2020
Felix Jean-Louis
Dissertation Abstract
"Between Harlem and Paris: Haitian Internationalism in the Interwar Period, 1919-1937"
This project locates the transnational contributions of elite Haitian men to the efforts to remake blackness and mitigate the racial subjugation of people of African descent between 1919 and 1937. It argues that despite being underrepresented, Haitian elites were well-placed and highly regarded in transatlantic
internationalist circles. The arguments forwarded here are founded on archival materials such as letters, newspapers, personal documents, and the reports of government agents drawn from fourteen repositories across four countries. Through my engagement with these documents, at times reading against the grain, I explore the ways in which my actors directed the course of events and shaped the discourses of major organizations that sought to affect Pan-African solidarity and promote anti-colonialism. This project locates them simultaneously in multifaceted, multilingual and transnational activism transcendent of the lines of imperialism. In Harlem, New York I locate the migrants as central figures in two initiatives that were antagonistic to one another: the Marcus Garvey led Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the W.E.B. Du Bois spearheaded international New Negro political agenda. I demonstrate that they were influential voices in the early Pan-African movements in Paris, France that worked toward the cohesion of the Afro-descended community towards the goal of ending colonial subjugation. I maintain that elite Haitian men were lead actors in the diaspora building, anti-colonial activism that defines interwar internationalism on both sides of the Atlantic.
This project locates the transnational contributions of elite Haitian men to the efforts to remake blackness and mitigate the racial subjugation of people of African descent between 1919 and 1937. It argues that despite being underrepresented, Haitian elites were well-placed and highly regarded in transatlantic
internationalist circles. The arguments forwarded here are founded on archival materials such as letters, newspapers, personal documents, and the reports of government agents drawn from fourteen repositories across four countries. Through my engagement with these documents, at times reading against the grain, I explore the ways in which my actors directed the course of events and shaped the discourses of major organizations that sought to affect Pan-African solidarity and promote anti-colonialism. This project locates them simultaneously in multifaceted, multilingual and transnational activism transcendent of the lines of imperialism. In Harlem, New York I locate the migrants as central figures in two initiatives that were antagonistic to one another: the Marcus Garvey led Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the W.E.B. Du Bois spearheaded international New Negro political agenda. I demonstrate that they were influential voices in the early Pan-African movements in Paris, France that worked toward the cohesion of the Afro-descended community towards the goal of ending colonial subjugation. I maintain that elite Haitian men were lead actors in the diaspora building, anti-colonial activism that defines interwar internationalism on both sides of the Atlantic.