Beyond Authenticity: The US Occupation of Haiti and the Politics of Folk Culture

This essay turns to a seminal ethnography, Jean Price-Mars’s So Spoke the Uncle (Ainsi parla l’oncle), considering this text’s engagement with the politics and poetics of Black folk culture during the US occupation of Haiti. It is well established that So Spoke the Uncle (1928) is a foundational text in indigéniste and noiriste movements, which offered ideological responses to the problem of US imperialism by turning to the beliefs and cultural practices of the masses. However, a full understanding of Price-Mars’s legacy must include his participation in transnational conversations on folk culture that invigorated Black literary production in the interwar period. While Price-Mars is often read as a purveyor of authentic folk culture, I argue that he turned to the folk not merely to reinforce their authenticity, but to demonstrate their historicity. Given the intellectual climate, this understanding of the folk was a strategic epistemological intervention. On one hand Price-Mars challenged an ongoing imperial narrative that cast Haitian culture as not only barbaric, but also ahistorical: fundamentally detached from (yet paradoxically a threat to) civilized modernity. On the other hand, his work also revised celebrations of folk culture that nostalgically relegated this group to a space of premodern myth, even as the folk served as passive inspiration for the modern artist. Price-Mars’s comparative method and his emphasis on the subversive potential of Vodou and folklore help to emphasize the folk’s active participation in the historical processes that had shaped Haiti since before the revolution. Neither primitive threat nor nostalgic anecdote to modernity, the folk themselves are modern. By highlighting the historicity of the folk, Price-Mars is able to emphasize the material circumstances of their lives and argue for their role in strategies of resistance.