Abstract
Crisis is used as a mechanism to put in motion a series of imperial performatives and performances. The sinking of the USS Maine, for example, was a prelude to the War of 1898, the revision of the Cuban constitution via the Platt Amendment, and the implementation of several short military occupations of the island over the next few decades. This approach to achieving the aims of empire is repeated in the case of the almost 20-year-long US military occupation of the Republic of Haiti (1915–34). The required crisis event that set imperial performativity in motion was the public execution of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam on July 27, 1915. The incident had been witnessed by telescope from the USS Washington, which was docked off Port-au-Prince. Under the Roosevelt Corollary, crisis was again used to issue a script for military-imperial performance. But rather than delivering a declaration of war as had been the case in 1898, the USA implemented an armed infiltration of Haitian territory by Marines, seizure of the Haitian customs office, revision of its constitution, and harsh, prolonged military occupation. The crisis method of imperial takeover uses events such as the explosion of the USS Maine or the execution of a foreign President in order to simultaneously downplay and enact pre-existing imperial motives—in this context, the goal had been to secure control of the Canal Zone and the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, which provided the deepest access for industrial and military shipping to and from the eastern seaboard of the United States and to minimize the possibility of future revolutions in the two countries. Crisis—perform—repeat.
Haiti is all negro, and has been “free” for genrations [sic]. Cui bono? Their “religion” is a mere mummery, and cannibalism a recognized institution.
—Rev. Thomas May Thorpe, 1898 (“White and Black),” New York Times, (November 27 1898).
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Notes
- 1.
Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 90–91.
- 2.
Frederick Bausman et al., The Seizure of Haiti by the United States: A Report on the Military Occupation of the Republic of Haiti and the History of the Treaty Forced Upon Her, ed. The Foreign Policy Association (Washington DC: The National Popular Government League, 1922).
- 3.
“crisis—perform—repeat” is the title of a multi-media performance I gave related to this material at the Northern California Performance Platform, UC Davis, March 2013.
- 4.
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 132.
- 5.
Ibid., 8.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), 7.
- 8.
Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 187.
- 9.
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 135.
- 10.
Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 71.
- 11.
George Currie, “W.B. Seabrook Returns from Jungle; Wirkus Steps Down from Throne--Books,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 5 1931, 63.
- 12.
Faustin Wirkus et al., The White King of La Gonave (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1931), 4.
- 13.
Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 6.
- 14.
Ibid., 5.
- 15.
“Introduction,” Wirkus et al., White King, xi–xii.
- 16.
Ibid., xii.
- 17.
Ibid., xii–xiii.
- 18.
Ibid., 4.
- 19.
Ibid., xiii.
- 20.
Ibid., 88, 97.
- 21.
What Roediger calls “blackface-on-Black” violence was common in the US from 1837 to 1848. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working-Class (London: Verso, 1991), 106.
- 22.
Wirkus et al., White King, 68.
- 23.
Ibid., 93, 112.
- 24.
John Houston Craige, Black Bagdad: The Arabian Nights Adventures of a Marine Captain in Haiti (New York: Minton, Balch, 1933), 129, 37.
- 25.
Ibid., 2.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Ibid., 128, 41.
- 28.
Wirkus et al., White King, 3.
- 29.
Craige, Black Bagdad, 41.
- 30.
Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 5.
- 31.
Wirkus et al., White King, 108.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Ibid., 108, 109.
- 35.
Ibid., 115–116.
- 36.
Ibid., 116.
- 37.
Ibid., 123.
- 38.
Ibid., 124.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
Craige, Black Bagdad, 99, 101.
- 41.
Wirkus et al., White King, 167.
- 42.
Renda, Taking Haiti, 10–11.
- 43.
Péralte qtd. in ibid., 151. “Bandits or Patriots?: Documents from Charlemagne Péralte,” George Mason University, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4946/
- 44.
“Bandits or Patriots?”
- 45.
John Houston Craige, Cannibal Cousins (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934), 96.
- 46.
Renda, Taking Haiti, 343 n. 159.
- 47.
Colonel Frederic M. Wise et al., A Marine Tells It to You (New York: J.H. Sears & Company, Inc., 1929), 321.
- 48.
Craige, Cousins, 93.
- 49.
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
- 50.
Shannon Steen, “Melancholy Bodies: Racial Subjectivity and Whiteness in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones,” Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 354.
- 51.
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 46. Stoddard, Rising Tide, 7.
- 52.
———, Rising Tide, 5.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
Ibid., 17, 54, 87, 104.
- 55.
Wirkus et al., White King, 40–41.
- 56.
Ibid.
- 57.
Ibid., 66–67.
- 58.
“Why the Black Cannibals of Hayti Mutilated Our Soldiers,” New York American, February 13 1921; “Voodoo Still Has Its Worshippers in ‘Black Republic’,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 14 1922; Beale Davis, The Goat without Horns (New York: Brentano’s, 1925); John Estevan, Voodoo: A Murder Mystery (New York: Doubleday, 1930); Gary D. Rhodes, White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film (Jefferson: McFarland & Co. Publishers, 2001), 32.
- 59.
Wirkus et al., White King, 137.
- 60.
Ibid., 136–137.
- 61.
Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 7.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Hesketh Pritchard, Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti (New York: Westminster, 1900).
- 64.
William Seabrook, The Magic Island (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 281–282.
- 65.
Renda, Taking Haiti, 80–81.
- 66.
Craige, Cousins, 136–142, 137.
- 67.
Ibid., 144–145.
- 68.
Ibid., 145.
- 69.
Ibid.
- 70.
Wirkus et al., White King, 180.
- 71.
Ibid., 179–182.
- 72.
Craige, Black Bagdad, 1–2.
- 73.
Ibid., 129. Stoddard, Rising Tide, 5.
- 74.
bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992).
- 75.
Scott Nearing et al., Dollar Diplomacy: A Study in American Imperialism [1925] (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1969), 134–137.
- 76.
Ibid., 136.
- 77.
Ibid., 137.
- 78.
Ibid., 138.
- 79.
Renda, Taking Haiti, 10. Nearing et al., Dollar Diplomacy, 139.
- 80.
———, Dollar Diplomacy, 138–143.
- 81.
Webb’s play was at the Biltmore in New York in February 1932 and then at the Adelphi in Chicago. Rhodes, Anatomy, 85. It does not appear to be extant, but descriptions of a few scenes remain, e.g. Bordman discusses one “creepy scene” in the “lurid” play where a “line of silent, stiff zombies” surrounds their victim’s “bungalow.” Gerald Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930–1969 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 48. This imagery seems indebted to the illustrations in Seabrook’s publication.
- 82.
Edward Lowry et al., “Enunciation and the Production of Horror in White Zombie,” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1984), 386 n.10. While there is no evidence of a suit or trial, there may have been an out-of-court settlement. Rhodes, Anatomy, 92.
- 83.
———, Anatomy, 161, 183.
- 84.
Ibid., 161.
- 85.
“3 Sued for $25,000 in ‘Theft’ of ‘Haiti’,” Variety, August 10 1938.
- 86.
Ibid.
- 87.
Martin Dies Jr. chaired the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), or Dies Committee, until 1945.
- 88.
Victor Halperin, “White Zombie,” ([Los Angeles?]: United Artists Corporation, 1932). Rhodes, Anatomy.
- 89.
e.g. Revolt of the Zombies (1936), King of the Zombies (1941), Revenge of the Zombies (1943), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).
- 90.
It is unlikely that Webb’s play had any influence on the film, which was shot in March. Rhodes, Anatomy, 111.
- 91.
George Cable, “Creole Slave Songs,” The Century Magazine, April 1886. The zombie legend may be related to an article of Haitian law that considers the use of drugs to simulate death and the burial of living persons as an act of attempted murder. There is little chance it is based on the historical Jean Zombi, who was allegedly instrumental in Haiti’s fight for independence. Rhodes, Anatomy, 75. I am not concerned with tracing Haitian origins, but with the cultural currency of the zombie in the USA.
- 92.
Written in 1927 as Grand Zombi, it won a national drama contest and was performed by Le Petit Théâtre in New Orleans in 1928. Published by Theatre Arts Monthly in 1929, it won the magazine’s international contest. Natalie Vivian Scott, “Zombi,” Theatre Arts Monthly 13, no. 1 (1929): 53. Republished in ———, “Zombi,” in Plays of American Life and Fantasy, ed. Edith J. R. Isaacs (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1929). John W. Scott, Natalie Scott: A Magnificent Life (Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2008), 265–67.
- 93.
Rhodes, Anatomy, 75.
- 94.
Halperin, “White Zombie.”
- 95.
Robert Miles, “Abjection, Nationalism and the Gothic,” in Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Fred Botting, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 195.
- 96.
Ibid., 205.
- 97.
Rhodes, Anatomy, 45.
- 98.
Tony Williams, “White Zombie, Haitian Horror,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 28 (1983): 18–19.
- 99.
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 43.
- 100.
Halperin, “White Zombie.”
- 101.
Rhodes, Anatomy, 46.
- 102.
Ibid., 321 n. 92.
- 103.
Halperin, “White Zombie.”
- 104.
Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 3.
- 105.
Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997).
- 106.
Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (New York: Praeger, 1964).
- 107.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 83–108.
- 108.
Halperin, “White Zombie.”
- 109.
Woodson describes miscegenation as a performance of white masculine privilege. Carter G. Woodson, “The Beginnings of the Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks,” The Journal of Negro History 3, no. 4 (1918).
- 110.
Lowry et al., “Enunciation,” 350–351.
- 111.
Halperin, “White Zombie.”
- 112.
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2.
- 113.
Craige, Black Bagdad, 139–140.
- 114.
Wirkus et al., White King, 94–95.
- 115.
Craige, Black Bagdad, 54.
- 116.
Wirkus et al., White King, 29–30.
- 117.
Ibid., 31.
- 118.
Ibid., 33.
- 119.
Ibid., 275, 283. See descriptions of “the king’s two bodies” and “The King is Dead—Long Live the King!” in Roach, Cities, 38, 68–71.
- 120.
Renda, Taking Haiti, 5.
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Riley, S.R. (2016). Military Occupation in Haiti: Staging Pan-Whiteness in a World of Color. In: Performing Race and Erasure. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59211-8_5
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