Haiti's Paper War: Post-independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 by Chelsea Stieber

Abstract

Reviewed by: Haiti's Paper War: Post-independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 by Chelsea Stieber James J. Fisher Haiti's Paper War: Post-independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954. By Chelsea Stieber. New York: New York University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-4798-025-9. 380 pp. $30.00 US. Chelsea Stieber's Haiti's Paper War offers an incisive examination of Haiti's guerre de plume between the royalist governments of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe and the republican governments of Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Pierre Boyer, as well as its legacies and repercussions. She takes as her source base the intellectual production of Haitian writers, artists, and political actors from the birth of an independent Haiti to the growth of a fascist, nationalist movement that culminated in the Duvalier dictatorships. In using these sources, Stieber traces the development of the Haitian Revolution's aftermath in order to demonstrate the "contestation, mutual definition, and continual (re)inscription" (2) of Haiti's meaning throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. She points out that although the Haitian Revolution has often been cast as the instantiation of a radical, liberal, and universal project that culminated in the founding of the Haitian Republic, this ignores the realities and internal tensions at play in the Revolution's aftermath and has established what the author calls the "myth of the universal Haitian Republic" (130). Stieber's innovative use of documents that have previously gone underexamined greatly contributes to our understanding of Haitian politics and history, particularly the guerre de plume. Stieber argues that the radical critique of Western Enlightenment liberalism offered by Dessalines and his political descendants has resonated in Haitian society and politics since 1804 (5–6). Likewise, she asserts that the assassination of Dessalines by Pétion and the republicans in 1806 has been viewed as a "historic stain" on the independence of the nation, remaining a key theme that later Haitian writers would return to again [End Page 170] and again (221–222). Ultimately, she concludes that the heritage of Haiti's radical critique of the Enlightenment and the resulting integral nationalism continued to resonate among a faction of Haitian thinkers, becoming a sentiment that François Duvalier would later tap into (245). Stieber's arguments add to a thriving body of scholarship that has examined the Haitian Revolution and its impact on intellectual production in the Black Atlantic.1 Stieber's examination of the radical critique of the Enlightenment in the foundation of Haiti points to the importance of the 1804/1806 divide. While 1804 represented a "radical anticolonial gesture," which Dessalinean writing helped consolidate, 1806 has too often been cast by historians as part of the "myth of the inevitable republic," ignoring the continuation of Dessalinean thought in Haitian politics (3). Her discussion of how Dessalinean political thought continued into the nineteenth century and was reinvented in the nationalist movement of the twentieth century contributes to our understanding of a longue durée in Haitian national politics, especially during less studied periods, such as the reign of Faustin Soulouque, the seventh Haitian president (and later emperor). Likewise, her following of how Dessalinean thought informs a longer history of Haitian political thought adds to the historical writing on Black radical thought in the Atlantic World (6–7). Such a tracing of Dessalines-inspired political philosophy can be seen especially in Stieber's examination of how the Haitian Revolution became a "central event for artistic reimagining in black radical thought" because as a subject, "it carries with it the full weight of its Enlightenment critique" (8). Similar examples of Haiti's uses in art might be noted in recent studies such as Ada Ferrer's Freedom's Mirror and Alyssa Sepinwall's Slave Revolt on Screen.2 One of Stieber's overarching arguments is that writing, particularly by Dessalineans, was used outside Haiti as an "anticolonial weapon" and internally as a "force of unity" (25). Writing is defined broadly in this sense, encompassing both traditional writing (newspapers, pamphlets, memos, etc.) and portraiture and other images (12, 15). Such mobilization of writing, art, and symbolic representation repeats throughout...