Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: “The unfitness of the Haitian people to govern themselves has been the subject of propaganda for the last century,” wrote James Weldon Johnson in 1920. Deploying the racially charged discourse of “fitness,” Johnson locates his study of the Haitian Occupation within an historic discourse on “negro capacity” that remained anchored to the question of black self-determination during the first half of the 20th century. An Occupation driven not simply by economic imperatives but shaped by a war psychology birthed during the global conflict abroad, Haiti offered fertile ground for both white supremacists and black intellectuals engaging the problem of black American civil rights. Against the United States’ imperialist occupation and cultural fetishization of Haiti, African Americans wielded the revolutionary history of the island as an instrument for extending African American civil rights within a global crisis over race and colonialisms. Their revisionist aesthetic for Haiti became part of a civil rights discourse on peace and democracy, on sovereignty and equality, after W.W. I. Reading Langston Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti, Troubled Island (1936) alongside his coverage of the Spanish Civil War, I outline a black internationalism that yoked domestic racial policies to the threatened sovereignty of Ethiopia and Haiti and to the rise of fascism in Western Europe. The figure of the slave anchors Hughes’s acerbic critique of modernity, his demands for black civil rights, and his indictment of the shifting political landscape announced by the rise of fascism and by the sustained colonialisms in Africa, India, the West Indies, and a segregated United States. The retreat to Haiti’s revolutionary past by black intellectuals during this period disrupted geographical and national distances and sublated ethnic and historical particularities among blacks in the Atlantic, instead emphasizing a shared history of New World enslavement. These revisionist histories did more than adjudicate a set of social and political symmetries across the black Atlantic, did more than supply a corrective to traditional historiography on the black body: rather, they posited an ineluctable changing same within something that may be classed as the modern black condition. Their restagings refused the partitive dimensions of history. Casting the Haitian revolution as a scene of black possibility and hope, as a political manifesto, and as an internationalized call to black political solidarity, they recalled the island’s historic utopian promise for black civil life despite its present attenuation. In their resurrection of the figure of the (Haitian) slave body, black intellectuals articulated the necessity of new forms of social and political relation for a world steadfastly wed to the sociopolitical and economic gains supported by black disenfranchisement and colonialism. The figure of the slave became a supple trope for unpacking the problem of sovereignty and freedom placed in crisis by Du Bois’s semi colonial black Americans. Part of a larger, anti-colonial campaign, their writings rehearse Du Bois’s turn of the century claim that the “color line belt the world,” and anticipate African American petitions for human and civil rights, and decolonization struggles that would mark the aftermath of W.W.II.