The 1938 Federal Theatre Project play Haiti has been repeatedly misattributed to the famous black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, however, white New York Times journalist William DuBois is the author of the work. The play’s contemporaries were aware that the white DuBois authored the work, however, at several points in the last few decades the mis-take has been made—and it appears to occur predominantly at the level of the archive.

Cuba and Haiti, as signs and as sites, were crucial to the imaginative restructuring of race and national identity in the US at the turn of the twentieth century. Between 1898 and 1940, the US occupied the two countries for extended periods of time, creating a transnational, intercultural contact zone that facilitated a large body of cultural production on the part of both black and white US Americans, including plays, operas, dance, music, films, and national spectacle.