‘A Very Hell of Horrors’? The Haitian Revolution and the Early Transatlantic Haitian Gothic (original) (raw)
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The Revolution in North American Scholarship The literature of the Haitian Revolution is substantially rich. The scholarship that does exist focuses on class and race structures, resistance of the enslaved and marronage, economic and political forces, and Toussaint Louverture. (2) The subsequent paragraphs will review and assess pertinent studies directly and indirectly relating to the subject matter, in order to identify various approaches to the issue. In North American scholarship, Alfred Hunt was the first to publish a full monograph on Haiti's influence on antebellum America. In Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (1988), Hunt explores Haiti's influence on antebellum America with respect to the social, political, and cultural repercussions of the Haitian Revolution and the meaning of the figure Toussaint Louverture to enslaved Africans in the United States. Very recently, in Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: Th...
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.
The Haitian Revolution in Interstices and Shadows: A Re-Reading of The Kingdom of This World
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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.
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This article sets out from an analysis of the pioneering work of Susan Buck-Morss to rethink, not only Hegel and Haiti, but broader questions surrounding dialectics and the universal brought to light by the Haitian Revolution. Reading through the lens of C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, I seek to correct a series of ironic silences in her account, re-centering the importance of Toussaint’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and underlining the dialectical importance of identitarian struggles in forging the universal. Finally, I offer Frantz Fanon’s reformulation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—overlooked in Buck-Morss’ account—as a corrective that allows us to truly rethink progress toward the universal in decolonized dialectical terms.
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Marronnage, or escape from slavery, was a longue-durée form of resistance to slavery in Haiti and was also, as Sylvia Wynter argues, a "dialectical response to the capitalist plantation system"-a system that aimed to deny humanity, sever social and cultural ties, and commodified people and their labor power. This article, as well as works by others such as Cedric Robinson (1983), Sylvia Wynter (n.d.), and Jean Casimir (2020), argues that marronnage was a fundamentally anti-capitalist mode of resistance, socio-political critique, and grassroots mobilizing. In the immediate moments when enslaved people fled plantations, they reclaimed possession of themselves and other tangible and intangible resources, such as their time, social relationships, forms of knowledge, and labor skills that enslavers stole from them. When maroons re-appropriated resources and mobilized themselves, they challenged and subverted colonial plantation structures, contributing to the downfall of both Spanish and French imperial slaveries in Haiti. During and after the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, Africa-born rebels and maroons were central to the mobilizing structures that successfully fought to abolish slavery and overturn colonialism-representing an astounding rupture to the prevailing Atlantic world-system that was dependent upon enslaved labor. Even after the post-independence Haitian government replicated aspects of the colonial administration, as Casimir (2020) points out, the formerly enslaved masses of Haiti organized themselves into communal social arrangements that prioritized subsistence labor and extended kin networks, and continued to rely on marronnage to protest exploitative economic practices. This article explores the trajectory of marronnage in Haiti as a continuous struggle, emphasizing the ways that it exposed the violence, exploitation, and oppression inherently embedded in the Atlantic world-system, and exposed the limits of the governing Haitian states.