Minette's Worlds: Theater and Revolution in Saint-Domingue

Abstract

Minette's Worlds:Theater and Revolution in Saint-Domingue Laurent Dubois (bio) What is the relationship between theater and revolution? The history of Saint-Domingue, and of the Haitian Revolution, offer a particularly riveting space through which to explore this question. This essay offers a tentative answer, or at least a few paths for exploration, through three figures: Alzire, Zaïre, and Minette. The first exists just as a character in a play. The second as both a character in a play and a woman who lived in Saint-Domingue. And the third was an actress whose increasingly well-known story stretched into the early nineteenth century. Each of their stories is intertwined with those of the Haitian Revolution. Collectively, they allow us to think through the relationship between gender and sexuality and the political and cultural transformations of the era. This essay is very much part of a constellation of work that has been deeply shaped by collaboration with two co-authors: Bernard Camier, the leading scholar of music and theater in Saint-Domingue, and Kaiama L. Glover, an eminent scholar of Haitian literature and translator of Marie Vieux-Chauvet's Dance on the Volcano, a twentieth-century novel about Minette. My findings are shot through with my ongoing conversations with both of them and refer to longer co-authored essays that explore some of the themes taken up here.1 [End Page 101] This essay is also meant as an invitation for scholars to engage more deeply with the foundational work on theater in Saint-Domingue written by Haitian historian Jean Fouchard in the 1950s. Fouchard's most famous work, and the only one translated into English, presents an argument about the centrality of marronage in the creation of the Haitian Revolution. But most of the work published during his lifetime actually focused, interestingly, on the cultural history of colonial Saint-Domingue, particularly music, dance, and theater. Working in both Haitian and French collections, Fouchard was able to gather together a tremendous archive of material on theater during the period, producing a study of the topic and a repertoire of plays and actors. The latter helped lay the foundation for a current and more complete digital project by Julia Prest, itself part of a larger current flourishing of work on theater in Saint-Domingue.2 I came to study theater in Saint-Domingue as part of a project of trying to understand, interpret, and narrate the history of political thought and action on the part of people of African descent, particularly the enslaved, during the Enlightenment and Age of Revolution. As I sought to absorb prodigious and wide-ranging work on theater in eighteenth-century and revolutionary France, I came to understand the particular importance and richness of studying theater in the context of the plantation society of Saint-Domingue. In a place where a particularly small minority of the population had access to the reading and writing of texts, I came to believe, theater took on a notable role. The wide circulation of theater in the French Atlantic made it probably the most important vector of Enlightenment ideas about virtue, justice, freedom, and other themes that were at once literary and political. The adaptability of theater, and particularly the fact that it always had to be performed by particular individuals, in particular spaces, with audiences that crystallized a broader community formation, meant that it could take on specific roles within a racialized plantation society. And the fact that theater opens itself up onto so many different interpretations and can be quoted and referred to, as well as re-performed informally, meant that phrases and plots could move into other realms of daily life, enabling a link between various sites of performance and self-presentation on and off stage. Several recent scholars, particularly Camier, Lauren Clay, and David M. Powers, have documented the richness of theatrical life in the French Caribbean.3 By the end of the eighteenth century, theatrical venues existed throughout Saint-Domingue, not just in the major port towns of Le Cap and Port-au-Prince but also in smaller ports such as Les Cayes, Léogane, and St. Marc. The well-known chronicler of...