Caribbean and Southern Literatures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wharton Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Global Studies ◽  
Mexican War ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Racial Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The U.S

Transnationalism and Global Studies have exploded old notions of artificial cultural boundaries, opening to view the myriad cross currents between the U.S. South and the Caribbean. Thus, the literature produced by the wider region of the circumCaribbean can be considered to reflect this interplay and as an alternative history to chronicles bounded by nationalism. While the age of contact and contest, the Haitian Revolution, and the U.S.–Mexican War were early focal points for interchange, the mutual influences of cultures have been dynamic, ongoing, and intricately connected to immigration, diaspora, racial conflict and mixing, and the creation of new forms of cultural expression. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in the literature of the circumCaribbean, especially in the new forms it has taken over the past fifty years.

Reimagining Instruction in Special Collections: The Special Case of Haiti

2020 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-321
Author(s):  
Kellee E. Warren
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Colonial Administration ◽  
The Past ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Special Case

ABSTRACT A growing body of literature has developed around critical archival instruction and archivists as educators. This development demonstrates the pedagogical evolution beyond show-and-tell sessions to critical approaches in archival instruction and specific standards in archival literacy. This article provides a cross-disciplinary discussion of an approach to archival instruction. Also included is a reimagined instruction session using a fragmentary collection from the Saint-Domingue/Haiti colonial administration. Stories of the enslaved are usually marked by death and brutality. But Haiti's is a story of triumph; though fleeting, a victory nonetheless. When instructors decolonize archival instruction, they bring the past into the present and the future. The Haitian Revolution was a large-scale revolt by enslaved Africans, and it was also directly connected to the expansion of the United States. Archival instructors should encourage students to reimagine the stories told from the Saint-Domingue colonial administration collection and from any colonial collections that may be under their care.

Silencing the Present? Decolonization, Nationalization, and Natural Right(s) in Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859)

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-209
Author(s):  
Jonas Ross Kjærgård
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
The Past ◽  
Structural Problems ◽  
Political Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

AbstractÉmeric Bergeaud wrote Stella (1859), his novelistic account of the Haitian revolution (1791–1804), at a most turbulent moment in Haitian history. Faustin Soulouque rose to power in the late 1840 s and soon began to pursue his political opponents with violent means. Coming from a “Boyerist” background, Bergeaud fled the country in 1848 and settled in St. Thomas where he worked on his novel while his health deteriorated. Despite his precarious life in exile, Bergeaud remained silent about Soulouque in his decisively political novel Stella. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Madeleine Dobie, and others have shown, the history of slavery has often been silenced in literature and public debate, but what does it mean for Bergeaud to silence the present and focus on the past? I argue that Stella in fact makes a significant intervention in the debates about mid-19th-century Haiti. Instead of confronting Soulouque directly, however, Bergeaud addresses a pair of structural problems of which I consider Soulouque and his policy emblematic expressions: decolonization and nationalization. Most existing readings have emphasized Bergeaud’s reflections on history, but in this contextualized analysis, I show that Bergeaud looks not only to the past but also and importantly to nature and natural right(s) philosophy in his novelistic search for a way forward for Haiti.

Exploring the Past of the ‘Other’: the Practice of U.S. History in Mexico

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 308-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Leidenberger
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberty ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Mexican War ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Opposition Movement ◽  
The U.S

In the courses on U.S. history I teach in Mexico, this speech by Maine congressman Severance serves well to illustrate arguments of the opposition movement to the U.S.-Mexican War. Severance offers a variety of reasons for his anti-war stand, but to my students I like to emphasize this particular one, for it follows a logic contrary to their nationally-framed perceptions. What Severance suggests here, is that these two countries share a common identity, namely that of being “the two largest republics of the world” based on “the principles of civil liberty and elective government,” and that therefore they ought not to be at war. My insistence on a perspective that views the commonalities of the two countries' historic experiences has been futile, however, when teaching about a war that resulted in the “transfer” - to put it in neutral terms - of over half of Mexico's national territory to the U.S. Students are little impressed by this congressman's (and my own) argumentation and stress instead what divides Mexico and the U.S., not only with regard to this historical event, but also with regard to the countries' pasts as a whole. For instance, in a conference at a university in Toluca, my efforts to make my audience understand the internal dynamics of U.S. foreign policy during the 19th century not only appeared to fall on deaf ears but also provoked nearly hostile reactions.

Haiti's Paper War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chelsea Stieber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Age Of Revolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Considerable Work

This book begins where so many others conclude: 1804. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the challenges that Atlantic world powers posed to Haitian sovereignty and legitimacy during the Age of Revolution, but there existed an equally important internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between those who envisioned a military authoritarian empire and those who wished to establish a liberal republic. This book argues that the post-independence civil war context is central to understanding Haiti’s long postcolonial nineteenth century: the foundational political, intellectual, and regional tensions that constitute Haiti’s fundamental plurality. Considerable work has been dedicated to unearthing the uneven and unequal production of historical narratives about Haiti in the wake of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s groundbreaking Silencing the Past, but many more narratives—namely, those produced from within Haitian historiography and literary history—remain to be questioned and deconstructed. This book unearths and continually probes the conceptually generative possibilities of Haiti’s post-revolutionary divisions, something the current historiographic framework on Haiti’s long postcolonial nineteenth century fails to fully apprehend. Through close readings of original print sources (pamphlets, newspapers, literary magazines, geographies, histories, poems, and novels), it sheds light on the internal realities, tensions, and pluralities that shaped the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath to reveal the process of contestation, mutual definition, and continual (re)inscription of Haiti’s meaning throughout its long nineteenth century.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Paugh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Economic Benefits ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
British Atlantic World ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Abolitionist sentiments had long circulated in the British Atlantic world, but it was not until the 1760s in Virginia that they gained political traction in a colony dependent on slave labor. The politics of reproduction explain the success of abolitionism in this time and place: Virginia was unique among Britain’s colonies because, by the mid-eighteenth century, its slave population was growing, and wealthy planters had no need for fresh recruits. The American Revolution depleted the slave populations in the Caribbean, however, because it disrupted both the slave trade and the flow of imported foodstuffs. Consequently, British politicians began to fantasize, by the 1780s, that Caribbean slave societies could mimic the demographic success in North America in order to enjoy the economic benefits of a plentiful labor supply and allow for the abolition of the slave trade. This vision for reform was postponed, however, by geopolitical developments, including the Haitian Revolution.

“All would be equal in the effort”: Santo Domingo's “Italian Revolution”, Independence, and Haiti, 1809-1822

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Eller
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Plantation System

AbstractThis article explores the colony of Santo Domingo just after it had passed from French back to Spanish hands in 1809. Although impoverished and at the very margins of the Caribbean plantation system, revolutionary winds were nonetheless buffeting the colony. Using the testimony of a failed 1810 conspiracy known as the “Italian Revolution”, the article explores the enduring inequalities present in Santo Domingo, the immediate influence of the Haiti to the west, and the beginnings of Latin American independence more generally. Whereas Spanish authorities and other Caribbean elites might have dismissed the colony as marginal to the political events, therefore, the conspiracy sheds light on its importance to subaltern travelers and migrants from neighboring islands. Finally, it shows the tremendous concrete and symbolic importance of the Haitian Revolution on the neighboring colony, complicating a historiography that often argues for conflict, and not interrelation, between the two sides of Hispaniola.

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