Augusta Savage was a Harlem Renaissance sculptor whose Haiti-facing work demonstrates how the U.
S. occupation generated Black artistic counter-memory. Her sculpture La Citadelle—Freedom links Haitian revolutionary memory to a feminine image of liberty, recoding the Citadel from colonial military architecture into Black freedom form. Through her work, the Citadelle becomes not just fortress history but a reusable image within Black Atlantic visual culture.
In the ScholarshipHow historians have read this figure.
How historians and scholars have interpreted this figure across different analytical traditions.
Renda's Taking Haiti provides the cultural-historical framework for understanding Augusta Savage's engagement with Haiti and Black Atlantic politics — situating Harlem Renaissance artists within the broader formation of Black American cultural life under the shadow of U.S. imperialism. Renda argues that Black American artists of Savage's generation were shaped by the occupation's racial politics in ways that inflected their cultural production and political commitments, even when those commitments were expressed through art rather than journalism or activism. Savage's career as a sculptor committed to representing Black subjects with dignity was inseparable from the political context Renda describes: a moment when U.S. imperialism was proving that Black self-governance was perpetually at risk.
Savage's artistic commitment to dignifying Black subjects was inseparable from the political context of U.S. imperialism — Harlem Renaissance cultural production shaped by and responding to the occupation's racial politics.
TimelineAcross the historical record.
- 1915
U.S. Occupation of Haiti
Her Haiti-facing work contested the occupation's dominant images of violence and control