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
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Notes
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944) p. 90.
Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1938) p. 271.
Mabel Steedman, Unknown to the World, Haiti (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939) p. 172.
Ruth Wilson, Here Is Haiti (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1957) p. 1.
E. Wilson, Red, Black, Blond, Olive (London: W. H. Allen, 1956) p. 44.
M. Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (New York: Doubleday, 1971) p. 179.
H. Courlander, Haiti Singing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939) p. 1.
J. Leyburn, The Haitian People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966) p. 4.
Courlander and Bastien, Religion and Politics in Haiti (Washington: Institute for Cross-Cultural Research, 1966) p. 40.
Maya Deren The Voodoo Gods (Frogmore: Paladin, 1975) p. 14.
V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre (New York: Vintage Books, 1984) p. 90.
Sidney Mintz, Introduction to Voodoo in Haiti (London: André Deutsch, 1972), p. 2.
H. Cave, Haiti, Highroad to Adventure (New York: Holt & Co., 1952) p. 170.
H. Cave, The Cross on the Drum (New York: Doubleday, 1958) p. 172.
P. Thoby-Marcelin, Panorama de l’art haitien (Port-au-Prince: Imp. de l’Etat, 1956).
L. Rosemond, Haiti et les Etats Unis (Port-au-Prince: Imp. Pierre Noel, 1945) pp. 21–2.
B. Ormerod, ‘Collapse of Stout Party: Two Haitian Views of the Anglo-Saxon Intruder’, Perspectives on Language and Literature (Mona: University of the West Indies, 1985) p. 53.
A. Métraux, Itinéraires I (Paris: Payot, 1978) p. 148.
J. B. Cinéas, L’Héritage Sacré (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1945) p. 72.
R. Depestre, Etincelles (Port-au-Prince: Imp. de l’Etat, 1945) p. 2.
For a discussion of some of these values see B. Ormerod, Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel (London: Heinemann, 1985) pp. 87–107.
J.-S. Alexis, Compère Général Soldi (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) p. 191.
J.-S. Alexis, Les arbres musiciens (Paris: Gallimard, 1957) p. 78.
J.-S. Alexis, Romancero aux étoiles (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) p. 208.
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© 1997 J. Michael Dash
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Dash, J.M. (1997). Passionate Apologists: Haiti and the Unitea States in the Post-Occupation Years. In: Haiti and the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25219-0_4
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