jones “a fine picture of the psychology of the whole Garvey movement” ( Perry 199). Stephens opens her discussion of Garvey with “a popular image of Paul Robeson in full costume as the Emperor Jones” (Black 75) and draws out the parallels between Garvey and the protagonist of O’Neill’s play. 14.  Renda offers an insightful reading of The Emperor Jones in terms of its relationship to the occupation of Haiti as well as its gender politics (196 –212). 15. Corbould gives a good summary of the African American response to The Emperor Jones, citing Jean Toomer, Paul Robeson, Hubert Harrison, and ­Langston Hughes (264 – 66 ). Renda looks at other responses, including those of W. E. B. Du Bois and George Schuyler (210). 16.  White playwrights during this period also had great success with plays about Haiti. William Du Bois’s Haiti (1938) ran at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem for more than one hundred shows, while Orson Welles made his directorial debut with the so-called Voodoo Macbeth (1936 ), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play set in Haiti and performed by an all-black cast. 17.  Spence’s plays set in Harlem include Hot Stuff (1927), Her (1927), The Hunch (1927), The Starter (1927), and Undertow (1929). One of Spence’s unpublished plays, “La Divina Pastora,” takes place among Spanish-speaking peasants in Trinidad. 18. Eulalie Spence to Alain Locke, May 17, 1927, Eulalie Spence Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Box 1, Folder 3. 19. Carl Lebovitz, “ ‘Plumes’: How Black Playwrights Bloomed,” Mattoon (IL) Journal Gazette, February 9, 1991, C-5, Eulalie Spence Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Box 1, Folder 10. 20.  Marks discusses responses in the black press in favor of and against fighting in the Philippines. 21.  From Epstein’s biography of Papp: “Miss Spence called me Joseph — ­unlike all the other teachers who called me Joe. . . . She made me feel real good about myself. She took me under her wing. And she was interested in an area that I seemed to find interesting: language” (44). 5. Afroantillanismo, the Marvelous Real, and the Occupation 1. Cass writes that Écue-Yamba-O “reads like a rudimentary exercise in avant-garde experimentation and even partakes of primitive, grotesque representations of the Afro-Cuban subject” (314); Valdez Moses notes that “Carpentier ultimately disowned this neo-romantic attempt to return to artistic nativism” (119). 2.  “Desde Washington,” Diario de la Marina, September 4, 1920, 3; “Desde Washington,” Diario de la Marina, September 7, 1920, 3.

204  Notes to Pages 124 –128 3.  “2,500 Haitianos muertos desde la ocupación americano,” Diario de la Marina, October 27, 1921, 20. 4.  Coverage of the uprising in Diario de la Marina began on December 7, 1929, with a brief story about two days of “popular unrest” (malestar popular [13]) before featuring front-page headlines on December 8, 9, and 10. 5. My chapter on C. L. R. James noted the way the Trinidad Guardian ­downplays and trivializes the 1929 uprising in Haiti. Puerto Rico’s El Mundo similarly attempts to trivialize the uprising, never letting the story onto the front page and taking the perspective of the official response. Articles on Haiti appear at the top of page 2 of El Mundo on December 6, 7, 11, and 13, but Haitian deaths are not mentioned. The series of articles closes with a December 17 piece headlined “La hija del presidente de Haiti contrajo matrimonio con un ­ingeniero” that ­begins, “Last night the recent difficulties were forgotten” (Anoche se ­olvidaron las recientes dificultades) before going on to describe the wedding of the president’s daughter. The euphemistic language combined with the emphasis on the return to normalcy is a remarkable rendition of trivialization. 6.  Nicolás Guillén, “Señorita Consuelo Serra,” Diario de la Marina, December 1, 1929, n.p. 7.  The occupation of Haiti may have been one of the first moments in which this vision of the Caribbean’s place in global capitalism was articulated; it has become the economic development model that has dominated the subsequent century. A generation after the occupation, Claudia Jones cites a U.S. State ­Department official in 1957 stating that decolonization in the West Indies presents opportunities for U.S. business because “the islands’ 3,000,000 people offer a reservoir of cheap labor to attract more American capital” (9). A decade later, François Duvalier, in a speech given on the occasion of Nelson Rockefeller’s 1969 visit to Haiti, made the case that Caribbean people “could be a great reservoir of manual labor for Americans establishing re-export industries” (qtd. in Trouillot, Haiti 200). 8.  “No se le acusaban — por casualidad — de hacer propaganda comunista ni de atentar la seguridad del Estado” (Écue 120). 9.  Park makes a strong case for how the novel embeds the point of view of the imprisoned into its perspective, whether in the scene that narrates the physical examination performed on Menegildo by his jailers (66 ) or when the prisoners peer from their bars to observe hotel guests across the street (73–74). 10.  “Pretendía sintetizar un espíritu democrático . . . en espera del momento en que pudieran comenzar a vender la república al mejor postor” (Écue 116 ). 11.  “Hipotecada en plena adolescencia, la isla del corcho se había vuelto una larga azucarera incapaz de flotar” (117). 12.  “Los trabajadores y campesinos cubanos, explotados por el ingenio yanqui, vencidos por la importación de braceros a bajo costo, engañados por todo el mundo, traicionados por las autoridades, reventando de miseria” (117). 13.  “Entonces comenzaba la invasión. Tropeles de obreros. . . . Y luego, la

205  Notes to Pages 128 –133 nueva plaga consentida por un decreto de Tiburón dos años antes: escuadrones de haitianos harapientos” (18). 14.  “Los haitianos eran unos animales y unos salvajes” (66 ). 15.  “On recontre, à l’ombre des toitures du central, côte à côte, des nègres de la Jamaïque et d’Haïti, importés, au sens propre du mot, sous le chapitre maind’oeuvre, par les compagnies américaines, et des nègres du pays qui travaillent dans les champs de canne. . . . Ils sont si différents les uns des autres qu’ils se regardent en ennemis et refusent de se connaître” (Carpentier, “Lettre” 95). 16.  “Anguloso, sencillo de líneas como figura de teorema, el bloque del Central San Lucio se alzaba en el centro de un ancho valle orlado por una cresta de colinas azules. El viejo Usebio Cué había visto crecer el hongo de acero, palastro y concreto sobre las ruinas de trapiches antiguos, asistiendo año tras año, con una suerte de espanto admirativo, a las conquistas de espacio realizadas por la fábrica” (Écue 15). 17.  Stephens uses the same term to describe how Eric Walrond’s fiction represents this process in the Anglophone Caribbean, of “a peasantry undergoing proletarianisation” (Black 170). 18.  “Los hombres, asexuados, casi mecánicos” (Écue 21). 19.  “Toda noción de redondez debe abandonarse cuando suena el cerroja de una prisión. . . . rectángulo del patio, visto por las ventanas rectangulares” (130). 20. “Quand on parle des nègres, on ignore presque toujours leur pouvoir d’adaptation à de nouveaux milieu, leur aptitude à transformer sur place, à se créer de nouvelles traditions. Les nègres des Antilles nous donnent un exemple frappant de cette faculté d’éloignement du tronc original” (Carpentier, “Lettre” 95). 21.  “¿Donde nació el santo? ¡Allá en Guinea!” (Écue 84). 22.  “¡El orange-crush se hacía instrumento del imperialismo, como el recuerdo de Roosevelt o el avión de Lindbergh . . . ! Sólo los negros, Menegildo, Longina, Salomé, y su prole conservaban celosamente un carácter y una tradición antillana. ¡El bongó, antídoto de Wall Street! ¡El Espíritu Santo, venerado por los Cué, no admitía salchichas yanquis dentro de sus panecillos votivos . . . ! ¡Nada de hot-dogs con los santos de Mayeya!” (118) 23.  “Por La Independencia de Puerto Rico,” Revista de Avance, December 15, 1929, 351; “La Tragedia Nicaragüense,” Revista de Avance, May 30, 1927, 125. 24.  See Sharpley-Whiting (48). 25.  “El señor Morand — al igual que muchos escritores europeos — se refieren a cuestiones de política americana que no son su especialidad. Esto no significa que ‘1929’ quiera ignorar el control económico que los Estados Unidos ejercen sobre una zona americana y contra el cual, en más de una ocasión, nos hemos pronunciado. Pero, sin negar esa influencia, bueno es recordarle al Sr. Morand que Cuba, pueblo libre y con soberbania propia, nunca ha padecido la abyecta condición que el Sr. Morand describe y, por consiguiente, no cabe aludirlo como término de su comparación” (“El zar” 20).

206  Notes to Pages 133 –138 26. It would only be two months later, in a March 1929 editorial, that Avance would accuse Morand of writing touristically about the Caribbean. They describe him as one of the writers who “pack in their luggage valuable collections of typical postcards, that later, back in their Paris studios, they illuminate with the rare shine of their own chemicals” ( Portan sus maletas valiosas colecciones de postales típicas, que luego, en su estudio de París, encarga de iluminar con los raros esmaltes de su propia química [“El Señor” 64]). 27.  Morand’s story likely takes its protagonist’s name from Occide Jeanty, a Haitian cultural nationalist of the period. Largey describes him as “an important composer within Haiti and one of its most beloved nationalist figures during the period of the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934” (61) and notes that when “1804,” his most famous march, “was played by the Musique du Palais National with Occide Jeanty directing, Haitian audiences spontaneously rioted in the streets of Port-au-Prince, voicing their anger and frustration at the United States’ occupation of their country” (91). 28. For a discussion of King’s illustrations of The Magic Island, see Twa (“Black Magic”). Twa also discusses Aaron Douglas’s illustrations of Morand’s Black Magic. 29.  Kaisary argues most openly that Kingdom is a fundamentally c­ onservative text: in his reading, the novel produces “an unbalanced and unreservedly pessimistic view of revolution: colonial tyranny is merely replaced by Christophe’s tyranny, and there is no sense of the fact that, notwithstanding the new oppression to which the Haitian people were subjected, the situation of black Haitians after 1804 was substantially improved, especially in terms of labor, living conditions, freedom of movement, sexual exploitation, and cultural production” (133). 30. Branche mentions this documentary (237), while Nazoa’s biographical information about Carpentier includes this entry: “ ‘Le vaudou’, película (texto, montaje, sincronización), realizada con documentos reunidos por William Seabrook. Editada por Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert, Paris 1936” (104). 31.  Rincón and Emery discuss Carpentier’s contributions to Bifur and Documents. Emery notes that “Carpentier’s name invariably appears among the list of collaborators that accompanied each volume of” Documents (24). 32. Rincón: “número 6 de Documents, en donde apareció el artículo de ­Carpentier sobre la música cubana, además de colaboraciones de Einstein (sobre Braque, sobre una exposición de arte abstracto) y Griaule (sobre totemismo ­abisinio), Bataille incluyó su texto sobre ‘Le gros orteil’ y Leiris un comentario sobre el libro de William Seabrook (‘L’isle magique’) dedicado a Haiti y el vodú” (115). 33.  Despite claiming to be apolitical, Seabrook explicitly disagrees with the Nation’s critique of the occupation (130, 133) and depicts the Haitian nationalist press, particularly Ernest Chauvet, as disingenuous and opportunistic (142– 49). He does criticize the U.S. occupation for its racism (131), but sees the military presence as on the whole “kindly” (133).

207  Notes to Pages 139 –151 34.  La Revue du Monde Noir published English translations alongside all of its articles, so I am here quoting from their translation. 35.  “Haitians, humiliated by the American Occupation, needed a new selfimage. The mask that provided this new defiant sense of self was that of ‘authenticité nègre’ ” ( Dash, Haiti 62). 36.  Another example from the prologue to Kingdom: “whereas in Western Europe folk dancing, for example, has lost all of its magical evocative power, it is hard to find a collective dance in America that does not embody a deep ritual sense and thus create around it a whole process of initiation: such are the dances of Cuban santería or the prodigious African version of the Corpus festival, which can still be seen in a town called San Francisco de Yare in Venezuela” (87). 37. Eco describes Phèdre as “evil because her race is damned” (33), a description that fits the Creole planter’s wife reciting lines from Racine’s play in ­Carpentier’s novel. 38. While del Valle is the only Puerto Rican marine to serve in Haiti that Renda finds, Calder notes that the U.S. occupation in the Dominican Republic “recruited and hired Puerto Ricans, usually for middle-status jobs of a kind which demanded native Spanish speakers but which few Dominicans could be persuaded to carry out, such as collecting the unpopular new taxes, spying, and interpreting” (28). 39.  For example, Mansour writes: “The poesía negrista as a literary movement was begun around 1926 by the Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos and was enriched by the major contributions of Nicolás Guillén, Emilio Ballagas, Regino Pedroso, Manuel del Cabral, and their emulators” (qtd. in Marzán 13). 40.  Branche writes that “José de Diego Padró, his closest artistic collaborator, has pointed to Palés’s voracious appetite for information from the literary world abroad, as well as his cosmopolitan pretensions, isolated, as he was, in his limiting island environment. . . . The transracial writings of José Mas, Vachel Lindsay, Eugene O’Neill, Blaise Cendrars, Leo Frobenius, William Seabrook, Carl Van Vechten, John Vandercook, among others, were all reflected in his work, as his earliest critics assert” (196 ). 6. Haiti Goes Global 1. Wolters’s The New Negro on Campus focuses on Fisk and Howard as hotbeds of student activism during the 1920s. Though Wolters does not ­discuss ­Padmore, Hooker’s biography mentions Padmore’s anti-imperialism as a student (6 ). 2. One of the central problems for pan-Africanists in Padmore’s writings during this period is his harsh criticisms of Marcus Garvey. Rupert Lewis contrasts “Padmore’s anti-Garvey tirades of these years . . . with his later views as a pan-Africanist” ( Introduction xviii), while Teelucksingh is specifically describing “criticisms of Garvey” as evidence of Padmore’s blind adherence to the Communist Party line (16 ). Calling into question the idea that the antipathy to Garvey shown in Padmore’s early writings was not his truly felt belief is C. L. R. James’s

208  Notes to Pages 151–154 remembrance of how, even after Padmore had broken with Soviet Communism, James and Padmore would go to Garvey’s speeches in London in the mid-1930s to heckle him (Grant 444). 3.  Padmore makes this argument especially in his letters to Henry Lee Moon found in Princeton’s George Padmore Collection. In these letters, Padmore explains his decision to leave the party, making it clear that he took positions that he considered in line with Leninist anti-imperialism even if they were not positions that had been arrived at by the Comintern. 4. Sundiata’s discussion of African American opposition to the Firestone Company in Liberia notes how “many African Americans were struck by the similarities between the position of Liberia in the early 1930s and that of Haiti fifteen years before” (104). 5.  See my introduction to this volume for a discussion of how Said’s Orientalism puts forward this narrative of the U.S. as a post–World War II imperial power. 6. Lawrence calls Hooker “probably one of the CIA’s most effective academic agents” and describes how he recruited other academics while remaining “personally close to leaders of liberation movements and heads of state in Africa and the Caribbean” (83). 7.  The full story of Padmore’s break with Communism is hard to definitively settle, with Padmore and those who remained in the Communist Party telling contradictory versions, not least of the disagreements being whether Padmore left the party or was expelled. Padmore’s response to the Communist version is extremely convincing: he effectively refutes each of their accusations, showing the internal contradictions in their stories, whereas the Communists never really rebut Padmore’s explanation for the break. To put it most simply, Padmore’s version is that the Soviet détente with Western powers leading up to World War II meant that the official Communist line on colonialism was required to be softened and Padmore felt that his work opposing black oppression no longer had a place in the party. As one oft-quoted anecdote from Hooker’s biography has it, “[ Padmore’s] nephew, Malcolm Luke, . . . once told me how Padmore used to recount receiving directives to cease attacking French, then British, then American imperialism, till he was left with the Japanese alone. These Asians, he snapped in disgust, are not the imperialists who have their boots across the black man’s neck” (32). As a secondhand story, I don’t want to read too much into the precise structure of this narrative, but it is worth noting that, in this version, Padmore remains a Communist after being instructed to stop writing against British empire, and it is only the instruction to leave U.S. empire alone that is more than he can take. 8. Crusader News Agency, August 4, 1934, George Padmore Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University, Box 1, Folder 9. 9. “Padmore Replies to Harry Haywood’s Slanders — Refutes Charges of Being Imperialist Agent,” George Padmore Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University, Box 1, Folder 10. It is a remarkable

209  Notes to Pages 154 –170 irony that the George Padmore Collection at Princeton, featuring various letters and newspaper clippings of Padmore’s demonstrating his opposition to U.S. imperialism in Liberia, are housed in Princeton’s Firestone Library, named after the founder and CEO of the tire company whose rubber plantations Padmore saw as the central threat to Liberian independence. 10.  “An Open Letter to Earl Browder, Secretary of the American Communist Party,” George Padmore Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University, Box 1, Folder 6. 11.  Hooker lists six pamphlets from Padmore’s “first year with the [ ITUCNW ] committee”: What Is the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers?; Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers; Negro Workers and the Imperialist War; Forced Labor in Africa; American Imperialism Enslaves Liberia; and L ­ abour Imperialism and East Africa (22). For whatever reason, Hooker does not include Haiti, an American Slave Colony, a pamphlet that has gone virtually unmentioned by Padmore scholars. What Is the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers? was published in Hamburg, probably immediately following the conference held there in 1930, while Negro Workers and the Imperialist War was published in Hamburg in 1931. 12.  Africa, the Land of Forced Labour lists the others as “books in the ­series.” 13.  Brockway himself is an interesting character in linking British anticolonialism to the occupation of Haiti. He was active in international socialist organizations throughout the 1920s, many of which took positions against the U.S. presence in Haiti. For example, he attended executive meetings of the Labour and Socialist International; the group’s Bulletin in September 1928 states: “The LSI demands the right of self-determination for the peoples of the Philippines, Annam, and Korea. It opposes the policy pursued by the U.S.A. of economic domination and military intervention in the republics of Central and South America and in the republics of Haiti, San Domingo, and Cuba” (12; Bulletin of the Labour and Socialist International, ser. 2, no. 3 [ September 1928], published in Zurich, Papers of the Independent Labour Party, London School of Economics Special Collections. ILP 6/19/2). 14.  Thanks to Leslie James for providing me with the text of this article. 15.  Leslie James finds my argument convincing, suggesting that “Padmore’s concern about a counter-­revolution, here, may have been influenced by some of his earliest political experiences in the United States, when he was crucially concerned with the United States’s occupation of Haiti” (George Padmore 174). 16.  Padmore certainly saw the United States as behind the overthrow of the Jagan government in British Guiana. In a letter to Richard Wright from October 12, 1953, Padmore writes: “The crisis in British Guiana has forced me to get down to work. . . . The boys in Washington brought pressure on Churchill to intervene. But as there was no rioting the tories had to whip-up a ‘red scare’ ” ( Richard Wright Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 103, Folder 1522).

210  Notes to Pages 170 –175 17.  Du Bois connects this fear of American capital to the occupation of Haiti in a 1946 letter to Sylvia Pankhurst, the British feminist radical with whom Claude McKay worked during his time in England. Du Bois writes: “There was a time when the Negroes of Haiti kept as far as possible from intercourse with and knowledge of American Negroes; but they found out in the attempt which the United States made to conquer Haiti, that it was the political power of American Negroes which blocked the effort and secured at least the beginning of their release. In the same way, Ethiopia, needing as it does capital and technical knowledge, may easily obtain that, at least in part, from America and at the same time have behind that political power on the part of the American Negro which may save this power of capital from turning Ethiopia into a semi-slave state of American imperialism” ( Du Bois, Correspondence 3:133). 18.  Hart recounts how Fairclough “had held a responsible post in the National Bank” in Haiti, but, “returning to Jamaica in 1934, he presented his credentials to the managers of the two Canadian commercial banks then operating in Kingston” (xv). After being turned down because of his color, Fairclough “first conceived the need for a political party [ in Jamaica], and . . . with some initial difficulty, persuaded Norman Manley to take the initiative” in forming the People’s National Party (xv). Conclusion 1.  I discuss The Pleasures of Exile in terms of Lamming’s engagement with the United States in “Authority and the Occasion for Speaking in the Caribbean Literary Field: George Lamming and Martin Carter.” Goudie also reads The Pleasures of Exile as a book about “a moment characterized by the mutually dependent phenomena of a dying European colonialism and a rising U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean” (86 ). 2.  Nadi Edwards points to the importance of the ceremony of souls to Lamming’s oeuvre as a whole: “The central themes of Lamming’s fiction engage the same dialectic as his essays, a dialectic that is shaped by two dramas: the Haitian Ceremony of Souls (which is a dialogue between the living and the dead and which occurs in the sacred space of the tonelle), and the Tempest” (69). 3.  Lamming’s pan-Caribbean orientation makes his interest in the struggle between African-derived spiritual practice and colonial legal authorities a reference not only to Haiti but also to persecuted religious practices like obeah in the British West Indies or the Shouter Baptists in Trinidad, as becomes clear in Season of Adventure. In Pleasures, the evocation of this struggle is specifically through description of “times when the Law decrees that there should be no Vodum rites” (10). The history of religious suppression campaigns in twentieth-century Haiti is inextricable from the U.S. occupation. See the chapter “Penalizing Vodou and Promoting ‘Voodoo’ in U.S.-Occupied Haiti, 1915–1934” in Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law.

211  Notes to Pages 176 –183 4. Interview in The Caribbean Writer, www.thecaribbeanwriter.org / index .php?option=com_content&view=article&id=866&catid=16:volume13&Ite mid=2. 5.  In addition to the networks with which Lamming interacted in the United States, he also connected with George Padmore while they were both in London during the 1950s. Richard Wright, a close friend of Padmore’s, wrote the introduction to Lamming’s first novel, In the Castle of My Skin. A letter from Padmore to Wright, though, suggests some of the cleavages between these figures: “I know only too well how you feel about Peter [Abrahams], Lamming and Co. I avoid these pretentious upstarts like the plague” ( Padmore to Wright, June 28, 1954, Richard Wright Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Box 103, Folder 1522). 6.  For more on Deren’s relationship with these figures, see Twa (Visualizing 145); Pipkin (427–28); and Jackson (4, 27). 7.  Lamming presumably means Charles Pressoir, who Deren thanks in Divine Horsemen for his “sensitive intelligence, moral support and practical assistance” (13). Pressoir was a Haitian philologist who in 1950 devised an orthography for Haitian Kreyol along with Lelio Faublas. He also contributed a number of poems and wrote the glossary to Edna Underwood’s book of translated ­Haitian poetry that I mention in chapter 3. I suspect that he is the “Charlot P ­ ressoir” ­Lamming describes meeting, and considering his work with Underwood, he offers a­ nother interesting connection to the occupation. In a conversation on March 4, 2011, Lamming reiterated the story from the Small Axe interview, ­telling me that he had been sent to Haiti by Holiday magazine and that he had met with Maya Deren before going. He also mentioned to me that he met Jean Brierre and Felix ­Morrisseau-Leroy while in Haiti. Brierre in particular was a notable anti-­ occupation poet who also had poems included in Underwood’s collection. 8.  Rohlehr’s reading of Season of Adventure provides insight into the novel’s critique of paternalism. Considering Renda’s emphasis on paternalism’s role in the occupation of Haiti, a productive dialogue could certainly be staged between Lamming’s novel and occupation discourse on this terrain as well. 9. The Pleasures of Exile describes its ceremony of souls as “Vodum rites” (10). 10.  Drake and Otto choose the spelling zombi, in keeping with their desire to connect Rhys’s representation with Haitian culture rather than the Americanized zombie. Wide Sargasso Sea uses both spellings. In a reversal of the idea of zombi as more indigenous and authentic, in the novel that spelling is used by ­Antoinette’s English husband (Wide 63) and in the novel’s fictional exoticizing book about the Caribbean, The Glittering Coronet of Isles (64). The spelling zombie is used to represent the speech of one of the local children taunting A ­ ntoinette. 11. For the connection between White Zombie and Seabrook’s The Magic Island, see Ramsey (172).

212  Notes to Pages 183 –187 12.  In “Woman Possessed” (1997), Paravisini-Gebert analyzes the particular intersection of race, class, and the erotic that come together in these stories of virginal, white or light-skinned female zombies. 13.  Dendle writes about how zombies have been used as a vehicle for social critique in U.S. popular culture. 14. Bansak speculates about another possible source for I Walked with a Zombie that also connects to the occupation-era. Bansak wonders if Lewton “may have recalled Orson Welles’s 1936 voodoo stage version of Macbeth. . . . If Lewton was thinking of Orson Welles, he couldn’t help but think about Welles’s current project, Jane Eyre,” which Lewton had worked on before turning to I Walked with a Zombie (146 ). Hilb discusses Welles’s “voodoo ­Macbeth” in connection to the occupation of Haiti. 15.  Ramsey explains how emphasizing voodoo as a means of manipulation helped marines and occupation officials explain why Haitians who should otherwise have welcomed the U.S. presence were fighting against it. 16. In her notes to the Norton Critical edition, Raiskin glosses the lines where Christophine’s name is mistakenly rendered as Josephine: “As opposed to Josephine, a name associated with Napoleon Bonaparte, the name Christophine is associated with Henri Christophe, who led a victorious black army against ­Napoleon and established Haiti in 1804, the first independent black-governed ­nation in the Caribbean. A christophine is also a local vegetable” ( Rhys, Wide 86 ). 17.  In her autobiography, Rhys credits her exposure to Afro-Caribbean folklore to a family servant “who talked so much about zombies, soucriants, and loups-garous” (Smile 23). She revisits that knowledge by “reading a book about obeah” (24) when she is older, again showing the interplay between firsthand exposure to Afro-Caribbean culture and mediation by textual sources. In a letter from 1964, meanwhile, Rhys describes some aspects of obeah before concluding “(they say), I wouldn’t know” (Letters 262), again distancing herself from firsthand knowledge of what she describes. 18.  Warner points to the fact that Wide Sargasso Sea incorporates material Rhys was originally writing under the title “Le revenant,” a play on the phrase “le pays de revenants” from Hearn’s writing, as a clue to this influence (154). Otto finds a passage from Hearn’s Two Years in the French West Indies that she compares to the passage on zombies from The Glittering Coronet of Isles (153). Rhys explicitly engaged with Hearn’s work in other writings. Her 1976 story “Heat” mentions Hearn by name as author of a competing version of the story she narrates, the eruption of Mont Pelée and the destruction of Saint Pierre in Martinique. “Heat” includes Hearn’s version alongside “a pile of old newspapers and magazines” that provide “the English version of the eruption”; the story ends by reflecting that “it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that at all” ( Rhys, Tales 43), making explicit her narrator’s desire to tell a different version than Hearn’s. 19.  Rhys mentions Morand’s writing in her autobiography. Morand’s story “L’enfant de cent ans” appeared in Transatlantic Review 1.5 (1924): 249 –57.

213  Notes to Pages 187–189 Rhys’s first published short story was “Vienne” from 2.6 (1924): 639 – 45. Nancy Cunard, who later edited the anthology Negro and worked closely with P ­ admore, also contributed to the journal. 20.  See Hulme’s Colonial Encounters. 21.  The penultimate poem of Brathwaite’s Arrivants trilogy, “Vèvè,” again references Haitian religious practice.

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Index

abolition of slavery, 17, 42, 64, 86, 126, 198n12. See also antislavery; ­emancipation Abyssinia, viii, 27, 31, 33, 36, 41, 42, 62, 153, 157, 158; Italian invasion of, 6, 17–18, 25, 105, 147, 150, 151, 165– 68, 192n1, 193n4. See also Ethiopia Afghanistan, 1, 13, 192n8 African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), 4, 45, 47– 48, 50 –51, 55–59, 60, 67, 78, 80, 84, 106, 110, 111, 148, 195n3, 197n7. See also Briggs, Cyril V.; Campbell, Grace; Domingo, W. A.; Huiswoud, Otto; Moore, Richard B. African diaspora studies, vii, 1, 5, 6, 8, 14, 17–18, 20, 29, 39 afroantillanismo, 2, 123, 125, 134, 140, 145, 146, 178. See also Afro-Cuban; negrismo Afro-Caribbean, 83, 93, 120, 134 –35; culture, 2, 94, 123, 125, 126, 129 –33, 145, 181, 185, 188, 212n17. See also afroantillanismo; Afro-Cuban; negrismo Afro-Cuban, 123, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 135, 173, 203n1 Albizu Campos, Pedro, 2 All-African Peoples Conference, 170 –71 American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC ), 45– 46, 60, 61, 63– 67, 149, 155, 159, 161, 171, 195n2, 196n16. See also ­Harlem Liberator; Negro Champion amnesia, 1, 6, 13 Anglophone Caribbean, 10, 44, 53, 67, 99, 145, 148, 152, 172, 174, 185, 191n2, 205n17. See also British West Indies; West Indian

animality, 28, 95, 96, 128, 137, 142– 44. See also nature; snakes anticapitalism, 20, 45, 48. See also ­Communism; Socialism anticolonialism, viii, 1, 16, 25, 31, 37, 39 – 43, 67, 69, 101, 110, 112, 121, 167, 168, 172, 192n1, 193n5, 194n7, 195n1, 209n13; Caribbean, xii, 2–5, 10, 19 –20, 189; Communism and, 44 – 48, 52, 62– 63, 150 –52, 159, 165, 194n11; pan-Africanism and, 22, 27, 61, 102, 147– 49, 159; romance of, 15, 39, 42– 43. See also anti-imperialism; anti-occupation discourse anti-imperialism, 17, 32, 56, 131, 133, 167, 192n1, 207n1, 208n3. See also League against Imperialism ( LAI ); Lenin, Vladimir anti-occupation discourse, 35, 50, 53, 109, 124, 139, 170, 196n6, 211n7 antislavery, 9, 95, 126. See also abolition; emancipation; Haitian Revolution Aponte, José Antonio, 9 atavism, 4, 90, 91, 92, 95, 97, 113, 130, 133, 138 authenticity, 3, 10, 22, 123, 129 –30, 172, 173–74, 176, 188, 207n35, 211n10 Aux Cayes massacre, 32, 34, 64, 157, 162 Avance, Revista de, 131–34, 206n26 Bailey, Amy, 103, 202n5 Barbados, 21, 45, 65, 72, 84, 94, 110, 162, 191n1 Baron de Vastey, vii, viii, 44, 195n1 Bataille, George, 136, 137, 206n32 Beacon, 2, 30, 32, 39

238  Index Belgium, 49, 53, 55 Bellegarde, Dantes, 5 Bhabha, Homi, 150 Bifur, 128, 136, 140, 206n31 blackface, 71, 89, 90, 114, 183 black magic, 183, 185, 186 blackness, 4, 20, 70 –72, 73, 75, 76, 82, 97, 114, 118, 129, 131, 145, 178, 197n1. See also Afro-Caribbean; race blindness, 5, 14, 16, 35, 147, 148, 207n2 Blyden, Edward, 148 Bogues, Anthony, 25, 151, 168, 192n1, 195n12 Bolívar, Simón, 15 Bolsheviks, 56, 58, 66. See also ­Communist International; Lenin, V ­ ladimir; Russian Revolution Borno, Louis, 32, 63, 64, 65, 87, 107, 163 bourgeois nationalism, 67, 165 Brathwaite, Kamau, 188, 213n21 Breton, Andre, 122, 177 Briggs, Cyril V., 19, 20, 45, 46, 47, 48–53, 55, 56–58, 60, 63– 64, 67, 76, 80, 103, 105, 108, 110, 148, 149, 154, 155, 156–57, 195n3, 196n7 British West Indies, 40, 58, 62, 67, 173, 200n26, 210n3. See also Anglophone Caribbean; West Indian Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 174, 182, 183, 186, 212n14 Buck-Morss, Susan, 5, 8, 35 Burks, Arthur, 4, 19, 71, 80, 89 – 92, 93, 94, 95– 96, 99, 132, 143, 144, 180, 200n22 Cacos, 89 – 91, 95, 156, 173 Cadet, Eliézer, 104, 202n6 Campbell, Grace, 45, 47, 48, 55, 58, 67, 110, 148, 149, 195n3 capitalism, 16, 20, 31, 38, 45, 55, 56, 60, 65, 91, 106, 118, 120, 123, 129, 132, 138, 163, 164, 170, 204n7, 210n17; finance, ix, 3, 12, 13, 22, 32, 44, 47, 52, 53–54, 56, 57, 58, 128, 138, 139, 148, 156, 157, 162, 165, 166. See also anticapitalism; National City Bank of New York; Wall Street Caribbean literary tradition, 2, 10, 27, 67, 98–100, 120, 122–23, 135, 173–74, 191n2 Caribbeanness, 21, 71–72, 74, 78, 116, 174, 182, 185, 188

Caribbean studies, 1, 5, 6, 8, 20, 67, 98, 145, 174, 191n2 Carpentier, Alejo, xii, 2, 4, 14, 19, 21–22, 35, 72, 100, 111, 122– 46, 173, 177, 181, 187, 188, 206nn30 –32, 207n37; Écue-Yamba-O, 21, 122–31, 134 –35, 138, 145, 203n1, 204nn8–14, 205n16, 205nn18–19, 205nn21–22; The Kingdom of This World, 21, 22, 122, 123, 125, 126, 130, 131, 134, 135–36, 140 – 45, 207n36; The Lost Steps, 131, 138, 141 Carteles, 136 Casséus, Maurice, 99 ceremony of souls, 22, 174 –76, 178–79, 180 –81, 210n2, 211n9 Césaire, Aimé, 4, 14, 15, 18, 35, 43, 67– 68, 99, 141, 173, 195n1; Discours sur le colonialisme, 55; Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, 41, 140; La Tragédie du roi Christophe, 2; Tropiques, 140 Christianity, 83, 96, 142 Christophe, Henri, viii, 2, 7, 17, 80 –81, 95– 96, 99, 113, 115, 116, 120, 122, 135–36, 146, 177, 185, 206n29, 212n16 Cipriani, Arthur A., 33 Cold War, 68, 150 –51, 168 colonialism, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 18, 22, 27, 37, 46– 48, 51, 55–56, 65, 68, 70, 85, 95, 97, 101, 120, 125, 148, 149, 151, 155, 158, 179, 184, 188, 193n2, 193n7, 194n11, 195n1, 206n29, 208n7, 210n3; European versus U.S., 14 –15, 16, 66, 67, 159 – 60, 162, 171, 180, 189, 210n1; discourse of, 39, 72, 174 –75, 189. See also imperialism; neocolonialism; ­occupation of Haiti Colored American Review, 48–51 Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre, 62 Communism, viii, 3, 10, 14, 16, 20, 44 –51, 53, 56, 58– 67, 69, 78, 79, 80, 106, 110, 111, 127, 133, 148– 67, 192n8, 195n3, 197n7, 207n2, 208n7. See also Workers Party (WP) Communist, 63– 66, 79, 156 Communist International (Comintern), 14, 20, 44, 48, 56, 59 – 60, 65, 67, 149, 151–53, 154 –55, 157, 159, 161, 208n3; congresses, 47, 79 community feminism, 109, 111, 121, 202n8

239  Index Convention People’s Party (CPP ), 147 corvée, 12, 54, 62, 79, 158 Courier Haïtien, Le, 83, 109 CP-USA, 151. See also Workers Party (WP ) Crisis, 48, 52, 53, 63, 112, 116, 136, 194n8 Crusader, 46, 47, 48, 50 –52, 56–57, 104, 108, 110, 154 Cuba, vii, 2, 19, 38, 60, 65, 79, 88, 96, 122– 45, 158, 159, 161, 173, 178, 191n1, 195n4, 197n1, 203n1, 205n25, 207n36; nineteenth-century, 9, 126; U.S. imperialism in, ix, 13, 16, 21, 32, 62, 68, 117, 122–23, 124 –27, 128, 129, 131, 132–33, 135, 145– 46, 155–56, 162, 163, 193n5, 199n19, 209n13 Cullen, Countee, 18, 132 culture industry, 3, 23, 100, 131, 174. See also Hollywood; zombie movies Cunard, Nancy, 111, 166, 167, 213n19 Dartiguenave, Sudre, 104 Dash, J. Michael, x, xi, 4, 5, 17, 72, 136, 137, 140, 191nn2–3, 199n21, 207n35 Davis, Henrietta Vinton, 103 De Boissiere, Jean, 32, 193n5 décalage, 72–73, 76, 184, 185 decolonization, 2, 3, 4, 5, 15, 20, 22, 27, 43, 67, 69, 112, 147, 149, 150, 165, 167; African, 28, 41, 42, 53, 168– 69, 170 –71, 173; Caribbean, 44, 46, 173, 204n7 decontextualization, 178, 183, 187 dehumanization, 28, 95, 96, 98, 135 De Lisser, H. G., 4, 200n33; White Witch of Rosehall, 99, 184 De Mena, Maymie, 103 departmentalization of Francophone ­Caribbean, 3, 67 Deren, Maya, 22, 177–79, 211n6; Divine Horsemen, 177–78, 211n7 de Saint-Mery, Moreau, viii Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 17, 42, 49, 50, 80 Diario de la Marina, 65, 124 –25, 133, diaspora, vii, 18, 19, 29, 35, 39, 45, 47, 50, 72–73, 74 –75, 78, 79, 98, 101, 102, 103, 108, 154, 165, 192n1. See also African diaspora studies Díaz, Junot, 1, 13 dime novels, 91 disavowal, 8– 9, 30, 98, 134, 194n9

discourse, 1, 4, 7, 9, 10, 15, 19, 51, 73, 77, 83, 93, 121, 128, 140, 146, 157, 158, 186, 187, 200nn28–29; ­anticolonial, 3, 4 –5, 17, 27, 44 – 45, 46, 50, 101, 107, 112, 139, 170, 189, 196n6; ­colonialist, 20, 23, 39, 50, 58, 70, 79, 80, 84, 86, 89, 91, 92– 93, 96, 98–100, 101, 123–24, 132, 137, 138, 145, 164, 174, 184, 185, 188–89, 211n8; primitivist, 4, 21, 71, 72, 77, 81, 84, 91, 94 – 95, 115–16, 134, 143, 180, 182, 184 –85, 197n2. See also anti-occupation ­discourse discrimination, 63, 76. See also racism disidentification, 70, 71, 76, 77, 92, 98, 100, 184, 185, 187, 188 domesticity, 82, 103, 117, 119, 120 Domingo, W. A., 45, 46, 55, 57, 58, 75–76, 85, 108, 110, 171, 195n3 Dominican Republic, 9, 16, 21, 51, 60, 145, 155, 158, 168; U.S. occupation of, ix, 1, 11, 13, 52, 55, 56–57, 62, 86, 106, 117, 192n6, 207n38, 209n13 Douglass, Frederick, 86, 104 Drake, St. Clair, 22, 149, 181 Du Bois, W. E. B., 19, 22, 48, 81, 112, 148, 149, 150, 169 –70, 195n1, 203n15, 210n17 Duvalier, François, 11, 204n7 Eastman, Max, 80, 81, 135, 177 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 72–73, 75, 77, 133, 140. See also décalage Edwards, Erica, 102, 201n2. See also Great Man theory of history Egypt, 54, 55, 60, 78, 107, 168 Eisenstein, Sergei, 163– 64 emancipation, 17, 25, 39, 64, 167, 169. See also freedom; independence; ­liberation; sovereignty England, 26, 33, 34, 52, 58, 67, 78, 86, 147, 176, 179, 185, 192n1, 193n2, 194n11, 195n12, 202n10, 210n17. See also Great Britain; London Enlightenment, 7, 35, 49, 135, 142, 144 Ethiopia, 36, 78, 105, 107, 149, 151, 152, 166, 167, 168, 169, 210n17. See also Abyssinia ethnography, 4, 123, 131, 177 Eurocentricism, viii, 7, 14, 32 exile, 77, 78, 82, 98

240  Index exoticism, 4, 10, 21, 22, 28, 72, 81, 84, 86–87, 89, 91, 94, 97, 102, 115, 116, 120, 123, 130, 133, 137, 139, 141, 145, 146, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 197n2, 200n24, 211n10; Caribbean religion and, 80, 82–83, 99, 103, 131, 144, 174, 179, 191n4 Fairclough, O. T., 171, 210n18 Fanon, Frantz, 4, 15, 33, 67, 150, 171, 193n6, 195n1 Faulkner, William, 72 feminism, 109, 111, 121; female solidarity, 119; female subjugation, 181. See also community feminism; gender feminization, 55, 101, 185. See also ­paternalism Fennell, Rufus, 36 fetishization, 140, 178, 201n1 Fifth Pan-African Congress, 112, 147, 150, 168– 69, 170, 171 finance capitalism. See under capitalism Firestone, 153, 208n4, 209n9 Firmin, Anténor, 44, 195n1 Fischer, Sibylle, xi, 5, 14, 15, 30, 42, 144; Modernity Disavowed, 8– 9, 27–28, 126, 194n9. See also disavowal Ford, James W., 66, 79, 81, 154, 161 Foucault, Michel, 4, 200n28 France, 7, 15, 16, 31, 32, 41, 52, 67, 68, 79, 107, 132, 137, 164, 193n2. See also Paris freedom, 5, 31, 35, 39, 43, 57, 58, 62, 68, 95, 102, 106, 126, 135, 154, 164, 165, 166, 175, 189, 201n2, 206n29. See also emancipation; independence; liberation; sovereignty Froude, J. A., viii Gandhi, Mahatma, 107, 148, 150 Garcia, Elie, 104 Garvey, Amy Ashwood, 4, 36, 110, 111, 112, 149, 167; Black Magic, 102–3, 121, 201n4 Garvey, Amy Jacques, x, 4, 19, 21, 102, 103, 107–11, 112, 120, 121; “Our Women and What They Think,” 107– 9 Garvey, Marcus, ix, x, 4, 19, 21, 41, 52, 86, 101–2, 103–7, 108, 110, 113, 114, 148, 201nn1–2, 203n13, 207n2

Garveyism, 46, 84, 103– 4, 113, 201n1, 203n13. See also Universal ­Negro ­Improvement Association; Negro World gendarmerie, 11, 53, 64, 89, 200n22 gender, 21, 73, 101–12, 117–21, 166, 183, 201n2, 203n14. See also feminism; masculinism Germany, 19, 49, 53, 149; Hamburg, 149, 158, 161, 209n11 Ghana, 19, 22, 39, 147, 149, 150, 169 –71 ghosts, 87, 114, 115–20, 186, 187 Gilpin, Charles, 114, 116 Glissant, Edouard, 2, 33, 173, 193n6 gothic, 86, 91, 99, 116 Great Britain, 16, 50, 54, 55, 59, 58, 153, 164, 165, 170, 172, 192n1. See also England Great Man theory of history, 101–2, 106, 108, 120, 201n2 Grenada, 13, 17, 192n8 Grupo Minorista, 127 Guggenheim Fellowship, 85, 176, 177, 199n19 Guillén, Nicolás, 99, 111, 125, 204n6, 207n39 Guirao, Ramón, 125, 132 Guyana, viii, 21, 45, 72, 84, 93, 97, 111, 170, 176, 191n1, 209n16 Haiti. See occupation of Haiti; Haitian Revolution Haitian assembly, 11, 54 Haitian Revolution, 1, 2, 5–10, 14 –15, 17–19, 21, 25, 27–28, 29 –30, 31–32, 34, 35, 36, 38– 40, 41, 49, 62, 63– 64, 74, 79, 111, 113, 114 –15, 126, 128, 135–36, 138, 156, 163, 166, 170, 174, 191n5, 192n9, 193n3, 193n5, 206n29. See also Christophe, Henri; Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; Toussaint Louverture Hamburg, 149, 158, 161, 209n11 Harlem, 19, 29, 34, 36, 45, 46, 58, 61, 65, 70, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 81, 102, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 139, 147, 148, 157, 195n3, 203nn16–17 Harlem Liberator, 46, 64 – 65, 107, 155 Harlem Renaissance, viii, 29, 45, 72–73, 193n3, 199n18. See also New Negro movement

241  Index Harris, Helen Webb, 114, 120, 121 Harrison, Hubert, ix, 54 –56, 58, 101, 110, 195n3, 203n13, 203n15 Hearn, Lafcadio, 86–87, 187, 188, 212n18 Herskovits, Melville, 4, 177 Hill, Ken, 150, 171 Hill, Robert, xi, 25, 46, 165– 66, 192n1 Hispanic Caribbean literature, 2, 123, 145. See also afroantillanismo; Carpentier, Alejo; Latin American literature; negrismo; Palés Matos, Luis Holiday, 176–77, 178, 211n7 Holly, Theodora, 108– 9 Hollywood, 19, 174, 183, 185, 186 Hooker, James, 147, 152–53, 170, 195n12, 207n1, 207nn6–7, 209n11 Howard University, x, 147, 149, 152, 207n1 Hughes, Langston, 19, 29, 72, 88, 111, 112, 114, 132, 167, 170, 202n9, 203n12, 203n15 Huiswoud, Hermina Dumont, 45, 55, 65, 67, 111, 196n16, 202n9 Huiswoud, Otto, 45, 55, 58, 60, 65, 66, 67, 111, 148, 149, 195n3, 196n16 Hurston, Nora Zeale, vii–viii, 19, 29, 72, 88, 112, 178 “Ideales de una Raza,” 125 immigration, 19, 47, 70, 77, 85, 110, 124 imperialism, 7, 25, 27, 37, 42, 49, 51, 53–55, 62– 63, 69, 83, 94, 101, 105, 106, 115, 124, 129, 134, 140, 148– 49, 158, 161, 166, 168, 169, 183, 188, 197n1, 201n1; cultural, 84, 96, 130, 136, 164, 181, 189, 199n19. See also anti-imperialism; colonialism; neocolonialism; United States imperialism independence, vii, viii, 2, 10, 17, 20, 33, 41, 44, 51, 59, 62, 67– 68, 76, 105, 106, 120, 126, 132, 133, 147, 149, 150 –51, 152, 156, 157, 162, 166, 167, 169 –71, 173, 175, 209n9; Haitian, 1, 3, 7, 8, 15, 28, 31–32, 38, 39, 40, 42, 48, 64, 74, 79, 107, 126, 135, 163, 168, 174, 189, 212n16. See also emancipation; freedom; liberation; national emergence; sovereignty Independent Labour Party ( ILP ), 31, 62, 78, 163, 167, 193n4, 209n13. See also Brockway, Fenner

India, 15, 55, 60, 66, 78, 161 indigeneity, 9, 21, 172, 174, 182, 189, 200n27 indigénisme, 3, 123, 139 – 40, 141 inequality, 8, 12, 28, 30, 42, 44, 48, 54, 59, 64, 76, 112, 117, 134, 145 infantilization, 50, 97, 101, 138, 141. See also paternalism International African Friends of Ethiopia, 25, 111, 167 International African Opinion, 167 International African Service Bureau ( IASB), 25, 36, 110, 147, 167 International Conference of Negro ­Workers ( Hamburg), 149 internationalism, viii, 19, 68, 69, 77, 78, 102, 148, 197n6; black, 18, 73, 108, 171; Communist, 14, 20, 44, 48, 56, 59 – 60, 65, 67, 149, 151–53, 154 –55, 157, 159, 161, 208n3. See also ­Communist International; Garveyism; pan-Africanism International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers ( ITUCNW), 60, 65, 79, 149, 153, 159, 161, 209n11 I Walked with a Zombie, 19, 23, 174, 183–84, 185, 212n14 Iraq, 1, 13, 192nn7–8 Ireland, 55, 56, 60, 66, 165 Jagan, Cheddi, 150, 209n16 Jamaica, 2, 19, 39, 65, 74, 76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 93, 99, 128–29, 132, 147, 150, 162, 171, 176, 185, 188, 191n1, 191n5, 198n12, 199n19, 200n31, 202n7, 210n18 Jamaica Progressive League, 110, 171 James, C. L. R., 4, 9, 22, 25– 43, 69, 78, 104, 106, 111, 114, 149 –50, 165, 167, 168, 169, 193n2, 193n5, 193n7, 194nn8–11, 195nn12–13, 204n5, 207n2; The Black Jacobins, 14, 19, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 37, 39, 40 – 43, 192n1, 193n3; A History of Negro ­Revolt, 37, 192n1; Toussaint L’Ouverture, 2, 26, 31–32, 36, 42, 194n10 James, Leslie, xi, xii, 147, 155, 159, 171, 209nn14 –15 James, Winston, 46, 70 Japan, 30, 50, 54, 58, 62, 86, 108, 164 – 65, 208n7

242  Index Johnson, James Weldon, 19, 29, 30, 39, 58, 62, 72, 76, 80, 87, 101, 105, 114, 124, 136, 171, 195nn4 –5, 196n6, 198n8; “Self-Determining Haiti,” 12, 32, 47, 50, 52–55, 56, 57, 71, 78, 108, 113, 158 Jones, Claudia, 4, 20, 67– 68, 69, 204n7 Karem, Jeff, xi, 5, 17, 72, 74, 76, 95, 97, 98, 195n1, 195n5, 197n6 Kenya, 39, 62, 170 Kenya African National Union ( KANU ), 147 Kenyatta, Jomo, 22, 149, 150, 167 Keys, 33–34 Ku Klux Klan ( KKK ), 59, 60 Krigwa Players, ix, 112–13, 116, 119, 120 Lafayette Theater, 102, 201n4, 203n16 Laleau, Léon, 99 Lamming, George, 4, 19, 100, 174 –81, 188, 189, 210n2, 211n5, 211n7; The Pleasures of Exile, 22, 174 –76, 178, 210n1, 210n3, 211n9; Season of ­Adventure, 22, 174, 175–76, 178, 179 –81, 210n3, 211n8 Larsen, Nella, 137 Latin American literature, 122–23. See also Carpentier, Alejo; Hispanic Caribbean literature; Palés Matos, Luis Latin American studies, 1, 5, 6, 8 League against Imperialism ( LAI ), 46, 61, 63 League of Coloured Peoples, 33, 35, 192n1. See also Keys League of Nations, 31–32, 51, 104, 153, 166 Leiris, Michel, 137, 206n32 Lenin, Vladimir, 3, 44, 47, 51, 53–54, 56, 208n3 liberation, 5, 20, 31, 47, 56, 64, 65, 66, 80, 159, 161, 164, 208n6. See also emancipation; freedom; independence; sovereignty Liberator, 78, 114 Liberia, viii, 17, 19, 38, 39, 51–52, 58, 59, 60, 62, 75, 104, 107, 149, 151, 152, 153–54, 156, 157–58, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 208n4, 209n9 Locke, Alain, 75, 98, 116, 203n12, 203n18

London, 19, 26, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 58, 78, 82, 86, 106, 111, 112, 149, 156, 157, 165, 167, 169, 184, 192n1, 195n12, 208n2, 211n5 Lumumba, Patrice, 170 lynching, 39, 59, 60, 62, 76 Machado, Gerardo, 123, 127 magical realism, 21, 122, 146. See also marvelous realism Mais, Roger, 99 Makalani, Minkah, 11, 46, 49, 56, 59, 60, 62, 80, 147, 151, 159, 167, 171, 195n3, 196n8 Makonnen, Ras, 40, 149, 166– 67, 169 Manchester Congress. See Fifth Pan-­African Congress manifest domesticity, 117. See also ­domesticity Marines, U.S., viii, 1, 3, 10, 11, 28, 30, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40 – 41, 48, 53, 57, 62, 64 – 65, 71, 79, 83, 89, 90, 93, 95, 101, 104, 105, 113, 145, 156, 162, 163, 164, 173, 181, 184, 200n22, 207n38, 212n15 Marinello, Juan, 129 –30, 131 Marson, Una, 103, 202n5 Martinique, 2, 35, 86–87, 99, 139, 140, 185, 212n18 marvelous realism, 37, 122, 123, 136, 140, 141– 43. See also magical realism masculinism, 21, 50, 55, 82, 101–2, 103–5, 113–14, 137, 174, 197n6, 201nn1–2, 202n8. See also gender; paternalism McKay, Claude, xi, 4, 19, 20 –21, 43, 66, 67, 70 –83, 84, 92, 98, 99, 114, 135, 137, 177, 179, 184, 188, 195n3, 197nn1–2, 197nn6–7, 198n12, 199n15, 200n26, 210n17; Banana Bottom, 82, 98, 179; Banjo, 20, 29, 72, 76, 77–78, 79, 84, 98– 99; Home to Harlem, 20, 29, 72, 73–75, 76–77, 79, 80 –82, 84, 98, 197n2, 197n6 Mendes, Alfred, 99 Ménil, René, 35, 140, 141. See also Tropiques Messenger, 46, 53, 57–58, 101, 108, 171 Middle Passage, 33, 176. See also ­transatlantic slave trade migration, 20, 21, 45, 70, 75, 76, 79, 93, 98, 124, 125, 127. See also immigration

243  Index Miller, May, 19, 114 –15, 116, 120, 121 minstrelsy, 113, 114 Mirault, Joseph, 83–84, 106 modernism, 100, 131–32, 187. See also primitivism; surrealism modernity, 7, 9, 14, 35, 91, 92, 118, 122, 130 –31, 141, 168, 181, 182, 199n15; Caribbean, 2–3, 37, 82, 83, 98, 99, 108– 9, 123, 133, 134, 138, 142, 144, 171, 191nn1–2, 192n1, 202n7. See also premodern modernization, viii, 12, 93, 127, 129 Moore, Richard B., ix, 19, 20, 45, 46, 47, 55, 58, 60, 61– 63, 67, 68– 69, 110 –11, 148, 149, 167, 195n3 Morand, Paul, 90, 132–34, 137, 187, 188, 200n24, 206nn26–28, 212n19 Moscow, 19, 149, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 161, Mundo, El, 125, 204n5 Muñoz, José Esteban, 71, 92, 200n28. See also disidentification Nardal sisters, Jane and Paulette, 35, 139, 140, 141. See also Revue du monde noir, La Nation, 30, 35, 50, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 71, 78, 108, 113, 206n33; “Self-­Determining Haiti,” 12, 32, 47, 50, 52–55, 56, 57, 71, 78, 108, 113, 158 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ), 52, 58, 133. See also Crisis National City Bank of New York, ix, 5, 11–12, 20, 29, 32, 47, 54, 57, 105, 155, 158 national emergence, vii, 2, 3, 7–8, 9 –10, 20, 31, 40, 41, 44, 47, 56, 66, 68– 69, 120, 132, 166, 168, 169. See also independence; liberation; nationalist movements; sovereignty nationalism, 9, 15, 22, 39, 40, 67, 98, 100, 101, 102, 105– 6, 109, 112, 140, 150, 152, 154, 165, 169, 172, 192n1, 197n6, 201n1. See also teleology, national nationalist movements, 3, 10, 44, 68, 149, 159, 173–74, 206n27, 206n33. See also national emergence National Urban League, 84. See also ­Opportunity literary contest

nature, 91, 92, 95, 133, 137, 141, 180 –81. See also animality; atavism negrismo, 2, 123, 125, 134, 140, 145, 146, 178, 207n39. See also afroantillanismo; Afro-Cuban négritude, 2, 3, 40, 41, 99, 140, Negro (anthology), 166, 213n19 Negro Champion, 46, 60, 63, 64 Negro Worker, 37–38, 58, 60, 61, 107, 149, 151, 154, 159, 160, 161– 65, 171, 196n14 Negro World, vii, 46, 55, 83–84, 104, 106– 9, 121, 194n8, 202n6 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 62, 149, 150 Nemours, Alfred, 31–32, 35 neocolonialism, 16, 36, 152 Nesbitt, Nick, xi, 5, 8, 15, 195n1 New Negro (anthology), 75, 98 New Negro movement, 20, 45, 73, 75, 98, 113, 199n18, 202n12, 207n1. See also Harlem Renaissance Nicaragua, ix, 13, 16, 51, 53, 117, 132 Nkrumah, Kwame, 22, 149, 150, 152, 169, 170 –71 obeah, 82–83, 88, 91, 93– 94, 96, 182, 184 –85, 186–87, 210n3, 212n17 occupation of the Dominican Republic. See under Dominican Republic occupation of Haiti, ix, 82, 167– 68, 171, 192n7, 194n8, 204n7, 210n3; cultural impact of, 4 –5, 10, 18, 19, 21–23, 28–29, 36, 41, 70 –72, 77–81, 84 –86, 87– 92, 95, 98–100, 101–3, 113, 114 –20, 122–23, 124 –26, 128, 132–33, 135– 41, 143– 46, 173–89, 196n6, 200n24, 203n14, 206n27, 207n35, 211nn7–8, 212n14; history of, 10 –14, 64, 89, 127, 155, 192n6, 193n7, 204n5, 206n27, 212n15; opposition to, viii, 3, 18, 19 –20, 34, 35, 37–39, 44 – 69, 70, 75, 83–84, 101, 105, 106–7, 107– 9, 121, 124, 149, 155–58, 161– 66, 169, 170, 196n6, 202n6, 206n33, 209n13, 209n15, 210n17; silence surrounding, 1–2, 5– 6, 8– 9, 10, 14 –19, 26–28, 30 –34, 39 – 40, 42, 66, 102, 104, 106, 147– 48, 150, 152, 189, 193n3, 193n5, 193n7, 195n13. See also anti-occupation discourse; Aux Cayes massacre; Cacos; corvée

244  Index O’Neill, Eugene, 4, 116, 132, 136, 146, 174; The Emperor Jones, ix, 19, 36, 58, 71, 80, 113–14, 115, 120, 202n12, 203nn13–15 Opportunity literary contest, 84, 85, 87–88, 112, 116, 199n18 orphan, Haiti as, 80, 138. See also ­paternalism Ortiz, Fernando, 132 othering, 4, 21, 72, 82, 89, 91, 97, 123, 131, 132, 138, 144, 145 “Our Women and What They Think” (Amy Jacques Garvey), 107– 9 Padmore, George, xii, 4, 17, 19, 20, 22, 51, 65, 79, 111–12, 127, 147–72, 181, 194n11, 195n12, 196n14, 207nn1–2, 208n3, 208nn7–11, 209nn15–16, 211n5, 213n19; C. L. R. James and, 29, 36–38, 41, 43, 69, 78, 106, 111, 149 –50, 165, 167, 168, 169; Haiti, an American Slave Colony, xi, 29, 156–57, 209n11; Harlem radicals and, 36, 45, 53, 56, 58, 60 – 61, 63, 67, 69, 147– 48, 149, 155, 156–57; The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, 37, 151, 157–58, 209n11; Pan-Africanism or Communism?, 151. See also Negro Worker Palés Matos, Luis, 2, 4, 19, 125, 145– 46, 207nn39 – 40 Pan-African Congresses, 17, 112, 150, 168– 69. See also Fifth Pan-African Congress pan-Africanism, viii, 2, 3, 14, 17, 18, 21, 101–2, 148, 149, 151–52, 165, 167, 171, 195n1, 207n2; anticolonialism and, 22, 27, 44, 61, 102, 121, 147, 159; community imagined by, 61, 77. See also African diaspora studies; Garveyism Panama, ix, 13, 16, 21, 72, 74, 84, 88, 93, 98, 163, 199n19, 200nn26–27 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 78, 210n17 Parascandola, Louis, 46, 66, 70, 85, 87, 88, 90, 199n19 Paris, 19, 26, 35, 36, 37, 38, 58, 72, 86, 123–24, 125, 131, 133, 136, 137, 139, 140, 187, 195n13, 206n26, 206n30 Paris Peace Conference, 104 passing, 89, 92, 119

paternalism, 50, 53, 80, 95, 101, 138, 211n8. See also feminization; ­infantilization; orphan, Haiti as patriarchy, 21, 101, 103, 115, 200n30 People’s National Party ( PNP ), 2, 147, 150, 171, 210n18 People’s Progressive Party ( PPP ), 150 Péralte, Charlemagne, 89 Philippines, the, 13, 16, 66, 107, 117, 119, 120, 161, 203n20, 209n13 Piñero, Miguel, 121 Pizer ( Padmore), Dorothy, 111, 202n11 Plácido, 9 plantation system, 12, 79, 155–56, 158, 166, 209n9. See also sugar economy Plummer, Brenda Gayle, 5, 48– 49, 83, 104, 107, 177 postcolonial, 39, 68, 150, 168, 171, 185, 188, 189; sovereignty, 22, 149; studies, 1, 5– 6, 8, 14 –16, 17, 20, 26, 145, 165, 174, 192n9 post–World War II. See World War II: after premodern, 4, 92, 129, 138, 142– 43, 144, 177, 180, 188. See also modernity Pressoir, Charlot, 179, 211n7 Price-Mars, Jean, 5, 35, 40, 139 – 40, 141, 178, 191n3. See also indigénisme primitivism, 3– 4, 86–87, 94, 95, 113, 116, 123, 129 –34, 144, 197n2, 202n7, 203n1; occupation of Haiti and, 4, 10, 21, 71–72, 81, 83–84, 85, 92, 99 –100, 102, 109, 131–32, 133–34, 136, 137–39, 180, 181, 182, 187 Profintern ( RILU ), 149, 151, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161. See also ­International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers proletarianization, 129, 155, 158, 181, 183, 205n17 Public Opinion, 171 Puerto Rico, vii, viii, ix, x, 2, 3, 16, 19, 21, 60, 66, 68, 85, 117, 125, 132, 145– 46, 155, 161, 173, 176, 191n1, 204n5, 207nn38–39 pulp fiction, 19, 80, 90, 91. See also Burks, Arthur; dime novels race, 44, 89, 96, 100, 105, 119, 120, 127, 129, 132, 134, 148, 166, 197n6, 200n27, 201n1, 212n12; Caribbean versus U.S. conceptions of, 20,

245  Index 46– 47, 70, 76, 198n12; Communist engagement with, 45, 48, 56, 59 – 60, 63, 66, 151, 159, 165; pride, 39, 136. See also blackness racism, ix, 46, 54, 98, 206n33. See also discrimination; white supremacy radicalism, 3, 28, 73, 82, 98, 151, 153, 155, 159, 165, 167, 171, 192n1, 193n5, 210n17; antislavery, 7, 9, 95, 126; West Indians in New York, 10, 20, 44 – 69, 79, 107, 110 –11, 147– 48, 157, 158, 166, 167, 168, 195n3. See also African Blood Brotherhood; American Negro Labor Congress; anticolonialism; Communism; Haitian Revolution Ramsey, Kate, xi, 5, 83, 181, 184, 191n4, 210n3, 211n11, 212n15 rape, occupation as, 53, 55, 101, 107 rationality, 91, 94, 101, 116, 119, 129, 141, 142; irrationality, 4, 91, 137, 188 Red International of Labour Unions. See Profintern ( RILU ) religious practice, 4, 22, 72, 82–83, 85, 94, 95, 118, 125, 130, 131, 136, 142, 144, 174, 176–81, 184, 191n4, 210n3, 213n21. See also spirituality Renda, Mary, 5, 17, 29, 39, 50, 72, 80, 83, 92, 101, 113, 138, 145, 178, 193n3, 200nn22–23, 200n28, 203nn14 –15, 207n38, 211n8. See also paternalism Revue du monde noir, La, 35, 139, 140 – 41, 207n34 Rhys, Jean, 4, 19, 23, 181–89, 212nn16–19; Good Morning, Midnight, 186, 187; Wide Sargasso Sea, 22, 174, 181–82, 184 –88, 211n10, 212n16, 212n18 Robeson, Paul, x, 36, 114, 116, 194n10, 203n13, 203n15 romance, 74, 81, 125; anticolonial, 15, 39, 42– 43; primitivist, 86, 87, 99, 122, 123, 129, 130, 139, 141, 179, 180, 203n1 Rosemond, Henry, 45, 195n2, 196n16 Roumain, Jacques, 5, 87, 99, 111, 163 Russian Revolution, 6, 28, 33 Said, Edward, Orientalism, 15–16, 83, 208n5 Sajous, Léo, 35, 139. See also Revue du monde noir, La Sam, Guillaume, 10, 95, 113 Sanhedrin, Negro, 58–59, 196n8

santería, 130, 207n36 savagery: stereotypes of Caribbean, 74, 81–82, 83, 95, 99, 114, 128, 135, 137, 138, 142, 143, 144; U.S. imperial, 104, 163 Schmidt, Hans, 5, 10 –12, 52, 64, 89, 192n6 Schomburg, Arturo, vii–ix, 19, 145 Schuyler, George, 58, 203n15 Scott, David, 25, 26, 39, 42, 92, 171, 192n8, 192n1 (chap. 1), 200n28. See also romance: anticolonial Seabrook, William, 4, 35, 85, 99, 123, 131, 139, 140 – 42, 146, 174, 177, 179, 180, 183, 198n8, 206n30, 206nn32–33, 207n40; The Magic Island, 19, 22, 23, 72, 122, 134, 136–38, 141, 143– 44, 178, 182, 206n28, 211n11 Selassie, Haile, 31, 105 self-determination, 3– 4, 36, 51, 57, 59, 68, 101, 113, 166, 201n1, 209n13 Selvon, Sam, 173 sexualization, 137, 181, 206n29. See also rape, occupation as Shange, Ntozake, 121 silence, viii, 1–2, 5– 9, 10, 14, 15, 18, 19, 26–28, 33, 35, 39, 40, 63, 66, 102, 104, 106, 189, 194n9 slave trade. See transatlantic slave trade snakes, 95– 98, 132, 143– 44, 180, 200n30 Socialism, 55–56, 58, 63, 78, 80, 110, 150, 152, 159, 164, 167, 195n3, 209n13. See also Independent Labour Party ( ILP ) Solomon, Mark, 46, 56, 58, 196n8 soucouyant, 94, 188, 212n17 South Africa, 58, 62, 155, 161, 162, 169, 177 sovereignty, vii, viii, 2, 5, 8, 9, 17, 18, 20, 22, 25, 27, 31, 36, 39, 42, 43, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 62, 68, 105, 106, 113, 115, 124, 128, 133, 149, 165, 169, 170. See also emancipation; freedom; ­independence; liberation Soviet Union, 3, 56, 79, 106, 133, 149, 151, 208n2, 208n7 Spence, Eulalie, viii, 4, 19, 120 –21, 203n17, 203n21; Her, ix, 21, 102, 103, 112, 115–20 spirituality, 103, 116, 131, 188, 210n3; Haitian, 4, 95, 136, 141, 144, 178, 184, 189, 191n4. See also religious practices

246  Index Stephens, Michelle, xi, 70 –71, 74, 76, 197nn5– 6, 201n1, 203n13, 205n17 sugar economy, 79, 94, 124, 125, 126–27, 128, 129, 132, 138, 155–56, 158, 183. See also plantation system supernatural, 86–87, 89, 94, 95, 99, 116, 119, 120, 143, 181, 185, 187, 199n21. See also soucouyant; ­vampirism; zombies surrealism, 122, 123, 124, 131, 136, 139, 140, 177 Sylvain, Benito, 44, 195n1 Sylvain, George, 53, 109, 196n6 Taft, Edna, 4 teleology, national, 3, 7, 9 –10, 14, 15, 20, 39, 41– 42, 150. See also romance: anticolonial theater, 21, 71, 101, 102–3, 112–21, 142, 200n31, 201n4, 203n16; James’s ­Toussaint L’Ouverture, 2, 26, 31–32, 36, 42, 194n10. See also Miller, May; O’Neill, Eugene; Spence, Eulalie Toomer, Jean, 85, 203n15 tourism, 10, 176–77, 178, 206n26 Toussaint Louverture, 14, 17, 25, 26, 30, 38, 39, 40, 49 –50, 62, 63, 64, 65, 80, 86, 95, 104, 106, 114, 115, 156, 163– 64, 167; James’s Toussaint L’Ouverture, 2, 26, 31–32, 36, 42, 194n10. See also Haitian Revolution transatlantic slave trade, 62, 97, 126, 156. See also Middle Passage transnationalism, 14, 15, 47, 48, 70, 75, 76, 85, 98, 101, 129, 150, 189, 197nn5– 6, 201n1 travel writing, 4, 22, 28, 29, 38, 58, 71, 72, 136, 137, 138, 176, 178, 187. See also Holiday; Seabrook, William Trinidad and Tobago, 2, 19, 20, 22, 25–26, 32, 33, 34, 37–38, 39, 45, 53, 65, 67, 106, 148, 149, 150, 162, 165, 176, 191n1, 193n7, 203n17, 210n3 Trinidad Guardian, 125, 193n7, 204n5 Tropiques, 140 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 1, 5, 6–8, 9, 14, 26, 193n7, 204n7. See also silence; unthinkable, the Trujillo, Rafael, 11, 192n6 Turner, Joyce Moore, 46, 60, 62, 63, 65, 68, 110 –11, 195n3

Twa, Lindsay, xi, 138, 202n12, 206n28, 211n6 Underwood, Edna, 87–88, 99, 199n20, 211n7 United States imperialism, ix, 1, 3, 5, 10, 12, 13–14, 15, 16, 20 –23, 38, 41, 44, 45, 47, 53, 55–56, 57, 58, 59 – 61, 64 – 66, 67, 70, 71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 84, 85–86, 87, 93, 98, 100, 102–3, 107, 108, 117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126–27, 128, 131–32, 135, 145– 46, 147, 151, 152–54, 155–57, 159, 162– 65, 170 –71, 173, 174, 177, 189, 192n8, 193n5, 208n5, 208n7, 209n9, 210n17, 210n1. See also culture ­industry; ­Marines, U.S. Union Patriotique, 53, 62, 83, 109, 124, 195n2, 196n6. See also Courier Haïtien, Le United Fruit Company, 127, 163, 199n19 Universal Negro Improvement Association ( UNIA), 21, 52, 55, 83, 101, 102– 9, 112, 202n5. See also Garveyism; Negro World unthinkable, the, 1, 6, 7, 10, 98 utopia, 11, 13, 20, 39, 41, 42– 43 vampirism, 94 – 95, 186 Vandercook, John, 132, 198n8, 207n40; Black Majesty, 19, 80 –81, 135, 146 vassalage, 12, 154, 156 Vietnam, 13, 86, 192n8 Vincent, Sténio, 163 Virgin Islands, 16, 55, 59, 62, 75, 85 voodoo, 13, 21, 92, 93, 94, 99, 116; as ­colonial fantasy, 4, 22, 72, 83, 85, 87, 91, 120, 131, 133, 136, 137–38, 141– 44, 145, 174, 180, 181, 184 –85, 186, 188, 191n4, 199n21, 200n24, 212nn14 –15. See also Burks, Arthur; ­exoticism; primitivism; Seabrook, ­William: The Magic Island; Walrond, Eric: “The Voodoo’s Revenge” Walcott, Derek, 2, 143, 173 Wall Street, ix, 13, 56, 58, 62, 66, 78, 106, 130, 132, 164, 166, 205n22. See also capitalism: finance; National City Bank of New York Walrond, Eric, vii–viii, xi, 4, 19, 20 –21, 70, 71, 72, 80, 82, 83– 99, 112,

247  Index 116, 143, 184, 188, 199nn19 –21, 200nn24 –25, 205n17; Tropic Death, 84, 85, 89, 93, 94 – 98; “The ­Voodoo’s ­Revenge,” 84, 85, 87– 93, 94, 199nn20 –21, 200n27 Washington, Booker T., viii, 49, 104 West Indian, 33, 38, 40 – 41, 83, 85–87, 107, 110 –11, 150, 152, 172, 183, 197n6; federation, 3, 62, 67– 68, 162, 173, 196n17; identity, 19, 20 –21, 29, 70 –78, 81, 84, 91– 94, 97, 184, 187–88; literary tradition, 98–100, 191n2; participation in Communism, 45– 47, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 66, 105, 147– 48, 157–58, 166– 68. See also Anglophone Caribbean; Caribbean literary tradition; Caribbeanness West Indian Review, 99, 200n31 West Indies Federation , 3, 62, 67– 68, 162, 173, 196n17 white supremacy, 18, 22, 28, 46, 63, 76, 89. See also racism White Zombie, 19, 23, 72, 174, 183, 211n11

Wilder, Gary, 2, 3, 44, 68 Williams, Eric, 22, 149, 150, 167 Wilson, Woodrow, 3, 10, 11, 50, 51, 52, 57. See also self-determination Workers Party (WP), 47, 55, 59 – 60, 63, 195n3 World War I, 3, 15, 18, 31, 40, 44, 49, 53, 73, 75 World War II, 2, 17–18, 99, 166, 168, 169, 171, 208n7; after, 3, 14, 15–16, 40, 44, 67, 69, 78, 145, 147, 150, 152, 167, 170, 173, 189, 208n5 Wright, Richard, 22, 149, 170, 202n11, 209n16, 211n5 Young, Robert, 16, 44, 63, 165– 66 Zobel, Joseph, 99 zombie movies, 28, 58, 72, 137, 183–85, 188; I Walked with a Zombie, 19, 23, 174, 183–84, 185, 212n14; White ­Zombie, 19, 23, 72, 174, 183, 211n11 zombies, 138, 173, 179, 181, 182, 184 –88, 211n10, 212nn12–13, 212nn17–18

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