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Ellen D. Tillman, Chantalle F. Verna. Haiti and the Uses of America: Post-U.S. Occupation Promises., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1701–1702, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy327
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Chantalle F. Verna’s Haiti and the Uses of America admirably joins recent works of Haitian history that challenge traditional assumptions about Haiti’s historical relationship to the United States. Haitian intellectuals, students, government functionaries, and others were not, Verna argues, pawns in a U.S.-dominated game of diplomacy, and nor were they unaware of potential problems or racial biases inherent in Haitian-U.S. relations following the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). Both before and after the occupation, Verna shows, many Haitians understood the possible advantages and dangers of closer ties to the United States. Haitians from various classes and professions actively navigated this imbalanced and potentially fraught affiliation for multiple reasons: to improve literacy and education within Haiti (through teacher-training programs, or later through UNESCO initiatives); to gain international funding; to involve Haiti in wider inter-American initiatives in which the United States traditionally had great influence; or to increase Haitian participation in major global initiatives in the 1930s and 1940s. Using interviews, periodicals, and various U.S. and Haitian archives—some in private homes and not previously accessed—Verna argues that Haiti’s growing twentieth-century connection to the United States was much more than a product of U.S. actions or Haitian political conditions; the connection was intensified both by the many opportunities it presented Haiti and by “complex affinities” that Haitians held historically toward the United States (19). Verna’s rich source material allows her to reach well beyond the frequently used U.S.-based sources, to successfully show the agency of diverse Haitian actors, thereby avoiding binaries that have too often colored the historiography. Haitians were “central players” rather than just “victims or resilient agents” in this history (5).
