Caribbean “Race Men”: Louis Joseph Janvier, Demesvar Delorme, and the Haitian Atlantic (original) (raw)
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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.
Set in Haiti: The Construction of Race in Historia de una bala de plata
Latin American Theatre Review, 1996
Literary and cultural critics must invent a term that surpasses "marginalized" to describe Haiti's place in literary history. Now that so many are claiming that politically coveted spot on the margin, what are we to do with Haiti, the Western half of an island which in multiple ways really exists on the fringes? Haiti is a small country in a region that, aside from Cuba, is only beginning to receive attention in drama and theatre studies-the Caribbean. Rather than as a producer of literature in general or theatre in particular, it is Haiti's history that has been significant to the Caribbean and the Americas, most particularly, its 18th century slave rebellion. This insurrection's symbolic importance is evident in Cuban Alejo Carpentier's novel El reino de este mundo (1949), while Trinidadian C.L.R. James links Haití to Cuba's 1959 Revolution in his essay "From Toussaint L'Ouverture to Fidel Castro." James, in fact, repeatedly returns to Haiti in his writings, for his best-known work, The Black Jacobins, lends its title to both a play about L'Ouverture (1936) and a history of Haiti in this period (1938). Another West Indian, Derek Walcott, published a historical drama Henri Cristophe in 1950 and Aimé Césaire from Martinique continued this focus with his 1963 play, La Tragedie du roi Christophe. There is an indirect reference to the Haitian backdrop in North American Eugene O'Neill's 1920 play The Emperor Jones (set "on an island in the West Indies as yet not self-determined by white marines") and a direct allusion to it in Colombian Enrique Buenaventura and the Teatro Experimental de Cali's La tragedia de Henri Cristophe from 1963, continued in his 1979 drama, Historia de una bala de plata. Almost all of the works I have cited in some sense presage the most recent U.S. occupation of Haiti for, while foreign intervention is not the main theme in every case, each, in its concentration on Haitian history, foregrounds the force or risk of radical mass mobilization. This activity can be envisioned as either liberating or menacing; Allan Nairn in an article from the Nation (Oct. 3, 1994) calls attention to an American perception of the threat of the Haitian populations'
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.
Interesting Beings and Racial Difference in Fictions of the Haitian Revolution
Karib: Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies, 2018
This article examines two novels about the Haitian Revolution, namely Leonora Sansay's epistolary novel Secret History, or the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) and an extended rewriting of this novel entitled Zelica, the Creole (1820), which has been attributed to Sansay. While Secret History narrates the events in Haiti through the lens of the American coquette Clara and her prudish sister Mary, Zelica transforms that sororal relationship into a crossracial friendship between Clara and the mixed-race character Zelica. In Secret History, Clara escapes both Saint Domingue and her abusive husband. In Zelica, she is killed by Zelica's father, a philanthropist who believes in emancipation through amalgamation. The aim of the article is not to provide definitive answers to the question of Zelica's authorship but to examine the motivational claims underlying the rewriting. It argues that the foregrounding of a mixed-race character reflects the increasing fixation on race-mixing in nineteenth century culture.
Research in African Literatures, 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.
Research in African Literatures, 2004
Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom ofthis World (1949), the o rendering of the Haitian Revolution in the Spanish Carib for its fictional treatment of Haitian history from a slave the preface that claimed for that history the distinction of ous realism in the Americas. This reading of the text's ap salient foundational narratives of Caribbean history look "minute correspondence of dates and chronology" of th The Kingdom ofThis World, the version of Haitian history is a fractured tale whose fissures may be read as subvert the facts of Haitian history and its primary sources that his text. It looks specifically as how the erasure of the leade from the text, particularly that of Jean-Jacques Dessaline hopelessness concerning the Haitian land and its people Lempere Dessalines oh!.. . Ou ce vaillant gacon Pas quitte pays a tombe. .. Pas quitte pays a gate Emperor Dessalines oh!.. . You this courageous boy Don't leave the fallen country. . Don't leave the ruined country Defilee's Song
This article, published in the 2015 French issue of MLN (130.4: 807-35), provides the first substantive account of Juste Chanlatte’s Le cri de la nature, a virtually unknown but pioneering work of Haitian literature published in 1810 as a direct response to abbé Grégoire’s 1808 De la littérature des Nègres. Focusing in particular on Chanlatte’s experimental approach to the representation of “race,” which both builds on and unsettles the abolitionist discourse of Grégoire, the article concludes with a comparative analysis of Le cri de la nature and a symptomatically edited version of it that was published in Paris in 1824 by a Frenchman named Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Cressé under the very different title of Histoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue.
The Haitian Revolution and the myth of the republic: Louis Joseph Janvier's revisionist history
This essay explores what I have termed the ‘myth of the Haitian republic’: the disconnect between the idea of a liberal democratic republic and its practical instantiation in Haiti but also the stories of the Haitian Revolution and civil war that partisans of the republic told to narrate its inevitability after the unification of the Haitian republic in 1820. After the fall of the northern monarchy and the end of nearly 15 years of civil war, historians, intellectuals and statesmen wrote the foundational national myths of the republic in poems, literary and political journals, travel narratives, geographies and histories. These texts narrated the inevitability of the republic by casting Dessalines’s empire and Christophe’s kingdom as perversions or aberrations of the inexorable march towards civilization and liberal republicanism. A first section considers the forging of the national republican myth in the work of Beaubrun Ardouin, considered at the time the foremost historian of the post-1820 republic. A second section considers Louis Joseph Janvier’s later revisionist history of Ardouin’s work. By illuminating the early republican mythologizing of Haiti’s revolutionary past, Janvier reveals how the post-independence republic failed to live up to the republican ideals of freedom and democracy that it proclaimed, particularly as it concerned Haiti’s majority group: the peasantry.