Racing the Nation: Cuba and Haiti in US Performance, 1898-1940

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. This material reveals the ways that Cuba and Haiti constituted sites of US empire, as well as the ways they were used to articulate a range of anti-imperialist and national projects in the US. By exploring the ways that the US national imaginary was racialized through images of Cuba and Haiti, particularly through performance, I am able to detail how such imagery compensated for white national hysteria while justifying US economic imperialism, yet also facilitated the racialization of the black community in the US.  For example, images of Cuba and Haiti were used by black US Americans to articulate a transnational pan-African history precisely in order to articulate an African American identity and critique US imperialism. This paper will explore the contested and contradictory intersections between the performance of race and nation in a range of performance forms including the masculine performance of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” in Cuba, vaudeville plays such as the 1898 Old Glory in Cuba, and the numerous plays by Harlem Renaissance authors on the theme of the Haitian Revolution.

Paper prepared for presentation in a Seminar titled “Performing Race, Performing ‘America’” at the American Society of Theatre Research Conference, November 2007, Phoenix.