Can the subaltern be heard? The Haitian Revolution and the Romantics (original) (raw)
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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
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.
New Literary History, 2018
In order to tease out the poetics of Haitian revolutionary politics and vice versa in the first two decades or so of Haitian independence, I turn to two of the country’s first epic poets, Dumesle and the author of a pseudonymously published poem titled L’Haïtiade. In so doing, I hope to underscore the contributions of these less well-known writers and their works not solely to Haitian poetics as such, but also to Haitian intellectual history. Turning to Dumesle’s Voyage and L’Haïtiade, in particular, allows us to trace how a poetics of Romanticism, or the notion that the poet is a “visionary, capable of piercing the mystery of the world and explaining it through symbol and allegory,” became wedded to a politics of historical analyses in nineteenth-century Haiti.
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.