Regionalism, Imperialism, and Sovereignty: West Indies Federation and the Occupation of Haiti

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-68
Author(s):  
Raphael Dalleo

Examining the West Indies Federation during the twentieth century against the backdrop of the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 shows the complex roots of decolonization and helps us understand the occupation as a foundational event for the twentieth-century Caribbean imaginary, much as the Haitian Revolution was for the nineteenth. The occupation is usually considered only in relation to its impacts in Haiti and the United States, but Haiti’s symbolic significance meant that its occupation shaped the perspectives of Caribbean people throughout the region. Major thinkers of federation, particularly Richard B. Moore and George Padmore, developed their political perspectives through responses to the occupation. We can thus see the questioning of nation-state independence and the critique of neocolonialism (as a form of US economic imperialism allied with elites in the neocolony) emerge from the lessons of Haiti’s occupation.

Author(s):  
Dan Sinykin

James Baldwin’s observation that “American investments cannot be considered safe wherever the population cannot be considered tractable” could serve as a précis for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I show how McCarthy’s novel traces US scalp hunters in northern Mexico in the aftermath of the US-Mexican War as they clear the land of intractable Indians—i.e. slaughter them for cash—so the United States can pivot from settler colonialism to economic imperialism. The scalp hunters prove as bad for capital as the Indians they decimate, debauching cities, taking Mexican scalps that might pass as Indian, and destroying the means of production. Writing from late twentieth-century capitalist crisis, McCarthy depicts a constitutive violence that capitalism has unleashed, but cannot control. What remains, for McCarthy, beyond capitalism is the excess that fells it, a drive to violence.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
James W. Wiley

Gerald Handerson Thayer (1883–1939) was an artist, writer and naturalist who worked in North and South America, Europe and the West Indies. In the Lesser Antilles, Thayer made substantial contributions to the knowledge and conservation of birds in St Vincent and the Grenadines. Thayer observed and collected birds throughout much of St Vincent and on many of the Grenadines from January 1924 through to December 1925. Although he produced a preliminary manuscript containing interesting distributional notes and which is an early record of the region's ornithology, Thayer never published the results of his work in the islands. Some 413 bird and bird egg specimens have survived from his work in St Vincent and the Grenadines and are now housed in the American Museum of Natural History (New York City) and the Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Four hundred and fifty eight specimens of birds and eggs collected by Gerald and his father, Abbott, from other countries are held in museums in the United States.


2019 ◽  
pp. 82-133
Author(s):  
Deborah Welch Larson ◽  
Alexei Shevchenko

This chapter argues that both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC) pursued social competition with the Western states while at the same time seeking recognition from the states they were trying to subvert. Stalin sought to increase the power and prestige of the Soviet state through coerced industrialization, and Khrushchev made an effort to “catch up and surpass” the West in economic production. The PRC sought to improve its status by allying with the Soviet Union, but the Chinese chafed under their status as “younger brothers” to their senior ally, and eventually Mao challenged the Soviets for leadership of the international communist movement. In the 1970s, China took advantage of the US need to balance Soviet military power by putting aside communist ideology to become a tacit ally of the United States, part of a “strategic triangle.”


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Baker Benjamin

At the heart of contemporary international law lies a paradox: the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001 have justified 16 years of international war, yet the official international community, embodied principally in the United Nations, has failed to question or even scrutinise the US government's account of those attacks. Despite the emergence of an impressive and serious body of literature that impugns the official account and even suggests that 9/11 may have been a classic (if unprecedentedly monstrous) false-flag attack, international statesmen, following the lead of scholars, have been reluctant to wade into what appears to be a very real controversy. African nations are no strangers to the concept of the false flag tactic, and to its use historically in the pursuit of illegitimate geopolitical aims and interests. This article draws on recent African history in this regard, as well as on deeper twentieth-century European and American history, to lay a foundation for entertaining the possibility of 9/11-as-false-flag. This article then argues that the United Nations should seek to fulfil its core and incontrovertible ‘jury’ function of determining the existence of inter-state aggression in order to exercise a long-overdue oversight of the official 9/11 narrative.


Text Matters ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Magdalena Szuster

It was in the mid-twentieth century that the independent theatrical form based entirely on improvisation, known now as improvisational/improvised theatre, impro or improv, came into existence and took shape. Viola Spolin, the intellectual and the logician behind the improvisational movement, first used her improvised games as a WPA worker running theater classes for underprivileged youth in Chicago in 1939. But it was not until 1955 that her son, Paul Sills, together with a college theater group, the Compass Players, used Spolin’s games on stage. In the 1970s Sills made the format famous with his other project, the Second City. Since the emergence of improv in the US coincides with the renaissance of improvisation in theater, in this paper, I will look back at what may have prepared and propelled the emergence of improvised theater in the United States. Hence, this article is an attempt to look at the use of improvisation in theater and performing arts in the United States in the second half of the 20th century in order to highlight the various roles and functions of improvisation in the experimental theater of the day by analyzing how some of the most influential experimental theaters used improvisation as a means of play development, a component of actor training and an important element of the rehearsal process.


Slave No More ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 164-196
Author(s):  
Aline Helg

This chapter explores the shock waves caused by the Haitian Revolution and the massive slave insurrection that took both the Americas and Europe by surprise. Despite the rarity of large-scale revolts after 1794, the Saint Domingue insurrection did have a lasting impact on the slaves. The greatest lesson they retained from Haiti was that the institution of slavery was neither unchangeable nor invincible. Amid the troubled backdrop of the age of revolutions, many attentively followed the legal changes upsetting their owners, like the Spanish Códigno Negro, the French abolition of slavery, gradual emancipation laws in the northern United States, and the ban of the slave trade by Great Britain and the United States. Furthermore, after 1794, protests during which slaves claimed freedom they believed to have been decreed by the king or the government, but hidden by their masters, multiplied.


Author(s):  
Nathan Cohen

This chapter describes Jewish popular reading in inter-war Poland, looking at shund and the Polish tabloid press. In the first third of the twentieth century, as the Polish press was developing rapidly, sensationalist newspapers began to proliferate. While this type of press had been widespread in the United States and western Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century, it first emerged in Poland only in 1910, with Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (Illustrated Daily Courier) in Kraków. In Warsaw, the first tabloid newspapers, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny (Information and Telegraphic Courier) and Ekspres Poranny (Morning Express), appeared in 1922. In 1926, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny changed its name, now printed in red, to Kurier Czerwony (Red Courier). In time, the colour red became emblematic of sensationalist newspapers in Poland, and they were nicknamed czerwoniaki (Reds), similar to the ‘yellow’ press in the West.


Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds

After 1820, the day-to-day duties of the United States Navy involved dealing with smugglers, pirates, and the illegal slave trade and so deploying the large ships of the line was deemed unnecessary. Also, the successful completion of treaties with both England and Spain demilitarized the Great Lakes and stabilized the country’s southern border, easing concerns about a future foreign war. ‘A constabulary navy: pirates, slavers, and manifest destiny (1820–1850)’ describes the peacetime navy activities carried out by small squadrons of sloops and schooners acting as a constabulary force on distant stations abroad, mainly in the Mediterranean, but also in the West Indies, off Africa, in the Pacific, off Brazil, and in the East.


Author(s):  
W. J. Rorabaugh

‘Drinking and temperance’ describes the history of alcohol consumption in the United States and the introduction of the temperance movement. From the earliest European settlers to the fighters of the Revolution, Americans were among the world’s heartiest drinkers, producing their own corn beer and importing rum from the West Indies. The British blockades during the war meant access to rum was lost. Americans began to distill whiskey from corn instead, which became the country’s patriotic drink. Problems associated with heavy drinking resulted in reformers creating the temperance movement, a cause that was then taken up by Protestant preachers. In the 1850s, evangelicals lobbied for statewide prohibition laws, but there was no viable system of enforcement.


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