n August 1802, however, resistance intensified as plantation laborers became convinced that the French intended to restore slavery. Leclerc, who lost much of his army to yellow fever, embraced increasingly murderous tactics against the black population until he died in November 1802.
For one year, Leclerc’s successor, General Donatien de Rochambeau, battled Louverture’s successor, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in a brutal conflict with genocidal overtones. The bravery of Dessalines’s troops, lack of support from France, epidemic disease, and the renewal of Britain’s war with France eventually doomed the French effort. After the departure of the last remnants of the Leclerc expedition, Dessalines declared the independence of Saint-Domingue, now known as Haiti, on January 1, 1804, and then put to death most of the remaining French planters.
Eric Paul Roorda
On August 29, 1916, the USS Memphis wrecked on the coast of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. A series of enormous waves drove the heavy armored cruiser ashore, killing forty-five sailors. The fact that the death toll was not much higher is owed to the heroic efforts of Dominicans to rescue the survivors of the shipwreck. This was despite the fact that the US Marine Corps had invaded their country three months before, initiating an occupation with unwonted violence. The US Marine occupation of the Dominican Republic would last for eight years, compiling a record of brutality inflicted on the civilian population that Senate hearings documented in excruciating detail. In the aftermath of the traumatic occupation, the shipwreck of the USS Memphis itself, rusting away in plain sight along the seaside boulevard in the Dominican capital city, became symbolic of US imperialism. The dictator Rafael Trujillo, a Marine protégé who seized power in 1930, pointed to the wreck as a relic of the days before US domination, contrasting it with the happy days after national sovereignty had been attained under his own strong rule. In order to implement the Good Neighbor Policy, an effort to expunge the negative legacy of the era of intervention and occupation known as “Gunboat Diplomacy,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the removal of the wreck of the Memphis after taking office in 1933. The wreck’s removal finally took place in 1937.
The Midwestern United States is home to several major public museum collections of Haitian art. These collections were established within a short period between the late 1960s and early 1970s. Similarities between the contents of these collections and their formations point to particular dynamics of visual-art production in Haiti and cross-cultural interactions in which works of Haitian art were collected abroad. This examination of particular collection histories of two Midwestern U.S. museums, both in Iowa, demonstrates shifting cultural narratives that have contributed to generalized definitions of “Haitian Art.” Considering the dearth of Haitian-American communities in the state and its far-flung geography, the fact that so many works by Haitian artists reside in the Midwest may appear to be a curious occurrence. However, these collections arose from individual bequests from local collectors who began acquiring Haitian art during the second “Golden Age” of Haitian tourism in the 1960s and 1970s. North American travelers who visited Haiti at this time sustained a market for Haiti’s artists and helped maintain international interest in Haitian visual culture. The common characteristics of these two collections—in the cities of Davenport and Waterloo—and the history of their development speak volumes about cultural intersections between Haiti and the United States, especially in relation to the effects of tourism and international travel on the production, circulation, and reception of Haitian art. More broadly, these histories exemplify wide-ranging shifts in North–South relations in the late 20th century.
In the United States, Iowa is home to two of the largest public collections of Haitian art in the country, one in Davenport at the Figge Mus