Blueprints for Haiti on the World Stage: Representing Race and Nation at the 1900 Exposition Universelle : Projeter Haïti sur la scène internationale: Représentation de la Race et de la Nation lors de l’ Exposition Universelle de 1900

The plans of Haitian diplomats to (quite literally) step up on the world stage during the 1900 exposition universelle in Paris mattered for Africa and its diasporas. International fairs empowered governments and individuals alike to reflect on their allegiances to both racial and (trans)national senses of self and community. However, citing financial constraints, Haiti did not move forward with a pavilion at a geographically symbolic locale in the heart of the French capital. This article offers a close reading of a curious item in the French national archives – what one might consider a book of lost dreams – a collection of blueprints and correspondence of Haitians, alongside representatives from other Latin American and African nations, that ultimately never participated in this world’s fair. I also juxtapose Haitian aspirations in relation to W.E.B. Du Bois’s pavilion about the Black experience in the United States and assess other events in which Haiti had a more solid presence, such as the Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1893 and London’s First Pan-African Conference in 1900. By unraveling Haitians’ navigations of the landscape of international events across the Atlantic World, we might historicize the malleability of Blackness as a border-crossing bridge during the rise of Pan-Africanism at the turn of the century. As the first Black republic with a century-long legacy of freedom leading up to the 1900 exposition, Haiti’s representations of itself – whether imagined or actualized – reverberated for people of African descent everywhere. Even with dashed dreams for a pavilion, Haitian thought at this time contributes to our understanding of the workings of race, nation, and transatlantic legacies of European colonialism.