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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]

The Haitian Revolution—the famed historical event that redefined the liberatory possibilities of modernity and altered Black diasporic subjectivities—offers a wealth of knowledge that has yet to be fully analyzed. This article explores the diasporic and queered possibilities embedded in the story and aesthetic representation of the revolutionary actor, Romaine la Prophètesse. This liminal figure of the early revolutionary era galvanized thousands of formerly enslaved people to fight against the French colonial apparatus while embodying a feminine, creative, and spiritual gendered subjectivity, diverting from the overdetermined masculinist and militaristic ethos of the time. Nonetheless, most accounts of Romaine are tangentially mentioned and do not explore the rebellious possibilities of this historical figure's imaginative gendered presentation. To counter the analytical impasse imposed by Western and authoritative archives and methodologies, the author employs a "radical interdisciplinarity"—a crucial Black studies approach—to unearth the potential of creative genders and their role in upholding Black diasporic epistemes of freedom and resistance. Paying attention to Haitian abstract art, and particularly the work of Haiti-born, Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Manuel Mathieu, the author explores how his pieces blur temporal, spatial and ontological registers offering a glimpse into undecipherable, yet affective, genealogies of "freedom dreams." Indeed, through the use of a conceptual frameworks that honours the "right to opacity," the author suggests that the obscured mythology and the abstracted aesthetics of Romaine la Prophètesse allow for a genealogical reading of queer spiritual ontologies that are part of larger Black diasporic freedom epistemes and that are demonstrated through contemporary Haitian queer designations and advocacy work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issues on topics including Jully Black's invocation of Black and racialized people's presence on Native land; the Haitian Revolution, and Black Diasporic Possibilities and Shanique Mothersill's poem, "Evincing."

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]

The reworlding of the world from the Global South directly challenges the resilient coloniser's model of the world. The coloniser's model of the world sustains the contemporary hierarchical and asymmetrical modern world system with Europe and North America at its apex of power. Consequently, reworlding from the Global South materialised as a counter-hegemonic initiative driven by struggles of the wretched of the earth for re-existence, liberation and freedom. The epic Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), which embraced 'Black' as an identity of a sovereign people opposed to racism, enslavement and colonialism, forms an ideal genealogy of reworlding from the Global South. This article reflects on evolving ideological, identitarian, cultural, intellectual and pan-African formations and initiatives of resisting empire and remaking the world after the empire. What is highlighted are freedom dreams, self-definition initiatives, critiques of the asymmetrically structured modern world and struggles and visions of re-membering and re-humanisation of the dismembered and dehumanised. The Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements, among many other initiatives and formations, have carried over the struggles for reworlding the world from the Global South. [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]

This article discusses Haiti's efforts to seek restitution from France for the "Double-Debt" imposed in 1825. After Haiti gained independence in 1804 following a slave revolt, France threatened to invade and re-enslave the Haitian people if they did not pay compensation to French slave owners for their lost "property." This became known as the Double-Debt, as French and American banks profited by converting the debt into high-interest loans. In 2003, on the 200th anniversary of Haitian hero Toussaint Louverture's death, Haiti's president Jean-Bertrand Aristide announced his intention to demand repayment from France. This sparked retaliation from France and Haiti's elite, who sought to undermine Aristide's government. A legal team developed arguments that the 1825 agreement was unlawful given the threat of re-enslavement. A draft complaint was prepared but the 2004 coup against Aristide halted the legal proceedings. The article argues that the restitution claim remains legally valid and an important symbol in Haiti's fight for justice, despite political opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Haitian Revolution introduced a seismic shift in political constellations, leading to the constitution of the first free Black republic within the New World. Revolutionary Haiti communicated the content of that freedom as it embarked along the path of revolutionary liberation. This article examines the nature of that communication by demonstrating how political speech is implicated at the formative levels of Black selfhood and statehood through the construction of a Black universalism, which disavows speechlessness and its sublimation as Black barbarism. Ultimately, the article contends a decisive shift transpires from Euromodernity to Afromodernity and with it, the (re)humanization of Blackness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major arguments made in the current boom in Haitian revolutionary studies connects today's conditions of possibility for modern democracy and human rights to the abolition of slavery during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). During the last decade, however, this connection between the Haitian Revolutionary period and our own age has been questioned by an increasing number of scholars: a phenomenon that this article conceptualizes as the 'sceptical turn'. The article argues that the sceptical turn consummates its critique through unacknowledged rearrangements of abstractions, and therefore misses its target. A corresponding critique of the sceptical turn is formulated here using Bertell Ollman's tripartite concept of the abstractions of vantage point, extension, and generality. Ollman's notion enables a shift of focus onto modes – instead of the more common focus on levels – of abstraction. Thus, the author argues, contra the sceptical turn, not only that the connection between the Haitian Revolution and the political and social situation of today is plausible, but that it also provides a more profound conceptual basis for analyses of revolutionary events in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of politics and the novel often turn to sympathy, or the imagination of the thoughts and feelings of others, in spite of widespread recognition of sympathy's limitations. This essay uses Harriet Martineau's historical romance of the Haitian Revolution, The Hour and the Man (1841), to consider how novels might seek to move or even motivate readers in ways that do not rely on sympathy. Rather than asking readers to feel for or with her characters, Martineau encourages readers to experience how slavery complicates or even precludes the possibility of sympathy., What makes one person wish to act on behalf of another? What inspires one to serve the interest of someone to whom--or some group to which--one has no obvious connection? [...]

It is a familiar story: in the world's first post-colonial republic, a nation conceived in liberty had to contend with the contradictions of African slavery. In the beginning, white colonists in what would become the United States assumed that Blacks were fit for nothing more than laboring in chains. With the advent of the Enlightenment, American intellectuals started to take seriously the idea of real equality, and a long struggle to abolish slavery and establish a truly free society began. That story culminated with the American Civil War, and the century that followed compelled white Americans to unlearn their ancient prejudices and eventually grant Black Americans civil rights. This Article offers a different story. The racial prejudice that underpinned American slavery was not ancient; Blacks were not always seen as inferior and what qualified an individual as 'Black' changed often in both popular understanding and, especially, under the law. To illustrate these points, this Article examines the development of slavery and racial laws not only in the United States but also in the British colony of Jamaica and the French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). In each society, the necessity of labor preceded, rather than followed, the existence of racial prejudice. In each society, the white elite had to contend with how to transform 'race 'from the amorphous concept it was in the 1600's into a system of laws, and in each society, the realities of racial mixing created a class of individuals who would confound the courts and ensure the fluidity of legal racism. If the familiar story were true, America's brilliant Founding Fathers would have certainly arrived at different solutions than colonial officials in Jamaica or the white masters of Saint-Domingue. Instead, what we see across all three societies is a remarkable convergence of the interests of the ruling class. Both the similarities and differences between racial laws in each society are best explained not by ideology, but by the material underpinnings of each country's economic system. If we are to understand how systemic racism impacts our world and our legal system today, it is crucial to recognize that prejudices will continue to exist until the material conditions that underlie them are overthrown. This Article represents a small contribution towards that goal., CONTENTS ABSTRACT 242 INTRODUCTION 243 I. THE ORIGINS OF RACE 245 A. Racial Materialism 247 B. Hegemony 249 II. THE UNITED STATES 251 A. A New Nation, Conceived in Liberty: [...]

The Haitian Revolution represents the only permanently successful uprising of enslaved people in world history. So far, it has attracted little attention in Germany, both publicly and in historical research, even though it is now considered the third great revolution of the late eighteenth century, alongside the French and American Revolutions. In French debates on colonial heritage, on the other hand, the Haitian Revolution has gained a great deal of prominence, as it has in discussions on postcolonialism and questions about the racist character of capitalism. The article analyses these debates and shows how the Haitian Revolution also raises fundamental questions about the character of the Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In 1802, the French painter Denis Volozan (1765–1820) completed a posthumous portrait of George Washington commissioned by the legislature of Delaware for its State House in Dover. A recent immigrant to the United States, the artist had relocated to Philadelphia from the island of Saint-Domingue at the height of the Haitian Revolution. Once it was unveiled, however, the painting provoked widespread public dislike. Hidden from view, it was barely saved from destruction in the 1960s. Though the choice to entrust Volozan with such a project may have seemed like poor judgment to contemporary audiences, this article argues that his portrait illustrates the symbolic reinterpretation of Washington by transatlantic French diasporas in North America and the Caribbean, of which the painter was a part. Volozan was familiar with depictions of both European elites and figures of power like Toussaint Louverture, whom he had sketched in 1800. As such, his approach to American political portraiture was a result of greater dynamics of circulation in the Atlantic world. Celebrating a patriotic figure, his Delaware picture was nonetheless shaped by the political and cultural interactions between France, Britain, and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

" Les Capitalistes " re-creates the gradual emergence in print of the word capitaliste during the second half of the eighteenth century. It retraces the word's transformation from a term used to refer vaguely to any wealthy individual to one with a meaning still familiar today, that of a high-stakes investor. As a result of this evolution, by the 1790s, men who made major investments in the hope of significant profits were first known as capitalistes. The original capitalistes participated in the financing of France's slave trade with its most lucrative colony, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), and subsequently in the financing of the debt created when the Haitian Revolution destroyed both Saint-Domingue's economy and the Haitian slave trade. [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]

The Saga of TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE and the Birth of Haiti (TSTLBH) is the first volume in the Golden Legacy: Illustrated History Series, launched in 1966 by Fitzgerald Publishing. A Black-owned company, Fitzgerald Publishing released 16 total volumes in the series. This study examines the various ways that TSTLBH pushes back against three trivialising tropes regularly used to promote anti-African retellings of the Haitian revolution: (1) L'Ouverture was acting and succeeding on European terms; (2) Africans were not skilled enough to defeat Bonaparte; and (3) African-led nations face hardships because they are barbaric. This article begins with a brief review of media about the Haitian Revolution. Next, it focuses on comic books on the subject. Lastly, it investigates the various ways that TSTLBH refutes each trivialising trope by (1) solidifying L'Ouverture's African roots and their positive influences on his upbringing; (2) showing the strategic decisions and purposeful actions taken by L'Ouverture and his allies to defeat their enemies; and (3) reinforcing the falsehood of notions that Africans are savage barbarians and inferior to Whites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a pivotal moment in the campaign for political rights mounted by free men of colour in Saint-Domingue during the era of the French and Haitian Revolutions, when the leaders of the free coloured movement were able to force white political leaders to agree to a revolutionary set of demands known as the concordats. Having taken place in the shadow of the August 1791 slave rebellion in the northern part of the colony, the concordats have traditionally been overlooked and understudied by historians of the Haitian Revolution; however, they reveal valuable insights into the political thought of Saint-Domingue's free coloured leaders, who sought to erase white supremacy in political, legal, and social arenas while simultaneously maintaining slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some recent historians of the Haitian Revolution have cited a document called 'The Letter of Jean-François, Biassou and Belair', as the most important statement of the goals of that movement, whereas other scholars have cast doubt on the Letter's authenticity. A previously overlooked archival source strengthens the case for the Letter's authenticity and clarifies the circumstances in which it was composed. A comparison of the Letter with other statements of the Haitian revolutionaries' goals shows that the Black leaders of the movement responded to changing political circumstances, shifting their language as their assessment of the situation facing them changed. [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 engages with two bodies of literature—the interdisciplinary studies of the Haitian Revolution and republican political theory—to make two corresponding interventions. First, I show how, despite republican political philosophy's exclusion of the slave from the practice of freedom, Haitian revolutionaries and radical abolitionists—whom I call Black Atlantic Republicans—challenged this exclusion using republican logic. To make this point, I engage with shared understandings of tyranny and domination in David Walker's Appeal and Toussaint Louverture's personal correspondence. Second, using Jean Casimir's notion of the counter-plantation system and Louverture's proclamations on labor, I argue that despite the Black Atlantic universalization of republican freedom, the ideology fails to properly theorize the domination inherent to plantation labor. This inability to theorize labor freedom, I claim, is endemic to republican political thought itself. We can arrive at this insight by centering the revolutionary Haitian masses rather than their leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marronnage, or escape from slavery, was a longue-durée form of resistance to slavery in Haiti and was also, as Sylvia Wynter argues, a "dialectical response to the capitalist plantation system"--a system that aimed to deny humanity, sever social and cultural ties, and commodified people and their labor power. This article, as well as works by others such as Cedric Robinson (1983), Sylvia Wynter (n.d.), and Jean Casimir (2020), argues that marronnage was a fundamentally anti-capitalist mode of resistance, socio-political critique, and grassroots mobilizing. In the immediate moments when enslaved people fled plantations, they reclaimed possession of themselves and other tangible and intangible resources, such as their time, social relationships, forms of knowledge, and labor skills that enslavers stole from them. When maroons re-appropriated resources and mobilized themselves, they challenged and subverted colonial plantation structures, contributing to the downfall of both Spanish and French imperial slaveries in Haiti. During and after the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, Africa-born rebels and maroons were central to the mobilizing structures that successfully fought to abolish slavery and overturn colonialism--representing an astounding rupture to the prevailing Atlantic world-system that was dependent upon enslaved labor. Even after the post-independence Haitian government replicated aspects of the colonial administration, as Casimir (2020) points out, the formerly enslaved masses of Haiti organized themselves into communal social arrangements that prioritized subsistence labor and extended kin networks, and continued to rely on marronnage to protest exploitative economic practices. This article explores the trajectory of marronnage in Haiti as a continuous struggle, emphasizing the ways that it exposed the violence, exploitation, and oppression inherently embedded in the Atlantic world-system, and exposed the limits of the governing Haitian states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on underexploited primary sources, this article provides insights on the political culture of slaves by reconstructing the negotiation strategies of Jean-François, one of the most powerful black leaders of the Haitian Revolution. While scholarship depicts Jean-François's loyalty to Spain as a foregone conclusion, it is suggested here that his rejection of an alliance with France was the outcome of a careful consideration of the options available and of his diplomatic machinations. Jean-François's entreaties to both France and Spain and his diversified approach to French, Spanish and black generals' propaganda may have represented an inspirational example for Toussaint Louverture. A reconstruction of Jean-François's relationship with Spanish clergyman Josef Vázquez shows that Catholicism formed a pillar of his efforts to gain diplomatic leverage in spite of the difficulties of establishing mutual trust across racial lines. Jean-François skilfully appropriated Catholicism – a cornerstone of European colonialism – to influence his Spanish counterparts and challenge their racist bias. Religious performances proved their cohesive power and potential for the mobilization of slaves: Jean-François's troops followed him until his final relocation to Spain, an outcome which was not a mere imposition by Spanish authorities as previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in the context of the international politics after the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and before the rise of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 leads to three discoveries in the history of European ideas. First, her reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was advertised, discussed, and rumoured to be the work of a woman in London papers days earlier in November 1790 than previously documented. Second, Wollstonecraft's first known instances of public reception beyond Britain were in a major Jamaican newspaper from January to March 1791. Thirdly, and most notably, in February 1791, the Kingston Daily Advertiser published a lengthy excerpt from her Rights of Men that called for the abolition of slavery and the realization of justice for the poor and oppressed. Long before Hegel probably developed his master-slave dialectic in response to journalistic accounts of the independence of Haiti in 1804, there was Wollstonecraft's actual reception in the international news in Jamaica, amid the spread of reports of the rise of slave unrest in the broader post-revolutionary Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the works of playwright and poet Manuel Rueda, including "Las metamorfosis de Makandal," which takes its inspiration from Alejo Carpentier's Spanish novel "The Kingdom of This World." It mentions the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave rebellion in the Americas, and Makandal, who is known for organizing a deliberate poisoning of more than six thousand French plantation owners in Saint-Domingue, Dominican Republic.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Renowned Haitian Scholar, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in his classic book, Silencing the Past (1995), surmised that the Haitian Revolution was an unthinkable history. His thesis centered on two firsthand accounts [...]

Stories abound of enslaved people who remained faithful to their owners during crises, but few offer critical insights into their motivations. This article offers alternative understandings for the appearance of slave loyalty through a close study of the life of Eustache Belin, who was born into slavery in Saint-Domingue just before the era of the French and Haitian Revolutions. He navigated the revolutionary era in ways that contemporary planters and later metropolitan observers defined as 'loyal,' and in 1832, received the Académie Française's prize for virtue for his purportedly 'faithful' and selfless actions. However, this article argues for a different interpretation that considers how his embeddedness in a wider context of diverse social relations reveals a more nuanced understanding of slavery and freedom, without diminishing his capacity for affection, kindness, and sacrifice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that focussing on issues of citizenship highlights the relationality of North/South dynamics and that doing so through a 'Southern lens' reveals two complementary and otherwise neglected aspects of North/South relationality: the coloniality of the institution of citizenship, and the lasting impact that (de)colonial contestations and reinterpretations of citizenship rights have had on this institution from its emergence in the context of colonial empires until its most recent global reconfigurations. In order to show how the coloniality of citizenship has played out in a particular region of the Global South, the article focuses on the Caribbean as the region with the longest history of colonial entanglements with Europe and one that captures the very dialectics of modernity/coloniality today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of the French Revolution usually locate the origins of the "one and indivisible Republic" in a strictly metropolitan context. In contrast, this article argues that the French Revolution's debates surrounding federation, federalism, and the (re)foundation of the French nation-state were interwoven with colonial and transimperial matters. Between 1776 and 1792 federalism in a French imperial context went from an element of an academic conversation among bureaucrats and economists to a matter of violent struggle in Saint-Domingue that generated new agendas in the metropole. Going beyond the binary language of union and secession, the article examines the contest over federation and federalism in Saint-Domingue between free people of color and white planters who, taking inspiration from both metropolitan and non-French experiences with federalism, sought to alter the colony's relationship with the metropole while also maintaining the institution of slavery. Revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, unsure which direction to take and without the benefit of hindsight, used the language of federalism to pursue rival interests despite a seemingly common vocabulary. This entangled history of conflicts, compromises, and misunderstandings blurred ideological delineations but decisively shaped the genesis of the French imperial republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the field of humanitarianism as the critical locus, this essay reflects on what Haiti, called the "Republic of NGOs," can teach us about unsettling the coloniality of being, power, and freedom if we acknowledge in our critical thought system the acts of humanitarianism this nation has performed. By pursuing the issue of agency otherwise denied to any organism—be it political or intellectual—that departs from Western paradigms, the author aims to contribute to the call on critics and historians to rethink the ideologies that have informed and continue to inform the patterns of research methodologies entrenched in various disciplines to address the vexed question of epistemic dependency. In response, the essay focuses on the episode of inter-minority solidarity between blacks and Jews when, following the 1938 Evian conference, the Haitian government offered asylum to the undesirables of Europe based on the principles of the 1804 Haitian Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]