Louverture Research Articles

Césaire at the Crossroads in Haiti: Correspondence with Henri Seyrig

Césaire at the Crossroads in Haiti: Correspondence with Henri Seyrig

Toussaint Louverture: the story of the only successful slave revolt in history: a play in three acts

In 1934 C. L. R. James, the widely known Trinidadian intellectual, writer, and political activist, wrote the play Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History , which was presumed lost until the rediscovery of a draft copy in 2005. The play's production, performed in 1936 at London's Westminster Theatre with a cast including the American star Paul Robeson, marked the first time black professional actors starred on the British stage in a play written by a black playwright. This edition includes the program, photographs, and reviews from that production, a contextual introduction and editorial notes on the play by Christian Hogsbjerg, and selected essays and letters by James and others. In Toussaint Louverture , James demonstrates the full tragedy and heroism of Louverture by showing how the Haitian revolutionary leader is caught in a dramatic conflict arising from the contradiction between the barbaric realities of New World slavery and the modern ideals of the Enlightenment. In his portrayal of the Haitian Revolution, James aspired to vindicate black accomplishments in the face of racism and to support the struggle for self-government in his native Caribbean. Toussaint Louverture is an indispensable companion work to The Black Jacobins (1938), James's classic account of Haiti's revolutionary struggle for liberation.

Arms and Men: the Diplomacy of US Weapons Traffic with Saint-Domingue under Adams and Jefferson

This article examines Franco-American Quasi-War Saint-Domingue diplomacy, including the issue of US shipments of arms to Toussaint Louverture's rebellious colony (Haiti). Most experts assume that the United States furnished Haiti abundant munitions, but in 1797 Congress passed an arms embargo for the Quasi-War's duration. From June 1798 until August 1799, after President Adams reopened trade with Haiti, no trade with France or its colonies was permitted. In June 1799, US consul Edward Stevens, British General Maitland, and Louverture agreed to ban Haitian weapons purchases. Unaware that US trade with Haiti was illegal, scholars assume that US merchants and the Adams administration supplied blacks munitions. The only specific arms deal cited, involving Boston merchant Stephen Higginson and Secretary of State Pickering, was unconsummated. US shippers smuggled weapons to Haiti (1799–1801), against US laws and agreements, and probably relatively insignificantly. To conciliate Britain and protect slavery, the State Department risked war with Louverture. Only after President Jefferson, whom historians assume bitterly opposed Haiti, disavowed Anglo-American agreements did US merchants legally sell blacks armaments, doing so in substantial amounts, arousing French protests. The eagerness of Higginson, Stevens, and others to profit from illegal arms sales suggests they followed pecuniary incentives more than antislavery idealism in Haitian policy.

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. …

What Language Did Toussaint Louverture Speak?: The Fort de Joux Memoir and the Origins of Haitian Kreyòl

Using contemporary accounts, letters drafted by former slaves, and the memoir written by Toussaint Louverture shortly before his death, this article attempts to recreate the language spoken by Haitian revolutionaries and, in particular, Toussaint Louverture. Detailed historical and linguistic analysis of these sources shows that Louverture wrote predominantly in French, only employed Kreyòl orally (especially when addressing a working-class audience), and rarely used the Ewe-Fon language of his Arada ancestors. His memoir suggests that Haitian Kreyòl, which some linguists think is derived from African languages, was more influenced by archaic, popular, or regional variants of French. Louverture’s preference for French also reinforces theses that describe him as a moderate figure inclined toward the European model.

“A Revolution of Love”: Ramón Emeterio Betances, Anténor Firmin, and Affective Communities in the Caribbean

This article examines the revolutionary politics of Puerto Rican intellectual and physician Ramon Emeterio Betances (1827–98) through an inter-Caribbean lens that goes beyond teleological and insular narratives of national liberation and identity. An under-examined figure in Caribbean intellectual history, Betances stood out among his fellow Cuban and Puerto Ricans revolutionaries for his singular experiences of dislocation: he lived most of his life in France, he included Haiti within his vision of a Caribbean federation, and he was of African descent. The article focuses on Betances’s resignification of the Haitian Revolution within the transatlantic context of the Ten Years War in Cuba, looking at two key pamphlets: his translation of US radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s encomiastic biography of Toussaint Louverture, “Touissant L’ouverture” (1869), and “A Cuba libre,” an account of the life of Haitian revolutionary general and president Alexandre Petion (1871). Though Betances aligns himself with Phillips’s prophetic brand of abolitionism, his distinct romantic discourse concerning the Haitian Revolution and Petion is ultimately linked to his affinity for French republicanism. I also explore Betances’s friendship with the Haitian intellectual and politician Antenor Firmin (1850–1911) and the latter’s musings about Betances, Haiti, and the Caribbean in Letters from Saint Thomas (1910), showing how the uses of community in Betances and Firmin signify an incipient “Latin” form of identification.

To Live and Die, Free and French

Haiti was not yet born when Toussaint Louverture wrote his 1801 Constitution as governor-general of the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Louverture declared loyalty to the French Republic and displayed his independent power with a third article declaring, “Here, all men are born, live, and die, free and French.” This essay examines the fraught construction of a new black citizenship based on slave emancipation and empire at the heart of Louverture's 1801 Constitution. In particular, I examine Louverture's Constitution alongside French constitutions of the 1790s and early Haitian constitutions in terms of gendered language of marriage and the family. As Louverture sought to transform racial slavery of the past into black citizenship for the future by enforcing ideals of order, purity, and the family, he presented new, problematic ways of thinking about “blackness,” “Frenchness,” and a gendered sense of self that can inform our understanding of human rights debates today.

Human Rights and Radical Universalism: Aimé Césaire's and CLR James's Representations of the Haitian Revolution

The article examines the way in which Aime Cesaire's book-length poem, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (?Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), the founding text of the negritude movement, and C.L.R. James's The Black Jacobins recuperate the Haitian Revolution, and in particular the character of Toussaint Louverture, in order to interrogate the absence of the consideration of the Haitian Revolution in human rights discourse and historiography. Particular attention is paid to the way in which Cesaire and James use the Haitian Revolution to foreground black agency and a discourse of universalism in their representations. For Cesaire, Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution signified blackness as a sign of the colonised condition and its overcoming - Haiti was where “negritude stood up for the first time“. For James, Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution provide an example where assumptions of black passivity and powerlessness were rejected.

The Panthéon's empty plinth: commemorating slavery in contemporary France

This article takes as its starting point a symbolically empty site in the French commemorative landscape – the plinth in the Panthéon to where Toussaint Louverture's remains may have been transferred had plans to pantheonize him ever been realized. It argues that the implications of this emblematic absence at the heart of official memorial practices in France are at least twofold: not only does this empty site reflect the persistent and systematic silencing of slavery and the enslaved in national commemorations (traditionally focused instead on abolition), but also, somewhat paradoxically, by avoiding any clear orthodoxy in formal processes of remembrance, it has permitted the opening up of possibilities for a range of alternative practices that have encouraged recognition of what Édouard Glissant dubbed the “nomadic,” “diffracted,” and plural memories of slavery. Drawing on Marcus Wood's recent study The Horrible Gift of Freedom (2010), the article suggests that national commemorations in France tend systematically to remember abolition whilst forgetting slavery. Having explored this analysis in the light of sites such as the Panthéon itself, the focus then shifts to the alternative memorials relating to slavery imagined by the artist Lubaina Himid in her work “What Are Monuments For? Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map.” Her reflection on the potential for politicians and citizens to collaborate actively in creating memorials and monuments allows a concluding study of two locations – Bordeaux and Nantes – where over the past decade different processes of commemoration have emerged, and where there have been dynamic, controversial, innovative, and, at times, highly constructive efforts to remember slavery and abolition in civic space, not least in the cities’ museums. The article concludes with a discussion of the distinctive project of a Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, a site whose ambition endeavours to reject any reduction of slavery to the histories of abolitionism.

The slaves who defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence, 1801-1804

To a contemporary audience, Haiti brings to mind Voodoo spells, Tontons Macoutes, and boat people - nothing worth fighting over. Two centuries ago, however, Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, was the Pearl of the Antilles, France's most valuable overseas colony, the largest exporter of tropical products in the world, and the United States' second most important trading partner after England. Haiti was also the place where in 1801-1802 Napoleon Bonaparte sent the largest colonial venture of his reign: the Leclerc expedition. His goal was to remove the famous revolutionary Toussaint Louverture from office and, possibly, restore slavery. But within two years, the remnants of Bonaparte's once-proud army were evacuated in defeated, and Haiti declared its independence. This forgotten yet momentous conflict, in which lives were consumed by the thousands, is this book's main focus. In this ambitious monograph, Philippe Girard employs the latest tools of the historian's craft, multi-archival research in particular, and applies them to the climactic yet poorly understood last years of the Haitian Revolution. Haiti lost most of its archives to neglect and theft, but a substantial number of documents survive in French, U.S., British, and Spanish collections, both public and private. In all, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon relies on contemporary military, commercial, and administrative sources drawn from nineteen archives and research libraries on both sides of the Atlantic. Due to its extensive archival basis, the book corrects the many factual inaccuracies that have plagued previous accounts. It also offers a more rounded view of the Haitian Revolution, going beyond mere military minutia to include the activities of U.S. merchants; the in-fighting within the French government; the diplomacy between both the French and revolutionaries with the United States, England, and Spain; and the lives of the maroons, women, and children caught up in the revolutionary struggle. This multidimensional work tells not only of barefoot black soldiers ambushing Bonaparte's columns, but also of Rochambeau's mixed-race mistresses, French child drummers, Jewish bankers in Kingston, weapon smugglers from Quaker Philadelphia, Polish artillerists, and African-born maroons struggling to preserve their freedom against both white and black opponents. Equally groundbreaking is the book's willingness to move beyond tidy ideological and racial categories to depict an Atlantic society at the crossroads of African and European influences, where Haitian rebels fought France while embracing its ideals. In the process, the reader is introduced to the extraordinary lives of multifaceted characters such as Wladyslaw Jablonowski, the son of a Polish woman and a black father who died fighting for France and white supremacy.

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890

In 2010, Joselyn M. Almeida edited Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary, a collection of fourteen essays that explores the exchange of cultural production between Britain and the Americas during the romantic era. In her introduction to these essays, Almeida highlights the lack of scholarship on Anglo-Hispanic history during this particular period and provides a general overview of the field. With Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890, Almeida expands on the ideas proposed in the 2010 volume and provides answers to many questions that had been left unanswered. Although she still greatly emphasizes the history of transatlantic cultural production, Almeida engages more with the literature produced at that time and shows how intricately intertwined fact and fiction truly were. Almeida also expands the boundaries of the existing scholarship, which focuses on either a transatlantic or circumatlantic model, and proposes a new panatlantic model, which “follow(s) the translation and transmission of culture and capital and the movement of peoples between Latin America, Africa, and Britain” (4). The panatlantic model therefore represents the triangulation of not only cultural production and capital but also that of empire, enslavement, and liberation; a triangulation that Almeida exemplifies from the book's very first paragraph.Chapter 1 provides readers with a perfect example of this panatlantic model through the analysis of William Robertson's History of America (1777), Francisco Javier Clavijero's Storia antica del Messico (1780), and Ottobah Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments (1787), each of which argues for its own definition of the New World. The chapter examines the reception and translation history of each of these works and presents the panatlantic connections between Native American and African enslavement. According to Almeida, Clavijero and Cugoano offer different interpretations of the history Robertson presents, with Clavijero emphasizing the Native history Robertson disregards and Cugoano proposing the African slave trade as crucial to European expansion and colonization. Cugoano's approach provides a segue to chapter 2, which highlights two of Britain's projects during the period: the abolition of slavery and the liberation of Latin America. In this chapter, Almeida demonstrates how the narratives of Toussaint Louverture and Francisco Miranda conflate these two projects and how Britain appropriated and altered these narratives for its own purposes. As she states, “This discourse of liberation in the pan-Atlantic, thus interanimated the abolitionist and independista imaginaries in relation to one another” (89).Chapter 3 provides a microscopic view of the role of translation in the exchange of cultural capital within the panatlantic imaginary Almeida has created. The first half of the chapter analyzes José María Blanco White's translations of abolitionist authors, which Almeida poses as the work that forged the connection between British abolition and the reformist project Blanco “envisioned for Spain and the American body politic” (107). The second half of the chapter returns to Richard Robert Madden's translation of Juan Manzanos's Poems by a Slave in the Island of Cuba (1840), which is the work Almeida uses to exemplify the panatlantic in the book's introduction. This translation is what helped create the image of “Britain as liberator” to the nations forming in the Atlantic (148).The fourth chapter describes how the expeditions of the HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin as “discoverer,” transformed South America into something tangible for the Britons: South America finally moves from British imaginary to British reality through Darwin's journals. The fifth and final chapter begins with the proposal that Darwin's belief in European superiority had been shaken by his findings in South America during the HMS Beagle expeditions; its focus is, however, on the flow of capital between South America and Britain. The first half examines how British periodicals published at that time governed discussions of labor and investments throughout the panatlantic, while the second half analyzes W. H. Hudson's The Purple Land, which exposes not only the trade of labor and capital but also the trade of culture between Britain and Latin America.Reimagining the Transatlantic is a well-written and comprehensive contribution to its field. It thoroughly engages with the current scholarship in transatlantic studies as well as extends it by providing a new conceptualization of the Atlantic through the transport and translation of literature.

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

"What Mischief Would Follow?": The Emersons, Haiti, and Romantic Racialism

"What Mischief Would Follow?"The Emersons, Haiti, and Romantic Racialism Colleen C. O'Brien (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Toussaint Louverture. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-7860. [End Page 218] In a letter dated 17 October 1849, Wendell Phillips thanks Ralph Waldo Emerson for the use of a set of volumes that he describes as a "valuable contribution to the scanty stores of Haytian history."1 Phillips's apparent claim that "Haytian history" exists only in "scanty stores" is interesting, not only because African American newspapers had been publishing stories about Haiti throughout the first half of the nineteenth century but also because Phillips himself would consequently discover and contribute to a broad Haitian archive, lecturing on the heroics of Toussaint Louverture by the beginning of the Civil War.2 The first decade of the twenty-first century is similar: many scholars who were previously unfamiliar with the "scanty stores" of Haitian history have, within ten years, become immersed in studies of the island—beginning with its 1791 insurrections. Even in an archive shaped by Western thought's limited ontological presumptions of racial difference and human freedom, the Haitian Revolution populates the historical landscape with possibilities whose "right to existence," as Michel-Rolph Trouillot puts it, had been silenced within the "field constituted by previously created facts."3 Rewriting the Haitian Revolution provided Ralph Waldo Emerson and his cohorts—especially his brother Charles Chauncy Emerson—with a corrective to the providential narrative of freedom that dominated United States history. [End Page 219] Placing the Anglo-American concept of righteous rebellion in a hemispheric context could amend the patterns of Anglo masculinity that had historically marred the ideal of freedom. This theoretical world, born of an odd combination of love and violent rebellion, presented a new world of racial meaning and masculine power. By amalgamating the histories of Haiti and the United States, mid-nineteenth-century scholars could also envision a reformed masculine world. Similarly, for many twenty-first century scholars, the "differential exercise[s] of power" that amplified the accomplishments of one colony's revolution and suppressed the other's shed light on the United States' exceptional "progress" as a world power.4 As the "other" foundational site of American Revolution, Haiti has become the focal point of contemporary scholarly rebellion. As a corrective to American exceptionalism, Haiti signifies what Nick Nesbitt describes as "the capacity for self-determination that is a universal, immanent potential."5 Haiti was not a nation whose founding fathers condoned what David Brion Davis identifies as the sin of slavery— or what Charles Emerson referred to as "sewing up the body politic . . . in a sack with a living viper."6 The two poles of representation that characterized Haiti in the nineteenth-century United States, however, ranged from Nesbitt's space of immanent potential to something far worse than Charles Emerson's viper-infested sack. In other words, the images of insurgent black power that characterized the first free black nation in the Western Hemisphere frightened many of Emerson's contemporaries more than any representation of slavery. Waldo Emerson's and Phillips's interest in Haiti on the eve of one of the most turbulent decades in United States history reflects their attempt, not only to make sense of conflicting racialized representations of the Haitian past and of people of African descent in general, but also to listen to the silences that reveal how a more perfect union might coalesce in the future. This perfectionist vision, however, frequently came into focus through the lens of romantic racialism. While romantic racialism often endowed people of African descent with a fictional, heightened capacity for love and empathy, [End Page 220] it at the same time depicted Anglo-Saxons as somewhat bereft of those qualities. Abolitionist representations of the Haitian Revolution deify Toussaint in particular on the grounds that he possessed a heightened sense of love, morality, and compassion. If anti-black representations of Haiti focused on violence and cruelty, the rhetoric of Waldo Emerson's English Traits (first published in 1856), which emphasized an Anglo-Saxon propensity for violence, flipped that proverbial script: it turned the most disturbing...

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (review)

Toussaint and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution. Matthew J. Clavin. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. 248, $39.95.)Reviewed by Laurent DuboisI will admit from the first my bias: I operate from the basic assumption that the Haitian Revolution is one of the most important events in the history of the world, and go around talking about it to pretty much anyone who will listen. So I was a particularly receptive audience for the arguments in Clavin's impassioned book about the ways in which Haiti - as example, referent, ghost, nightmare, prophesy, and much else - shaped politics and culture in the decades leading up to the Civil War.This is not the first time this story has been told: The book returns to a terrain explored in Alfred Hunt's 1988 book Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Vokano in the Caribbean, reissued by Louisiana State University Press in 2006. In some ways, his argument is about extending and further emphasizing these earlier arguments: The Haitian Revolution, he writes, a much a greater impact on slavery and abolition than has been suggested (4). But Clavin also brings out new material as well as a different energy and angle to the story, making this a vital contribution. Before and during the Civil War, he argues, Louverture and the Haitian Revolution were resonant, polarizing, and ultimately subversive symbols, which antislavery and proslavery groups exploited to both provoke violent confrontation and determine the fete of slavery in the United States (5). I appreciated the way Clavin illuminates how complex, slippery, and multivalent the Haitian Revolution was as a symbol. He remains attuned throughout to the often contradictory way in which it could surface in various types of debates and discourse, and does a nice job of leading us through its various appearances. At the same time, he also preserves a line of attack and argument throughout, with a drive and urgency that made it exciting reading. To my mind, alongside works like Ashli White's Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore, 2010) and a series of recent works on U.S. foreign policy toward Haiti during the Revolution, this book is required reading for anyone interested in thinking about the ways U.S. and Caribbean histories of slavery and antislavery shaped one another.I didn't - and couldn't - read it this work the way a specialist on antebellum U.S. history would, and will have to leave to others to respond to and evaluate the specific claims Clavin makes about the extent and impact evocations of Haiti had on debates about secession. More familiar with the history of slave revolt and abolitionism in the United States, however, I was impressed by the way in which is his study illuminates the way the symbolism surrounding Haiti really shaped the political imaginary of antislavery activism. …

Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions

Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions

Beyond the Slave Narrative: Sex, Politics, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Slave Narrative: Sex, Politics, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution Doris Kadish Jenson, Deborah . Beyond the Slave Narrative: Sex, Politics, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2010. Pp. 322. ISBN: 978-1-84631-497-1 Colonial and postcolonial studies have gained significant new breadth and depth with the publication of Deborah Jenson's Beyond the Slave Narrative: Sex, Politics, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution. This pathbreaking book brings to light the rich but largely neglected Francophone record of black literacy from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rectifying the anglocentric view that slave narratives were the only or most authentic form of black voices from the past, Jenson provides probing analyses of Creole poetry, political discourse, and other materials. Jenson finds in the cultural heritage of the past the basis for a fuller understanding of Haiti's past. Beyond the Slave Narrative is divided into two parts of unequal length. The first and longest, "Authorizing the Political Sphere," is devoted to an analysis of the discursive structures in texts by Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, and Henry Christophe from 1791 through the early years of the creation of the Haitian nation in 1804. The second, shorter part, "Authorizing the Libertine Sphere," is devoted to poems and songs that give voice and agency to Afro-diasporic women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The considerable differences between the two corpuses that Jenson has chosen to discuss requires justification, which she provides. As explained in the introduction, in both cases the focus is on subaltern voices seeking to forge a free consciousness, to "un-become" the legal property of others, and to challenge Euro-American hegemony. Through political discourse, the founders of the Haitian nation used language to construct themselves and the nation. Libertine verse provides access to women's power and intelligence in conducting sexual and social transactions. Both corpuses have been undervalued if not ignored altogether. Because the "authorship" of the texts is typically collaborative, a notion that Jenson explores with great sophistication, they have been attributed in some cases to whites who published them or even, as with Toussaint's documents, not even considered "writing" at all. In eight striking illustrations, or "textaul artifacts," Jenson shows exactly what Toussaint, Dessalines, [End Page 151] and others put on paper. She also explains in detail her work in the archives that enabled her to unearth obscure material. Graduate students and scholars who plan to continue her work will be inspired and instructed by such explanations. The five chapters in Part I move from Toussaint Louverture, through Dessalines and Henry Christophe. It begins with an analysis of Toussaint's "will to literary power" and the decolonization strategy he used to challenge European universalism. Through correspondence and public statements, Toussaint sought to forge a dialogue and establish parity with metropolitan and colonial leadership. Three chapters are then devoted to Dessalines, whom Jenson identifies as "in many ways the star of this book" and whose legacy she links to that of Malcolm X. In Chapter 2 Jenson provides an analysis of the discursive strategies deployed in the service of Dessalines's radical anti-colonial and postcolonial philosophy. She then goes on in Chapters 3 and 4 to examine what the historical record tells, directly or in some cases obliquely, of his significance in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Chapter 5 shows that a logical extension of the forced migration that occurred during slavery was the practice of kidnapping which afflicted members of the families of black leaders: notably the sons of Christophe and Toussaint. For Jenson "the phenomenon of Napoleanic kidnapping" exemplifies the battle for cultural command of the transatlantic world that was taking place between Haiti and the métropole. The three chapters in Part II focus on the "thriving, intertextual, but generally verbal poetic culture" of women of color in pre- and post-independence Haiti. These chapters provide textual examples in Creole accompanied by English-language translation. Chapter 6 questions what constituted Haitian culture at the time and explores the theoretical implications of the notions of "authentic" and "indigenous." Jenson asserts that in a racially hybrid Haitian context...

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (review)

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (review)

The Haitian play: C. L. R. James' Toussaint Louverture (1936)

The play Toussaint Louverture, staged in London in 1936, was the first in a series of interventions by C. L. R. James into the representative politics and historical implications of the Haitian revolution. The theme was most famously to recur in The Black Jacobins (first published in 1938), a text whose shifting frames of reference and lines of emplotment have become central to contemporary discussions of the current postcolonial moment (Scott 2004). Despite the attention accorded Jacobins, the play has received little critical notice, largely because of the absence of a script authenticated as that originally performed in 1936, but never copyrighted or published. Using a range of archive evidence, this article argues that a document held in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, is, first, a copy of the text that formed the basis of the performance; and, second, a document whose circulation helps position James within the complex network of activity that constituted the black Atlantic response to the political and cultural opportunities of the early twentieth century. It considers the critical reception of the play, the significance of the London metropolitan setting, and the ways in which the plot may have been designed to anticipate, and play to, an audience self-image rooted in ambivalence to its own past, yet drawn to increasing possibilities of the politically and aesthetically new.

A Revolutionary Dinner: U.S. Diplomacy toward Saint Domingue, 1798–1801

At a secret dinner in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, U.S. government officials moved beyond trading with the revolutionary French colony Saint-Domingue. They began to treat with the island's black leadership to secure American commerce in a hostile Atlantic world. President John Adams offered to Toussaint Louverture economic support and political encouragement. The administration, led by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, forged the United States' first diplomatic relationship with a black-led government from a foundation of confidence and bilateral cooperation. Adams's foreign policy toward Saint-Domingue advanced U.S. trade interests without forfeiting the Declaration of Independence's pledge of natural rights. From 1798 to 1801, the United States and Saint-Domingue shared a similar moment within Atlantic world history: that of emerging republics striving to escape domination and finding their own way. At the cessation of Dominguan-American relations, following Adams's electoral defeat, the revolutionary colony stood upon the threshold of nationhood. For its part, the United States moved a step closer toward its aspirations to reshape the Atlantic world.