‘A Very Hell of Horrors’? The Haitian Revolution and the Early Transatlantic Haitian Gothic (original) (raw)

This article explores the Gothicisation of the Haitian Revolution in the transatlantic dis- course during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As it argues, the Gothic mode has to be understood as a reaction to the profound challenges that the Haitian Revo- lution posed to a transatlantic world built on the slave economy. Pro-slavery and pro-colo- nialist authors demonised this successful slave revolution and one of the first anti-colonial revolutions in modern history by resorting frequently to the ‘hegemonic Haitian Gothic’. By contrast, early Haitian leaders and some Black Atlantic radicals appropriated this mode, turning it into the ideologically contrary ‘radical Haitian Gothic’.