Staging the Haitian Revolution: Performing Blackness and the Role of the Mulatta/o

Abstract

Well before the US occupation of Haiti, the “Black Republic” was important to reimagining the sign of blackness and throughout the Americas, its long and ultimately successful revolution stoked the possibility of gaining freedom from slavery by force. On January 1, 1804, the once enslaved Jean Jacques Dessalines declared the former colony independent of French rule and in several powerful gestures, marked Haiti’s decolonial stance. He recouped the Taino name for the island, “Haiti,” and in an 1804 proclamation after the “massacre of the white French,” declared, “I have avenged America.”(J. Michael Dash, The Disappearing Island: Haiti, History, and the Hemisphere, Cerlac Colloquia Paper (2004), 2. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Dessalines declared Haiti independent on November 29, 1803 and more famously on January 1, 1804; the statement of avenging America was made in a proclamation after the “massacre of the white French” in the spring of 1804. Philippe R. Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2012): 569–70; 580.) In a gesture that seemed to thumb its nose at colonial categories of racial difference, he authorized an 1805 constitution that declared all Haitians black, including the Polish population who had helped fight Napoleon. (Dash, Disappearing Island, 2; Girard, “Reappraisal,” 570.) His performative declarations made a powerful statement not only for the people of the newly formed Republic of Haiti but also for, and against, the international community of nations and empires. (Girard describes Dessalines as a savvy international statesman who was “well aware of the naval, commercial, and diplomatic requirements for victory” and who did not wage war on nearby slave-owning colonies, but promised non-aggression in exchange for weapons and other trade. ———, “Reappraisal,” 569.) Yet Dessalines’ performatives were partly “unhappy” within Austin’s formulation of speech acts—neither true nor false, performatives are considered happy or unhappy depending on the outcome or uptake and whether the intended enactment is achieved. (J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).) Haiti was indeed free of French rule, but the international community largely refused recognition of its sovereign status and the internal racial and class problems between the formerly enslaved, many of whom had been born in Africa, and the gens de couleur, or free people of color, persisted despite his symbolic and political declarations of Haiti’s blackness. (See Chap. 1. France recognized Haiti in1825 on the condition that Haiti pay 150 million gold francs as reparations for lost “property.” Philippe R. Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence 1801–1804 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2011), 342. The US granted recognition in 1862. Laurent Dubois translates gens de couleur as “free people of color” or “free-coloreds.” The term was favored by politically active members of that group in Haiti in the late eighteenth century and as Dubois notes, was a more complicated designation than the term, “mulatto.” Dubois, Avengers, 6, 70.)