Red & Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 (review)

Red & Black in Haiti details the way radical activists in Port-au-Prince shaped national politics by espousing different strands of nationalist, race- and class-based ideologies in the period between the exit of United States Marines from the country in 1934 and François Duvalier's rise to power in 1957. Through various oral interviews and a close engagement with archival sources in Haiti, the United States, and France, Matthew J. Smith (2009) offers a narrative that avoids the pitfalls of previous studies that treat the period as "the postscript or prelude to studies of the occupation or Duvalier" (p. 2). Each of the book's five chapters, with the exception of one detailing the Revolution of 1946, corresponds to one of the three presidential administrations and the period of military rule between 1934 and 1957. Over the span of these political administrations, Smith argues, the radical movements opposing them became less ideologically unified, increasingly propelled by popular sectors, and more likely to use violence for political ends (p. xx).

Red & Black enters ongoing debates in Haitian historiography about the role of race, class, and color in the political sphere. It also makes significant contributions to understandings of the effects of the U.S. occupation on Haitian politics, the Revolution of 1946, the rise of François Duvalier, and the relationship between all three. Finally, by identifying activists' relationships with the United States and their commonalities with counterparts in Latin America and the Caribbean, Haitian radicals are firmly placed within their regional context. The result is a book that will be of interest for students, not just of 20th century Haiti, but of race and radical politics in the Americas as well.

In the final decade of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, different urban opposition movements rallied around common visions of Haitian nationalism that had been forged out of the written and armed opposition to the foreign invaders. But as Smith shows, the relative nationalist unity of the 1920s eroded in the post-occupation years. By the late 1930s, the ideological cleavage between Marxists and noiristes, Haiti's radical black nationalists, was clearly defined, even though both had their origins in this moment of relative unity. The 1946 formation of the PPN, a popular front composed of both communists and noiristes, represented the final, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt at collaboration (pp. 83-86). As the 1940s wore on, Smith ably demonstrates, divisions deepened, not just between Marxists and noiristes, but also within the respective movements. The original Parti Communiste Haitien of 1934 was joined by the Parti Socialiste Populaire (PSP) and smaller organizations. Their differences were partially based on disagreements about the interactions of class and color in Haiti (pp. 19, 86-88). Such factionalism also occurred among noiristes. Dumarsais Estimé, the first noiriste president in Haiti, was criticized by one-time cabinet member Daniel Fignolé, for taking a soft stance against Haiti's light-skinned, wealthy elite (pp. 121).

As Haitian radical movements became more ideologically splintered, their membership, as a result of the growth of the labor movement, was increasingly composed of the urban lower classes. This is exemplified by the trajectory and mobilizing techniques of different noiriste organizations from the 1920s to the 1940s. Although the Griots study group of the 1920s, arguably the birthplace of noirisme, was made up of individuals outside of Haiti's traditional elite, its treatises about the "psychological and biological distinctiveness of African and African-descended peoples" limited its appeal to a relatively small group of lettered Haitians (p. 24). By the late 1940s, the noiriste message was manifest in emerging forms of popular culture like vodou-djazz (p. 106). Even more demonstrative is the woulu konmpresè (steamroller), "a large amalgam of disenfranchised and impoverished blacks that Fignolé could at the shortest notice arouse with a simple call to march" (p. 86).

Red & Black criticizes previous studies that interpret the conflicts...