Enwhitening Haitian darkness

This research compares US foreign policy officials’ discursive legitimisations of the US Occupation of Haiti (1915-34) and the US intervention of Haiti (1994-6). Inspired by contemporary news reports that continue historical discourses of supposed Haitian incapability for self-governance, this thesis sheds light on the similarities of such discourses with US foreign policy discourses in 1914-5 and 1991-6. This thesis aims to undercut such discourses through highlighting the role of international and US involvement in Haitian turmoil. Although research has been conducted into both interventions, their discursive legitimisations by US foreign policy officials have not been researched nor compared. The sources were drawn from the Foreign Relations of the United States (1914-5) and the Foreign Policy Bulletin (1991-6), and analysed through critical discourse analysis, guided by concepts such as standards of civilisation, racialisation and colour-blind racism. This thesis finds that the 1915 Occupation relied on a discursive civilisational Self/Other dichotomy, US exceptionalism, explicit stereotypes of supposed Haitian racial backwardness, and imperial standards of civilisation. As civilisation was seen to be both learned and hereditary, US foreign policy officials constructed the US as helpfully administering the Haitians their civilisational cure, allowing the US to claim to intervene on behalf of Haitian sovereignty, while actually obliterating it. The 1994 intervention relied on a similar civilisational Self/Other dichotomy, although now based on US standards of civilisation that had become discursively connected to international institutions while simultaneously grounded in US exceptionalism. This dichotomy was instantiated through relying on specific renditions of both Haitian and US history, naturalising the existing racial hierarchy between Haiti and the US. Again, the intervention was constructed as act of helpfulness. However, the implicitness of the racial hierarchy meant the intervention was constructed as a Haitian solution, while in actuality imposing US-ideological policies. In sum, while the 1994 discourse did so much more implicitly, both interventions combined racialised notions of Haitian backwardness with US exceptionalism, refiguring Haitian sovereignty compatible with US imperial oversight. The discourse of black Haitian incapability underwrote both interventions, and might still do so. This calls for a reconfiguration of the relationship between the international community and Haiti, in order to end the imperially-created self-fulfilling prophecy of black Haitian governmental incapability.