"Sentiments of a Private Nature": A Comment on Ann Laura Stoler's "Tense and Tender Ties"

Mary A. Renda

In the closing months of 1918, Haitian government officials grew impatient with what seemed to them the obvious "injustice" then being perpetrated against their nation by "the powerful Republic of the United States." For over three years, they had attempted to maintain some semblance of independent action in the face of an uninvited military occupation replete with what one Haitian diplomat termed "imperious injunction[s]" and another named more baldly "the vexatious and unfair tyranny of American officials."1 When Louis Borno, then Haiti's minister of finance, authorized an appeal to Washington for redress of those grievances, he sought to give U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing and President Woodrow Wilson a way to rise above such injustice, a way to square the occupation with the president's rhetoric about fairness for small nations. "With the American Government's help," he sought to assure them, "the Haitian people are firmly resolved to carry out . . . all the reforms that progress demands." But they would do so, he insisted, "through that most cordial cooperation . . . which proceeds on joint examinations and not on imperative commands notified without regard to national dignity and prompted perhaps by sentiments of a private nature, in which the higher interests of the two countries are given no consideration."2	1
The private sentiments that "perhaps" prompted U.S. officials' imperious behavior were amply in evidence in occupied Haiti, both before and after Borno's complaint. They were in evidence in the summer of 1915, when a U.S. military officer rained down a shower of condescension on the revolutionary leader and heir apparent to the Haitian presidency, Dr. Rosalvo Bobo, treating him like an errant schoolboy. They were at work the following year when the wives of U.S. military officers arrived in Haiti and the interracial sociability that had heretofore characterized Haitian-American intercourse came to an abrupt and insulting end. They were in play when the American chief of the new United States–trained Haitian army became disgusted at the possibility that some might think he was subordinate to the Haitian president. And they were on hand as U.S. marines "prowled" for Haitian women but felt disgraced by the few among them who went so far as to marry one. They were even working their way into the lives of small children—the sons and daughters of marines in Haiti—as they aimed imaginary guns and tittered over racial jokes in the generous yards their parents might not have been able to afford back home.3	2
Ann Laura Stoler's essay "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies" helps place those sentiments within a broader field and offers a powerful comparative framework for examining the ways they shaped, and were shaped by, empire. That framework stands in stark contrast to the one suggested by Louis Borno's message to Lansing back in 1918, in which an imperious racism was relegated to the realm of the private, set apart from the true "higher" interests of states. As was the case with Stoler's earlier influential work, this essay paves the way for rich historical scholarship by insisting on the fundamental connection between the affairs of empire and the private worlds of "sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement, and child rearing." Building on and revising the insights of Michel Foucault, Stoler sees empire's intimate relationships as "microsites of governance," sites that were charged with the maintenance of racial and national boundaries. Such intimate relationships, and the sentiments they inspired and foreclosed, were linked, Stoler further asserts, to transnational developments. Her wide-ranging essay calls our attention to suggestive connections that might usefully join plantations in South Carolina to those in Sumatra, strategies of dissemblance in Detroit to similar silences in Java, and "displays of manliness in French Indochina" to masculine posturing in Washington, D.C. And Stoler sees more than parallels in these connections; she sees the operation of transnational "strategies of rule," worked out in part through "circuits of knowledge production" that we can, as yet, only partially trace. Did some U.S. officials in Haiti, for example, seek guidance from Sir Evelyn Baring's reflections on his own strategies of rule in Egypt, as Hans Schmidt's work suggests? Stoler urges us to be more attentive to the lines of communication that set such possibilities in motion.4	. . .