The Idea of 1804 (original) (raw)
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Revolution and Universality: Interpreting the Time and Age of the Haitian Revolution 1791-1804
The Future(s) of the Revolution and the Reformation, Elena Namli (ed.), 2019
A major theme of the current “Haitian turn” has been what I call a “universality-analysis”, which stresses that the Haitian Revolution, in contrast to the American and the French, once and for all abolished slavery. The chapter investigates the intervention into the Haitian Turn by two scholars specialized in the history of human rights: Lynn Hunt, who advocates a universality-analysis of the Haitian Revolution; and Samuel Moyn, who defends what I call a “universality-skeptical” analysis. It is argued that a theory of universal political forms, understood as contradictory and limited by the social content of power they mediate, can reveal that Hunt presuppose the effectivity of the political form independent of social content and a theory of historical continuity connecting the Haitian Revolution to our own age, and that Moyn presuppose emptiness of the political form reducible to intentions of actors and outcomes of events and a theory of discontinuity.
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.
Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution
University of North Carolina Press, 2023
The Haitian Revolution was a powerful blow against colonialism and slavery, and as its thinkers and fighters blazed the path to universal freedom, they forced anticolonial, antislavery, and antiracist ideals into modern political grammar. The first state in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery, outlaw color prejudice, and forbid colonialism, Haitians established their nation in a hostile Atlantic World. Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the rest of the Americas and foreign nations and empires repeatedly attacked Haitian sovereignty. Yet Haitian writers and politicians successfully defended their independence while planting the ideological roots of egalitarian statehood. In Awakening the Ashes, Marlene L. Daut situates famous and lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.
The Haitian Revolution & Contemporary Theory
The Frantz Fanon Blog, 2014
This essay will discuss two of the ways in which the Haitian Revolution is significant for the practice of contemporary theory. It suggests that the Haitian Revolution unseals the silenced history of the contemporary praxis of liberal democracy-issuing a warning of the long-term consequences of silencing that which is deemed unthinkable at one time-and in the process offers the emancipatory potential of an actual universal doctrine of human rights. It will track the history of the hegemonic global political order that is now understood to be that of "neo-liberal capitalism and democracy" (Neocosmos, 2011: 362) and its limitation to a negative, legal interpretation of human rights (Nesbitt, 2009: 94). The contradictions and silenced chapter of that history establish the need for a rethinking of human rights. This is necessary for the practice of contemporary theory to constitute an emancipatory political project. The recognition of the Haitian Revolution shifts the genesis of contemporary human rights discourse - with emancipatory implications.
The Haitian Revolution (book chapter)
Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations, 2023
This chapter sketches out two divergent options for rectifying the neglect of the Haitian Revolution in the eld of international relations. First, we can make a claim for Haiti's centrality to international politics by tracing the effects and repercussions of its revolution on the Caribbean, the Americas and the world at large. Alternatively, we can see Haiti’s revolution as exposing the limitations of the categories we use to measure significance and meaning when we study the international. This latter option means abandoning the idea of centrality altogether, drawing on Haiti’s own intellectual history to sketch an alternative view of the international: its forms of power, hierarchies, constraints, and possibilities.
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.
Haiti: a (forgotten) philosophical revolution
Sociedad, 2008
In August 1791, after a massive meeting of slaves in the Bois Cayman that ended up in an equally massive vodú ceremony, the first Latin-American independence revolution took place: it was that of Haiti, which back then was known as the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and was, by far, the wealthiest colony any colonial power had ever settled in America. Haiti declared its independence in 1804 (and, with the * This article was specially rewritten for Sociedad #28
Archives of Revolution: Toward New Narratives of Haiti and the Revolution
Cul de Sac: : Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue. By PAUL CHENEY. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. 274 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies. Edited by ELIZABETH MADDOCK DILLON and MICHAEL J. DREXLER. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 430 pages. Cloth, ebook. Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America. By JAMES ALEXANDER DUN. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 350 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy. Edited by JULIA GAFFIELD. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. 295 pages. Cloth, ebook. An Islandwide Struggle for Freedom: Revolution, Emanicipatin, and Reenslavement in Hispaniola, 1789–1809. By GRAHAM T. NESSLER. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 312 pages. Cloth, ebook.
The Haitian Revolution: An Insignificant Revolution
Philosophy Study, 2023
This work posits that the Haitian Revolution became an insignificant Revolution the minute that it was usurped by the Affranchis class, the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois creole blacks, seeking equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their former colonial masters, from the Africans who commenced the event on the night of August 14 th , 1791. Whereas the Africans, I conclude, sought total freedom from the mercantilist and liberal order of the whites, which made the Haitian Revolution significant, the vindicationism sought by the Affranchis class undermined the agential initiatives of the Africans rendering the Revolution revolutionarily insignificant.