Book Reviews: Recent Historical Scholarship
The Black Atlantic Resource presents reviews of two of the most recent publications which expand understandings of U.S. African-American relationships with Haitians and their revolutionary history:
Millery Polyné, From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870–1964, 2010 (University Press of Florida: Gainesville)
Review By: Wendy Asquith (University of Liverpool)
Published: December 2010
From Douglass to Duvalier is an important new work, situated in the ‘emerging field of Hemispheric American Studies’, which presents new approaches to the role of Haiti in African-American consciousness.1 This work moves through a number of chronologically ordered case studies which demonstrate U.S. – Haitian African American relations, between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. Polyné considers intra-racial interactions between these two groups to ‘have been central to the spirit of the pan-American movement because of their long history of transnational engagements.’2
Overarching the entire volume is a distinct reformulation of the hegemonic U.S. model of pan-Americanism. This concept is considered as African-Americans (a term used here in its broadest sense, denoting those of African descent throughout the Americas) actually attempted to work through pan-Americanism’s ideals, rather than using them as a smoke-screen for an imperialist agenda. Though the focus remains on U.S. - Haitian interactions, broader examples of this are mentioned. So, Haitian attempts to engender a mutually co-operative, non-interventionist movement are briefly demonstrated through their government’s support of Latin American independence movements.
The volume begins, as others before it, in the late nineteenth century with Frederick Douglass. The personification and forerunner of black pan-Americanism (“an organizing concept encompassing movements and expressions for development and racial solidarity in intra-racial communities”3) and takes us up to the dictatorship of François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier and the role of Haitian exiles in the 1960s.
In between are a number of case studies which explore both inter-racial and intra-racial schemes of development and uplift, originating in the United States. Implemented on behalf of Haiti these schemes spanned cultural, economic and political spheres. They include: Claude Barnett’s Associated Negro Press information network, which sought to aid business investment in Haiti through positive reporting and; the Moton Commission which explored potential trajectories of educational uplift in Haiti.
Polyné in a number of ways approaches topics popular in current historiography from a subverted angle. Briefly he uses the Haitian Revolution as an ‘overture’ to his study, mirroring the rituals of U.S. black and Haitian ‘transnational exchanges of ideas’, however he does not retread that oft-treaded ground for long. 4 Neither does he reconsider African-Americans’ abstract musings on Africa as a diasporic homeland. Rather, refreshingly he explores a set of case-studies which demonstrate the physical and psychological investments of African-Americans in the second half of their hyphenated identity.
However, he then goes onto pessimistically argue that it was this investment in national (racist U.S.) systems and identity that overrode intra-racial alliances between U.S. and Haitian blacks stifling if not dooming black pan-Americanism to failure.5 In support of this he demonstrates U.S. African-Americans’ psychological investment (like the wider U.S. population) in U.S. paternalism. This aided, what Polyné highlights as, the problematic conflation in U.S. black consciousness of the history and objectives of the Haitian Revolution, with an ideal imagined Haiti as a ‘city upon a hill’, which requires their assistance to be uplifted to ‘finish the unfinished’ revolution which would could Haiti perfectly representative of black achievement.6
This text also approaches the subject of ‘silences’ so memorably asserted by Laurent Dubois, with regard to Haiti’s place in historical memory, from a novel angle. Rather than re-layering the idea of U.S. African Americans struggling to assert the importance of Haiti’s revolution in the wake of Western discourses silencing of it as an unthinkable history. (As Kachun notes, so popular in current historiography that historians themselves are creating a ‘historical mythology’ of African American celebrations that there is not definitive evidence for.7) Polyné highlights U.S. African-American hesitations to recount this history, and silences about it when contemporary Haiti presented a less attractive option than other intra-racial symbols or national inter-racial opportunities.
Most notably the hesitation of the vast majority of U.S. African-Americans to criticise the marine invasion of Haiti in 1915, until they had a need to speak through the injustices of that regime to highlight their own unjust experiences in the ‘Red Summer’ and the need to fight to establish an anti-lynching bill.8 Similarly after the years of cultural, economic and personal intra-racial relationships between these two groups Polyné notes the somewhat disappointing ‘deemphasising [of] the importance of Haiti’ among U.S. African Americans.9 Polyné locates the origins of this deterioration, and the slow silencing of Haiti as a symbol of race pride, in the 1960s, as a result of the actions, and mainstream press accounts, of the Duvalier dictatorship.
Each case adds a layer which supports this fresh perspective and cements the foundational argument of the need for a broader understanding of the role of pan-Americanism in the consciousness of African-Americans.
1 Millery Polyné, From Douglass to Duvalier, p.15
2 Ibid, p.11: including emigration, diplomacy, mission, economic co-operatives and, anti-imperialist campaigns.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid, p.7
5 Ibid, p,24
6 Ibid, p.4: Quoting Ron Daniels scheme ‘Cruising into History’. A weeklong salute to 1791 planned for August 2004 in the United States, aimed at promoting future economic and cultural development in Haiti which was ‘shipwrecked’ by the political unrest of Artistide’s kidnap in February.
7
Mitch Kachun, ‘Antebellum African Americans, Public Commemoration, and the Haitian Revolution: A Problem of Historical Mythmaking’ in Jackson and Bacon (eds), African Americans and the Haitian Revolution, p.93-106
8 Millery Polyné, From Douglass to Duvalier, p.62
9 Ibid, p.186
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Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon (eds), African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents, 2010 (Routledge: London and New York)
Review By: Wendy Asquith (University of Liverpool)
Published: December 2010
Jackson and Bacon’s edited volume is a collection of recent work which provides key contextualisation of African Americans interaction with the Haitian Revolution from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century. These essays and case-studies presented as a collection are so compelling because stylistically mirroring the historical ebb and flow of ideas across ‘porous borders’, the works in this volume converse with each other. They present a variety of evidence which unarguably attests to the enduring influence which Haiti has and continues to have on the actions and consciousness of African-Americans. From Toussaint inspired soldiers fighting the American Civil War while singing ‘La Marseillaise’ to the projects and words of Danny Glover contemporary activist and co-founder of louverture films.1
These chapters span a number of disciplines: From the outset, the editors present, the roots of the ‘transtemporal’ and transnational nature of the work to follow.2 These can be found in the expanding scope of African-American studies, and Atlantic approaches. Byman places this in a wider scholarly trend of “considering “bodies of water” as well as “land masses ... as sites of connectivity and mutual influence,” through which we can explore “diasporas, mobility, diversity, cultural borrowing, and the porousness of borders.”3
Fanning and Alexander both consider movement across material borders in the African-American emigration movements to post-revolutionary Haiti. However they present differences of accentuation in looking at the significance of these movements. Alexander explores this phenomenon from the 1820s to its ultimate end in the 1860s as ‘phantasms’ and escapist fantasies which many who physically partook of returned dissatisfied with the realities of the ‘black republic’.4 Fanning however delves deeper into the 1820s movement but seems unable to reconcile herself with the idea that African-Americans were dissatisfied with physically living in Haiti, she substitutes a less than convincing supposition and misses what I believe is the real power of Haiti in the black Atlantic: Its symbolic significance of black pride, potential and achievement. This provided so strong a pull on the minds of free blacks in America that, at a time when they were despised and frustrated at home, despite the post-revolutionary turmoil in Haiti like a siren it called across the waters: a mirage of a diasporic homeland, successfully drawing in 6000 to 13000 African-American migrants, temporarily.5
At times these essays unabashedly and directly present conflicting views, notably over the controversial issue of public commemoration of the Haitian Revolution. A number of chapters casually make reference to the assumed occurrence of such events among African-Americans.6 Kachun, however, notes that little if any primary evidence has been presented by the scholarship as a whole for these assertions, and he goes on to meticulously observe the accumulation of a “historical mythology” through a “well-intentioned” “scholarly collusion”. Kachun’s essay is important as it warns against an assumption of repeated though unsubstantiated information in a field of study which has gained notable popularity in recent years. However, in conflict with Kachun labelling this scholarly trajectory as ‘counterproductive and downright dangerous’, I find this occurrence infinitely interesting and demonstrative of the enduring potency of Haiti’s history as a mythology or folktale.7
Though this volume is mainly a compilation of works that focus on textual sources, the themes and arguments constructed are nonetheless instrumental to a good understanding of the critical and enduring impact of the Haitian Revolution, and its heroes (interestingly female archetypes are introduced here through Bacon’s chapter8) on African-Americans. However Jackson’s ‘No Man Could Hinder Him: Remembering Toussaint…’ which takes a wide-ranging and at times unwieldy approach to twentieth century cultural remembrances of Toussaint and the Revolution considers a broader set of sources beyond the textual.9
Particularly Jackson presents a short in-depth consideration of a key visual source: Jacob Lawrence’s Toussaint L’Ouverture series.10 In discussing this work which memorialises the Revolution Jackson reveals some surprising influences on Lawrence, including his attendance at a play on the life of Toussaint by a W. Dubois, which he mistook for the famous African-American political leader and founding member of the NAACP, but was in fact a white southerner: William Du Bois. Jackson also discusses some motivations behind Lawrence’s Toussaint series and raises some interesting questions, including to what extent Lawrence as a 21 year old, painting this piece, understood the deeper implications of this dramatic story, though Jackson suggests no clear answer to this.
What is abundantly clear though, through the chronologically wide-ranging array of evidence presented in this volume, is that Haiti’s revolution and its aftermath have been undeniably key in African-American’s: recognition of their own potential and; galvanising themselves and their community to act in creating both material freedoms and continuing to inspire freedoms of mind. This event continually resonated with African Americans, ‘even as changing times gave is new meanings.’ 11 African Americans have not only encountered the Haitian Revolution as a historical reality, but socially and culturally have redefined, reshaped and retold it as a defining collective memory, key to the cosmology of African American and indeed black Atlantic consciousness: ‘the touchstone of a transatlantic identity’. 12
1 Matthew J. Clavin, American Toussaints: Symbol, Subversion, and the Black Atlantic Tradition in the American Civil War, p.110; Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, Introduction, p.1
2 Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, Introduction, p.2
3 Ibid.
4 Leslie M. Alexander, “The Black Republic”: The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on Northern Black Political Consciousness, 1816-1862, pp.57-80
5 Sara C. Fanning, The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans’ Invocation of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century, pp.39-58
6 Ibid., p.39
7 Mitch Kachun , Antebellum African Americans, Public Commemoration, and the Haitian Revolution: A Problem of Historical Mythmaking, p.105
8 Although the disappointing lack of further evidence beyond two female figures: one of which, Madame Christophe, is made famous primarily as the wife of Henri Christophe, and the other; Theresa, is a fictional character, makes this argument feel somewhat forced, this gender angle is interesting and one which has lacked in the historiography up to this point; Jacqueline Bacon: “A Revolution Unexampled in the History of Man”: The Haitian Revolution in Freedom’s Jounral, 1827-1829, pp.86-90
9 This chapter covers the vast ground of: black 20th century political leaders, including some West Indians such as C.L.R. James; African-American engagement with US invasion; a variety of literary responses including McKay; theatrical pieces; dance; anthropology and; jazz music.
10 Maurice Jackson, No Man Could Hinder Him: Remembering Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in the History and Culture of the African American People, p. 150-152
11 Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, Introduction, p.4
12 Ibid.
