What did Christopher Columbus once mean to Haiti? Émile Nau’s Histoire des Caciques d’Haïti and Irving’s Columbus in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay responds to scholarship on nineteenth-century representations of Christopher Columbus, by reinscribing Haitian writing on Columbus into transnational approaches largely focused on the US and Latin America. Throughout this essay, I contend that Émile Nau’s Histoire des caciques d’Haïti (1854) was profoundly influenced by Washington Irving’s A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). In particular, I show how Nau reframed Irving’s text in nationalist terms to reimagine Columbus as the catalyst of modernity while asserting the centrality of Haiti to his life. To do so, I compare key passages in Nau and Irving to reconstitute Nau’s enigmatic methodology and to show how Nau adapted Irving’s text to inscribe Columbus within his vision of Haitian history that included the Spanish colonization of Hispaniola. This analysis reveals the ways in which Haitian cultural nationalism drew from and spoke back to the larger network of nineteenth-century Atlantic nationalisms.