Introduction: Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks (original) (raw)
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The Politics of Democratization: Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas Movement in Haiti
whose mentorship and professional guidance will not be forgotten. I wish to thank the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, Dr. Frank Mora, Liesl Picard, and staff. I am appreciative of the numerous opportunities I have had to work with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), the Green Family Foundation (GFF), FIU Libraries, Mireille Louis Charles, Brooke Wooldridge, Rose Nicholson, and Adam Silvia. I would also like to thank all of my graduate student peers who have shared in both times of great difficulty, but also times of great progress. Lastly, an affectionate thank you to all of my family and friends, too numerous to name, who provided me with a core of emotional support that has carried me here to this point. This dissertation is very much a product of all the people who have supported me over the years. vi
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.
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 (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.
The Haitian Revolution and Jean-Jacques Dessalines: The End of History and the Last Man Standing
Philosophy study, 2023
This work, using a structurationist approach, phenomenological structuralism, argues that the Haitian Revolution and Jean-Jacques Dessalines represented the first embodiment of Alexandre Kojève's "End of History" thesis. Following the Haitian Revolution, which is a revolt against slavery and mercantilist capitalism, the founder of the country, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, attempted to synthesize three forms of system and social integration on the island in order to constitute the nation of Haiti: the mercantilist and liberal capitalism of the Affranchis, petit-bourgeois blacks and mulatto elites, respectively; and the Lakouism, communism, of the African majority on the island. In this sense, Dessalines represented the first embodiment of Kojève's end of history Hegelian thesis. Using a structurationist, structural Marxist, understanding of practical consciousness constitution, the work explores the origins and basis for Dessalines's social, political, and economic policies to that end. The death of Dessalines, I conclude, would undermine this revolutionary impetus of the Haitian Revolution, rendering it insignificant, and converted Haiti into the so-called poorest country in the Western Hemisphere under American neoliberal capitalist hegemony.
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.