Knowledge through misrepresentation in Renda's Taking Haiti

Mary Renda’s Taking Haiti is by far my favorite work we have read to date. Regrettably, I knew absolutely nothing about the American occupation in Haiti. This moment in history was so important in shaping both Haitian and American cultures and I had never learned of it. Thinking about this gap in my history reminded me of the rich conversation we had last week when we were trying to figure out which part of Rosalie’s history was our own. Renda addresses how something so pertinent to the political and cultural shaping of American history could be excluded from the larger picture of U.S. history. Paternalist discourse emerged after patriarchalism and helped shaped the understanding and experience of the occupation.

One tenet of paternalist discourse that Renda discusses is rhetoric. Rhetoric, which was sometimes coded, like in the language of Woodrow Wilson, or blatant, like that of Smedley Butler, was the manner by which distinctions became made between the “civil Americans” and the “savage Haitians.” While categories between American and Haitian were also blurred, it is important to note how the rhetoric that is used to represent peoples then becomes fact. These facts soon become knowledge. In travel narratives, white explorers often sensationalized the inhabitants of the foreign land they were exploring. This sensationalism can be seen dating all the way back to the 16^th  and 17^th centuries  when explorers like John Hawkins and William Towerson first documented their encounters with racial others in the West Indies and the West coast of Africa. By representing the natives as docile, overly eager to serve, seemingly unintelligent, and primitive, these travel narratives helped lay the foundation for racial misrepresentation resulting from circulated knowledge surrounding these othered peoples.  

We can see the same modes of representation and othering during American-occupied Haiti. The marines and sailors upon entering Haiti were genuinely afraid that the Haitians (assuming because they practiced Vodou) would poison them. As a result, their first encounters with the Haitians were built upon distrust and racial misrepresentations. It is remarkable to realize how one person’s observations, like that of Adolph Miller who said that the Haitians were “a highly excitable people,” become part of a normalizing discourse about Haitians and their culture (Renda 83). Because of the racial distinctions drawn from these representations, it was easier for the American marines to adopt an “us vs. them” mentality, where they could define themselves in contrast to defining “the other.”