ABSTRACT
The case of Maya Deren shifts the focus to US imperialism, and specifically to the post-US-occupied Haiti of the mid-twentieth century. Given primitivism’s quest for the timeless and ahistorical, it is ironic that each example of this aesthetic project speaks so richly of its historical context, whether that might be anxieties surrounding the waning of European imperialism; anti-colonial or anti-capitalist struggle; or the search for a society free from the confines of Western convention. Deren’s primitivism is the flash point here: it is this that both resists US imperial discourse, and is also most likely to be complicit in it. It is also this which allows Deren to give voice to her disidentification with the United States in favour of her own, Slavic “blood memories.” Manifestations of primitivism have generally been understood to be causally tied to modernist suspicions of Enlightenment ideals of human progress.
