Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 by Marlene L. Daut

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 by Marlene L. Daut Angeletta K. M. Gourdine Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865. By Marlene L. Daut. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1-78138-184-7. 692 pp. £90 hardcover, £25 paper. With Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, Marlene L. Daut's predominant intention is to interrogate the tradition of racial troping that underwrites contemporary understandings of and engagement with Haiti. Her project articulates the racial taxonomies inherent in narratives, thereby exposing "the crushing significance of … the 'mulatto'" as "the primary topos through which to understand the epistemological problems of the Haitian Revolution" (8). Though the project's focus is 1789–1865, Daut carefully and effectively uses her position as a twenty-first-century scholar to critique the retrospective approach and to identify the tendencies of fiction that intrude on history as well as the ways history has created certain fictions. Her definition of "literary print culture" is expansive, and she aptly refers to her narrative sources as "storytellers" and includes works despite their various intentions of being "fictional or biographical, interpretive or historical" (27). Analyses move between written texts and their writers as texts, mining a tension between lived and textual bodies. Daut also untangles the racialized and violent tropic frameworks that entrap the Haitian Revolution in its, and our, contemporary imagination. What makes Tropics of Haiti compelling is the daunting amount of research sources—primary and secondary, ranging from fiction to eighteenth-century historiography and reportage—that Daut brings into conversation. Most impressive is the attention paid to synchronicities and how they have colluded to fix the Revolution within a primarily gendered strain of racialized violence. The year 1789 is the theoretical starting point for Daut's query, generating in Tropics of Haiti the "most comprehensive literary history of the Haitian Revolution" to date (44). An intensely deft introduction and perspicacious coda bracket the project's four parts, which are dedicated to developing individual aspects of the generic trope of "mulatto vengeance" and analyzing its representation. Each part contains an introduction and three critical chapters that engage key textual imaging and the focal characters of the genre. Despite her claim to the contrary, Daut's analysis disrupts the continued circulation of the "idea that the Haitian Revolution was silenced" through her excavation of the "immense body of writing" signaling revolution and post-independence (3). [End Page 153] The introduction outlines the intervening argument that from the French Revolution to the end of the US Civil War, Haiti signified racialized violence. This metonymy arose at the intersection of debates about slavery and revolution, as well as the space between Enlightenment debates around humanity and literacy and French indictments of Haitian independence as mulatto vengeance. At the confluence of these moments, Daut posits, the Haitian Revolution emerged in the literary imaginary through the tropes of "monstrous hybridity," the "tropical temptress," and the "tragic mulatto/a," to which she adds "the colored historian." Part 1, "From Monstrous Hybridity to Enlightenment Literacy," surveys naturalist writing as well as travelogues, essays, personal letters, periodicals, legal treatises, and traditional literary fiction to outline how the Enlightenment's pseudoscientific ideas of race informed discourse around Haiti and Haitians. The three chapters in this section unpack this discourse through the pronouncement of the monstrous hybrid in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates "about whether or not, and to what effect, 'white' Europeans and 'black' Africans could reproduce with one another," as contested by nineteenth-century Haitian historian Baron de Vastey and manifested in nineteenth-century fiction (86). Daut reads a broad range of nineteenth-century Atlantic writers, positioning mulatta/o vengeance against a backdrop of Enlightenment literary narratives revealing different but related tropic strategies. For me as a womanist scholar, part 2 develops Daut's most compelling contribution to ongoing conversations about the Haitian Revolution through its incisive exploration of revolutionary women and the raciogendered and violent "tropical temptress" (198). Daut begins by questioning the binary of the either...