Performing Race and Erasure

Cuba, Haiti, and US Culture, 1898–1940

Shannon Rose Riley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137592101
• eBook ISBN: 9781137592118
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

In this book, Shannon Rose Riley provides a critically rich investigation of representations of Cuba and Haiti in US culture in order to analyze their significance not only to the emergence of empire but especially to the reconfiguration of US racial structures along increasingly biracial lines. Based on impressive research and with extensive analysis of various textual and performance forms including a largely unique set of skits, plays, songs, cultural performances and other popular amusements, Riley shows that Cuba and Haiti were particularly meaningful to the ways that people in the US re-imagined themselves as black or white and that racial positions were renegotiated through what she calls acts of palimpsest: marking and unmarking, racing and erasing difference. Riley's book demands a reassessment of the importance of the occupations of Cuba and Haiti to US culture, challenging conventional understandings of performance, empire, and race at the turn of the twentieth century. 

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Shannon Rose RileyPerforming Race and ErasurePalgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History10.1057/978-1-137-59211-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Cuba, Haiti, and the USA: Performing Race, Nation, and Empire, 1898–1940

Shannon Rose Riley¹

(1)

San José State University, San Jose, CA, USA

End Abstract

Cuba, Haiti, and US Empire

On April 3, 1914, 4 months before the opening of the Panama Canal, William A. MacCorkle, state senator and former governor of West Virginia, delivered an address before the American Academy of Political and Social Science in Philadelphia on the value of Cuba and Haiti to US interests.¹ “Second to Cuba in strategical importance is the Island of Haiti,” the senator declared—and he framed the significance in terms of US foreign policy, which was invested in creating pathways and seaways for the flow of capital.² As evidence, he cited their proximity to the Canal, potential market value, and strategic importance as military additions to the geo-political Canal Zone.

To these aims, MacCorkle applied a racialized, imperial logic: he argued that Cuba and Haiti were crucial to US empire and its goal of seeking and securing new routes and markets because the two were geographically located in such a way that they “could largely control the commerce of practically half of the world” due to their position on either side of the Windward Passage—the 50-mile-wide strait between them and the only deep sea-lane from the eastern US seaboard to the new Canal (Fig. 1.1). Of utmost concern was that this power might end up in the hands of the “descendants of those slaves” who “control the Republic of Haiti.”³ Arguing that “Negro rule” had “destroyed this beautiful island” and quoting Rear-Admiral Colby M. Chester’s claim of a “general tendency of the people to revolution,” MacCorkle forecast that, “sooner or later the irresponsible government of the Republic of Haiti will commit the act that will involve us under the first clause and original application of the Monroe Doctrine.”⁴ For MacCorkle, the 1823 Monroe Doctrine (or more precisely its 1904 Roosevelt Corollary) was the solution to enact commercial and racial aims in the Passage and Canal Zone.

Fig. 1.1

“Map Showing Location of Haiti,” from MacCorkle’s The Monroe Doctrine in its Relation to the Republic of Haiti (1915). Note the Windward Passage route marked, “To New York”

At the time of MacCorkle’s address, the United States had already established a presence in Cuba via the War of 1898 and the Platt Amendment to the Cuban Constitution, which forced Cuba to accept US terms and military intervention.⁵ Within just over a year, as MacCorkle foresaw, the USA had its reason to begin a military occupation of Haiti that would last almost 20 years. Overlaying the timeline of the occupations with that of the Canal project foregrounds their strategic importance within the larger scope of empire and allows me to delineate a micro-geography of empire for analysis, namely the period of the US occupations of Cuba and Haiti, from 1898 to 1940.

US military and economic control of Cuba began in 1898 when the US government declared war against Spain and performed an armed intervention on Cuban soil. After the war, the USA established a military government on the island from 1899 to 1902 and a form of “indirect rule” under the Platt Amendment that lasted through 1934.⁶ The USA began Canal construction in 1904 and its troops occupied Cuba from 1906 to 1909, briefly in 1912, and again from 1917 to 1922.⁷ Meanwhile, citing political violence, risk of revolution, and potential threat to lives and property and invoking Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, US Marines invaded Haiti in July 1915—within less than a year after the Canal opened for business.⁸ The brutal military occupation lasted until 1934 with financial control through 1940.⁹ This timeline and imperial geography forms the historical framework of this book; the material under examination, about which I say more below, is primarily performance culture that was produced in the USA during this time and that trades in representations of the two Caribbean countries.

Indeed, MacCorkle’s speech exemplifies how racial thinking structured the transnational encounters of empire and points to the legacy of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1803) in US national memory and the possibility of its repetition, that is, the potential for other revolutions.¹⁰ J. Michael Dash drives home that Haitian independence in 1804 “challenged the whole system of slavery and notions of black inferiority so violently that Rayford Logan, in commenting on its impact on the American consciousness, likens it to ‘the effect that the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 produced upon the capitalistic nations.’”¹¹ Nor did concerns about Haiti and its capacity to inspire other revolutions lessen after the end of slavery in the USA. Haiti remained a symbol of the capacity for resistance on racial terms—namely of racial mobilization and revolution under the sign of blackness.

According to historian Louis A. Pérez Jr., the prominence of Cubans of African descent among those fighting for independence from Spain throughout the nineteenth century “raised suspicions” among US politicians that Cuba would become, like Haiti, another site of racial mobilization.¹² Indeed, the trope of “another Haiti” was used frequently in connection with Cuba. In March of 1898, not long before the USA declared war against Spain, Stewart Woodford, President McKinley’s minister to Spain, for example, described the insurgency in Cuba as “confined almost entirely to negroes [sic]” and concluded that an independent Cuba would be “a second Santo Domingo”—meaning Haiti.¹³ General Leonard Wood, Rough Rider and military governor of Cuba (1899–1902), also believed the country threatened to become “another Hayti.”¹⁴ “Another Haiti” is thus a trope that represents revolution and annihilation in terms of black and white. In 1899, journalist Herbert P. Williams expressed concern, for example, that a successful revolution in Cuba would result in racial civil war, thus exposing “law abiding citizens” to “the fury of the negroes.”¹⁵ Similar concerns were re-amplified as the strategic importance of the “Black Republic” with regard to the Panama Canal became clearer to US national interests and foreign policy aims.¹⁶ Part of the goal of US empire was thus to produce and then secure Cuba and Haiti as racialized spaces prone to a certain kind of revolution.

For MacCorkle, controlling Cuba and Haiti not only allows the USA to secure commerce through the Canal, it also permits a policing of racial tensions that might be understood as transnational; the occupations of Cuba and Haiti were mechanisms of empire because they secured pathways for commerce and also attempted to constrain the possibility of racial revolution near the Zone. The importance of Haiti and Cuba to US interests therefore had as much to do with protecting the hegemony of whiteness as with securing access to the isthmus and limiting foreign involvement in the area.

Finally, in order to articulate Haiti’s strategic importance without giving it symbolic or political power, MacCorkle devotes an entire section of his speech on “Moral Conditions in Haiti” to the “cannibalistic” and “horrid rites of the voodoo,” in order to dismiss the entire political project of Haitian independence as a “horrid phantasmagoria” and thereby justify US invasion and occupation.¹⁷ For MacCorkle, the strategic conversion of the religion, Vodou, into the “cannibalistic” and “horrid” “voodoo” permits the argument that Haiti is morally deficient and therefore already guilty of “chronic wrongdoing.”¹⁸

Considerable work in American studies links the importance of new markets and the Panama Canal to US empire and examines the interconnections of race, empire, and nation. Jason Colby’s The Business of Empire and John Lindsay-Poland’s Emperors in the Jungle make clear that the growth of commerce and trade was a major project of US empire and that the locations of its imperialist takeovers, whether military or corporate, were “othered” in particular ways—racialized and gendered, made visible through stereotypes to be rendered politically invisible.¹⁹ Vicente L. Rafael describes, for example, how the census was an “instrument of white love” intended to give Filipinos a chance to perform their capacity for self-government “before the solicitous gaze” of US “tutors” and by which brown bodies were racialized, subjected, and managed.²⁰ Yet Rafael clarifies that Filipinos also performed in ways that challenged structures of imperial power.²¹

Amy Kaplan’s concept of the “anarchy of empire” refers productively to the destruction brought about through colonization/occupation as well as to the ways that empire opens up spaces for contestation and unravels through internal contradictions.²² Indeed, as several scholars have shown, empire is a kind of relational dynamic wherein the “system of rule” also “transforms society at home.”²³ The US occupations of Cuba and Haiti operate similarly; while images in US popular culture and media often stereotyped them as the others of US empire in order to denigrate their sovereign status, military occupations were also “contact zones” that transformed US society.²⁴ The US occupations of the two Caribbean republics created a transnational space that facilitated a large body of cultural production in the USA, particularly performance culture, which fostered domestic transformations in terms of race and public buy-in to imperial foreign policy. Plays like Old Glory in Cuba (1898) and Frank Dumont’s The Cuban S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Cuba, Haiti, and the USA: Performing Race, Nation, and Empire, 1898–1940
• 2. Imperial Scripts and Vaudeville Skits: Faulty Memory and the Power of Performance
• 3. Patriotic Performance Culture and Whiteness: The Trope of Old Glory in Cuba
• 4. Re-Racing the Nation: From Cuba—A Drama of Freedom to the Cultural Performance of Negro History Week
• 5. Military Occupation in Haiti: Staging Pan-Whiteness in a World of Color
• 6. Staging the Haitian Revolution: Performing Blackness and the Role of the Mulatta/o
• 7. Biracial Palimpsests: Racing and Erasure in Black Empire and Haiti
• 8. Palimpsest-Postscript: Tracing the Past in the Present
• Backmatter