Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940

A cultural history treating the 1915–1940 U.S. occupation not just as policy or military rule but as a culture-producing event, asking how marines, journalists, missionaries, artists, theater audiences, and African American intellectuals imagined Haiti and how those acts of imagining shaped the occupation itself. Renda analyzes paternalism as the occupation's constitutive ideology, traces its expression in Marine memoirs, occupation-era photography, the Emperor Jones, tourism promotion, and Harlem Renaissance responses, and shows how the cultural memory of Haiti as zombie land and exotic frontier was manufactured during these years.