I first heard Lindsay Twa give a talk from this project a number of years ago during a panel at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association. The talk began with a deft and careful reading of a small painting, entitled Thoughts of Liberia: Emancipation (1861), of an interior scene by American artist Edwin White. In offering a visual analysis of the piece, Twa drew the audience's attention to the myriad details that dotted the mostly barren visual field of the painting: a paintbrush here, a broom there, a suspended kettle and a small and slightly blurry poster attached to the wall at the farthest edge of the painting's visual field in which one word – Hayti – is legible. Twa suggested then that the twinning of Liberia and Haiti in the painting lent the “thoughts” regarding emancipation a more complicated transnational and transatlantic meaning than merely the eradication of slavery on US soil. Race and politics circulated, although quietly, in the painting's interior, along with the potential for black nationhood as expressed in Haiti's and Liberia's political existence. This talk highlighted aspects of the cojoined realities of Liberia and Haiti, especially with regard to their synchronous recognition by the US government in 1862, and the ways that visualizing Haiti would have political as well as aesthetic ramifications.

Twa has now completed this project and published it as Visualizing Haiti in U.S. Culture, 1910–1950. The introduction sets the theme for a book that sets out to analyse “representations of Haiti and the cultural exchanges between the ‘Black Republic’ and the United States” (xviii). In it, Twa does more than merely chart who did what when and in what aesthetic form. This is not a historical reconstruction of tropes and events. Instead, Twa highlights how a bevy of African American artists and burgeoning and established creative ethnographers encountered, constructed and co-influenced the creation of visual narratives regarding Haiti – many of which emerged due to the shenanigans of Haitian and foreign economic and military antagonists. What Twa curates, then, is less an articulation of Haitian stereotypes than a survey of relationality in which a range of artists, influencers and cultural workers engage with Haiti – on either Haiti's terms or their own.

Twa does travel down a few intellectual paths covered by others, notably Krista Thompson (regarding the location of Haiti in the dreams of diaspora within African American art), Mary Renda (as reflected in her reading of the US military's occupation and influence in Haiti from 1915 to 1934) and Mimi Sheller (regarding tourism, consumption and commoditization in the Caribbean). Twa adds to these considerations the ways that particular art foundations and funding agencies provided infrastructure (such as schools and training centres) and financing for an interdisciplinary team of people to reside in Haiti, absorb aspects of Haitian culture (or ossify stereotypes) and produce work. In examining forty years of creative exchange, Twa links a wide community of respondents to transnational histories, claims, exploitation and stereotypes about Haiti, noting the form and structure that emerged from these intercultural relationships.

Specifically, Twa discusses the artwork and writing of celebrated African American artists, such as Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence, and notes the ways that representations of Haiti enabled artists, activists and other creative types to address political, racial and cultural issues in Haiti and the US. The book does this through a six-chapter arc that moves from material published in National Geographic on Haiti and the US military's “taming of Haiti,” to illustrations of Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones, to the marketing of Haiti by the Haitian Tourist Board in 1950. In combining tourism studies with literary studies, and visual cultural studies with historical anthropology, Twa offers a compelling book that does not separate art from politics or ethnography from considerations of cultural primitivism that tended to view Haiti as either a strange black magical island or a monstrous black wilderness. Everyone, including Haitian leaders, played up some aspect of these narratives.

In concluding the book, Twa observes that there is much work that remains to be done by artists, activists and critics. “Until the … exceptional and the extreme are replaced by a wider awareness of the historic roots of poverty and upheaval [and] the structures and syncretisms of Haitian culture,” she writes, “then Haiti will continue to have an ‘image problem,’ regardless if that image is meant to capture the sensational, or to form a more ‘positive’ but proscribed representation” (240).