CHRISTOPHER P. IANNINI. Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature.

Abstract

Two of the most important literary figures of the early republic, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and John Audubon, were Frenchmen whose sensibilities had been shaped by their experiences in the dynamic plantation world of the circum-Caribbean. Audubon, indeed, was the son of a Saint-Domingue sugar planter who would not have emigrated to the United States if not for the trauma (as he saw it) of the Haitian Revolution. In this short, dense, and rewarding series of essays on writers on nature in the lower South and the West Indies—from Hans Sloane at the start of the eighteenth century through to naturalists Mark Catesby, William Bartram, and Audubon—the plantation world was not some exotic and culturally retrograde region at the edge of a cosmopolitan non-slaveholding world. For Audubon and Crèvecoeur as well as Thomas Jefferson (who is the subject of a very interesting chapter), these were places that were central to the scientific and literary culture of Enlightenment America. But the very novelty of the plantation world and the cruelty it engendered as capitalist social institution and economic engine made this idea difficult to articulate. Both Audubon and Crèvecoeur wanted to efface the Caribbean from their consciousness, to drop a curtain, as Audubon put it, over the dire picture of slave revolt, and to escape as soon as they could from what Crèvecoeur called a “chaos of men, negroes and things” (pp. 143, 255).