“The Way of Progress and Civilization”: Racial Hierarchy and US State Building in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (1915–1922)

Abstract

Racial stratification remains critically undertheorized in hierarchy studies. Postcolonial analyses demonstrate how diffuse systems of racial knowledge produce unequal subjectivities in world politics, but they are often criticized for making overdetermined explanations that do not account for agency or contingency. To rectify this theoretical lacuna, I develop a postcolonial-practice theory approach to explain variation in the intensity and duration of governance hierarchies. I argue that racialized discourses constitute the habitualized dispositions of dominant and subordinate actors and make possible specific governance practices. This approach can account for puzzling cases of successful resistance by some subordinates while others languish under intense domination. Two such cases are US state building interventions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic during the early twentieth century. By using a variety of primary archival and public sources, I demonstrate how ideas about racial differences among Anglo-Americans, Dominicans, and Haitians led US policymakers to enact a more long-term and domineering occupation of Haiti compared to the Dominican Republic. Once Dominican elites articulated a European–Spanish identity in opposition to Blackness, they mobilized support from other Latin American states and made US withdrawal practical. A postcolonial-practice explanation is useful because it addresses the limitations of both narrow and broad approaches to the study of hierarchy. Its focus on the contestation of US hierarchies further contributes to hegemonic-order theory while illustrating how the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion shape imperial rule and strategies of anti-imperial resistance.