Passionate Apologists: Haiti and the United States in the Post-Occupation Years

Abstract

Even after the end of the American Occupation in 1934 Haiti continued to be visible in terms of antithetical extremes — land of promise or land of savagery, where the natives were nobly or ignobly black. Either uncritically idealized or blindly denigrated, Haiti had become the stock in trade for cheap sensationalist fiction, such as Theodore Roscoe’s Murder on the Way (1935) — a murder mystery complete with voodoo drums and malevolent zombies. However, at the end of the decade, Haitian-American relations entered a new phase. Politically and culturally a new ‘order of things’ was established, as Americans, like Plato’s Cave dwellers, bravely turned away from what appeared to be Haiti’s disturbing strangeness and tried to face the reality of Haiti.

What came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre and that of the catalogue was … a new way of connecting things to the eye and to discourse.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things