Caribbean “Race Men”: Louis Joseph Janvier, Demesvar Delorme, and the Haitian Atlantic (original) (raw)
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.
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.
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.
The Journal of Pan-African Studies, 2012
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...