Jean-Jacques Dessalines Research Articles

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.

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.

Haiti - Harmed at the Hands of Others

On January 1, 1804, Haiti officially proclaimed its Declaration of Independence, roughly two months after its forces led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines expelled the last remaining French forces from their territory. Their revolution had begun in 1791, when enslaved people sought to break free of brutal French colonial rule that originated in the mid-seventeenth century. The subsequent Haitian Constitution, published in 1805, detailed a “free and form sovereign state, independent of all the other powers of the universe,” known as the “Haitian Empire,” where “slavery is abolished forever” and “equality before the law is irrefutably established.” The future appeared bright for this newly independent Black nation in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, for Haiti and the Haitian people, this bright future was not to be. For the past two plus centuries, Haiti has been continuously disadvantaged and subjected to mistreatment by other nations, including France and the United States. The potential for Haiti to emerge as a prosperous nation has thus been quashed due to numerous cases of foreign interference, which are still ongoing today.

The Political Project of Marie Sainte Dédée Bazile (Défilée): Reappropriating This Heritage to Build the Present

The Political Project of Marie Sainte Dédée Bazile (Défilée): Reappropriating This Heritage to Build the Present Sabine Lamour On January 31, 2020, a gathering was held to remember the massacre that had occurred in La Saline, the second-largest slum in Port-au-Prince, on November 13 and 14, 2018.1 Attended by family members of the victims as well as Haitian civil society representatives, feminists, and activists from human rights organizations including Solidarite Fanm Ayisyèn (SOFA) and the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), the event was titled Ann Refè Jès Défilée a! (Let us repeat Défilée’s gesture!).2 According to a report published by RNDDH (2018), several state dignitaries had participated in plotting and carrying out the carnage in La Saline. This service functioned as a symbolic gesture that enabled the living to mourn and provided an appropriate burial for the dead—similar to the duty that Défilée had fulfilled in 1806 when she gathered the remains of Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines and gave him an honorable burial after his assassination on October 17, 1806. Défilée prevented the body of Dessalines, the founder of the Haitian nation, from being left on the street and eaten by animals. Haitian historiography has erased the political dimension of Défilée’s civilizing act and humanizing intervention. This historiography seems to disregard the accomplishments of women; their narratives do not hold historical value, nor do they provide meanings to Haiti’s collective dynamics in the same way as men who are, in contrast, revered as the fathers of the nation. Studies that mention women’s actions and recount their lives3 as part of Haiti’s national epic are almost nonexistent. Instead, scholars of Haitian history devote their attention to the biographies and [End Page 62] thoughts of Toussaint, Dessalines, Pétion, and Christophe. Venerated as ancestors and elevated to the rank of fathers of the nation, these four men occupy the most prominent places in Haitian memorial celebrations. Their actions, deeds, and gestures are analyzed and examined by academics in Haiti and abroad. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Défilée la folle. Painting by Patricia Brintle, reprinted with permission. Women do not have the status of mothers of the Haitian nation,4 nor are they considered ancestors whose actions are worth remembering. When they appear in accounts of Haitian history, scholars tend to list their actions in footnotes; their political positions are often linked to those of men, or their decisions are perceived as being influenced by men. Pushed to the side, women’s words and actions reach current generations through anecdotes and jokes whose historical significance is overlooked. Unknown or nicknamed with sobriquets, women are discredited as ancestors and their contributions devalued. Similar to dominant epistemologies of the Global North, Haitian history ignores gender relations and women’s accomplishments. However, in Haiti and abroad, and in various fields of research, some scholars are striving to excavate the contributions of women in the [End Page 63] history of Haiti. The earliest discussion began with the publication of Madeleine Sylvain Bouchereau’s thesis Haïti et ses femmes in 1957; Grace Louise Sanders (2013, 2023) undertook a systematic review of women’s activism during and after the United States Occupation of 1915–1934. In Haitian literature, Évelyne Trouillot (2001, 2003, 2010, 2020) and Marie-Célie Agnant (2007, 2015) stand out among those who use history to expose the erasure of women and give a voice to them. In addition to these novelists, Yveline Alexis (2021) highlights the contributions of women to the Caco movement in her study Fight Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte. Like Sabine Manigat (2013), Alexis explains that Haitian historiography constrains women to the roles of wives, mistresses, or lovers of those considered heroes. Similarly, Jasmine Claude-Narcisse (1997) explains in an interview with Radio Haiti that even such figures as Joute Lachenais, who was the wife of President Pétion and then of President Boyer, are wholly ignored in the examination of Haitian history between 1806 and 1843. In analyzing...

Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh

Haitian Revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture has been the focus of many plays, novels, children’s books, illustrated histories, and biographies since the nineteenth century. Yet, Louverture’s story has seemed elusive to scholars until just recently. In this biography, Hazareesingh works “to return as far as possible to the primary sources, to try to see the world through [Louverture’s] eyes, and to recapture the boldness of his thinking and the individuality of his voice” (10). Through research in libraries and archives in France, Britain, and the United States, Hazareesingh shows how Louverture “embodied the many facets of Saint-Domingue’s revolution” (2). He challenges assumptions that European ideas brought about the Haitian Revolution, instead focusing on the local origins and “intellectual potency” of the Black revolutionaries (12).Hazareesingh divides this sizeable tome into four parts, each with three chapters. The first part explores Louverture’s emergence as a revolutionary. He disputes the overstated differences between enslaved people born in the colony and those born in Africa. He explains how these distinctions were “another essential tool of white power” (25). Hazareesingh refers to the period from 1791 to 1794 as Louverture’s apprenticeship, serving under other Black revolutionaries and the Spanish. He stresses that Louverture’s choice to join the French was not a rallying to Jacobin republicanism, and he attributes Louverture’s military successes to his focus on fraternity among his troops, his presence on the battlefield, his paternal leadership, and his insistence upon humanity toward civilians and prisoners of war.Parts II and III explore Louverture’s time in power, when he acted in accordance with a “multi-layered concept” of fraternity that “included whites, people of colour, republicans from France and all the men and women across the Atlantic who were engaged in the just war against slavery” (103–104). He had to convince the formerly enslaved, particularly those born in Africa, and maroons to join the republican cause. He also faced challenges to his leadership and vision from representatives sent from France, namely Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Gabriel d’Hédouville, both of whom he outmaneuvered. Louverture worked to establish economic relationships with the United States and British in Jamaica to ensure the success of the colony, and he secured control over Spanish Santo Domingo on the eastern part of the island. Furthermore, he worked with a small group of men to draft a constitution from Saint-Domingue in 1801.In Part IV, Hazareesingh describes the last years of Louverture’s leadership as “an authoritarian spiral” (278). Indeed, his agrarian policies provoked the formerly enslaved in Saint-Domingue with their “echoes of slavery” (277), and his political and military actions prompted Napoleon Bonaparte in France to send an expeditionary force to the colony. Even though Louverture anticipated an attack and prepared the island, the French tricked and arrested him. Hazareesingh suggests that Jean-Jacques Dessalines may have been complicit in Louverture’s capture to secure power for himself. Imprisoned in Fort Joux in France, Louverture wrote and dictated his defense. Following his death, he became a hero to revolutionaries of all stripes, from enslaved people who revolted elsewhere in the Caribbean and the United States to Fidel Castro in the 1950s. Hazareesingh describes Louverture as “the first black superhero of the modern age” (329).Hazareesingh refers to Louverture as “Toussaint” throughout the manuscript while using the last names of all the other figures, including Bonaparte and Dessalines. Although exclusive use of the first name reflects a personal story, it also denies Louverture the respect afforded to other figures in the book. A formerly enslaved man deserves to be identified by his chosen name of Louverture. Production elements in this book make it more appealing to a popular audience than to a scholarly one. The book has a helpful chronology and glossary but no bibliography. Moreover, its endnotes, which run together in paragraph form, are difficult to navigate. On the other hand, a popular audience may struggle with untranslated French and Kreyol (Hatian Creole) within the text. Nonetheless, this biography makes a solid contribution to our understanding of Haiti’s most well-known revolutionary.

The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy ed. by Julia Gaffield

Reviewed by: The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy ed. by Julia Gaffield Dannie Brice The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy. Edited by Julia Gaffield. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. ISBN: 9780813937878. 280 pp. US$39.50 cloth. Julia Gaffield’s unearthing of the Haitian Declaration of Independence at the National Archives of the United Kingdom has prompted an interdisciplinary collection of scholarship framing the act of the declaration within an Atlantic context. While the scholarly study of Haitian independence has centered primarily on the Haitian Revolution, this volume is devoted to the documentation of the Haitian Declaration of Independence in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. In an introduction addressing the book’s contributions and methods, anthology editor Gaffield and collaborator David Armitage, a British [End Page 193] historian, discuss the importance of new archival strategies on Haitian statecraft as scholarly sources continue to grow and reimagine the revolution and its effects in the independence period. The volume’s expansive scope spans historical materials on the declaration. It also offers literary references and political bibliographies focusing on diplomatic and commercial connections between and among Haiti, the circum-Caribbean, and the larger Atlantic from the pre-revolutionary era to the contemporary moment. For the first time, the document of the Haitian Declaration of Independence is examined from transnational perspectives. As a result, “its meanings and significance are now better understood than at any time since 1804” (10). Part 1, “Writing the Declaration,” sets the stage creatively for subsequent chapters. This section cogently elaborates on aspects of writing a declaration of emancipation during an era of colonial slavery that readers may not have considered before. David Geggus’s chapter, “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence,” and John Garrigus’s “‘Victims of Our Own Credulity and Indulgence’: The Life of Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre” both complicate the contentious role of the declaration of 1803 and the official act of independence in 1804 in bringing about democratic ideals and republican rights in an emerging state. Drawing on letters from the signatories and leaders of Independence, Geggus’s work examines the textual production and radical development of the declaration in the aftermath of the revolution. Garrigus reconstructs a bibliography of Boisrond-Tonnerre, one of the authors, whose mixed-race status enabled him to write the final document in French in order to reach France and the outside world.1 This diplomatic tactic omitted from consideration the formerly enslaved people who fought for independence, and whose language was Kreyòl. If the Haitian declaration was distinct in political style, Deborah Jenson points to its poetic form, which encapsulated the violence of the war of independence on the people and the land. Her article “Living by Metaphor in the Haitian Declaration of Independence: Tigers and Cognitive Theory” sheds light on the role of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, referred to as the “author,” in instigating the famous language of the proclamation of independence, suggesting that the heroic image of Haitian independence is indebted to his inf luence. What has not been elaborated on thus far in scholarship, Patrick Tardieu argues in “The Debate Surrounding the Printing of the Haitian Declaration of Independence: A Review of the Literature,” is a comparative study of related documents: “Only by taking into account other printings from the time can we discuss the issue of manuscript versus printed version of the January 1, 1804, Acte de l’Indépendance” (62). Tardieu’s chapter on the [End Page 194] reception of the declaration in Latin America establishes the discussion for the second section of the volume. Part 2, “Haitian Independence and the Atlantic,” delves into the circulatory networks of the Haitian Declaration through discussions of its impact on the world stage and its domestic aims in the aftermath of the revolution in 1804 and 1806. Phillipe Girard’s multiarchival research, which focuses on international policies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Santo Domingo, traces the circulation of rumors and conspiracies of rebellion in Spanish colonies that inspired enslaved and free people of color to revolt, promulgating regional abolition of slavery decades after the document’s creation. Although the Haitian constitution had not indicated the intention of interfering...

A History of Latinx Immigrant Activism

A History of Latinx Immigrant Activism

The Borders of Citizenship in the Haitian Revolution

This essay surveys the appropriations and transformations of the modern concept of citizenship by the actors of the Haitian Revolution, analyzed through the intertwining of race, plantation labor, and the postcolonial state. The concept of citizenship is interpreted as an instrument of emancipative struggles as well as of practices of government. The reconstruction is focused around four moments: the liberal critique by free people of color of the racial boundaries of French citizenship; the strategic uses of citizenship by the insurgent slaves to secure their freedom; the inclusion of former slaves into citizenship to preserve the plantation system within the republican order; and postcolonial Haitian citizenship. By analyzing the constitutional shifts and the political thinking of different figures, such as Julien Raimond, Georges Biassou, Jean-François, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the essay shows the conceptual originality of Haitian political thought and its relevance for the history of modern political concepts.

Freedom over democracy in post-revolutionary Haiti, c. 1804-1844

ABSTRACT This article considers Haitian nation-building in the nineteenth century and its connection to the wider development of democracy in the Americas. In the way that the Haitian Revolution has caused scholars to rethink the discourses around concepts like liberty or rights, the early decades of Haiti’s independence also offer the opportunity to consider the meaning of freedom. Full universal freedom was at the centre of building Haiti’s political future, and this article looks at where that sits in the context of how democratic ideas and practices took shape in the nineteenth century by considering three key moments: Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s constitution in 1805; the era of the two Haitis; and unification with Spanish Santo Domingo from 1822–44.

Haiti's Paper War: Post-independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 by Chelsea Stieber

Reviewed by: Haiti's Paper War: Post-independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 by Chelsea Stieber James J. Fisher Haiti's Paper War: Post-independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954. By Chelsea Stieber. New York: New York University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-1-4798-025-9. 380 pp. $30.00 US. Chelsea Stieber's Haiti's Paper War offers an incisive examination of Haiti's guerre de plume between the royalist governments of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe and the republican governments of Alexandre Pétion and Jean-Pierre Boyer, as well as its legacies and repercussions. She takes as her source base the intellectual production of Haitian writers, artists, and political actors from the birth of an independent Haiti to the growth of a fascist, nationalist movement that culminated in the Duvalier dictatorships. In using these sources, Stieber traces the development of the Haitian Revolution's aftermath in order to demonstrate the "contestation, mutual definition, and continual (re)inscription" (2) of Haiti's meaning throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. She points out that although the Haitian Revolution has often been cast as the instantiation of a radical, liberal, and universal project that culminated in the founding of the Haitian Republic, this ignores the realities and internal tensions at play in the Revolution's aftermath and has established what the author calls the "myth of the universal Haitian Republic" (130). Stieber's innovative use of documents that have previously gone underexamined greatly contributes to our understanding of Haitian politics and history, particularly the guerre de plume. Stieber argues that the radical critique of Western Enlightenment liberalism offered by Dessalines and his political descendants has resonated in Haitian society and politics since 1804 (5–6). Likewise, she asserts that the assassination of Dessalines by Pétion and the republicans in 1806 has been viewed as a "historic stain" on the independence of the nation, remaining a key theme that later Haitian writers would return to again [End Page 170] and again (221–222). Ultimately, she concludes that the heritage of Haiti's radical critique of the Enlightenment and the resulting integral nationalism continued to resonate among a faction of Haitian thinkers, becoming a sentiment that François Duvalier would later tap into (245). Stieber's arguments add to a thriving body of scholarship that has examined the Haitian Revolution and its impact on intellectual production in the Black Atlantic.1 Stieber's examination of the radical critique of the Enlightenment in the foundation of Haiti points to the importance of the 1804/1806 divide. While 1804 represented a "radical anticolonial gesture," which Dessalinean writing helped consolidate, 1806 has too often been cast by historians as part of the "myth of the inevitable republic," ignoring the continuation of Dessalinean thought in Haitian politics (3). Her discussion of how Dessalinean political thought continued into the nineteenth century and was reinvented in the nationalist movement of the twentieth century contributes to our understanding of a longue durée in Haitian national politics, especially during less studied periods, such as the reign of Faustin Soulouque, the seventh Haitian president (and later emperor). Likewise, her following of how Dessalinean thought informs a longer history of Haitian political thought adds to the historical writing on Black radical thought in the Atlantic World (6–7). Such a tracing of Dessalines-inspired political philosophy can be seen especially in Stieber's examination of how the Haitian Revolution became a "central event for artistic reimagining in black radical thought" because as a subject, "it carries with it the full weight of its Enlightenment critique" (8). Similar examples of Haiti's uses in art might be noted in recent studies such as Ada Ferrer's Freedom's Mirror and Alyssa Sepinwall's Slave Revolt on Screen.2 One of Stieber's overarching arguments is that writing, particularly by Dessalineans, was used outside Haiti as an "anticolonial weapon" and internally as a "force of unity" (25). Writing is defined broadly in this sense, encompassing both traditional writing (newspapers, pamphlets, memos, etc.) and portraiture and other images (12, 15). Such mobilization of writing, art, and symbolic representation repeats throughout...

“It Cancels the Slave Ship!”: Africa, Slavery, and the Haitian Revolution in Langston Hughes’sEmperor of Haitiand Aimé Césaire’sThe Tragedy of King Christophe

Langston Hughes and Aimé Césaire knew each other only slightly but shared a dedication to telling stories of a noble and uplifting black past. They also shared a fascination with the Haitian Revolution and its early-nineteenth-century aftermath. Both wrote plays about the first decades of Haiti’s independence: Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti (1936) is set during the rise and rule of Jean-Jacques Dessalines; Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963) recounts the rule of his successor Henri Christophe. These plays enfold Haiti’s story of armed resistance to slavery and oppression into a larger story of a noble African past. But both writers are keenly aware of the dangers of “musealization,” the process by which memorials to the past render it, paradoxically, prone to being forgotten and neglected. Significantly, then, these authors tell the story of Haiti’s journey from slavery to independence and then to despotism through the comparatively ephemeral mode of drama. In Diana Taylor’s terms, Hughes and Césaire bring the narratives of slavery and revolution out of the inert archive and reanimate them through living, ever-evolving performances of the repertoire. Hughes and Césaire thereby strive to endow Dessalines and Christophe, larger-than-life figures from the black past, with the permanence and authority of the archive. But they also leave narratives of slavery and revolt open to what Hortense Spillers calls new “modes of improvisation and rearrangement” – to continual reanimation, reinterpretation, and reinvention.

Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America by James Alexander Dun

Reviewed by: Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America by James Alexander Dun Jeffery L. Stanley (bio) Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America. By James Alexander Dun. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. viii, 342. $45.00 cloth; $45.00 ebook) James Alexander Dun's Dangerous Neighbors is a well-researched and creative study of how early Americans contextualized the Haitian Revolution within political discourse about their own revolution and used the drama in Saint Domingue as a sounding board for partisan political rhetoric in America's early party system. Dun's work makes a valuable contribution to a growing field of scholarship that explores the Haitian Revolution's reverberations throughout the Atlantic world, specifically building on the work of historians such as Ashli White and François Furstenberg who have recently analyzed the impact of refugees from Saint Domingue on American politics during the early republic period. As a study of public discourse, Dangerous Neighbors relies mainly on newspapers and political pamphlets published in Philadelphia from 1789 to 1804. Dun demonstrates convincingly that the Philadelphia press commentary on Haiti changed over time, reverberated across the young republic, and influenced national political discourses. The author's command of the histories of both the Haitian Revolution and the early republic is a strength of Dangerous Neighbors. The book consists of an introduction and seven chapters arranged chronologically according to different phases of the Haitian Revolution. Chapter one discusses the initial phase of "Philadelphia's Haitian Revolution" from the outset of the French Revolution in 1789 to the French Legislative Assembly's May 15, 1791, law that granted political equality to free people of color in Saint Domingue born to free parents. This development led to a public debate that broadened the implications of the universal declarations at the heart of the American Revolution as the proto-Republican (Dun's term to identify those who would later join Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party) defenders of the French Revolution argued for the positive effects of the May 15 law. Chapters two, three, and four discuss the [End Page 666] next phase of the Haitian Revolution in Philadelphia, which began in August 1791 as slaves rose up on Saint Domingue's North Plain, setting fire to the cane fields and launching the first successful slave uprising in the Western Hemisphere. Although American observers condemned the violence and bloodshed emanating from Saint Domingue, proto-Republican commentators in Philadelphia used the event as an avenue to discuss the potential danger of slavery in the United States, leading to "a high tide of Revolutionary-era antislavery sentiment and activity" (p. 21). Chapters five and six discuss the impact of Toussaint Louverture's rise to power on discussions about the meaning of the Haitian Revolution for the United States. Louverture's rise occurred in the context of an increasingly bitter partisan divide between Federalists and Republicans amid the Quasi-War with France. As Louverture increasingly steered Saint Domingue toward independence, Federalists championed cooperation with his government as a way to strike against France while Republicans "married a simmering effort to expose the Federalists as betrayers of American honor and independence to a portrait of Louverture as a despot" (p. 147). Chapter seven discusses the final phase of the Haitian Revolution, marked by former slave Jean-Jacques Dessalines's declaration of Haitian independence in 1804. As the first black republic, Haiti became "an alien and dangerous place" in the minds of white Americans, and commentators increasingly dismissed events there as "irrelevant to their discussions about race, slavery, and revolution" (p. 23). Dun suggests that "in reducing the intricate and nuanced revolutionary agendas at work in Saint Domingue over the period to a simple portrait of black violence, Americans pieced together a basic agreement about their own nation's Revolution, one that marked it as complete" (p. 23). Dun's most important contribution is to show that Haiti's legacy in the United States was an historical construction that developed during extended public discourse about the revolution in the early republic. Initially, events in Saint Domingue sparked genuine debate about the meaning of the American Revolution for slavery and racial [End Page 667...

‘From freedom’s sun some glimmering rays are shed that cheer the gloomy realms’: Dessalines at Dartmouth, 1804

ABSTRACTToussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the Haitian Revolution’s two most important leaders, have long been considered each others’ foils. Whereas Dessalines has been subjected to vicious, racist caricature, Toussaint has tended to elicit more sympathetic portrayals. This paper examines a rare, recently rediscovered exception to this dichotomy. Stephen Farley and Avery Williams, two Dartmouth College seniors, co-wrote and performed a short play in August 1804 that offers a nuanced understanding of Dessalines. Farley and Williams’s play-script thus affords insight into the impact of Haitian independence on representational forms in the United States in the early nineteenth century.

Representing Haiti: Postcolonial Discourse and Aimé Césaire's La tragédie du roi Christophe

IN An inteRview with chARLes RoweLL in 1989, Aime Cesaire frames his representation of Haiti's King Henry Christophe in the following terms:The difference between my 'vision' of Christophe and that of my predecessors is that they see only the ridicule, the Bourgeois gentilhomme aspect, the 'Negro vanity' aspect that abounded in the white racist and colonialist literature. But I want people to go beyond this. What I mean is that behind Christophe's ridicule there is something pathetic, and it is this pathos that European historians never perceive. It is the pathetic dimension of a man who comes out of slavery and wants to raise his people, and raises himself to an extraordinary kind of mystique. He uses all the means available to him in his time; but these means were not always the best ones.1Cesaire's representation of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, and his attempts to humanise Henry Christophe in La tragedie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe)2 and to debunk the Eurocentric discourse to which he alludes, are all too clear in the above excerpt from the interview. His literary vehicle - the dramatic genre - is deliberate and crucial to our understanding and appreciation of the play. He recasts Christophe as a tragic figure, a persona that redeems him from the ridiculous king of history books, and thus prepares the reader/audience for pathos, fear, admiration, fate, death, and inevitability, which are necessary ingredients of a tragedy.3 playwright expressed his pride, interest, and respect vis-a-vis in another interview with Rene Depestre:After my discovery of the North American Negro and my discovery of Africa, I went on to explore the totality of the black world, and that is how I came upon the history of Haiti. I love Martinique, but it is an alienated land, while represented for me the heroic Antilles, the African Antilles. I began to make connections between the Antilles and Africa, and is the most African of the Antilles. It is at the same time a country with a marvellous history: the first Negro epic of the New World was written by Haitians, people like Toussaint l'Ouverture, Henri Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, etc. is not very well known in Martinique.4To argue that the first Negro epic was written by men like Louverture, Christophe and Dessalines, not only qualifies the play as an epic, but also endows these revolutionaries with heroic qualities. In his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Cesaire proclaims as an embodiment of and a precursor to Negritude ideology when he writes, in reference to the Haitian Revolution, Haiti [is] where Negritude stood up for the first time and said it believed in its humanity5 - an indication that Negritude encompasses more than a literary and an aesthetic phenomenon.The Tragedy of King Christophe bears resemblance to metadrama,6 in that it is self-reflexive and its characters are conscious of their theatricality, of being on stage. As Christophe's secretary Vastey aptly points out, The whole world is watching us, citizens, and the nations think black men have no dignity (1.2, 18). thus represents the stage on which the drama of the challenges of decolonisation and nation-building is played out; and Christophe stand in for more than a geographic location and an individual. As Cesaire asserts in reference to another historico-political drama of his, A Season in the Congo, Lumumba is not the man Patrice Lumumba; he is, before everything else, a symbol of a man, a man that identifies with Congolese reality and with Africa of decolonisation, an individual that represents a collectivity.7 Christophe and Haiti, then, become prototypes and symbols of black emancipation, and a blueprint for the task inherent in nation-building in post-emancipation/independence nations in the black Atlantic world. deployment of metadramatic techniques has prompted critics to stipulate that the play characterises as a theatre state. …

Restoring Haitian Women’s Voices and Verbalizing Sexual Trauma in Breath, Eyes, Memory

A figurative dark presence representing the Duvalier era looms over Edwidge Danticat's central characters in Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), manifesting in their relationships with men and with each other. The Caco family consists of four generations of women who pass down names and traditions, as well as their burdens, to the next in line. The story is narrated by Sophie Caco, a young girl raised until adolescence by her single, childless aunt in Croix-des-Rosets, Haiti. Her time with her Tante Atie abruptly ends when Martine, her mother in New York, sends a recorded message to Atie, along with a one-way plane ticket, summoning Sophie. As the twelve-year-old settles in with Martine, whom she knows only through photographs and cassette tapes, Sophie learns about the nightmares that disrupt her mother's sleep. Each night, Martine relives the brutal perpetrated more than a decade ago by a masked man, likely a tonton macoute, and the fear and violence the memory evokes.1in Danticat's novel, the reconstruction of memory involves the disclosure of Black female trauma and a revision of Haiti's official history of resistance and triumph. Revolutionaries such as Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and their predecessor, the mystical Makandal, who led a rebellion more than thirty years prior to the Haitian Revolution, are often celebrated for their contributions in making Haiti the first independent Black republic. Yet there is little mention of the countless women who, for more than two centuries, have fought alongside their fellow countrymen for freedom. For example, Cecile Fatiman, a mambo who purportedly officiated over the Bois Caiman ceremony, is usually omitted from narratives about the Haitian Revolution-a major historical event that she helped to launch.2 In sources that do mention her, she is either a young, green-eyed mulatto who later became the wife of Jean-Louis Pierrot, the fifth president of Haiti, or an old African woman 'with strange eyes and bristly hair,' whose ferocity was more frightening than Boukman's.3 Compared to the actions of her male counterparts in what would be the largest and only successful slave revolt in the Americas, Fatiman's role has been treated as inconsequential.Other female revolutionaries such as Suzanne Belair, Marie-Jeanne Lamartiniere, and Defilee have also been largely ignored. Belair served with her husband, Charles, in Louverture's army and was promoted from sergeant to lieutenant. After her capture, Belair refused to be blindfolded before her execution by French troops, showing unyielding courage and strength to the very end. Lamartiniere subverted gender roles by donning a soldier's uniform as she led a group of Haitian rebels in the Battle of Crete-a-Pierrot.4 Among the heroines, Defilee, a former slave typically described as a madwoman, is perhaps the better known, as she has become mythologized in Haiti as a symbol of courage and freedom.3 She is celebrated for collecting Dessalines' remains in order to give him a proper burial after he was murdered. However, Defilee's personal narrative as an enslaved woman regularly subjected to by her owner before claiming her freedom has been appropriated as the figurative rape of Haiti and its people by colonial powers. As a way to restore Defilee's personal narrative, Danticat reimagines her as the foremother of a generation of Haitian women silenced by gendered violence in her short story Nineteen Thirty-Seven.6 In essence, these are the omissions in Haiti's history that Danticat draws upon in shaping her fictional female characters. Although Haitian women have been systematically excluded from social and historical discourse even as they actively engage in the fight for change, Danticat proves through her characters that revolutionaries come in many forms.The myths embedded in the country's historical narratives are rewritten in Breath, Eyes, Memory so that Haitian women are unsilenced. …

Displacing Dessalines, or the Transatlantic Geographies of Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture

Alphonse de Lamartine’s verse drama Toussaint Louverture (1850) stands out as one of the most earnest attempts by a nineteenth-century European writer to grapple with what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called the ‘unthinkable history’ of the Haitian Revolution. Originally composed to promote abolition of slavery in France’s colonies, the play was not staged until two years after emancipation and after Lamartine’s precipitous fall from political grace. In this context, Toussaint Louverture seemed to offer a defence of Lamartine’s own political legacy. The work has thus been interpreted as an attempt by the author to identify himself with his protagonist, a messianic leader of the Haitian people. This essay examines the transatlantic geography that structures this ‘poème dramatique’. In projecting an ideal nation, France and Haiti are set up in chiastic opposition, and this transatlantic chiasmus only becomes possible through a series of anatopisms, or erreurs de lieu. The central argument holds that this dramatic construction, centred on Toussaint, works to erase or rather displace another key Haitian leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the ultimate author of his country’s independence and a radical figure far less amenable to French Republican ideology.

'So Much the Worse for the Whites': Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution

This article sets out from an analysis of the pioneering work of Susan Buck-Morss to rethink, not only Hegel and Haiti, but broader questions surrounding dialectics and the universal brought to light by the Haitian Revolution. Reading through the lens of C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, I seek to correct a series of ironic silences in her account, re-centering the importance of Toussaint’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and underlining the dialectical importance of identitarian struggles in forging the universal. Finally, I offer Frantz Fanon’s reformulation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—overlooked in Buck-Morss’ account—as a corrective that allows us to truly rethink progress toward the universal in decolonized dialectical terms.

Haiti’s Prized Presidential Legacies

Throughout Haitian history, the country's presidents have not been viewed as effective heads of state. When they are acknowledged at all, they are not recognized for the progress made in Haiti. As of today over fifty heads of state have acceded to the Haitian leadership position, and all have been accused of corruption in one way or another, as any random reading of Haitian history will reveal.1 Such a conclusion, if true, would be quite a disheartening aberration. Is it believable that over fifty successive Haitian presidents, in over two hundred years of independence, were nothing more than corrupt people? Aside from the canonized founder and second chief of state Henry Christophe from 1807 to 1820, were there no celebrated post-founders, say a Franklin D. Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy of Haiti? Foreign accounts of Haitian history seem to suggest a resounding NO!2 Haitian accounts of their history certainly make such mention, but one would be hard pressed to find a consensus surrounding one or more presidents among a group of Haitians in the homeland or migrants living abroad.This essay briefly reviews some of the achievements of lasting significance of seven such chief of states: Christophe-the reigning King of Hayti (as it was spelled until 1890)3; Boyer-the Unifier of Hayti; Geffrard-the Redeemer of the Republic; Salomon-Leader of the Black National Party; Hyppolite-the Panama Hat- and Iron Pants-wearing horseman; the 1946 Revolution of Estime; and Magloire-the military man who led the way to Haiti's Golden Age. These men represented seven instances of a functioning Haitian state, yet the positive impacts of their leadership have been minor footnotes in historiographies of Haiti. I will focus on these seven chiefs of state since they have some notoriety among Haitians in the country and abroad.Henry Christophe, King of Hayti, 1807 to 1820Probably the best known of these seven leaders is Henry Christophe, a self-proclaimed monarch. Christophe's major accomplishments include establishing a monarchy in northern Haiti as well as amicable relations with the British and the Germans.4 He also created a trading partnership between Haiti and Jamaica, constructed the Citadelle fortress and SansSouci palace, and recruited teachers for the nation's schools. The lasting significance of Henry Christophe's rule is immortalized in the Citadelle and Sans-Souci, which now symbolize Haitian nationality.Christophe was the King of Hayti from 1807 to 1820. His legacy was forged during the slave abolition movement emerging in Great Britain. Having secured their independence in 1804, Haitians emerged as crusaders for Black people under bondage, but this fact angered slaveholding nations, which feared slave revolts, and Haitians as well, who feared imperial retaliation. More than Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines before him, Christophe became concerned about securing Haitian independence and protecting the country from another assault, which seemed ever more vulnerable (as the French seemed ever more determined) to a reinvasion after the failed French invasion of 1802.Christophe seems to have felt that Great Britain was a nation that advanced the abolition of slavery-far more than imperial France, which had offered earlier plea deals of slave emancipation during the Haitian Revolution, and the United States and Spain, which as slaveholding nations lagged behind the antislavery movement. Moreover, Christophe believed that if a kingdom such as Britain could do more to abolish slavery than France and the United States, Haitians might be better off within a kingdom.5Christophe thus modeled northern Haiti after a monarchy. This move was as much as to venerate Black independence as it was to incense slaveholding powers in the international realm. As the first-ever Negro of a liberated colony, however, Christophe sought the respect of the international community, sending several letters requesting national leaders to address him as such. …

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois (review)

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. By Laurent Dubois. New York, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012. 434 pp. $19.04 hardcover.Historian Laurent Dubois's Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012) is an important intervention on discourses surrounding Haiti following earthquake of 2010 and an overview of history in general. Unlike Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and Earthquake of2010 (2010) edited by Martin Munro, who one reviewer has argued is already out of date,1 Dubois's work will stand test of time in offering a critical lens into Haiti that world watched crumble on that fateful afternoon and human disaster that followed. The book is not so much about earthquake as it is about centuries of internal and external obstacles to autonomy and freedom of Haitian people from time of Haitian Revolution.As author states, true causes of Haiti's poverty and instability are not mysterious-the result of some secret pact with Devil as televangelist Pat Robertson argued or influences of voodoo religion as journalist David Brooks proposed. Nor can it be attributed to some inherent shortcoming on part of Haitians. Rather, Haiti's present is product of its history: of nation's founding by enslaved people who overthrew their masters and freed themselves; of hostility that this revolution generated among colonial powers surrounding country; and of intense struggle within Haiti to define that freedom and realize its promise(4). A big hindrance to realization of dream of freedom rests precisely in country's emergence out of slavery and being led by men who had known an economy that was driven by export. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, like Toussaint Louverture before him, saw continuation of plantation system as only viable choice for sustaining economy even as masses who had fought to be free resisted a continuation of system and instead conceived of what sociologist Jean Casimir calls a counter-plantation system (33). But this is just one example of processes that led to Haiti becoming a country that is meant to serve a small, elite segment of population. It is through such examples both from within country and in its dealings with international community that rallied against first black republic in Western hemisphere that Dubois traces how foundation for current exclusionary political and economic system was laid and sustained over centuries.What emerges is a complex, beautifully rendered text that accounts for well-rehearsed narratives about Haiti as well as not-so-well-known. For example, while it is pretty common knowledge amongst Haitians and Haiti-philes that France demanded an indemnity from Haiti to pay for loss of colony, it is not so well-known that President Alexandre Petion actually offered to pay indemnity to France in exchange for recognition years before demand was made on Jean-Pierre Boyer (79). Also, rather than one-dimensional buffoon that King Henri Christophe is regularly portrayed as, Dubois reveals a man who developed an extensive public education infrastructure (72) and supported arts (63). Another example of little-known history is Britain and France's settling of their diplomatic conflict at Congress of Vienna over body of Haiti by making a secret agreement that Britain would not interfere if France decided to invade country and France would look other way while Britain opened trade relations (76). Haiti was practically treated like a prostitute or a hidden-away concubine before it was finally recognized by France, willing as French were to trade with Haiti but not allowing latter's merchants into their colonies' ports nor extending Haiti's representatives the formalities extended to other diplomats (71).Dubois takes reader through several key moments in Haitian history, strategically focusing on those events and conditions that have had a direct impact on way that Haiti looks today. …

Empire of Freedom, Kingdom of Civilization: Henry Christophe, the Baron de Vastey, and the Paradoxes of Universalism in Postrevolutionary Haiti

This study proposes a new interpretation of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath by examining the ideological foundations for the emergence of the first monarchy in the postcolonial Atlantic world. The discourse of freedom and the practice of authoritarianism in the Haitian Revolution, which was followed by Jean-Jacques Dessalines's establishment of an “empire” and the kingdom of Henry Christophe, show the profound antinomies of the discourse of universalism. Beginning with a reading of Haiti's founding documents in light of the political thought of Etienne Balibar and Hannah Arendt, the author proceeds to a brief case study of the highly polemical writings of Pompée Valentin, baron de Vastey, the secretary and “publicist” to King Henry Christophe. The first Haitian writer of note, Vastey passionately defended Haiti's revolutionary birth, its sovereignty, and its monarchy in an attempt to argue for its belonging within the modern world. At the same time, his writings point out the tensions of a universalism that both claimed for Haitians the status of a universal class and legitimated the founding of authoritarian rule within Haiti.