Pathbreaking and provocative, Taking Haiti illuminates the complex interplay between culture and acts of violence in the making of the American empire. discourses on Haiti, including the writings of policymakers the diaries, letters, songs, and memoirs of marines stationed in Haiti and literary works by such writers as Eugene O'Neill, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 15. Her analysis draws on a rich record of U.S. 11 Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. She explores the ways in which diverse Americans-including activists, intellectuals, artists, missionaries, marines, and politicians-responded to paternalist constructs, shaping new versions of American culture along the way.

imperialism.Īt the heart of this emerging culture, Renda argues, was American paternalism, which saw Haitians as wards of the United States. contact with Haiti during the occupation and its aftermath, Mary Renda shows that what Americans thought and wrote about Haiti during those years contributed in crucial and unexpected ways to an emerging culture of U.S. and Haitian governments into a kick-back corruption scheme inside its Washington embassy. Rendas Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Haiti has fired its ambassador to the United States, Bocchit Edmond, following investigations by the U.S. cultural understandings of Haiti that prompted Donald Pifer to consider a solitary white marine to be a king. soldiers, like Faustin Wirkus, and the U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 explores both the experiences of U.S. Exploring the cultural dimensions of U.S. The central literature on Haiti is as follows: Mary A. Renda's Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. invasion of Haiti in July 1915 marked the start of a military occupation that lasted for nineteen years-and fed an American fascination with Haiti that flourished even longer.

Taking Haiti by Mary A. Renda