Haiti and the Americas

6. The Black Magic Island: The Artistic Journeys of Alexander King and Aaron Douglas from and to Haiti

133 6 The Black Magic Island: The Artistic Journeys of Alexander King and Aaron Douglas from and to Haiti —Lindsay Twa “Blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened . . . danced their dark saturnalia” (fig. 1). Readers familiar with Haiti and its representation in U.S. culture will recognize this drawing by Alexander King from William Seabrook’s 1929 best-selling pseudo-anthropological travelogue on Haiti, The Magic Island. We scholars of Haiti love to hate Seabrook’s book and King’s accompanying drawings, decrying how they are emblematic of European- and American-centric representations of Haiti at their most exoticizing, titillating, and racist extreme. Beyond the requisite excoriating remarks, however, few scholars have actually attempted a contextual artistic analysis of King’s images.1 This is perhaps because to engage with them would seem to dignify their representations, or perhaps because they seem so extreme and naked in their primitivism and racism that we assume any conclusions drawn must be tautological. But The Magic Island was not King’s first or his last artistic engagement with Haiti. A longitudinal engagement with his visioning and revisioning of Haiti can reveal not only the cultural complexities of primitivism but also how such representations were shaped and helped to shape the idea of Haiti within the early twentieth-century U.S. imagination. Moreover, the Austrian American King’s engagements with Haiti are surprisingly parallel to those of the famous African American painter Aaron Douglas. King’s undercontextualized images have long stood as the paragon of white misrepresentations, while Aaron Douglas, as the quintessential artist of the Harlem (New Negro) Renaissance, has long been presumed to have represented black subject matter automatically with greater nuance and validity. A comparison of their artistic lockstep thus exposes how certain visions came to dominate and be accepted as “authentic” representations of Haiti. Moreover , their common trajectory maps how imaginative encounters with Lindsay Twa 134 Haiti during the U.S. occupation (1915–34) gave way to greater aspirations to document and ethnographically record firsthand experiences in Haiti in the 1930s and 1940s. Such encounters, however, were still shaded by, and in dialogue with, earlier primitivistic assumptions. Alexander King’s first artistic encounter with Haiti begins one year before The Magic Island, with a series of illustrations for the 1928 Boni and Liveright special edition of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones. Many literary scholars and historians have discussed the Haiti-inspired elements that undergird this innovative play. I will not review their analysis here, Figure 1. Alexander King, “ . . . blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened . . . danced their dark saturnalia,” ca. 1928. Drawing. Published in William Seabrook, The Magic Island (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1929). Image used by permission of Margie King Barab. Artistic Journeys of Alexander King and Aaron Douglas 135 Figure 2. Francis Bruguiere, Charles Sidney Gilpin as Emperor Brutus Jones, (Provincetown Playhouse, 1920). Acetate negative. Photo by Vandamm Studio ©The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Figure 3. Alexander King, The Emperor Jones, Scene One, ca. 1928. Drawing. Published in Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1928). Image used by permission of Margie King Barab. Lindsay Twa 136 but suffice it to say that O’Neill links the play to the U.S. occupation of Haiti by describing the play’s setting as “an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by White Marines.” Moreover, O’Neill acknowledged taking inspiration from biographical details of Haiti’s King Christophe and President Sam (Gelb and Gelb, 438–39; Hanson, 23–43). And as the historian Mary Renda has shown, the play is a meditation on race, imperialism, primitivism, and national identity at the crossroads of Haiti-U.S. interactions (Renda, 196–212). Inspired by the play’s innovations, racial subject, and drama, many artists created their own interpretations of The Emperor Jones. They also capitalized on the play’s popularity for publishing opportunities. Artistic renderings usually mirrored standard publicity photographs: well-known actors posed in the full military costume of the play’s opening scene (fig. 2). Alexander King’s illustrations for The Emperor Jones are unusual in that they do not portray a specific actor (fig. 3). King does, however, still borrow the publicity photographs’ common visual vocabulary of tightly framed subject and dramatic lighting. Like the original photograph of Charles Gilpin, King’s lounging enthroned emperor appears haughty, fearless, and without...