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Two Paris‐based factions offered the reading public competing histories of the French and Haitian Revolutions as they vied to settle old scores and secure influence over future imperial policy in Thermidorian France. One, a colonial faction, sought to restore as much as possible of Saint‐Domingue's pre–slave rebellion structure and identity; the other was more mixed but consisted of individuals who were reconciled to working with the emancipated Black majority in the colony to secure the French republic's strategic and economic interests. The two groups disseminated printed pamphlets offering starkly different visions of the upheaval in France's prized Caribbean colony, as well as opposing interpretations of how revolutionary events in Saint‐Domingue and the metropole had been enmeshed since 1789. What both factions shared was a belief in the political significance of controlling this narrative and an emphasis on the shared nature of Saint‐Domingue and France's recent history: a dual revolution spanning the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Haitian author Marie Vieux-Chauvet's novel Dance on the Volcano (1957), this essay examines representations of an anxious White minority on the eve of the Haitian Revolution. It argues that Vieux-Chauvet deploys theatrical conventions to suggest that White benevolence, a valence of White saviorism, is a performance designed to maintain the status quo of colonial Saint-Domingue. The essay also considers the implications of examining global South critiques of Whiteness for the often US-centric field of critical Whiteness studies. Dance on the Volcano focuses on a uniquely formative moment: the last years of colonial rule punctuated by the raced tensions that gave way to a revolution that forever altered the global colonial order. Vieux-Chauvet's use of dialogue, gestures, and eavesdropping illustrate the duplicity of White characters, while foregrounding the critical gaze of the protagonist, the first woman of color to perform in the theater of Saint-Domingue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the international arms trade bound the revolutions in British North America, Saint-Domingue, and Spanish America in dependent relationships. Throughout the colonial era, an informal arms control regime made it impossible for Europe's American subjects to mass-produce war material or buy enough on the open market to equip independence through war. As became clear by late 1776, even the hemisphere's best-connected colonists could not overcome this obstacle. Only the decisions of France and Spain to secretly arm and then openly support the British North Americans made their revolution a success. But as France and Spain would soon come to realize, US independence fatally undermined the early modern arms control regime that had kept independence a practical impossibility in their own colonies. North American merchants became the indispensable arms dealers to the hemisphere's later revolutionaries, first in Saint-Domingue and then across mainland Spanish America. Crucially, though, the United States never offered terms remotely as generous as those it had enjoyed during its own independence struggle. Rather than rely on imperial patronage or republican solidarity, Haitians and Spanish Americans had to navigate a cutthroat market to obtain the tools of independence. That comparative disadvantage would haunt their postcolonial histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to decolonize time from the perspective of the Caribbean, particularly Haiti? This essay tackles the question of decolonial temporalities in narratives of Haitian pasts, presents, and futures. For Caribbean historians, the past of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) provides a transformative set of coordinates for projecting anti- and decolonial visions. This essay pays special attention to the layered histories and temporal condensations entailed in James, Trouillot, and Casimir's interventions. To discuss decolonial time, this essay analyzes a range of histories, dramas, literary texts, and oral storytelling. Connections across these different texts, and, especially, their various iterations over the decades will be used to explore the shifting understandings of time and historical change. The essay will illustrate how new visions of the past are understood through the changing lenses of the present. How, the essay asks, are imagined futures grounded in, shaped by, and how do they refashion in turn, historical pasts and contemporary presents? Rasanblaj – meaning gathering/reassembling/rebuilding in Haitian Kreyòl – is the central decolonial concept and process for this essay, which builds on Gina Athena Ulysse's previous articulations. This essay's argument links space to time and relates to the specific spaces of Haiti and the Caribbean, and to rewriting literary and historical narratives. Such is the power of rewriting and rasanblaj that they completely refashion any discussion of time and space in the postcolonial Caribbean literary and historiographical narratives discussed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a description of the colonial structures up to the 18th century, it alludes to the Bourbon reforms and then focuses on the Haitian Revolution at the end of that century and the beginning of the 19th century in order to determine its influence on the republican thought of Simón Bolívar. It is argued that the liberation of slaves, the elimination of all kinds of servitude, as well as other principles of republicanism, are taken by Bolívar from the Haitian revolution rather than from the French and English enlightened political thought. Finally, it is argued that Bolívar's wager represents a classic example of the struggle for the democratic expansion of rights where education, civic virtue, the fight against corruption and the search for more egalitarian societies are constitutive of republicanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the genre of mémoire produced by gens de couleur (free people of color) within the colonial and military bureaucracy of revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Building on recent scholarship on Toussaint Louverture's 1802 "Mémoire du général Toussaint Louverture," it situates the genre in broader conversation with the mass of bureaucratic and administrative writing in the colony by offering close readings of mémoires from Julien Raimond and André Rigaud. Though written for different purposes, these mémoires evince a shared formal and rhetorical strategy: they present textual evidence and employ forensic rhetoric to refute competing claims and vindicate their cause. By elucidating the generic conventions of the mémoire, this essay contributes to the growing body of scholarship on Black writing that has moved beyond the paradigm of the slave narrative toward other forms and genres of Black protest. In so doing, it refocuses vindicationism on these rhetorical evidentiary practices, rather than on the mythos of romance and romantic overcoming that has categorized vindicationist narratives of the Haitian Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the interactions, connections and parallels in literary texts addressing Haiti by Anglophone Caribbean writers C.L.R. James and Derek Walcott, and Francophone writers Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. Primary materials considered include: C.L.R. James' 1934 playscript, Toussaint Louverture, which had been lost for many years until recently; two plays by Derek Walcott, Henri Christophe and Drums and Colours; Aimé Césaire's book-length poem, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land and his theatrical work, The Tragedy of King Christophe; and Édouard Glissant's single published play, Monsieur Toussaint. Collectively, this corpus of primary materials demonstrates parallels and connections within literary efforts at decolonization across the Caribbean and reveals Haiti as a principle of coherence, and of hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After returning from exile in Mexico to Germany in spring 1947, Anna Seghers began to write three historical novellas on anti-slavery revolts in the Westindies around 1800. But the cycle Karibische Geschichten (Caribbean Tales) couldn't be finished before 1960. Seghers had to interrupt writing the third short story Das Licht auf dem Galgen (The Light on the Gallows). What was the reason? All of the Karibische Geschichten deal with violence and revolution in different times and places: the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolution (especially under Stalin). Focusing on the original version of Das Licht auf dem Galgen, written in 1948, I will try to show that Seghers had difficulties in coming to terms with the inevitability of violence when a society is formed, i.e. with the question of authority and its legitimation (›Gründungsgewalt‹). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a selection of understudied nineteenth-century Haitian texts to illuminate how Haitians tensely narrated their country’s foundational event and negotiated the challenge of constructing the first black nation-state in the Americas. The predominantly mixed-race male authors held their own biases and prejudices that were often informed by the same racialized labels they sought to overturn. Writing Haiti’s history, specifically that of the revolution, exposed these biases as well as critical social divisions, most notably between an emergent Eurocentric élite and the majority of recently freed, uneducated former slaves who spoke no French. Despite appeals to unity and Haitians’ Africanity, early narratives of the revolution disavowed or treated with ambivalence the role of former slaves and African-derived spiritual traditions in Haiti’s founding. I trace this ambivalence towards or disavowal of the black majority through a corpus of understudied texts that represent specific interventions in Haiti’s emerging national historiography. In particular, I focus on how five authors, Juste Chanlatte, Baron de Vastey, Hérard Dumesle, Thomas Madiou, and Beaubrun Ardouin, narrate the Haitian Revolution and grapple with the role or contributions of slaves/former slaves in the revolution and the influence of African-derived spiritual traditions. Their histories initiated a process of incorporating the black majority and African traditions into the official national imaginary, though on élite terms. For these authors, the predominantly black majority, while contributors to the country’s founding, needed civilizing in order for Haiti to prosper and progress as a nation in the post-Enlightenment Atlantic World. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This work focuses on how and why the purposive-rationality of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution at Bois Caiman is an anti-dialectical, as opposed to a dialectical, movement against enslavement as offered by traditional interpretations of the Revolution. The author concludes that the intent, as reflected in Boukman’s prayer, of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution at Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman) was not for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with whites by reproducing their norms and structure, as in the case of the Affranchis under the purposive-rationality of the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois blacks, but for the reconstitution of a new world order or structuring structure ‘enframed’ by an African spiritual and linguistic community, Vodou and Kreyol, respectively, grounded in, and ‘enframing,’ liberty and fraternity among blacks or death. In fact, the author posits that it is the infusion of the former worldview, liberal bourgeois Protestantism via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, on the island by the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois free persons of color,Affranchis, looking to Canada, France, and America for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition that not only threatens Haiti and its practical consciousnesses, Vodou and Kreyol, contemporarily, but all life and civilizations on earth because of its dialectical economic growth and accumulative (neoliberal) logic within the finite space and resources of the earth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the recent international growth of interest in Haiti, there has been an increased focus on the ways in which the narratives and impact of the Haitian Revolution have travelled beyond their historical and geographical points of origin. Researchers have explored the ways in which the Revolution has been actively “used” or instrumentalized in often very different cultural and ideological niches. This article asks whether interpretations of the Revolution have always been localized, and shaped by the clear national contexts in which they occur, or whether it is possible (and indeed helpful) to evoke a type of transnational or even global iconicity that sees the leader of the Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, adopted as a cipher for the wider understandings of Haiti in a global frame. Underlying this analysis is a comparison—often made but rarely scrutinized—between Louverture and Che Guevara. The article concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the status of Toussaint as a revolutionary icon in a global frame has acquired renewed intensity in recent years, but has arguably at the same time taken a new turn, as the focused implications of this iconicity for anti-colonial struggle and postcolonial reflection have lost their specificity and risked being diluted into generality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This study features the interpretative framing and publication history of Frederick Douglass's 2 January 1893 Haiti orations. Beginning with the initial accounts and discussions of the speeches carried in white and African American newspapers, then moving to their publication in pamphlet form, I explore the rhetorical consequences of authors' and editors' efforts to reproduce, interpret, praise, criticize, frame, and reframe Douglass's words in the months following the delivery of the speeches. To conclude, I consider twentieth- and twenty-first-century efforts to edit and publish Douglass's Haiti speeches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framing island space as one of the black freedom struggle's pivotal formal topographies, this article maps an abolitionist archipelago', or a chain of freedom-oriented islands repeating through space, time, and writing. As the first section outlines, the island of Hispaniola, upon which Haiti established itself by means of black revolution, emerged as a generative insular site within the abolitionist project. Nineteenth-century contestations surrounding abolitionism constructed Haiti as a social laboratory, with proliferating versions of Haiti's island-based experiment in black nationality advanced as arguments for and against the cause of black freedom on the American continent. Largely constituted by competing representations of Haiti's insular experiment, this portion of the abolitionist archipelago had important ramifications even after North American slavery came to an end. As the article's second section outlines, these ramifications become especially apparent in writer Richard Wright's repeated reliance on island space to theorize black hope for liberation from slavery's enduring legacies. Linking itself to abolitionism's nineteenth-century island chain, Wright's archipelago emerges in his reflective and expressive writings, ranging from 12 Million Black Voices (1941) to The Color Curtain (1956) to 'Five Episodes' (1963), the latter of which is the posthumously published portion of Wright's still unpublished novel 'Island of Hallucinations.' Wright emerges as a master deployer and deconstructor of the insular form's abolitionist legacies. In mapping Wright's islands and nineteenth-century abolitionism's islands as subsets of (to borrow a term from Antonio Benitez-Rojo) a larger 'meta-archipelago,' this article introduces an increased geoformal attentiveness to what generally has been the geoculturally oriented project of tracing the dreams of freedom that have animated diasporic struggles against slavery and its legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps no other revolution in modern times, whether American, French, Russian, or Algerian, has stirred such different emotions and raised so many theories of the act itself as the Haitian Revolution. This essay is framed around the given and received interpretations of Haiti’s long history in order to demonstrate that there is neither curse nor punishment in Haiti’s history; there is only intrigue, interest, and interference. The natural disasters whether earthquakes or hurricanes do not occur because of some rational targeting of the country but are the results of the arbitrariness of nature. Of course, how Haiti has dealt with these natural disasters can be interpreted from positions of class narrative, religious narrative, and cultural narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trained, as most of us are, to focus on a small corner of the globe during an equally small moment in time, historians too often miss the larger interconnections that help explain regional racial identity and specific types of class formations in the Atlantic world. Denmark Vesey, for example, is too often depicted merely as an "enslaved rebel leader" (despite being free for two decades prior to his execution) rather than a black abolitionist, or a man of the black Atlantic. In the same way, Simon Bolivar is forced Into equally simplistic categories. He is a general and a politician, but rarely a resident of Paris at the time of Bonaparte's coronation, or a visitor to Vesey's South Carolina, or a refugee in Haiti. However, in their later years, and especially in the early 1820s, they both thought much about events in Haiti, and their competing views of the black nation say much about the shifting boundaries of race and class in the western Atlantic. Conventional wisdom holds that for much of the late colonial era and early national periods in both North and South America, the connection between race and class can scarcely be overemphasized. Scholars now acknowledge that racial definitions are always being defined and redefined, just as class status is never static. Nothing better illustrates this understanding than the way these two individuals viewed the possibilities, as well as the dangers, inherent in Haiti's destruction of old correlations and new perceptions of class structures. If elite whites regarded Haiti as a terrifying example of a world turned upside down, Vesey evidently regarded the black nation as the sort of country where bright, aggressive, ambitious men like him could prosper and advance in rank. Historians, with a few notable exceptions, have been dismissive and patronizing of post-1804 Haiti, with its governor-generals, emperors, and presidents for life. But as a former resident of Danish St Thomas, French Saint Domingue, and patriarchal South Carolina (and, most likely, as the child of West Africans), Vesey had never actually seen a truly egalitarian society. If the antislavery ever harbored the sort of communalistic ideals that scholars wish to impose upon black abolitionists, there is now no evidence for it. Vesey appeared to care tittle about the fact that post-Louverture Haiti was both politically undemocratic and class based. With Christophe's eradication of the blancs and the gens de couleur, race was no longer a component in its class structure, except to the extent that the old order's racial structure was turned upside down. For an exceedingly entrepreneurial businessman tike Vesey, Boyer's country was not just liberty or a convenient safe haven; it was the very picture of class mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]