At the Feet of Dessalines: Performing Haiti’s Revolution during the New Negro Renaissance, in Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 259-288. (original) (raw)
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Journal of Canadian studies, 2023
The Haitian Revolution—the famed historical event that redefined the liberatory possibilities of modernity and altered Black diasporic subjectivities—offers a wealth of knowledge that has yet to be fully analyzed. This article explores the diasporic and queered possibilities embedded in the story and aesthetic representation of the revolutionary actor, Romaine la Prophètesse. This liminal figure of the early revolutionary era galvanized thousands of formerly enslaved people to fight against the French colonial apparatus while embodying a feminine, creative, and spiritual gendered subjectivity, diverting from the overdetermined masculinist and militaristic ethos of the time. Nonetheless, most accounts of Romaine are tangentially mentioned and do not explore the rebellious possibilities of this historical figure’s imaginative gendered presentation. To counter the analytical impasse imposed by Western and authoritative archives and methodologies, the author employs a “radical interdisciplinarity”—a crucial Black studies approach—to unearth the potential of creative genders and their role in upholding Black diasporic epistemes of freedom and resistance. Paying attention to Haitian abstract art, and particularly the work of Haiti-born, Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Manuel Mathieu, the author explores how his pieces blur temporal, spatial and ontological registers offering a glimpse into undecipherable, yet affective, genealogies of “freedom dreams.” Indeed, through the use of a conceptual frameworks that honours the “right to opacity,” the author suggests that the obscured mythology and the abstracted aesthetics of Romaine la Prophètesse allow for a genealogical reading of queer spiritual ontologies that are part of larger Black diasporic freedom epistemes and that are demonstrated through contemporary Haitian queer designations and advocacy work.
Enlightenment Tropes in French Popular Theater on the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s
Reverberations of Revolution, 2019
The metaphor of theater surfaces persistently in relation to the descriptions of revolutionary events throughout cultural and literary history. The stage seems to represent the external world: the world as theater and revolution as theater. With respect to the Haitian revolution, we can trace the metaphorical use of theatrical space in several texts on the events in Saint-Domingue and later Haiti; this metaphor also confirms the importance of the institution as political space at the time (Dubois, Camier 2007). As I will argue in this chapter, theater becomes one of the important representational modes that represents revolutionary events and ideas on stage while also shaping the conception of these events for the European metropolises. Jenna Gibbs (2015, 631) has pointed out that especially popular theater played an important role in shaping "how predominantly white audiences" in Europe and America understood slave-led revolution, since the ambivalent attitude towards slave revolution was often represented in their highly over-determined portrayals of revolutionary leaders. Gibbs' findings on blackface pantomime in Great Britain and the US also hold true for the French context: "Blackface rebels were plastic figures in whom playwrights could sublimate ideological contention over slave revolt as a site of, on one hand, retributive violence and, on the other, democratic rights and liberation." (2015, 628).
Before Malcolm X, Dessalines: a 'French' tradition of black Atlantic radicalism
International Journal of Francophone Studies, 2007
This article explores the anticolonial and postcolonial thought of Haitian revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Résumé La pensée anticoloniale et postcoloniale de Jean-Jacques Dessalines, chef de la Révolution haïtienne et premier empereur d'Haïti, est considérée ici vis-à-vis de la tradition de l'Atlantique noir formulée par Gilroy, et surtout par rapport à Malcolm X en tant que 'prophète colérique' de l'Atlantique noir. Malgré le statut 'd'auteur' de la déclaration de l'indépendance haïtienne souvent conféré au secrétaire Boisrond Tonnerre, la pluralité des documents produits par Dessalines en conjonction avec plusieurs secrétaires laissent entendre une voix distincte. L'idéologie anticoloniale de Dessalines incorpore de façon syncrétique des traces d'interprétations africaines du monde spirituel et de la nature. Ces proclamations et manifestes mettent en question l'identité anglophone de l'Atlantique noir et nous invitent à interroger les diverses 'commencements' du postcolonial.
Atlantic Studies, 2018
This article offers an original and nuanced contribution to the larger discussion of dance in the colonial Caribbean. Its focus is on the largely neglected phenomenon of the colonial imitator, and specifically on white imitations of local slave dances in the public theatres of Saint-Domingue in the 1770s and 1780s. Colonial accounts of different types of slave dance (calenda, chica and vodou) are examined as an important point of reference for the subsequent analysis of theatrical performances of what were heralded as slave dances. The majority of these formed part of the performance of a local Créole-language work called Jeannot et Thérèse, set explicitly in Saint-Domingue and featuring slave characters. Despite a number of claims to verisimilitude in relation to these dances, it is clear that they bore little resemblance to their supposed models and that what was presented was, from the colonial perspective, a less threatening, more Europeanized form of slave dance. Most revealing of all is the fact that white dancers in the theatre appear never to have imitated vodou dances, which were bound up with spirit possession, even in a work that does allude to local vodou practices. Rumours had no doubt spread of the involuntary imitations that some colonials had experienced when spying on vodou rituals in secret. This avoidance of vodou dance-and the careful negotiation of a pseudo-vodou ritual in the body of the work-is further evidence of a genuine fear-and, crucially, recognition-of the potency of vodou practices even before the Haitian revolution.
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
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'
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.
From the late eighteenth century through most of the nineteenth, Buenos Aires and Montevideo were hosts to a joint theatrical circuit characterized by the regular comings and goings of impresarios, artisans, musicians, and actors between the two cities. The military conflicts that shaped this period actually encouraged these connections, as they stimulated both exile and repatriation between one locale and the other. Africans, and particularly their Rioplatense descendants, were an integral part of popular entertainment circuits in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Some of the first Argentinean historians of theater and music, among them Vicente Gesualdo and Teodoro Klein, were aware of this connection and included in their initial scholarship links that connect the history of free and enslaved Afro-descendants to the early theater of Río de la Plata. 1 People of African ancestry participated in the European-style performance arts in Buenos Aires and Montevideo during the viceregal period (1776–1810), and they continued to do so during the revolutionary nineteenth century. While this article centers on theater, it also provides glimpses into the dance academies and pulperías (combined bars and grocery stores) that were centers of community expression. Africans and Afro-descendants also played guitars and other instruments at bonfires (fogones) and street parties, owned pulperías and dance academies, and more broadly, engaged in popular culture other than
‘A Very Hell of Horrors’? The Haitian Revolution and the Early Transatlantic Haitian Gothic
This article explores the Gothicisation of the Haitian Revolution in the transatlantic dis- course during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As it argues, the Gothic mode has to be understood as a reaction to the profound challenges that the Haitian Revo- lution posed to a transatlantic world built on the slave economy. Pro-slavery and pro-colo- nialist authors demonised this successful slave revolution and one of the first anti-colonial revolutions in modern history by resorting frequently to the ‘hegemonic Haitian Gothic’. By contrast, early Haitian leaders and some Black Atlantic radicals appropriated this mode, turning it into the ideologically contrary ‘radical Haitian Gothic’.