Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic. By Jennifer L. Palmer

Abstract

One wonders what the late Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who wrote famously of the historical ‘silencing’ of the Haitian Revolution, would make of the great proliferation of works on Haiti and the Revolution that have appeared over the last decade or so — books, articles, and edited volumes by scholars such as Laurent Dubois, Deborah Jenson, Marlene Daut, Jeremy D. Popkin, Nick Nesbitt, Charles Forsdick, Kaiama L. Glover, and many others. Collectively, this body of recent work, building on previous landmark publications by, among others, C. L. R. James, David Geggus, Michael Dash, and Trouillot himself, has had the effect of promoting Haiti to the forefront of debates on race and revolution during and after the Enlightenment era, to the extent that it has become an unavoidable point of reference for any scholar working on those themes and periods. A primary concern has been to investigate what Nesbitt terms ‘The Idea of Haiti’ (see ‘The Idea of 1804’, in The Haiti Issue: 1804 and Nineteenth-Century French Studies (= special issue Yale French Studies, 107 (2005)), 6–38), the philosophical and political underpinnings and ramifications of the Revolution, and to assert the primary importance of Haiti to emerging ideas on race, human rights, slavery, and other contemporary concerns. Arguably, the drive to promote Haiti in this way has rather ignored some of the complexities and contradictions of the Revolution, and paid relatively little attention to the everyday, lived experience of slavery and colonialism in Saint-Domingue. Jennifer L. Palmer’s fine study of that very experience complements some of the other recent work on Haiti, and also subtly critiques its tendency to reach for the overarching political-philosophical meanings of the Revolution while ignoring, and indeed ‘silencing’, accounts of the quotidian reality of slavery. Tellingly — and in this regard she echoes Geggus — she argues that the Revolution, just as it challenged notions of white, European superiority, also had the effect of solidifying race as a political and social category, and of curtailing the fluidity that had previously characterized social relations — the ways in which bonds were formed across racial lines, in the ‘intimate’ settings that she writes about: in workplaces, homes, families, commercial relations, and other situations in which Africans, Europeans, and Creoles inevitably met and formed bonds. As the Revolution progressed, so the personal ties that had bound different groups together began to dissolve and to be replaced by more clearly oppositional, binary understandings of race. Palmer’s meticulous research uncovers a range of intimate connections that go beyond the usual interest in sexual intimacy to include bonds of, for example, common masculinity, shared work, kinship, and neighbourliness, and which, she says, characterized the lived experience of colonial rule. In ranging broadly from Saint-Domingue to La Rochelle, she suggests the ways in which such intimacies were transatlantic in nature and implication, and, again, how such bonds were curtailed as binary notions of race established themselves across the Atlantic world. Palmer’s arguments are persuasive, and should be incorporated into the broader debates on race and revolution, while we remain aware that the historical accounts of such ties remain inevitably one-sided, and that the silencing of the enslaved created one intimate reality that even the most sophisticated study is unable to enter.