From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964 (review)

For all the changes that have swept through public address scholarship in recent decades, one stubborn mainstay has been its U.S. centrism. This, despite the sea change in disciplines such as American history and literature that testify to America's entanglement with the rest of the world. Millery Polyne's From Douglass to Duvalier is just the kind of book rhetoricians will want to consult if they are interested in revisioning the history of the field in a more cosmopolitan direction.

From Douglass to Duvalier offers a history of how U.S. blacks and Haitian intellectuals and leaders sought to fashion a black pan-American identity bound by a common interest in Haiti. This identity was articulated in part as an alternative to an existing U.S.-centric, imperialistic, pan-Americanism whose discourse was often inflected by white supremacist assumptions. More than that, however, U.S. and Haitian intellectuals were also anxious to display Haiti's success as a symbol of "black potentiality and humanity" (5).

But, as Polyne painstakingly shows, black pan-Americanism did not function in simple opposition to nationalism. The activists he profiles were persistently caught in a dialectical tension between lofty transnational ideals and—sometimes unconscious, sometimes pragmatic—fealty to national interests. On the one hand, it was manifestly clear that in proclaiming solidarity across national lines, U.S. and Haitian intellectuals were challenging prevailing nationalist allegiances. On the other hand, they often argued for a pan-American identity to strengthen their hand in domestic contestations. Moreover, for all their efforts at seeking to articulate an alternative pan-American identity based on cooperation and mutual respect, U.S. blacks could not completely transcend the presumptions and attitudes of national supremacy and condescension then in widespread circulation among U.S. citizens.

The upshot was that black pan-Americanist discourse was often riddled with contradictions, aporias, and good intentions gone awry. Each of the book's chapters seeks to offer a case study of how black intellectuals and leaders attempted to reconcile these competing pressures and interests. However, because each of his chapters is essentially freestanding, Polyne's book has an episodic, rather disjointed quality. The first chapter focuses on the activism of Frederick Douglass on behalf of Haiti. Buoyed by the fall of the institution of slavery and the spectacular progress that ushered a class of African Americans into a variety of political and administrative posts within the U.S. government, Douglass proclaimed that the United States had been transformed into a "multiform, composite nationality" (29). Consequently, he championed a transnational identity within which the United States would establish deep commercial relations with countries such as Haiti and annex other countries such as Santo Domingo (the current Dominican Republic). He repudiated any forcible annexation of territories in the Americas, attacking the U.S. myth of manifest destiny as nothing but "manifest piracy" (26). Nonetheless, his belief that other populations in the Americas would gratefully submit to U.S. hegemony echoed U.S. nationalist assumptions of supremacy. Douglass would eventually, however, dramatically revise his views in the wake of the assault on Reconstruction by domestic forces of reaction and his growing alarm at the increasingly militaristic turn in U.S. foreign policy as the century drew to an end. His disillusionment led to his resignation as the U.S. minister to Haiti.

Chapter 2 examines the efforts of U.S. black intellectuals to lead reforms of the Haitian educational system during the U.S. government's occupation of the country in the early twentieth century. Many of the commissioners shared Booker T. Washington's ideology of racial uplift through moral improvement, the very ideology that was complicit with the capitalism that had devastated Haiti. Nonetheless, in part because of what they learned during the trip and in part because of their mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. government, the commissioners would issue...