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259 At the Feet of Dessalines Performing Haiti’s Revolution during the New Negro Renaissance CLARE CORBOULD Black Americans during the interwar years expended a remarkable amount of energy describing the history, culture, and current conditions of people in the nearby republic of Haiti. Their efforts went beyond nonfiction, with a diverse bunch of cultural producers turning their hands to the task, including librettists, composers, visual artists, filmmakers, photographers, and writers of short stories, poetry, novels, and plays. Such products were part of a cultural-political movement, known as the New Negro Renaissance, characterized by an intense scrutiny of all issues relating to black identity. Culture produced during the era challenged mainstream and dominant accounts of history, which claimed for the United States a unique position as the most progressive of nation-states, the founder of modern democracy , the place where the ideals formulated in ancient Greece finally came to fruition. Black writers and artists used a wide variety of cultural forms to campaign for adequate recognition of black Americans’ past and present contributions to the American nation, but also to challenge the rhetoric that asserted America was exceptional. In bringing Haiti to life on stage and in film, black Americans drew attention to the occupation by U.S. Marines of the neighboring republic and introduced into the public sphere a sustained and serious attack on the reputation and credibility of the United States. Denouncing their homeland as an imperial overlord, not so different from the European imperial states Americans so often defined themselves against, black Americans instead pledged their allegiance to Haitians, and by extension, with other colonized people around the world. Playwrights were fascinated by Haiti, and especially its 1791–1803 revolution , which delivered the Western Hemisphere its first independent black nation. That event was almost always sidelined in accounts of world history , Western history, and histories of the development of civilization.1 In black American history, by contrast, it was a signal and founding event. The 260 CLARE CORBOULD leading characters of that complicated rebellion and its tumultuous aftermath mesmerized black Americans one hundred years after the revolution’s close. Play after play focused on three men: brave, tragic Toussaint Louverture , betrayed by the French; self-proclaimed emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines , deposed by a coup that brought Henri Christophe to power in the north, who in turn completed the triumvirate in twentieth-century black Americans’ memory. Stage writers of the interwar years all but ignored the period of Haitian history from about 1820 to the 1920s and 1930s. Casting physically robust and often well-known male actors in the leading roles, black playwrights and directors staged a type of masculinity by and large unavailable to black American men, especially those who lived in lynching’s shadow in the segregated South. Staging Haiti therefore became a way to protest against both the occupation of the small nation and also American race relations.2 Inspiration for bringing Haiti to life came from many places. American slaves and free people of color had celebrated the black republic’s existence ever since its foundation in the revolutionary overthrow of a white slaveowning class.3 Some blacks emigrated to the Caribbean republic, including over 2,000 people in the middle of the nineteenth century.4 Reverence continued in the next century, for example in the naming of schools such as the Toussaint L’Ouverture Grammar School in St. Louis that writer Maya Angelou attended in the 1930s. Black activists and intellectuals vigorously promoted plays and pageants as one of the best means of improving the selfimage of black Americans, especially children. When troupes staged a production —studied their lines together, made sets, sewed costumes, coaxed audiences—they forged and strengthened community ties. Most interwar pageants and many plays, especially those of just one act, dramatized the lives of famed black men and women, past and present, as well as lauding the achievements of a race whose members had mostly been enslaved just some sixty years before. In time, it was hoped, such performances would improve race relations. Putting Haiti on stage came out of this fondness for performance as a means to improve psychological health. Haiti was in the mind’s eye for a less edifying reason. From 1915 until 1934, American Marines occupied the nation, purportedly for the benefit of Haitians. Haitians themselves were not so sure. Elites on the island were affronted by accusations of poor self-government, while poor Haitians were subject to the restoration of the dreaded corv...

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