The Slave Revolt That Changed the World and the Conspiracy Against It: The Haitian Revolution and the Birth of Scientific Racism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Black Studies, 2020
This paper argues, first, that despite the transnational impact of the Haitian Revolution, it remains mostly unknown in the Western hemisphere. This is primarily the result of an international racist project to repress the idea of Black Revolution and undermine Haiti's progress. Second, I argue that, since the second half of the 19th century, intellectuals and social scientists have contributed to this racial project, and thus that scientific racism was born primarily as a response to the Haitian Revolution. The proliferation of racially oriented pseudosciences was part of significant efforts on the part of European and American intellectuals to undermine the notion of Black Revolution and Black power, and to demonstrate that Blacks were not capable of self-governance.
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.
Insights of anthropology, 2019
In 1885, the nineteenth-century Haitian lawyer, statesman, anthropologist, and Egyptologist, Joseph Antenor Firmin (1850-1911), published his work, De l’egalite des races humanines (The Equality of the Human Races) as a rebuttal to Arthur de Gobineau’s, “Essai sur l’ inegalite des races (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). In this article I argue that Firmin's critique of western anthropology is not a vindication for afrocentrism as expressed in the works of afrocentric scholars like Molefi Kete Asante and others. Instead, it is a call to highlight the contributions of African people to intellectual thought and development as it has come to be embodied in the universal ontology and epistemology of science. Be that as it may, in this work I want to continue Firmin’s position by demonstrating the African contribution to social and scientific theories by highlighting the scientism of the African people of Haiti as revealed by the religion of Vodou, its epistemology (Haitian/Vilokan Idealism), and its form of system and social integration, the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism. Essentially, like Firmin, I assume, against the noiriste and Afrocentric positions, science as a human universal, which began in Africa, and has now reached maturity in Western society. This work seeks to highlight the African/Haitian contribution to the scientific process as encapsulated and revealed in Paul C Mocombe’s [1] social theory and method of “phenomenological structuralism” thereby reconstructing the social sciences and humanities to account for the contribution of black Atlantic thought and culture.
Marooning Human Rights and Science in Colonial Haiti
In the 1820s, Balzac’s go-to mesmerist, Doctor Chapelain, published records from the Socièté Magnétique du Cap-François that, I will argue, provide an overlooked yet critical perspective on one of the most important incidents leading to the Haitian Revolution. The records include a list of members of the Society, descriptions of mesmeric treatments performed on the island, and a speech on Mesmer’s doctrine of “animal magnetism” delivered in 1784 at various receptions. As we will see, this speech is an ardent support of black self-emancipation and radical anti-slavery that should figure prominently in the history of human rights as a crucial event occurring between the 1781 publication of Condorcet’s Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres and the 1788 creation of the Société des Amis des Noirs. Less than seven years before the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), colonial authorities perceived Mesmer’s doctrine and the spread of its “magnetic” practices among the slave population as a major source of civil unrest. In this paper I will show how they proceeded to defeat the threat of mesmerism on scientific grounds, and how their rational provides a critical case study to examine the complex relationship between colonialism, human rights, and modern science.
Set within a larger analysis of class relations in the Haitian Revolution, this is a microhistory that intersects with several important themes in the revolution: rumor, atrocity, the arming of slaves, race relations, and the origins and wealth of the free colored population. It is an empirical investigation of an obscure rebellion by free men of color in the Grande Anse region in 1791. Although the rebellion is obscure, it is associated with an atrocity story that has long resonated in discussion of the revolution. Based primarily on unexploited or little-known sources, the article demonstrates the range and depth of research that remains possible and suggests that a regional focus is the best way to advance current scholarship on the Haitian Revolution.
MARX AND HAITI. Towards a Historical Materialist Theory of Racism
Marx and Haiti. Towards a Historical Materialist Theory of Racism, 2022
Although modern racism was fully developed by their time, Marx (and Engels) did not engage in a theoretical discussion of its essential features. This analytical silence is investigated in the chapter MARX AND HAITI: NOTES ON A BLANK SPACE. At the same time, the chapters of this volume demonstrate that and why the principles of a historical materialist analysis of society present links for a critical theory of racism. In the chapter DEHUMANIZATION AND SOCIAL DEATH: FUNDAMENTALS OF RACISM, this is shown concerning the various historical shapes of racisms caused by different forms of class relations. The chapter ›RACISM‹: BIRTH OF A CONCEPT connects the conceptual history of racism with the socio-historical conflicts of differently affected social groups. Finally, the chapter A HISTORICAL MATERIALIST THEORY OF RACISM: INTRODUCTION addresses basic elements of a Marxist analysis of racism. It elucidates the necessity of a theoretical conjunction of classist and racist discrimination as well as the historical differentiation of racisms.
Race as a weapon: defending the colonial plantation order in the name of civilization, 1791-1850
The object of this study is to analyze the use and adaptation of racialist ideology in the Afro-Hispanic Antilles following the start of the Revolution of Saint-Domingue in 1791, as it evolved to justify and reinforce plantation slavery and served to reinstitute and police the color line that was the central ideological premise supporting the economy of exchange and exploitation in the world of Atlantic coloniality. The renewed stigmatization of the racialized types in Creole population aimed to limit the echoes of the revolution against the plantation and it was an attempt to dismiss its political significance as a movement of self-emancipation and decolonization. The fear promoted by the colonial authorities, the planter class and Creole intellectuals, liberal and otherwise, aimed to establish a delicate balance between terror and profits wanting to justify the continuation of plantation slavery through the purposeful resemantization of the ideological tandem civilization/barbarity based on a racialized reading of history that championed European immigration and the systematic reduction of the population of Afro-descendants.