Enlightenment Tropes in French Popular Theater on the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s (original) (raw)
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Delos 37(2), 2022
This volume offers a superb example of research that dares to take the lofty ideals of the French Enlightenment at their word and "confront a triumphalist narrative of enlightened eighteenth-century European thought with the stage culture of a global empire reliant on slavery" (1). Especially noteworthy is its inclusion of African diaspora stage culture in eighteenth-century performance studies. Moreover, its rich collection of innovative contributions brings together scholars of various disciplines. Historians, literary scholars, and researchers in theater and performance studies unearth the distinctive stage culture that emerged in the colonial Caribbean, while focusing on the transposition, staging, and creolization of French plays in a cultural, social, and physical environment deeply shaped by slavery, racial discrimination, and systemic violence. The volume's three parts are complementary, though, with different theoretical perspectives and methodological frameworks. The first section explores staging and representation in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), noting changes made to the repertoire as well as the colonial audience's reception. The second part explores theatrical characters representing slaves, indigenous people, and African descendants on European stages, while the third part is devoted to the "reactivation" of colonial history in twentieth-and twenty-first-century Caribbean performances (dance, theater, and music). Logan J. Connors studies the experiential effects of the ever-increasing presence of military personnel on theatrical performances. With theater-going emblematic of social distinction and racial discrimination, he expertly shows that the "colonial military culture" (30) manifested in tensions specific to heavily militarized colonial societies where the theatrical experience clashed with safety considerations. Julia Prest's deft study examines racial politics evidenced by slave imitations and blackface practices in Saint-Domingue and Paris. Scrutinizing the announcements published in Saint-Domingue's gazette, she explains that while blackface in Paris was used as a theatrical disguise which denoted the exotic, its use in Saint-Domingue represented another form of "white control over the theatrical representation of blackness" (51). Béatrice Ferrier investigates the new meanings of Parisian productions, after they
Public Theatre and the Enslaved People of Colonial Saint-Domingue
2023
The book] is an exciting and impressive project that presents the first study of public theatre and slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haïti), attending not only to representations of enslaved people on stage, but also the real presence and relationship between enslaved people of colonial Haïti and the theatre. Prof. Prest brings to bear a remarkable corpus of sources, from notarial records and eyewitness accounts to newspaper adverts, published treatises, and the texts of plays, to advance a series of significant, groundbreaking findings."
Francosphères, 2015
This article discusses the presence of Haiti, and in particular Haitian men, in francophone theatre published and staged throughout the world. It discusses Haitian male protagonists' engagement in quests for sovereignty, and specifically how their passion for this quest leads them into revolting states that are simultaneously yet varyingly political (revolt) and aesthetic (revulsion). Such a claim reawakens the argu ment that Haitians of Haiti or the diaspora-and even Haiti writ large-continue to be connected to heroic and sometimes misguided quests because of assumptions made about dramatic elements of Haiti's revolutionary history. Alongside the novel, which has remained the most globally and critically known literary space where such questions take shape, dramatic works like Vincent Placoly's Dessalines, ou la passion de l'indépendance (1983), and Simone Schwarz-Bart's Ton beau capitaine (1987), have also inserted themselves into the conversation for decades. Through a discussion of these works, this article underscores the particular even unique relationship between quests for sovereignty, dramatic text and the performing arts. More notably, it demonstrates how the actions of the protagonists, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Wilnor Baptiste, spotlight the revolting legacy bequeathed by non-Haitian francophone playwrights and directors to Haitian male protagonists and, indirectly, to Haitian men. Ultimately, Dessalines and Capitaine, as written and performed works circulated in francophone global spheres, productively complicate perspectives on ways in which Haitians and specifically Haitian men pursue sovereignty as the texts reveal the inexorable drama forever wrapped up in such quests of humanity.
Caribbean Literature in Transition, Vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 2021, p. 68-81., 2021
Very little has been written on Anglophone Caribbean theatre (the few publications include work by Judy Stone, Errol Hill, Richardson Wright, Rex Nettleford, and Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett). As for theatre from the French-speaking Caribbean, it also remains an understudied field. A few book-length studies (Bérard, Sahakian, Artheron) on theatre from the French Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guyana) have emerged in recent years; however, the extraordinary and rich theatre tradition of Haiti has almost been entirely neglected by scholars and critics of Caribbean theatre. Yet drama, in the form of dance theatre, music theatre, various forms of ritual theatre, political theatre, and national pantomimes, has not only been at the heart of the Caribbean literary and cultural sensibility. The genre in its various forms has played a major role in nationalist movements across the Caribbean, and in attempts at cultural decolonization viewed as indispensable to the process of political and social decolonization. This paper focuses on ritual theatre during the decades of the 1930s to the 1970s in the English- and French-speaking Caribbean, an era in playwriting and staging marked by returns to the Haitian Revolution; major investments in history; ancestral recuperation; politics and traditional culture; and cultural decolonization through the project of rewriting colonial narratives. I argue that ritual theatrical forms, enlisting Afro-derived Caribbean ontologies, reflected the importance of the sacred in affecting the material conditions of existence in the colonized post-slavery societies of the Caribbean.