Haitian Revolution Research Articles

‘Oh Dutchmen, Defer this Catastrophe’

‘Oh Dutchmen, defer this catastrophe’ wrote a former Dutch plantation owner commenting on the temporary abolition of slavery in the French empire in 1794. It seems that his advice was heeded, as it took close to 70 more years to abolish Dutch slavery. Strangely, however, the successful defence of slavery does not feature prominently in the historiographical debate over the late abolition of Dutch slavery. This article ventures to explore the ideological defence of slavery in the Dutch Republic around the turn of the eighteenth century, and how it was connected to Atlantic debates on race, slavery and civilisation in the wake of the Haitian revolution (1790-1804). By studying historical publications I show that the Dutch interpretation of the Haitian Revolution came about through translated works. These works almost exclusively supported a racial conservative interpretation of Haiti. The revolt even became an important point of reference in Dutch political circles. These findings offer a new perspective on the decline of principled abolitionism in the Netherlands from the late eighteenth century until the 1840s.

Constructing an Antislavery Hero: The Portrayal of Toussaint Louverture in British Abolitionist Texts, 1803–1863

ABSTRACT Shortly after Toussaint Louverture died in 1803, a literary tradition emerged in British abolitionist texts which portrayed the character of Toussaint in heroic terms. This article takes five texts written between 1803–1863 to demonstrate how Toussaint was constructed as an antislavery hero and what the motivations were behind this construction. The hero can be understood as a lens through which Toussaint’s character, and the character of the whole Haitian Revolution, was flattened. The hero was a frame that made him knowable and understandable to European audiences, but that also erased both the mass of enslaved people that formed the grassroots of the revolution in Haiti, as well as the many aspects of Toussaint himself that were not deemed to fit the hero narrative. This literary tradition arose because the mainstream of the nineteenth-century British antislavery movement opposed and feared rebellions led by enslaved people, believing on racist grounds that they were violent, uncontrolled, and anarchic, and at odds with the new liberal vision of empire that most British abolitionists wanted to create.

Rethinking the Haitian Turn – Beyond the Universality Paradigm and Its Enemies

ABSTRACT Recent assessments of the literature on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) offer radically different images, ranging from the identification of a politics of universal human rights to objections against conservative assumptions. The present article instead uncovers an overarching conflict between what is named the universality paradigm and the sceptical responses. However, in the outskirts of the controversy, its participants agree that the Haitian Revolution was the most radical revolution of the period, and that issues of inequality cannot be disregarded. To advance the debate, polarisation must be transgressed and the assumption that universalism and inequality are incompatible must be abandoned.

On the idea of freedom in modern African political philosophy

AbstractWhen Liberia, at its inception, adopted for her motto, “The Love of Freedom Brought Us Here,” they were registering their embrace of a core tenet of modernity: the idea that freedom was the primary state of humanity and that any form of social living that turned this free being into a bonded phenomenon, forces it to obey dictates and laws not of its own choosing, to bow before rulers it had no hand in electing, and to live at the behest of another must stand condemned. They were merely the latest, back then, instantiation of Africans as singers of freedom's song in the modern age. Unfortunately, neither theirs nor earlier iterations in the Haitian Revolution, much less later contributions by other Africans in the continent, are to be found routinely, if at all, in the annals of modern philosophy. In this essay, I bring to our awareness how African thinkers have domesticated the idea of freedom as a legacy of modernity in their world. This is one of the bodies of work that is obscured by the wall that I argue, in Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst Publishers, 2022), decolonizers have erected in their mistaking, wittingly or unwittingly, modernity for colonialism and/or Westernization.

Kant, silence and the Haitian Revolution

AbstractThis discussion explores the significance of Kant's silence on the Haitian Revolution. In contrast, Kant was not silent about the French Revolution, and he also went to great lengths to publish his work on religion, which was seen as controversial. I argue that Kant's silence on the Haitian Revolution demonstrates his complicity with the status quo regarding the independence and rights of people of color.

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Frames of Personhood

ABSTRACT Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), which recounts the culmination of the Haitian revolution against French colonialism (1791–1804), evokes a nostalgia for colonial order even though colonialism would remain in the Caribbean for decades. The epistolary novel’s narrator, an American visiting Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti), yearns for the “paradise” that she imagines has been destroyed by the revolution, aligning Sansay with Paul Gilroy’s notion of postcolonial melancholia. More insidiously, in Secret History, the longing for the reinstatement of the colonial system in Saint Domingue positions people of African descent outside “frames of recognition,” as Judith Butler in Frames of War conceptualizes the way in which biopolitical forces constitute personhood. I argue that for Sansay, the norms that constitute a living being as recognizable as a life are the ideologies of Romantic settler colonialism, as well as American exceptionalism. As such, within Secret History, Sansay reifies a stratified racial and national hierarchy while also actively denying the state violence that sustains it.

Fanon’s Postcolonial Critique of Hegelian Recognition and Buck-Morss’ Haiti Thesis

This philosophical investigation interrogates the relationship between G.F.W. Hegel’s concept of the master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit and the critique and reformulation of it by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. As a means of contextualization and expansion of Hegel’s original textual account, I consider Susan Buck-Morss’ seminal defense through grounding the dialectic in Hegel’s possible historical knowledge of the Haitian Revolution. I conclude that despite a compelling picture, Buck-Morss’ insights are unable to fully vindicate Hegel from the rebukes of Fanon, and as a result, Hegel’s phenomenology necessitates a concrete analysis of the actual conscious experiences of the racialized and colonized subject in order to realize its aims.

Atlantic Passage and the Fugitive Text

Abstract This essay intervenes in global histories of theory and exile modernism by developing fugitivity as a capacious lens for examining entangled histories of flight and artistic practice in the Atlantic world. I draw on theorist and poet Fred Moten’s theorization of the concept to foreground a missed encounter between fugitivity’s Antillean history and the communist writer Anna Seghers, whose escape from European fascism places her in a Martinique internment camp in 1941. After examining how fugitivity uneasily merges histories of Black struggle and art with a tradition of modernist antifascist writing, I proceed by closely reading Seghers’s novella on the Haitian revolution, Die Hochzeit von Haiti (1948). Seghers’s text, I argue, imagines fugitive struggle and marronage as a lawless, ‘deranged’ freedom. I show how the novella’s own historiographic and narrative framing redouble the efforts of its protagonists to regulate fugitive struggle via various forms of mastery, most notably: literacy.

Forgotten Truth

The Haitian Revolution stands as an important event in the history of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade due to it being the first successful slave revolt resulting in complete independence from the former slave society. This paper, follows the cultural history of the Haitian Revolution by analyzing political femininity present within Saint-Domingue/Haiti pre, mid, and post-revolution in order to bring forward female Haitian political actors. By examining how gender influenced the Haitian Revolution, a broader historical narrative is formed, one that accounts for intersectional perspectives and understandings to better conceptualize the whole history of the Haitian Revolution. This paper seeks to preserve the often-forgotten female legacies by analyzing primary sources written directly on the Haitian revolution and secondary sources written by historians specializing in either Trans-Atlantic or gendered histories.

Toussaint Louverture and the Undermining of the Haitian Revolution

This work using a structurationist, structural Marxist, phenomenological structuralism, understanding of practical consciousness constitution, explores the origins and basis for the Haitian Revolutionary leader, Toussaint Louverture’s (May 20, 1743-April 1, 1803), social, political, and economic policies. The eldest son of an Arada King, Toussaint Louverture, was a creole-slave born on the island of Saint-Domingue/Haiti. As the eventual leader of the Revolution from 1794-1801, Louverture attempted to have the island remain an independent French territory where slavery was outlawed, but the export-oriented plantation economy, with the slave trade, persisted. He, essentially, adopted the position of the French Royalists, the white plantation owners who wanted more autonomy from France and its “exclusif” mercantile economic system, which forced them to trade and do business exclusively with French merchants and bankers. Although, Louverture’s demeanor and position is typically juxtaposed against his successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, all subsequent leaders, I argue here, would go on to adopt Louverture’s policies, the export-oriented agricultural economy, with variations based on who (mulattoes or members of the black grandon class) should serve in the position of the white planters once independence was declared from France in 1804. This decision, to maintain Louverture’s political and economic policies as opposed to redistributing the land to the African masses so that they can pursue their subsistence agriculture and komes, I conclude, has undermined the Revolutionary impetus of the Haitian Revolution and converted Haiti into the so-called poorest (periphery) country in the Western Hemisphere.

Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom by Paul Clammer (review)

Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom by Paul Clammer (review)

Colonialism and the Sovereignty of Peoples: A Dialogue between Hegel and the French Revolution

Abstract This article discusses the relation between colonialism and the sovereignty of peoples through a dialogue between Hegel and the thought of the French Revolution. These two sides are relevant to each other not only because of their historical proximity, but also because of the connections that can be established when we approach the topic of colonialism through these two manifestations. Hegel is explicit that his philosophy of history and his philosophy of right are supposed to be philosophies of freedom. Yet despite the importance that he lends to freedom, Hegel also explicitly defends, in the very same text, colonial domination when he deals with the relation between peoples. A similar problem had arisen in the course of the French Revolution. Following the declarations of war, France is confronted on various occasions with the question of how to deal with other peoples and countries. With the foundation of the Republic in 1792, the relation with other peoples becomes central in the revolutionary debates. The topic of colonialism is part of the constituting debates, and not only because of the uprisings in then Saint Domingue leading to the Haitian Revolution. This article is a part of a larger research project that attempts to reassess the relations between Hegel and the French Revolution, and deals with the question of how we can re-read Hegel's interpretation of the French Revolution based on the evolving historiography of the Revolution. After an introduction of both sides of this dialogue, the paper discusses how Hegel's political philosophy can be applied to understand the debates about the emancipation of colonies that take place during the French Revolution. The next part further analyses some issues, such as the notion of sovereignty and, in the concluding remarks, I summarize my discussion and point to some avenues for further research.

“The fires of liberty”: American abolitionist perspectives on the Haitian revolution, 1791–1806

ABSTRACT This article explores how American abolitionists reacted to the Haitian Revolution between the start of the Revolution in 1791 till the passage of Congressional legislation banning trade with Haiti in 1806. Abolitionists' reactions to the Revolution illustrate some of the unifying and dividing ideas deeply imbedded within the abolition movement. The Haitian Revolution did not create the divisions between abolitionists, but rather brought to the forefront divides that had already existed from the formation of the movement. Importantly, this article illustrates how dichotomic framings of American abolitionism as either radical or conservative are insufficient to explain the diversity of thought within the movement, as reflected in abolitionists' reactions to Haiti.

‘The Black Prince of Baker Street’ and the Black Presence in Britain, 1837–1849

Between 1838 and 1849 a man repeatedly visited London claiming to be ‘Louis Christophe’, seeking access to money deposited in the Bank of England by his ‘brother’ the deceased King of Haiti, Henri Christophe. By following this impostor around London and the wider Atlantic, this article makes an important contribution to understanding of the Black presence in Britain during the early Victorian period. Alongside his interactions with the Black community, it documents how ‘Louis Christophe’ was able to defraud British philanthropists, the forms of racial prejudice he received during the decade, and the legacy of the Haitian Revolution.

Tumba Francesa: Kinetic and linguistic archive of the African diaspora

ABSTRACT Declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, Tumba Francesa is a cultural manifestation brought to Cuba with the Haitian revolution (1789–1805) incorporating the kinetic vocabulary of European court dances as well as different elements of African origin. It represents a memorial archive which includes dance, music, religion, and language in their transit from Africa to Haiti and then to Cuba, passing through the codes of European court dances. The lyrics of the songs develop from a Kreyòl base into a complex patois, while dance and music also develop from a ritual code into a syncretic court dance. This study will reinforce the importance of oral culture, as the study of performing culture in the Caribbean allows us to tell stories that belong to “the realm of the beyond” (Bhabha) that belong to those who could not speak, and that official history would not tell.

The common wind from below: unruly metaphors, radical rhetorics, and pluriversal worlds within/across/beyond the Haitian and Zapatista Revolutions (part 2/2)

ABSTRACT Through an “inter(con)textual reading” (Maraj), this essay explores the resonances and generative incongruences between two prominent metaphors that reflect the thought/feeling/praxis of two of the modern era’s most significant revolutions – “the common wind” from the Haitian revolution and the “wind from below” from the Zapatista revolution. My goal is to think within/across/beyond these revolutions via the methods, epistemologies, and imaginaries that flow within these shared metaphors – in the common wind from below – and speculate on how the seeds and meanings carried therein might take root and grow into something beyond what the disciplines and world currently offer.

Defenders of Liberty: The Congos and the Question of African Agency in the Haitian Revolution

D<scp>efenders of</scp> L<scp>iberty</scp>: The Congos and the Question of African Agency in the Haitian Revolution

Conjectures on Kant and the Haitian Revolution

AbstractIn this article, I put forward, as a suspicion only, that Kant never thought Black lives had dignity but only price. I follow Michel‐Rolph Trouillot's argument that the Haitian Revolution is unthinkable for Enlightenment philosophers to examine what Kant could have, would have, or should have said about this world‐historical event. By making conjectures about Kant's silence on the Haitian Revolution, I also draw from Kant's writings on the American and French Revolutions. If my suspicion is right, then Kantianism cannot accommodate an antiracist program. This ought to change how we talk about racism, slavery, and colonialism in Kant scholarship and in the history of philosophy.

Socialism with Haitian Characteristics

This work argues that following the Haitian Revolution, which is a revolt against slavery and mercantilist capitalism, the founder of the country, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, attempted to synthesize three forms of system and social integration on the island in order to constitute the nation of Haiti: the mercantilist and liberal capitalism of the Affranchis, petit-bourgeois blacks and mulatto elites, respectively; and the Lakouism, communism, of the African majority on the island. In this sense, Dessalines, represented the first embodiment of Kojève’s end of history Hegelian thesis, and defined Haiti’s socialism, what Mocombe calls libertarian communism, with its Haitian characteristics.

Peter P. Reed. Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance

This book provides a vital study of the assorted theatrical exhibits that emanated from the Haitian Revolution; case studies include refugee dramas, commencement ceremony dialogues, minstrel shows, and abolitionist speeches. Demonstrating how Americans used the theatre to understand an often incomprehensible revolution, Staging Haiti will be invaluable to theatre scholars and historians alike.