The Black Atlantic Resource presents reviews of two of the most recent publications which expand understandings of U.S. African-American relationships with Haitians and their revolutionary history:
From Douglass to Duvalier is an important new work, situated in the ‘emerging field of Hemispheric American Studies’, which presents new approaches to the role of Haiti in African-American consciousness. This work moves through a number of chronologically ordered case studies which demonstrate U.S. – Haitian African American relations, between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. Polyné considers intra-racial interactions between these two groups to “have been central to the spirit of the pan-American movement because
Jackson and Bacon’s edited volume is a collection of recent work which provides key contextualisation of African Americans interaction with the Haitian Revolution from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century. These essays and case-studies presented as a collection are so compelling because stylistically mirroring the historical ebb and flow of ideas across ‘porous borders’, the works in this volume converse with each other. They present a variety of evidence which unarguably attests to the enduring influence which Haiti has and continues to have on the actions and consciousness of African-Americans. From Toussaint inspired soldiers fighting the American Civil War while singing ‘La Marseillaise’ to
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