Race-crossings at the crossroads of African American travel in the Caribbean Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Alston, Vermonja Romona Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 03/10/2021 22:46:02 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280506 RACE-CROSSINGS AT THE CROSSROADS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN TRAVEL IN THE CARIBBEAN by VERMONJA ROMONA ALSTON Copyright © Vermonja Romona Alston 2004 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the PROGRAM IN COMPARATIVE CULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIES In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2004 UMI Number: 3131583 Copyright 2004 by Alston, Vermonja Romona All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI UMI Microform 3131583 Copyright 2004 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 The University of Arizona Graduate College As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Vermonja Romona Alston entitled Rar:fi-Crossings at the Crossroads of African American Travel in the Caribbean and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 'Ml Annette Kolodny 7 date CMtQi Adele Barke^ « / • h luf/plAM' ''My.lWJiP' Yvonne Reineke date date Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. Dissertation Director: Annei^e Kolodny U date STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Acknowledgments At the University of Arizona, I was fortunate to have an able and dedicated doctoral committee chaired by Professor Annette Kolodny, and including Professors Yvonne Reineke and Adele Barker. I am especially grateful to Annette for mentoring me throughout my graduate work, and for her subtle and uncompromising reading of drafts of this dissertation; nothing escapes her critical and editorial eyes. I am also grateful to Professors Ana Alonso and Ana Ortiz for guiding my study of the theories and methods of anthropology. Kali Tal provided critical insights into the field of historiography, for which I am grateful. I developed an understanding of the history of travel writing while working as a graduate teaching associate with Adele Barker. I began this project in 1996 when Lydie Moudileno, Professor of Francophone African and Caribbean Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, suggested that I complicate "the African Diaspora" as a category of analysis. I am grateful to Lydie for her insights and encouragement. My fieldwork and language study under the aegis of Florida International University in Miami and Haiti during the summer of 2000 would not have been possible without a grant from the University of Arizona Graduate College Final Project Fund, a Graduate College Fellowship, and a research associate stipend from Adele Barker. I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Sara Alexander of Baylor University for a field research assistantship that permitted me to complete six months of critical tourism study in Belize. For their assistance in locating records and images, I am grateful to the curators, librarians, and staff of the following libraries and archives: Collection of American Literature, Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; The Amistad Research Center, Tulane University; The New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Northwestern University Archives; and The University of Pennsylvania Archives. The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without a Northeast Consortium Dissertation Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship from Middlebury College, which provided me with one uninterrupted year of writing. I am grateful to John Elder of the English Department for his counsel and advocacy, and to William Hart, Hilda Llorens, Yumna Siddiqi, Natasha Chang, Antonia Losano, and Daniel Brayton for reading and commenting on drafts of chapters. I owe very special thanks to the people of Haiti, Jamaica, and especially Behze, who opened their homes and lives to me, and to my intrusive gaze and questions. Finally, I am grateful for those gifts that cannot be quantified: From Margaret Powell Alston, my mother and first reader, I can never repay the gift of Saturday afternoon excursions to public libraries; from my maternal grandparents, Ella Myrick Powell and Sandy Powell, for gifts of two oral traditions—Southeastern United States and West Indian, respectively. I finished this dissertation in the shadow of a loss; my father, William Vermon Alston, did not live to see its completion. I remember him with this book. Margaret Powell Alston and In Memoriam William Vermon Alston TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 7 ABSTRACT 8 INTRODUCTION RACE-CROSSINGS AT THE CROSSROADS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN TRAVEL IN THE CARIBBEAN 10 PART ONE AESTHETIC JUDGMENT AND POWER 28 Chapter 1 Encountering the Beautiful and the Beastly in the Tropics: Power and Aesthetic Judgment in James Weldon Johnson's Along This Way 29 Chapter 2 "Cutting Continents in Two"; Anti-Aesthetic Language as Critique of Imperial Power in Eric Walrond's Tropic Death 60 PART TWO CIVILIZATION OR BARBARISM 84 Chapter 3 Picturing and Possessing Haiti 85 Chapter 4 When West is East: Ethnographic Fantasy and Orientalist Fiction in Zora Neale Hurston's Tell l(/ly IHorse 147 PART THREE AFRICAN AMERICAN TOURISTS IN THE CARIBBEAN 185 Chapter 5 Mapping Imperialist Nostalgia/Interrogating Tourism 186 Chapter 6 The Leisurely Consumption of Laboring Bodies, or African American Women at Play in the Garden of Earthly Delights 238 Conclusion 288 WORKS CITED 293 7 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURE 1.1, American Consul James Weldon Johnson in pose 56 FIGURE 1.2, American Consulate in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela 57 FIGURE 1.3, Mrs. James Weldon Johnson (Grace Nail Johnson) 58 FIGURE 2.1, Hand drill gang, February 1912 82 FIGURE 3.1, Albert A. Smith Illustration, Crisis June 1930 85 FIGURE 3.2, Hotel Bellevue, Port-au-Prince, Haiti 103 FIGURE 3.3, Theatre Parisiana, Port-au-Prince, Haiti 104 FIGURE 3.4, Cathedrale de Port-au-Prince, Haiti 105 FIGURE 3.5, Garage Ford, Port-au-Prince, Haiti 108 FIGURE 3.6, Langston Hughes in Haiti 114 FIGURE 3.7, Advertisement for Tell My Horse 130 FIGURE 3.8, American Minister and President Stenio Vincent, Haiti 135 FIGURE 3.9, Felicia Felix Mentor, the Zombie 144 FIGURE 4.1, Advertisement for the National Folk Festival 154-155 FIGURE 6.1, Ogilvie's Jamaica Tourism Brochure 247 FIGURE 6.2, Advertisement by the Jamaica Tourist Board (1968) 259 ABSTRACT RACE-CROSSINGS AT THE CROSSROADS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN TRAVEL IN THE CARIBBEAN Traversing geographical borders frequently allows people the illusion of crossing social, political, and economic boundaries. For African-Americans of the early twentieth century, crossing physical borders offered the promise of freedom from racial segregation and discrimination in all aspects of social, political, and cultural life. Haiti became a site for African-American imaginings of a free and just society beyond the problem of the color line. From the 1920's through the 1980's, African-American travel writing was strategically deployed in efforts to transform a U. S. society characterized by Jim Crow segregation. In the process, Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean were romanticized as spaces of racial equality and political freedom. This project examines the ways in which the Caribbean has been packaged by and for African-Americans, of both U. S. and Caribbean ancestry, as a place to re-engage with romanticized African origins. In the selling of the Caribbean, cultural/heritage tourism, romance/sex tourism and ecotourism all trade on the same metaphors of loss and redemption of the innocence, equality, and purity found in a state of nature. Through analyses of standard