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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.2 (2002) 317-319



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Book Review

Taking Haiti:
Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940


Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940. By Mary A. Renda (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001) 414 pp. $49.95 cloth $19.95

Renda uses interdisciplinary cultural categories and methods, mostly literary criticism in the American Studies style, to examine the Haiti occupation as a key exemplar of the culture of U.S. imperialism during the early twentieth century. From an experiential, existential perspective, how did Faustin Wirkus in The White King of La Gonave (Garden City, 1931), John Houston Craige in Black Baghdad (New York, 1933), and Cannibal Cousins (New York, 1934), and other marines imagine their experiences? What were their expectations in going to Haiti, and how were they confirmed or reshaped by experiences? Renda focuses on "subjective experience and identity" to explore "the cultural and material dynamic of empire building" in order to show "that empire requires [End Page 317] stories as well as guns" (9). This strategy includes, on the darkest side, study of "the cultural processes that shaped the violence of imperialism" (4). In her broadest projection, Renda contends that the lore transmitted home by marines, journalists, and other cultural interpreters indicated that the Haiti occupation "was no sideshow" but "one of several important arenas in which the United States was remade through overseas imperial ventures" (12).

The effectiveness of this method depends largely on the thoroughness, scope, and choice of detail with which Renda explores her material. The book is thoroughly researched, using private letters, diaries, and published writings of marines and others to illuminate personal perspectives of individuals, and then to show how these sources blended with pervasive official and popular American attitudes. Witnesses include many enlisted marines, as well as such superiors as marine officer Smedley D. Butler and President Woodrow Wilson.

The central theme of the occupation, adopted universally by white Americans, was paternalism, to which a chapter is devoted, as well as are numerous references throughout the book. Renda sees paternalism "as a discourse of domination that shaped those assigned to carry it out" (312), as opposed to Genovese's eminent interpretation of paternalism as a relationship that shaped both masters and slaves.1 Wilson's racist paternalism is seen as "fundamental to his approach to Latin America," and thus instrumental in military interventions "founded upon racial hierarchy and political domination" (113). Renda pays little attention to the Haitian side of the relationship.

The book is divided into two parts—the first on the dynamics of American culture in Haiti and the second on the impact of the Haiti occupation upon American culture as revealed by its travel literature, popular writing, and pulp fiction during the 1920s and 1930s. A lengthy discussion of Eugene O'Neill's play Emperor Jones (1920) describes the play as "the first major artistic translation of the U.S. occupation of Haiti in the United States," illustrating "a fundamental contrast between the discourses of paternalism and exoticism, despite their usual alliance in support of U.S. imperialism" (198, 208). A section on the "Commodification of Haiti" elaborates the many exotic representations of voodoo and other Haitiana, in the spirit of O'Neill's "primitivist rendering" (212).

Along with the many sensational, exploitatively racist pulp works, Renda systematically reviews such respected literature as James Weldon Johnson's journalism in Crisis and Nation, Langston Hughes' reporting in New Masses and elsewhere—following his sympathetic 1931 sojourn in Haiti—and Zora Neale Hurston's anthropological novel Tell My Horse (Philadelphia, 1938). Edna Taft's A Puritan in Voodooland (Philadelphia, 1938) provides a female perspective on sexual fantasies to contrast with those of the marines and white male pulp writers. [End Page 318]

Renda argues that "relations of power at work in the occupation facilitated U.S. Americans' appropriation of Haitian themes, and such cultural appropriations in turn effaced those very relations of power" (185). But whether Americans' commodification of...

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