Arna Bontemps was a Harlem Renaissance writer who helped move Haiti from symbol to historical drama in African American literature.
He learned about Haiti through Langston Hughes, coauthored Popo and Fifina with him, and turned toward revolutionary fiction — including Black Thunder and Drums at Dusk — that used the Haitian Revolution to think about Black revolt and the possibilities of radical change in the Depression era. When Alabama authorities demanded he burn his race-conscious books, he refused and left, deepening his turn toward Haitian revolutionary history.
In the ScholarshipHow historians have read this figure.
How historians and scholars have interpreted this figure across different analytical traditions.
Plummer's Haiti and the United States situates Arna Bontemps within the African American intellectual and artistic engagement with Haiti that intensified during the occupation and its aftermath, reading it as part of the diplomatic and cultural pressure that contributed to U.S. withdrawal. Plummer argues that African American solidarity with Haiti was not merely cultural expression but a form of political pressure — the NAACP, Black newspapers, and Harlem Renaissance artists collectively made the occupation's racial politics visible in ways that complicated the U.S. government's justifications. Bontemps's literary engagement with Haitian history appears in this account as one strand of a broader African American Haiti advocacy that linked cultural production to political critique.
Bontemps's literary engagement with Haiti was part of African American political and cultural pressure on the occupation — solidarity expressed through art that made the occupation's racial politics legible.
Renda's Taking Haiti provides essential context for understanding Arna Bontemps's literary engagement with Haiti and the occupation — situating his work within the broader Harlem Renaissance response to U.S. imperialism that Renda reads as a cultural formation shaped by the occupation's racial politics. Renda argues that Black American artists and intellectuals of the 1920s-1930s who engaged with Haiti were navigating the contradictions of their own racial position: citizens of the occupying power, identifying with the occupied, producing cultural work that criticized the occupation while the occupation was ongoing. Bontemps's Haiti writing appears in Renda's account as part of the cultural counter-narrative that the Harlem Renaissance constructed against the occupation's justifying ideology — a Black Atlantic solidarity that connected African American artistic culture to Haitian sovereignty struggles.
Bontemps's Haiti writing is part of the Harlem Renaissance's cultural counter-narrative against the occupation — Black Atlantic solidarity expressed through literary engagement with a Haiti under U.S. military control.
TimelineAcross the historical record.
- 1915
U.S. Occupation of Haiti
His Haiti-facing work was shaped by and responded to the U.S. occupation era
RelationshipsPeople connected to this life.
- Allied withLangston Hughes
Coauthored Popo and Fifina with Hughes; learned about Haiti through their friendship