Saint Domingue is first the “pearl of the Antilles,” the most perfected example of the plantation system, and then its egregious failure, a decline from splendour to unparalleled squalor in the years following independence. Lost in between is the emergence of the Haitian state itself.
Michael J. DrexlerFootnote 1Answering the question as to what sovereignty is cannot be separated, for example, from the question as to who is thought to be its proper bearer.
Hent Kalmo and Quentin SkinnerFootnote 2INTRODUCTION
Let us begin with a story that illuminates the complex interplay between bearing sovereignty and constraining it. Although a historical narrative that occurs decades after independence in Haiti, this tale evocatively merges Drexler's warning about statehood and Kalmo and Skinner's claims about bearing authority, highlighting what I see as the circumscribed contours of black sovereignty. Although this essay and the issue that it appears in chronicles acts of emancipation and considers the multiple ways that people of African descent made their lives – and their politics – legible, the contours of black sovereignty that I describe below were never a stable entity. Black sovereignty, by construction, was constantly renegotiated and constantly redrawn across borders and between categories of difference, as black cultures sought (and sometimes violently demanded) the right to self-govern.
Rather than read sovereignty through the interplay between subjects and a monarch or subjects and the state, I read Haiti's sovereignty as a constantly negotiated dance (or battle) between other sovereign Atlantic nation-states and it. This shifting movement can be detected in the ways that most nineteenth-century political entities described Haiti along a continuum from abject horror to burlesque. According to Caribbeanist and cultural critic J. Michael Dash, Haiti has been imagined since its revolutionary beginnings as a body invariably repulsive or sick.Footnote 3 Historian Laurent Dubois ties these corporeal views to the viability of Haiti as a nation. He examines its political vibrancy through readings of nineteenth-century commentators who describe Haiti as a farce – something best labelled as a “phastmagoria of civilization.” Dubois argues that Haiti remains conveniently framed, in these narratives, as something comical – a perpetual black fool in nation-state clothing.Footnote 4
Contemporary theorists should find, in these articulations, rationales for the financialization, privatization and occupation of land (and seas) that geographer David Harvey has labelled “accumulation by dispossession.”Footnote 5 A recent American Quarterly issue on accumulation, dispossession and debt succinctly notes “recent histories [of globalization] are themselves embedded in the colonial and racial matrix of capitalist accumulation of land … exploitation of labor … [and the] appropriation of resources.”Footnote 6 The story that I am about to unfold unveils the racialization, appropriation and dispossession in the US's claim to a resource-rich territory that Haiti declares as its own. Specifically, it chronicles the battle over Navassa Island, a two-square-mile island thirty miles southwest of Haiti in the Caribbean Sea that is currently administered, protected, financed and rigorously controlled by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as the Navassa Island Wildlife Refuge. Our story begins more than a century ago when the US was only interested in exploiting Navassa's land and waters. Although it is the story of a singular moment in a longer battle over control of Navassa, I use it to argue that there has been (and continues to be) an ecological chain that entwines racialized notions of power with racialized notions of sovereign rights.
To understand these chains, we must turn to one of its demonstrable moments of crisis. In 1858, a representative of a US-backed guano mining company wrote a letter to the then US Secretary of State outlining the pressures experienced by the company on Navassa Island (due to what they perceived as Haitian interference to their lawful capitalist enterprise of island resource extraction.) In this letter, the representative describes Haiti, and its two vessels of war that were sent to patrol the waters off the island, as a terror. Frightened, the representative asks for the US's protection, but not before ridiculing Haiti's sovereign claims to the island territory:
The claim of the Haytien [sic] government … is predicated upon the assumption that Navassa is one of the “dependencies” of St. Domingo [an alternative name also used to designate Saint-Domingue]; that it has become, as such, part of the Haytien territory, under the various political changes which have taken place in that quarter; and that Hayti has been in peaceable and undisputed possession of the same for half a century. The perfect futility and absurdity of these pretensions will be quite obvious to you.Footnote 7
The above quotation highlights the ways that black sovereignty in the Atlantic world pivots, as in the case of Haiti, from a haunting apparition to a haunting recognition, never quite forming a tangible, and legal, sovereignty unto itself. Haiti's tangled and complicated geopolitical positioning within the Atlantic world gives this spectral state of being meaning. Sovereignty, or, as I will suggest, the processes of recognition and the material shape of its appearance, imbues Haiti's sovereign claims with a specific racialized threshold – a threshold made all the more apparent in the refusal of the above company representative to regard Haiti's claims to Navassa as valid or even possible. He would be neither the first to enchain Navassa outside Haitian control, nor the last to challenge Haitian displays of sovereign power.
Reading, specifically, along Haiti's nineteenth-century racio-national edge illuminates the tenuous position on the international stage of two other nations – Liberia and Abyssinia – who, along with Haiti in the late nineteenth century, would represent an important set of self-avowed black and independent nations. Although a small representative group, these nations deserve far more scrutiny within the fields of race and sovereignty studies by legal scholars and scholars of transnational American studies, especially because of the ways they battled for recognition and respect amongst other nation-states who attached derogatory notions of power and status onto the political work and rights of these self-avowed black nations. Although the intertwining of race and sovereignty across time and space (as well as an ocean) deserves far greater scrutiny, this essay will deal exclusively with Haiti and its endangered sovereign status. Its reality impacted the reality of other black nations. According to Sibylle Fischer,
Haiti, despite its troubled history (and perhaps because of it), has so much symbolized the struggles and aspirations of the black diaspora … that any analysis of the silences in the Western record needs to be balanced against the fact that Haiti also occupies a central position in the cultures of the Black Atlantic.Footnote 8
Haiti's conspicuous beginnings and its revolutionaries' and early leaders' unmoored radical conceptualizations of slavery, power and race impacted dealings with it and conceptualizations of it by nineteenth-century thinkers, politicians and businesspeople, such as the company representative above. These articulations of Haiti offer a range of perspectives regarding black freedom and power-wielding that illuminate aspects of the contours of what I describe as black sovereignty. This “turn” to sovereignty joins recent scholarship from literary critics, social scientists and Caribbean and American studies critics who have offered highly intricate offerings of Haiti's past and its revolutionary reverberations.Footnote 9 Although a timely corrective to the purported critical “silence” on Haiti and its revolution, many of these works have localized their study of black power and emancipation in the period surrounding Haiti's beginnings and early years of existence.Footnote 10 Yet, as Anthony Bogues stresses, Haiti experienced not one, but two revolutions, one of which extended beyond 1804: The first was “against slavery”; “the other against colonial domination.”Footnote 11 This essay argues for a third: Haiti's black sovereignty.
A few critics have discussed the importance of Haiti's sovereignty – if only obliquely. Sybille Fischer's Modernity Disavowed examines the contours and shapes of revolutionary anti-slavery in Haiti and the responses (and disavowals) of it in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and other European metropolitan centres. In this seminal work, she argues that “the first black state in the Americas” erupted into the modern world and “realized a complete reversal of imperial hierarchies and social goals.” Fischer notes that alongside many Atlantic nation-states' disavowal of Haiti's existence and struggle to contain its effects churned “a radically heterogeneous, transnational cultural network,” whose “projects and fantasies of emancipation converged, at least for a few years, around Haiti.”Footnote 12 Although Fischer's text does not focus explicitly on Haiti's sovereignty, it still ends with the contention that the shape of nineteenth-century modernity in the western hemisphere contains “the suppression of a struggle whose aim was to give racial equality and racial liberation the same weight as those political goals that came to dominate nineteenth-century politics and thought” – namely sovereignty.Footnote 13 Following from Fischer's work, then, it is possible to see Haiti's third revolution – black sovereignty – as an act of emancipation that responded to and critiqued the challenges to Haiti's “absurd” claims to power. As such, this essay offers a window into an understudied archive of black power and emancipation that charts Haiti's political existence and performance of black sovereignty in the Atlantic world.
Although current work on sovereignty continues to pivot between sovereignty's elusiveness (see Hidemi Suganami) and its particularities (see John Agnew), significant work remains to determine how racialogies, the legacies of Atlantic racial slavery, and the visual and material embodiment and enactment of black sovereignty complicate how other nation-states viewed, negotiated with and disavowed nations such as Haiti (as well as Liberia and Abyssinia).Footnote 14 Forged and formed through specific histories, each illuminates the openings and the conscription of black sovereignty in the Atlantic world. In the work that follows, I focus specifically on Haiti and chart the ways that Haitian governmental leaders wielded sovereignty amidst attempts by other nation-states to typify it as a comical, futile and absurd black country.
My formulation of black sovereignty has been informed by constitutional law and legal theorist Denis Baranger's arguments, in which he clarifies that studies of sovereignty “cannot elude” the most “elementary questions regarding the relationship between what is and what appears to be.”Footnote 15 It has also been expanded by considerations of race by political theorist Siba Grovogui, in which he identifies the chasm between being and recognition – a gulf, he argues, that may become complicit with the practice of racism. In a recent work on quasi-sovereignty in Africa, Grovogui historicizes the “rationalization for the domination [and non-recognition] of non-Europeans” by Europeans as part of their “supposedly scientific evidence” of non-Europeans' “racial inferiority.” This claim, he presses, was a racist endeavour, “simply one more instrument used to manipulate science and other categories of knowledge to political and economic ends.”Footnote 16
Motivated by these considerations, this essay weds aspects of political theory and sovereignty with the current turns in American studies to decidedly more global processes and interactions, especially those encoded in lands and seas. It is, at best, a partial effort. Much more work needs to be done to work through aspects of black sovereignty (both diasporic and nation-state) in the nineteenth century as well as in our current one. Given the import of the issue, the next section of this essay takes up the issue of black sovereignty and links it with racialized ecologies before turning to the specific case study under review here, the US-claimed unincorporated, unorganized territory of Navassa Island, a curious environmentally protected site not coincidentally due south of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As this essay contends, the political, capital and environmental fights over Navassa are best understood as a challenge to Haiti's black sovereignty.
THE RACIALIZATION OF SOVEREIGNTY AND ECOLOGIES
In the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, Haiti's sovereign appearance and demands of reciprocity disrupted the contours of political power enabled and re-enforced throughout the Americas and Europe. It did this through its attempts, such as the deployment of vessels of war in the above story, to force other modern nation-states to concede and regard its power and control. Although Haiti's formal nineteenth-century articulation of a singular black political identity does not correspond to the intricate socio-racial strata exemplified amongst its citizenry, its use as a category of demarcation within diplomatic circles enabled other nineteenth-century political entities to label the country and its political strategies a black farce.Footnote 17 I adopt this racialization consciously, not to try to force a particular raced understanding of power, control and authority, but to highlight the ways that Haiti would be viewed as a racial burlesque. Race, then, was conspicuously intertwined with Haiti's revolutionary beginnings and its political and sovereign authority, along with challenges to its continued existence.
In examining the chasm between the non-recognition of Haiti's sovereignty by other Atlantic sovereign entities and Haiti's claims to and wielding of black sovereign power, I posit that the more Haitian officials took on the formal apparatus of sovereignty, the less they would be recognized (by some entities) and the more they would be publically cast as absurd.Footnote 18 In these instances, displays of power by Haiti, such as the deployment of war vessels around Navassa Island in the story above, were categorized as pretentious efforts – futile demonstrations. Yet Haitian officials continued to engage in them and demand equal status, even as the Atlantic world routinely identified Haiti as its bête noire, especially during the nineteenth century.Footnote 19
These moves would often be greeted in the wider Atlantic world with disdain. Grovogui ties these attacks on Haiti's sovereignty to racialized notions of political aptitude and power. He maintains that some universal features of modern politics or legal theory – such as sovereignty – are in actuality produced through articulations of racial difference. “The modern law of nations,” he argues, “has been proposed by a select group of nations, not as the ethical basis of a universal order, but as a means to hegemony.” Although argued by endless jurists, historians and political scientists as having fundamental principles, sovereignty – and most notably recognition – are actually predicated on the incompatibility between states of existence. Grovogui notes that the stakes of recognition are more than merely descriptive. “The legal provisions that have applied to non-Europeans have been culturally specific, enabling Europe to undermine the other's subjectivity and sovereignty in the international order.”Footnote 20 The consequences of this worldview, he observes from a reading of de Vattel, is a conviction that certain communities “had no physical, legal, or emotional attachments to land or territory worthy of European respect,” a cosmological and ecological view of difference that rejects not only sovereignty, but also worth.Footnote 21 Much of the discourse on sovereignty does not expose these roots. Instead, it tends to focus on the power wielded by a sovereign entity and the interaction between the actualization of the sovereign and the violence needed to keep its power absolute.Footnote 22
As discussed above, Haiti's nineteenth-century performance of black sovereignty made visible the challenges and constraints of black power in an Atlantic world still fuelled and formed by racial slavery. Of course, pejorative articulations of people of African descent are not surprising given the ways that imperialists and colonial-minded folks across temporal and geographical zones have paradoxically diagnosed Haiti's (and by extension the Caribbean's) supposed “ills” while working furiously to materially and economically consume it. Thanks to the work of critics such as sociologist Mimi Sheller, we can more subtly trace the ways that Caribbean “things or commodities” are consumed, “as well as entire natures, landscapes, cultures, [and] visual representations,” forming all manner of chains of belonging and chains of unequal power relations.Footnote 23
The particular chains under discussion in this essay are ecological and geopolitical in nature. My ecological slant to black sovereignty occurs at a prolific time in the “greening” of the humanities. In recent years, new journals and books have emerged that have moved environmental studies and ecocriticism from nature writing or examinations of unspoilt wilderness to a more global environmental-justice and even postcolonial edge.Footnote 24 Literary and postcolonial critics Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley note the importance of the latter lens, suggesting that “place … might be defined geographically, in terms of the expansion of empire … genealogically, in linking communal ancestry to land; as well as phenomenologically, connecting body to place.” They go on to note that “place encodes time, suggesting that histories embedded in the land and sea have always provided vital and dynamic methodologies for understanding the transformative impact of empire and the anticolonial epistemologies it tries to suppress.”Footnote 25 As I argue here, these places transmit the vectors, limitations and contours of an ecological enchainment that illuminates the problematic nature of black sovereignty. Who owns what, who can have what, and who has the sovereign powers that are recognized to decide on these matters lay bare the dynamics of these transnational power relationships and the ways that certain legacies haunt them.
Two competing ideas come from the word “haunt”: a noun that demarcates a place that one frequents and a verb form that suggests the appearance of a ghost or supernatural entity. Earlier, I mentioned the ways that black sovereignty, especially within Haiti, pivots from a haunting apparition to a haunting recognition. What must be reckoned with in this spectrum are the other types of haunting – the ones roaming the land and forming the ways that the land and seas have been partitioned, occupied, extracted and controlled, that live on in battles over sovereignty and attempts at making and unmaking freedom. Emerging from analyses into these hauntings are the racial secretions, discharges, residue and waste that surround the material reality of black sovereignty – in essence, black sovereignty's racial effluvia. Tracing it, even with a focus on materiality, is difficult. To paraphrase Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the challenge is to expose its roots and its embeddedness within situations, events and circumstances that, at first, do not seem racial or racist at all – such as the sovereignty battle over Navassa Island.Footnote 26
NAVASSA: ACT ONE
The ecological and geopolitical challenges to spaces such as Navassa garner little notice in a world swept along by a hyper-media focus on grand geographical events, such as Hurricane Sandy, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
Going further back in time does not remediate this tendency. Navassa, to all intents and purposes, is a small, uninhabited and remote island in the Caribbean that has had a spectacular history – one that has remained mostly unexamined. Its history unfolds without the grand sweep of blood and revolution of Haiti, the labour upheavals of Jamaica or Grenada, or the social unrest of Cuba. Instead, Navassa's waters have been fished and its shores travelled to and from by humans and non-humans alike. Although a non-actor in Atlantic emancipation movements or strategies of political change, Navassa is at the heart of a key sovereign conflict in the region. This role may be surprising given the fact that Navassa is a territory that has mostly existed within the shadowed recesses of global modernities. Elsewhere, I have labelled such island sites twilight islandsFootnote 27 – critically important to geopolitical processes and global capitalism, but nonetheless neglected. The Caribbean has a significant number of these sites – both those engineered, such as the resort island Atlantis, and those ignored, such as Navassa Island.
Isolated from the cultural imaginary of the Atlantic world and often removed from critical examination, islands such as Navassa operate as intriguing locales whose natural resources, economic contribution and sovereign status remain unnoticed. In essence, by existing outside public scrutiny, these locales have been (and can continue to be) consumed and exploited (and even protected) at will by an increasingly diverse range of power players. In many ways, what I am charting is old news – cool and understudied, but old. This becomes apparent once one considers the Caribbean, with all of its historical contingency and varied linguistic discourses, as a unit of analysis.
Individually small, sparsely populated, and politically less influential than much larger regions in the world, the Caribbean basin – even in its chaotic and assorted conglomerations of linguistic, economic and political entities – has come to see itself as a concentrated source of economic and ecological power in the world, even as North Atlantic global leaders have stressed the political instability and economic underdevelopment of some territories and nations within the region.
What this means, of course, is that the Caribbean basin has become an increasingly important player in the solutions to off-the-scale human alteration of the Earth's ecosystems. What the region lacks in population numbers, it makes up for in its regional ease in legally and illegally moving or hiding money, guns, drugs or people, and its offerings of holiday playgrounds for the rich, as well as the package-tourer. Mimi Sheller argues that the Caribbean basin – “used to promote everything from package holidays and cruises to time-shares and villa purchases all over the world” – has become “a generic, global, and empty signifier of ‘the tropical island’” – one in which all of its ecological systems are open and available for development and rebranding “for North Atlantic inhabitants' pleasure and use.”Footnote 28
Navassa's history is almost a textbook illustration of the historical processes of consumption and accumulation that have enabled certain Caribbean sites to move in and out of geopolitical importance. This may be a surprising fact given that Navassa Island is bounded by dense coral reefs, measures about five square kilometers, and is, most importantly, situated off the southwestern coast of Haiti in the Caribbean Sea. Isolated, rocky and difficult to reach, the island lacks fresh water, but has become a centrally important node in the geopolitics of the region. I would be remiss if I failed to repeat the fact that Navassa is also due south of that militarized US space-unto-itself, the United States Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, also known as GITMO, in Cuba.
Our story begins farther in the past than the creation of that military–industrial complex. Navassa has a prehistory of US contact, but what I want to draw our attention to is the conflict over power, sovereignty and rights that erupted during the ensuing melée over claims of possession in the mid-1850s, for the power play offers up significant details about the limits of Haiti's black sovereignty and the ways that they could perform that authority. Crucial to this analysis of the contours of black sovereignty is the fact that these nineteenth-century claims of possession repeat themselves more than a century later, but in an entirely different form.
NAVASSA: ACT TWO
Rather than offer you its entire historiography, I will focus, today, on two scientific expeditions to Navassa separated by nearly 140 years. This gap in biographical and geographical inquiry occurs, not coincidentally, due to shifts in the significance of Navassa to the economic fortunes of political actors and the military–industrial complex within the United States.
Although predicated by different economic urges, the two research expeditions and the sovereignty battles that link them translate the cataloguing of the macrobiota of the island and its surrounding reefs into a language of profit that conspicuously, in its unfurling, denies Haiti any recognition of its sovereignty. In addition, the expeditions and power struggles highlight the perceived absurdity (according to US representatives) of Haiti's attempts to wield power. Instead of directly colonizing Haitian land or engaging in a covert attempt to neuter Haiti's long-fought-for independence, the US acquired and appropriated Haitian territory by delegitimizing Haiti's claims to power through repeated acts of non-recognition.
The first research expedition to Navassa occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, not long before the exchange that opened this essay, and was led by a team of engineers and metallurgists who went to Navassa at the behest of the Navassa Phosphate Company, a New York-based company that had a commercial interest in Navassa. In a report to the company about the island, one of the team members, with an eye on profit, notes, “exploration of this island could not have been made at a more propitious time.” It “opens a new era,” he continues, by “restoring and exalting the fertility of exhausted and worn out lands … [Guano has] increased our agricultural products, and thus … our general welfare.”Footnote 29 He concludes with a special flourish: “I am happy to record here the discovery, I may say, of an inexhaustible quantity of a mineral substance … so instrumental in the development of agricultural wealth.”Footnote 30 Literary critic Jennifer James recently linked that wealth with racial capitalism, noting that many of the labourers who mined this product in unsafe and unscrupulous conditions around the world were people of colour.Footnote 31
Legal theorist and historian Christine Duffy focusses less on guano's labourers and more on the complex territorial status of the many guano islands around the world. In a recent essay, she argues that non-US guano arrived in the US, but at a steep price. Southern plantation owners, determined to increase the yields of their faltering crop production and reduce their costs, began a concentrated lobbying campaign in the US Congress to bring guano lands – American-controlled guano lands – into a legal structure of territorial acquisition.Footnote 32
In 1856, the Guano Act finally emerged from the US Senate. Although debate centred on the conditions of sovereignty and expansion, proponents, such as Senator Seward (the bill's drafter), scoffed at the notion of occupation, noting that “the bill is framed so as to embrace only … [the] more ragged rocks, which are covered with this deposit in the ocean.” He concluded by suggesting that the territories were “fit for no dominion, or for anything else, except for the guano which is found upon them.”Footnote 33
Once approved, the Guano Act granted US subsidiaries, such as the Navassa Phosphate Company, the right to temporarily claim, occupy and extract guano from uninhabited and unclaimed territories discovered to contain natural fertilizers, such as bird droppings, typically found on seacoasts.Footnote 34 The law obligated any “discoverer” of a guano island to claim legal possession of the island for the US and report that claim to the government before beginning any extraction of deposits. To all intents and purposes, the act enabled the USto establish its own temporary guano plantations around the world. As a testament to its focus on resource extraction rather than territorial acquisition, the act included an “out” clause, allowing the termination of the claims of possession once the ecological resources had been forcibly (and violently) removed.
The desire to control the removal of and profit from this mining drove the Age of Guano mania that involved multiple empires and cultivators in the nineteenth century. Environmental historian Gregory Cushman argues that guano enabled “our species to escape a major limitation imposed by the ecological old regime,” enabling crop yields to be pushed ever higher, no matter the resulting soil degradation and environmental loss of ecosystem viability.Footnote 35 Given this boost, nations around the world rushed to set up their own guano fields.
From the outset, the US government claimed that it wanted resources, not colonies. As a result, the Guano Act set about making the sovereign claims along these ecological chains both visible and temporary. It would do this by offering tangled legal language that allowed the islands to exist as “neither foreign nor part of the United States.”Footnote 36 This would be the direct (and later) interpretation of these words within the act:
whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.Footnote 37
These new islands were connected to the US, but were not truly a part of it.
Just after the Guano Act of 1856 passed, Navassa ended up in the hands of Peter Duncan. Duncan occupied Navassa for the express purpose of extracting guano and would eventually file the necessary paperwork declaring possession with the US government in 1857. Duncan would work with the Navassa Phophate Company. By filing the claim, Duncan and his associates could obtain the full backing and protection of the US government for their enterprise.
They would need it. In an 1858 letter from one of Duncan's agents to the then President of the United States, James Buchanan, the agent gives some scope to the extraction being undertaken on the island. He gives a rough estimate that about eighty or ninety men had pulled out some three thousand tons of guano; an amount at a then valuation of about twenty-two dollars per short ton.Footnote 38 This wealth, the agent asserts, faced threats from a delusional Haitian government and its emperor, who dared, “under the absurd pretense that Navasa [sic] is a ‘dependency’ of St. Domingo,” to place “the island in a state of blockade by its armed forces.” Haitian vessels had entered Navassa's waters and stopped any other ships from arriving at the island and those anchored there from departing. This blockade also prevented Duncan's other ships “from leaving provisions or water for the men who are there.”Footnote 39
In the letter, the agent calls for redress by the US against any lost property and capital due to the “imminent danger” the company faced being exposed to the rapacious and frightening Haitians. Although he never actually labelled Haiti the Atlantic world's bête noire, his wording comes close, as he casts the Caribbean nation as a dangerous and potentially violent entity that only the might of the United States could stop. And Haiti definitely needed stopping, he argued, as it dared to interfere with “an American citizen, prosecuting a lawful trade,” and demand the cessation of excavation activities. The agent challenged how “a foreign government outside of its own territorial jurisdiction” could even attempt such a thing.Footnote 40 By refusing to extend this rationale to his own activities – or those of the US – the agent failed to comprehend how the US could be exercising a potentially unlawful sovereignty grab “outside” its own “territorial jurisdiction.”
This was – and remains – Haiti's claim. After the letter-writing campaign, the Commander of the US sloop Saratoga, T. Turner, arrived in the Caribbean with his crew and went to investigate the situation in Haiti. In a letter recounting his time there to his superiors, he laments the entire affair, noting how it put him in an embarrassing and tenuous position to intercede in a fight between nations over the rights to shit. Continuously, he asserts that while he has no “opinion upon the points of disagreement,” he would “protect this company” on behalf of the US.
Within a short period of time, he learned that Duncan had had a partnership with another man that had dissolved acrimoniously. The bitter business breakup might have driven the former partner to approach the Haitian government and ask for the right to lease Navassa in return for a share in the profits. The entire affair would soon be exposed, prompting Haitian officials to cut all ties with Duncan's former partner. This did not make the issue of rights disappear.
Commander Turner encountered the question of Haiti's rights during his investigations when he interviewed Lieutenant Colonel Hogarth of the Haitian army. Hogarth, sent by the Haitian government to talk with Turner, stressed that “the Island of Navassa is a part of the Haytien empire.”Footnote 41 And he meant empire, not nation. By the mid-1850s, Haiti's President, Faustin-Elie Soulouque, had become Faustin I, the last emperor of Haiti, and set about violently retaking the other half of the island of Hispaniola. Haiti's invasion of the Dominican Republic dominated discussions in the US Congress that seemed to hinge not on Haiti's rights, but on the Dominican Republic's “race.” This debate would get so heated that two different political tracts were published in the US by Haiti's Commercial Agent there, the Boston merchant B. C. Clark, on the blackness of the Dominican Republic.Footnote 42
Clark would also intercede in the battle over Navassa. In a 13 November 1858 letter on behalf of the Haitian government to the US Secretary of State, Lewis Cass, Clark laments the “unauthorized” occupancy of Navassa by US citizens. He argues that “the territory over which Hayti [sic] now claims sovereignty was once the property of Spain, who, in the exercise of an undisputed right, ceded said territory to France” at the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697.Footnote 43
Clark goes on, though, stressing that France's recognition of Haiti as a sovereign nation in 1825 “vested her with the perfect title to the ‘French part’ (popularly termed) and all of its dependencies.”Footnote 44 This undisputed claim had never been rescinded, Clark noted, stressing that “although frequently importuned,” Haiti had “never ceded, sold, or leased either of these dependencies to any nation, company, or individual.”Footnote 45 In linking Haiti's revolutionary origins and anticolonial tendencies with its sovereignty, Clark asserts more than just rights; he sets up an ethical dilemma for the US. Instead of merely being temporary extractors, Clark suggests that the US were imperial agents intent on trampling Haiti's independence and ignoring its continuous presence in the world as a sovereign nation. To Clark, this non-recognition was unjust.
The Assistant US Secretary of State, John Appleton, would not address this challenge in a returning letter on 17 November 1858 to Clark. Called to respond to Clark by his superiors, Appleton dashed off a short note that states that the US had “sufficient proof” that Navassa had lain “derelict and abandoned” and, therefore, was an empty, available island for claiming – temporary claiming. As proof of this, he included a copy of the Guano Act of 1856 with his letter, and takes pains to stress that “the act does not make it obligatory upon the government to retain permanent possession of the island.”Footnote 46 In retrospect, these are empty promises. The US did, and continues to, possess Navassa. Why? And more importantly, how?
NAVASSA: ACT THREE
In the nineteenth century, waves of convict and conscripted labourers – mostly African Americans – removed guano from Navassa. They worked in dangerous and horrific conditions: imprisonment for insolence, a significant lack of food, and no safety provisions as they dynamited their way across the island. Using only pickaxes, the men would remove the guano and transport it on railcars to the coast, where it would be bagged and placed on waiting barges for transport to larger ships nearby. This was deadly work that allowed no rest, sick leave or even a change of mind regarding employment. The Phosphate Company made sure that the last item never occurred by forcing the men to repay them for the cost of travel to and upkeep on the island. This kept many forever indebted – and forever working for – the Phosphate Company.
In 1889, tensions reached boiling point and rebellion occurred between the black labourers and their white overseers. Quickly arrested and brought back to the States, the labourers faced a range of charges that carried the penalty of death, in some cases. Legal allies and societies came to the men's aid and helped argue their case in the courts. In the court case that followed, the defendants' core defence centred on the fact that the US had no sovereign rights to Navassa Island, and therefore, as labourers on Navassa, they were not subject to US laws while working there. In essence, the island belonged to Haiti. This was an explosive claim that would eventually attract the attention of the US Supreme Court, who, in a majority opinion, rejected it. The justices, though, gave further arguments, settling the constitutionality of the Guano Act and offering legal language that would appear again in the insular cases involving US sovereignty claims to Guam, Puerto Rico and other island spaces.Footnote 47 Not surprisingly, the ruling suggested that Haiti's sovereign claims to Navassa did not matter; they were, in effect, not sovereign enough to disallow the US and its corporate designees the right to touch Navassa and remove its valuable resources. This is a curious ruling for temporary rights of extraction. Somehow, the Guano Act enabled permanent non-incorporation of guano islands and other territories.
Guano's days as a resource critically important enough to warrant temporary occupation were numbered as guano dropped off in significance as a natural fertilizer. Unfortunately, this did not end the use of Navassa by the US. It merely shifted from being a guano island to being a military possession due to the island's importance along the Windward Passage for ships travelling to the Panama Canal, and its placement within the security zone near the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Due to its heightened role in the geopolitics of the region, Navassa would be patrolled by the US Marines, obtain a lighthouse to aid in the sea mobility of cargo vessels, and eventually find itself under the supervision of the US Coast Guard.
Haitians responded to this by performing acts of sovereignty on the island. In the 1850s, Haitians built on the rocky island cultural icons, such as a church, for fisherfolk, and broadcast radio shows from Navassa more than a century later.Footnote 48 Political scientist and legal theorist Fabio Spadi notes that while various US governmental departments posted “no trespassing” signs on Navassa, Haitian citizens continued to travel to the small island, even though they faced immediate removal or possible detention. Haitian governments also kept up the pressure, publicly, by rejecting the US's claims to Navassa and arguing their rights and sovereignty over the island. Their arguments went unheeded. Everything changed in 1998 with the second research expedition to the island.
In 1998, the US-based Centre for Marine Conservation led a scientific tour of Navassa. During this visit, researchers from US institutes, agencies and universities discovered nearly a hundred different indigenous organisms. In countless newspaper and journal accounts that heralded their “discoveries,” the expedition leaders described the island in terms that seemed to combine notions of ecological conservation with articulations of wealth and capital, calling it “a marvel of biological treasures,” “a true gem”Footnote 49 and “green gold.”Footnote 50 Although the US-based scientists never discussed what these island gems were worth, others translated their language through the imperial and power processes of Haiti's past relationship with Atlantic nation-states. This was ecological imperialism at its most ardent best.Footnote 51 In a move typical of the politics of the region, Navassa would cease being merely a guano island or a security site for US military officers of the seas. It would become a world treasure policed by the US, an entity that designated itself the planetary sovereign.Footnote 52
CONCLUSION
Today, Navassa is administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and federally protected as the Navassa Island National Wildlife Refuge, part of the much larger Caribbean Islands National Wildlife complex. A living museum, it remains in the hands of the US. No longer a site for resource extraction, Navassa is a global ecological “gem” that the US must protect. But from whom? As of this writing, Navassa remains closed to local and regional traffic and closed to researchers based at agencies and centres principally outside the US. In simple terms, Haitians, even Haitian-based scientists, are barred from entry.
What this historiography suggests is that the US's ardent desire to protect Navassa as an ecological marvel that needs conserving for the world depends on a misremembering of the slow violence and catastrophic change waged against the island by the Navassa Phosphate Company, the US Marines, and, ultimately, the United States government.Footnote 53 Navassa is not so much an untouched paradise as a site continuously able to be retouched by the US in any way it chooses. As a result, the island can now be environmentally saved by the same entity that exploited it. And if Haitian rumors are anything to go by, this saving is not for species conservation purposes, but for pharmacological reasons. This “gem,” these protestors believe, is literally full of green gold that US companies seek to keep for themselves.
In a 2007 op-ed piece for the New York Times, Ted Widmer, then director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, succinctly captures the situation, asking, “On the 150th anniversary of the year Navassa came into American possession, it feels a bit unseemly to see the world's richest nation entangled in a dispute with the poorest nation in our hemisphere over a remote rock.” Widmer continues, echoing much of the argument of this essay, “All that Navassa holds for us is the right – or more specifically, the power – of its possession. Perhaps we should celebrate the sesquicentennial by just giving it back – to Haiti.”Footnote 54 This has not happened, and will more than likely never occur, as what Widmer imagines is a kind of sovereign recognition that the US has struggled to give Haiti, one that fully illustrates the threshold of black sovereignty and the limits of black power in the Atlantic world.
While not a complete disavowal, the ways that Haiti has been seen, but not recognized – especially around its rights to Navassa – as a sovereign entity has had long-standing ramifications. From the indemnity placed on it by France in 1825 in which Haiti had to pay its former imperial masters 150 million francs for recognition of its own freedom to the various structural-adjustment programmes in the late twentieth century that tied loans and monetary aid to certain free-market strategies, Haiti has been enchained by various concepts and considerations that have articulated its sovereign status as something laughable, absurd or, more troublingly, dangerous. This essay has given some form to this enchainment by noting the ways in which the contours of Haiti's black sovereignty have been tempered and challenged by various political and cultural considerations. It has focussed on a particular set of circumstances – sovereignty over Navassa island – and used this issue as a way to chart black sovereignty's movement and morphing. In tying the performance of sovereignty to the battles over Navassa, this essay has highlighted the ways that ecology can be used as a tool within political and economic processes.
Rather than argue for a form of “third space of sovereignty” for people of African descent – following the work of Kevin Bruyneel on indigenous sovereignty in the Americas – this essay calls for a reframing of sovereignty that considers the ways that blackness as a concept, a stance and a performance transforms and haunts sovereignty and demands that it respond to the conditions that consistently challenge its existence.Footnote 55 It provides a window into the past and potentially opens up a new line of political inquiry for future populations within black (widely defined) sovereign lands.
If we wish to live in a world in which Haiti and other nations with majority populations of people of African descent can exercise their politics free from political restrictions and constraints, then we need to grapple with the contours of black sovereignty. J. Michael Dash argues in his seminal The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context that Haiti “was conceived as the [political] alternative to the plantation.”Footnote 56 In order to comprehend its political acts and performances of power, we must shift through wide (and unexpected) material, such as the battle over Navassa Island, that highlights the ways that racial effluvia of the past live on in our present lives, lands and seas.
