ce.” Haitian visual arts struck many of these art-buying travelers to such a degree that they would make many return visits to Haiti, amassing enough work that would eventually make up collections of art back in the United States. The cross-cultural interactions of these traveling collectors can be framed through a study of the art objects they collected and their interactions with Haitian artists and arts institutions. Focusing on individual case studies reveals broader trends in the international reception of Haitian art and how collections in Iowa and elsewhere were established.
Beginning in Davenport, whose Figge Museum of Art is the earliest established public and permanent collection of Haitian art in the United States, this examination of collection histories will shed light on how global, regional, and individual contexts and circumstances contributed to Haitian art’s presence in Iowa and its reception abroad. In addition, these collection histories highlight connections among collectors, artists, and other active participants in the circulation of Haitian in the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The second example considers the origins and development of the Waterloo Center for the Arts’ Haitian collection and demonstrates one institution’s efforts to connect Haitian art objects with local audiences. Both case studies also underscore histories of engagement between the United States and Haiti, as well as issues that museums have grappled with concerning their Haitian art collections and the shifting circumstances of art production in Haiti.
Forming and encouraging families in Jamaica was a struggle from the very beginning of English colonization there, making Caribbean households transatlantic in nature. The explosion of plantation slavery in the 17th century prioritized economic expansion over white family cultivation. Likewise, planters were more concerned with profits than they were with enslaved families. Constant migration from Europe and Africa was therefore needed to keep populations stable for the whole history of slavery in Jamaica. The island’s demographic and political security was always tenuous as a result of this, and officials attempted numerous strategies to encourage family growth, among both the free and enslaved communities. As the island transitioned to freedom, regulating the definition of “proper” families became a weapon from which English authorities wielded imperial power. Racist sentimental toward Caribbean households created social tension when thousands of black Jamaicans emigrated to Britain after the Second World War. Their arrival produced new British households that challenged some British conceptions of domestic family life. Throughout this whole history, migration defined the growth and character of families in the Jamaican-British Atlantic World.
The Cuban poet José María Heredia (1803–1839) spent twenty months exiled to the United States because of his involvement in pro-independence conspiracies. In that time, Heredia wrote a prodigious number of poems and letters, which are the subject of an ongoing scholarly project undertaken by Frederick Luciani of Colgate University. Luciani’s work involves more than translating these poems and letters into English—it examines Heredia’s stay in North America against the background of political and historical events, and traces the matrices of his connections with key figures, literary and otherwise, in Cuba and the United States. Questions that have surfaced through the translation process and scrutiny of this period of Heredia’s life include the relationship between Heredia’s poetry and his letters; the value of his letters as a form of travel literature; the contradictions inherent in his exilic condition; the ambiguity of his political sentiments; the nature of the networks that joined 19th-century Anglo-American and Hispanic writers, translators, and scholars; and the challenges and opportunities that Heredia’s life and work pose for readers, translators, and scholars today.
Reinaldo Funes Monzote
In the summer of 1981 the co