The Caribbean as Literary Crossroads of Popular Genres

John Ribo

Data-mining HathiTrust for gothic depictions of Haiti and the 19th century Haitian revolution in English, French, and Spanish

Overview

Context

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) transformed the Atlantic world. The slaves of the French colony of Saint-Domingue emancipated themselves, declared independence from European colonizers, and founded the first nation of the Caribbean. As neighboring nations and colonies accelerated the importation of enslaved people from Africa, Haiti’s mere existence undermined the racial logics justifying slavery and its shores offered liberation to all escaping bondage throughout the Americas.

Many people still do not know this history, and much has been made of the silencing of the Haitian Revolution since the publication twenty-five years ago of Haitian anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot’s groundbreaking meditation on coloniality and historiography Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. In the nineteenth century, however, partisans and naysayers of the first black republic vehemently debated the implications of Haitian independence across the Atlantic and throughout the circum-Caribbean in what Baron de Vastey—Haitian writer, educator, and secretary to the first and only Haitian king Henr Christophe—described as “the paper war.” These debates left a rich archive of texts that merits further study. Moreover, since the bicentennial of Haiti’s independence in 2004, numerous scholars across multiple fields have participated in what Haitian religious studies scholar Celucien L. Joseph has dubbed “the Haitian Turn.” This collective, interdisciplinary turn towards Haiti’s revolutionary history offers a transformative corrective to Eurocentric histories of the Age of Revolutions and theorizations of the emergence of Western modernity.