Twin Pillars of Resistance: Vodou and Haitian Kreyòl in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti [Stirring the Pot of Haitian History] (original) (raw)
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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 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.
From November 1905 to June 1906, Haiti’s French-literate reading public followed the trials and travails of the West African-born slave turned maroon turned revolutionary leader Jean —“Acouba” in his native language— in Massillon Coicou’s serial “La Noire“. Published in the Port-au-Prince daily Le Soir, the serial included over the eight months 165 installments and recounted the commencement of Haiti’s revolution. The feuilleton begins in the late 1780s and follows an allegorical cast of characters —slaves, free people of color, and planters— during the first years of the Revolution. Coicou’s inclusive cast provides him the opportunity to narrate the Revolution from multiple perspectives and illustrate the complex web of alliances and rivalries in revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Unfortunately, he never finished “La Noire”. The final known installment leaves the reader and main character Jean in the middle of revolutionary upheaval in late 1792/early 1793 after the arrival of the second civil commission from France. Despite the unfinished nature of the story, it is an exceptional text in Haiti’s literary canon and one of the earliest Haitian fictional treatments of slavery, yet has received no scholarly analysis. This chapter begins to address this silence by focusing on Coicou’s theory of Creole genesis described in “La Noire”. Beginning with scenes of storytelling among the slaves, Coicou recounted the linguistic encounters between slaves and masters and the process of creating Haitian Creole. For Coicou, these encounters were part of the larger process of cultural exchange occurring between French planters and West/Central African slaves, which he referred to as “creolization”. His imaginative ethnographic forays offer one of the first discussions of Creole genesis by a Haitian intellectual. I read these selections alongside late-nineteenth-century Creole studies to contextualize Coicou’s fictional investigations. Similar to the early creolists, Coicou’s use of Creole sought to legitimate the language and Haiti’s African heritage. Building upon earlier proverb collections by Haitian intellectuals, Coicou’s feuilleton initiates a radical departure from the general silence on Haitian Creole in Haitian publications. Moreover, Coicou’s interpretation of Creole genesis contributes to his narrative of the Haitian Revolution. In contrast to proponents of the “mulatto legend”, earlier Haitian authors who privileged the role of mixed-race leaders of the Revolution, and late-nineteenth-century revisionists who stressed the role of black creoles, Coicou chose a protagonist who was African-born but also had a command of French. According to Coicou, the slave Jean represented an ideal balance between Haiti’s two main cultural influences in the 18th century—West/Central Africa and France. Coicou’s inclusion of linguistic encounters on the plantation further illustrates this cultural métissage and validates Haiti’s hybrid cultural heritage.
Journal of anthropological and archaeological sciences, 2019
This work, using a structurationist approach to consciousness constitution, focuses on how and why the purposive - rationality of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution and Vodou diametrically opposes that of the African American Civil Rights movement and the desires of the Affranchis of Haiti. The author concludes that the antidialectical intent of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution at Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman) was not for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with whites by reproducing their norms and structure, as in the case of the African American civil rights movement under the purposive-rationality of liberal bourgeois black Protestant men. Instead, it was a clarion call, which emerges out of Vilokan/Haitian Idealism, for the reconstitution of a new world order or structuring structure “enframed” by an African linguistic and spiritual community, Vodou and kreyol, respectively, grounded in, and “enframing,” liberty and fraternity among blacks or death. In fact, the author posits that it is the infusion of the former worldview, liberal bourgeois Protestantism via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, on the island by the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois free persons of color, Affranchis, looking to Canada, France, and America for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition that not only threatens Haiti and its practical consciousnesses, Vodou and Kreyol, contemporarily, but all life and civilizations on earth because of its economic growth and accumulative logic within the finite space and resources of the earth.
Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (Table of Contents)
Haitian Revolutionary Fictions, 2021
The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was the first antislavery and anticolonial uprising led by New World Africans to result in the creation of an independent and slavery-free nation state. The momentousness of this thirteen-year-long war generated thousands of pages of writing. This anthology brings together for the first time a transnational and multilingual selection of literature about the revolution, from the beginnings of the conflicts that resulted in it to the end of the nineteenth century. With over two hundred excerpts from novels, poetry, and plays published between 1787 and 1900, and depicting a wide array of characters including, Anacaona, Makandal, Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henry Christophe, this anthology provides the perfect classroom text for exploring this fascinating revolution, its principal actors, and the literature it inspired, while also providing a vital resource for specialists in the field. This landmark volume includes many celebrated authors—such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Heinrich von Kleist, Alphonse de Lamartine, William Wordsworth, Harriet Martineau, and William Edgar Easton—but the editors also present here for the first time many less-well-known fictions by writers from across western Europe and both North and South America, as well as by nineteenth-century Haitian authors, refuting a widely accepted perception that Haitian representations of their revolution primarily emerged in the twentieth century. Each excerpt is introduced by contextualizing commentary designed to spark discussion about the ongoing legacy of slavery and colonialism in the Americas. Ultimately, the publication of this capacious body of literature that spans three continents offers students, scholars, and the curious reader alike a unique glimpse into the tremendous global impact the Haitian Revolution had on the print culture of the Atlantic world.
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.
Stealing the Citadel: Icons of Nationhood and Memories of Theft in Haitian Narratives of Kout Kouto
New West Indian Guide, 2024
This essay analyzes popular Haitian tales about sovereign theft by stealth which seek to expose machinations of graft and usurpation by outsiders and politicians. The foundational act for this genre of popular narratives in Haiti I argue is the indemnity that the Haitian State was forced to pay France of 150 million francs in exchange for international recognition to compensate for losses in property incurred by the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) which Haitian statesman Frédéric Marcelin described as an "act of dispossession." But popular rumors of national theft kept returning. I argue that these stories linking sovereignty, debt, and theft represent truth claims on the part of those who have long been "hermeneutically marginalized" and should be seen as a call for testimonial justice that challenges the triumphalist story of Haitian independence through revealing and denouncing deceitful chicanery on the part of those in power.