Review of The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination by Natalie Marie Léger in Research in African Literatures (original) (raw)
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Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (Table of Contents)
Haitian Revolutionary Fictions, 2021
The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was the first antislavery and anticolonial uprising led by New World Africans to result in the creation of an independent and slavery-free nation state. The momentousness of this thirteen-year-long war generated thousands of pages of writing. This anthology brings together for the first time a transnational and multilingual selection of literature about the revolution, from the beginnings of the conflicts that resulted in it to the end of the nineteenth century. With over two hundred excerpts from novels, poetry, and plays published between 1787 and 1900, and depicting a wide array of characters including, Anacaona, Makandal, Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henry Christophe, this anthology provides the perfect classroom text for exploring this fascinating revolution, its principal actors, and the literature it inspired, while also providing a vital resource for specialists in the field. This landmark volume includes many celebrated authors—such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Heinrich von Kleist, Alphonse de Lamartine, William Wordsworth, Harriet Martineau, and William Edgar Easton—but the editors also present here for the first time many less-well-known fictions by writers from across western Europe and both North and South America, as well as by nineteenth-century Haitian authors, refuting a widely accepted perception that Haitian representations of their revolution primarily emerged in the twentieth century. Each excerpt is introduced by contextualizing commentary designed to spark discussion about the ongoing legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Americas. Ultimately, the publication of this capacious body of literature that spans three continents offers students, scholars, and the curious reader alike a unique glimpse into the tremendous global impact the Haitian Revolution had on the print culture of the Atlantic world.
The Haitian Revolution is one of the most important revolutions in the Western world, in which a large population of formerly enslaved Africans founded a new nation without slavery, put a permanent ban on colonial slavery in the new republic's first constitution, and declared the undivided human rights of and the absolute equality for all people. After a successful revolution against the inhuman institution of slavery and unflagging striving against the colonial-imperial powers of France, Spain, and Britain, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the general in chief who succeeded Toussaint Louverture, declared the emergence of the new state of Haiti on the first day of the new year in 1804. This essay is a critical evaluation on the most recent literary and historiographical scholarship on the Haitian Revolution. It reflects on the significance of the Revolution as a historic world event as well as a reference point for thinking about freedom, universal human rights, social justice and equality in our postcolonial moment. I argue that there has been an "intellectual shift," what I call "The Haitian Turn," in modern scholarship in North America on the Haitian Revolution. 1 I close with some suggestions on the future scholarship on the Haitian Revolution. This is not an exhaustive study on the scholarship of the Haitian Revolution but a critical reflection on the most recent important studies on the topic.
Law and Humanities (Vol 6, No 2, Winter 2012)
The article examines the way in which Aimé Césaire's book-length poem, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (?Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), the founding text of the négritude movement, and C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins recuperate the Haitian Revolution, and in particular the character of Toussaint Louverture, in order to interrogate the absence of the consideration of the Haitian Revolution in human rights discourse and historiography. Particular attention is paid to the way in which Césaire and James use the Haitian Revolution to foreground black agency and a discourse of universalism in their representations. For Césaire, Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution signified blackness as a sign of the colonised condition and its overcoming - Haiti was where “négritude stood up for the first time“. For James, Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution provide an example where assumptions of black passivity and powerlessness were rejected.
Revolution and Universality: Interpreting the Time and Age of the Haitian Revolution 1791-1804
The Future(s) of the Revolution and the Reformation, Elena Namli (ed.), 2019
A major theme of the current “Haitian turn” has been what I call a “universality-analysis”, which stresses that the Haitian Revolution, in contrast to the American and the French, once and for all abolished slavery. The chapter investigates the intervention into the Haitian Turn by two scholars specialized in the history of human rights: Lynn Hunt, who advocates a universality-analysis of the Haitian Revolution; and Samuel Moyn, who defends what I call a “universality-skeptical” analysis. It is argued that a theory of universal political forms, understood as contradictory and limited by the social content of power they mediate, can reveal that Hunt presuppose the effectivity of the political form independent of social content and a theory of historical continuity connecting the Haitian Revolution to our own age, and that Moyn presuppose emptiness of the political form reducible to intentions of actors and outcomes of events and a theory of discontinuity.
The Haitian Revolution in Interstices and Shadows: A Re-Reading of The Kingdom of This World
2004
Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World (1949), the only sustained literary rendering of the Haitian Revolution in the Spanish Caribbean, is known both for its fi ctional treatment of Haitian history from a slave's perspective and for the preface that claimed for that history the distinction of epitomizing marvelous realism in the Americas. This reading of the text's approach to one of the salient foundational narratives of Caribbean history looks at how, despite the "minute correspondence of dates and chronology" of the events narrated in The Kingdom of This World, the version of Haitian history offered by Carpentier is a fractured tale whose fi ssures may be read as subverting the adherence to the facts of Haitian history and its primary sources that the author claims for his text. It looks specifi cally as how the erasure of the leaders of the Revolution from the text, particularly that of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, reveals Carpentier's hopelessness concerning the Haitian land and its people.
Colonial Subjects No More: Histories of the Haitian Revolution
In his 1995 book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot has used the construction of both public memory and the academic M a t t s o n | 2 historiography of the Haitian Revolution to explore issues such as dominant narratives, historical silences, and the postmodernist recognition of many truths. These themes can in fact be seen quite often in the recent historiography of the Haitian Revolution due to its remarkable but for too long silenced impact on world history. Trouillot emphasizes the usefulness of the Haitian Revolution in examining the discipline of history itself, down to the insistence upon the rigors of research even in a postmodernist context. "The unearthing of silences," writes Trouillot, "and the historian's subsequent emphasis on the retrospective significance of hitherto neglected events, requires not only extra labor at the archives […] but also a project linked to an interpretation." 1 The historiography of the Haitian Revolution intersects with many issues of French colonialism; modernism, colonialism, postcolonialism, slavery, revolts, revolutions, racism, citizenship, republicanism and historical discourse are all topics which are well-represented in the scholarship. This essay will explore the English-language histories of the Haitian Revolution with a primary focus on the most recent works.