Dash reads relations between the two countries as a problem of representation. Borrowing Said's account of how a dominant culture assembles an "Other" out of its own anxieties, he traces how American writing cast Haiti alternately as empty ground for racial regeneration and as proof of African darkness, a pairing organised by nineteenth-century racial theory and by a habit of describing the Caribbean in feminine, submissive terms.

The occupation of 1915 sharpened the pattern. Travel books and sensational journalism sold poisoning, sorcery and cannibalism; a few novelists, Rex Beach among them, tried instead to explain the events politically, though their confidence in what the Marines had achieved was its own distortion.

Haitian writers answered by inverting the terms, adopting the figure of the defiant nèg and the values of the peasantry as weapons against American order. Black American writers of the 1930s, meanwhile, found in Toussaint and Dessalines a usable heroic past.