Architectural Remnants and Mythical Traces of the Haitian Revolution:

Abstract

In Architectural Remnants and Mythical Traces of the Haitian Revolution: Henri Christophe's Citadelle Laferrière and Sans-Souci Palace, Peter Minosh examines two works of architecture related to the Haitian Revolution: the Citadelle Laferrière and Sans-Souci Palace, built under Henri Christophe, who reigned as the first king of Haiti from 1811 until his death in 1820. No archival records exist regarding the construction of these neoclassical edifices, and even their architects are unknown; all that remain are literary productions and mythical traces. Yet these traces point, productively, to a mythos behind this architecture—that of the enslaved who formulated a political space outside the terms of the colonial project, as well as that of the colonizer for whom the very suggestion of a slave insurrection would undermine France's colonial mercantile economy. Minosh takes the Citadelle Laferrière and Sans-Souci Palace to be architectural instantiations of these mythic configurations and shows that these artifacts of the world's first independent black nation attempt to solidify in architecture the ephemeral condition of insurgency.