For two decades, coincident with the emergence of Caribbean and African diasporic anticolonialism, Caribbean writers and activists living in Harlem, Paris, London, and Germany, as well as at home on the islands, engaged radical critiques of the occupation.
This impact is the more notable because of the ways it has been hidden from view. Its persistence may be observed in the unexpected routes traveled by exoticism’s tropes and in the shapes of Caribbean radicalism and African diasporic anticolonialism between 19.įrom critiques cast in the mold of James Weldon Johnson’s Nation articles to the vogue for tales involving snakes and zombies, Dalleo traces the impact of the occupation’s discursive preoccupations in the defining works of Caribbean radicals and writers C.L.R. James, Cyril Briggs, Richard Moore, Grace Campbell, Amy Jacques Garvey, Eulalie Spence, Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, George Padmore, Alejo Carpentier, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, and others. Putatively put to rest with the withdrawal of the Marines in 1934, it walks Caribbean islands still, in bodies of discourse animated by that encounter. The U.S. Occupation of Haiti that began in 1915 is, in Raphael Dalleo’s telling, the undead of American imperialism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Raphael Dalleo, American Imperialism’s Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism, 1915–1950.