In contrast to the celebratory representations of the Haitian revolution that African American artists produced in the United States, these artists filtered the island through representational systems historically used to deal with difference or to domesticate foreignness. The physical and visual encounter with Haiti awakened African American artists from the “dream” of racial solidarity and radically transformed the presentation of Haiti in their work.
Among artists who traveled to Haiti, such as William Edouard Scott, Aaron Douglas, and James Porter, the Pan‐Africanist notion of diasporic connections and revolutionary inheritance was harder to sustain. Their work was central in forging diasporic links between African American and Haitian contemporaries and inspiring black populations throughout the diaspora to imagine freedom, to dream, through Haiti. At this time many African American artists working in the United States represented the first black Republic through symbols of the Haitian revolution and its leaders. Haiti was on mind and in the imagination of many African American artists throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a period that coincided with the U.S.
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