Interpreting the Haitian Revolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Alexander D. Barder
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Long relegated to the margins of history in the study of international relations, the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 should be considered of paramount importance for understanding the emergence of a global racial imaginary of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The consequences of the liquidation of slavery and French colonialism on the island were felt throughout the western hemisphere and constituted a perpetual source of anxiety about the possibilities of racial rebellion. This chapter examines the intellectual effects of the Haitian Revolution in order to demonstrate the crystallization of a global racial hierarchy. This global racial hierarchy took for granted the ineluctable supremacy of “white” Western Europeans and Americans but was, nonetheless, deeply anxious about the possibilities of its future demise. A key element in this intellectual history, examined in this chapter, is the idea of racial violence or war that is used to interpret the events of the Haitian Revolution.

Global Race War

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander D. Barder
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Independent States ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Global Imaginary ◽  
Race War

Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy explores the historical connections between race and violence from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Barder shows how beginning with the Haitian Revolution and nineteenth century settler colonialism the development of the very idea of global order was based on racial hierarchy. The intensification of racial violence happened when the global racial hierarchy appeared to be in crisis. By the first half of the twentieth century, ideas about race war come to fuse themselves with state genocidal projects to eliminate internal and external enemy races. Global processes of racialization did not end with the Second World War and with the discrediting of scientific racism, the decolonization of the global South and the expansion of the state-system to newly independent states; rather it continued in different forms as the racialization of cultural or civilizational attributes that then resulted in further racial violence. From fears about the “Yellow Peril,” the “Clash of Civilization,” or, more recently, the “Great Replacement,” the global imaginary is constituted by ideas about racial difference. Examining global politics in terms of race and racial violence reveals a different spatial topology across domestic and global politics. Global histories of racial hierarchy and violence have important implications for understanding the continued salience of race within Western polities. The book revisits two centuries of international history to show the important consequences of a global racial imaginary that continues to reverberate across time and space.

Circuits

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-195
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Secret History

This chapter reads the dynamics of gender and racial violence in Leonora Sansay’s 1808 novel Secret History in transoceanic context. Even as the French Atlantic triangle generated enormous wealth through enormous exploitation, encounters and events in the transnational Pacific were laying bare the unequal terms and coercive relations that underpinned such triangles and the circuits that spun around them. Set in Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, the novel situates the violence of both marital and plantation intimacies within the turning global circuits of sexual-economic drive and their production of disproportion and inequality. By presenting French European and French creole desire in terms of a sexualized colonialism and a pornographic capitalism, Secret History exposes the rotations of capitalist drive as a violent obscenity, and revolution as its violent offspring.

Clarence Cameron White’s Ouanga! in the World of the Harlem Renaissance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen M. Bryan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
American Opera ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter examines Clarence Cameron White's Ouanga! in the context of the Harlem Renaissance. Produced by White in collaboration with John Frederick Matheus, Ouanga! is an important example of African American opera in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It draws upon Haiti's role as the first independent black-ruled state in the Western Hemisphere, as well as the prominence of its African heritage and the voudon religion. This chapter first provides a brief synopsis of the impact and legacy of the Haitian revolution on American society in the 1920s before discussing the genesis of Ouanga!, along with its use of physical representation and description to heighten the contrast between the concepts of old and new. It also considers social and religious structures represented in Ouanga! as well as its musical representation of Haitian culture. It argues that Ouanga! illuminates the history, heritage, and complexity of Haitian culture by combining two conceptions of Haiti: a highly romanticized view of Haiti's revolutionary history with an African American response to twentieth-century society and culture.

Rebuilding and Retrenchment

2019 ◽  
pp. 174-212
Author(s):  
Emily Richmond Pollock
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

This chapter places the opera commissioned for the reopening of Munich’s faithfully reconstructed Nationaltheater, Egk’s Die Verlobung in San Domingo, in the context of postwar Munich’s architectural and cultural restoration. The ethos behind the Nationaltheater reconstruction reflected Munich’s understanding of its relationship to National Socialism and to wartime destruction. The festival to celebrate the newly built theater mythologized Munich’s operatic tradition and was largely insensitive to recent history, instead emphasizing a continuity of greatness. This attitude of retrenchment was reflected in Egk’s opera, which was about romance and racial violence during the Haitian Revolution. Despite his interest in modern techniques, Egk was invested in traditional operatic expression and forms. He problematically used jazz idioms and percussion effects to “other” Black characters while coding expressive verismo tropes as white and heroic. Die Verlobung in San Domingo is a product of the patriotic, monumental, and traditional milieu for which it was written.

scholarly journals Hegel and Dessalines: Philosophy and the African Diaspora

2010 ◽  
Vol 84 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 269-275
Author(s):  
Deborah Jenson
Keyword(s):  
African Diaspora ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
University Of Virginia ◽  
University Of Pittsburgh ◽  
Universal History ◽  
Catastrophic Earthquake ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

[First paragraph]Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Susan Buck-Morss. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. xii + 164 pp. (Paper US$ 16.95)Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Nick Nesbitt. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. x + 261 pp. (Paper US$ 22.50)These two books have relaunched universal history – not without controversy– as a dominant trope in the fields of colonial history and postcolonial theory. They have also highlighted tensions around the application of a Hegelian philosophical genealogy to Haiti, the first self-emancipated black postcolony, the state ghettoized as “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” and now the embattled zone of recovery from the catastrophic earthquake of January 2010.

The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (3) ◽  
pp. 841-868
Author(s):  
Julia Gaffield
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Holy See ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Abstract The Haitian state shaped international definitions of sovereignty and national legitimacy after the Declaration of Independence in 1804. Haiti’s nineteenth century was not a period of isolation and decline; its first six decades were globally connected because the country’s leaders challenged their postcolonial inequality with diplomacy and state formation. This strategy aimed to establish Haiti’s membership in the “family of nations,” a central metaphor in European and American diplomatic, legal, and religious decision-making. In doing so, the Haitian state forced the Atlantic powers to redefine the boundaries of international relations. Haiti’s decades-long negotiations with the Catholic Church were tied to the racialization of the global hierarchy. After its Declaration of Independence, the Haitian state began clearing a theoretical path toward recognized sovereignty based on the dominant narrative that a society must be considered “civilized” on the world stage. But, as it cultivated internal policies and practices that rejected the dominant racist assumptions, these discriminatory ideologies became increasingly more explicit in international law.

The Slave Revolt That Changed the World and the Conspiracy Against It: The Haitian Revolution and the Birth of Scientific Racism

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 275-294
Author(s):  
Jean Max Charles
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Scientific Racism ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Slave Revolt ◽  
The World ◽  
Black Revolution ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
The 19Th Century

This paper argues, first, that despite the transnational impact of the Haitian Revolution, it remains mostly unknown in the Western hemisphere. This is primarily the result of an international racist project to repress the idea of Black Revolution and undermine Haiti’s progress. Second, I argue that, since the second half of the 19th century, intellectuals and social scientists have contributed to this racial project, and thus that scientific racism was born primarily as a response to the Haitian Revolution. The proliferation of racially oriented pseudosciences was part of significant efforts on the part of European and American intellectuals to undermine the notion of Black Revolution and Black power, and to demonstrate that Blacks were not capable of self-governance.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Maguire ◽  
Scott Freeman ◽  
Nicholas Johnson
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
International Community ◽  
Subsequent Evolution ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Interpersonal Level ◽  
The Way

This concluding chapter considers concepts fundamental to the ‘idea’ of Haiti as rooted in the Haitian revolution and the subsequent evolution of the independent nation. The analysis emanates from a dialogue at the end of a May 2014 symposium on Haitian sovereignty conducted among all panellists. Perspectives of sovereignty and ownership described in the volume contemplate international relations not only on a larger scale, but on an interpersonal level as well. Specifically, concepts of ‘honor’ and ‘respect’ that are present in Haitian greetings are contrasted to the way in which the international community ‘uses’ Haiti. By considering issues of participation and the actually existing needs of Haiti and Haitians, it is argued that the logic of respecting Haiti and Haitians, and their sovereignty as a people and a nation, has often been either absent or under assault. Honor and respect of Haiti and its people, however, are critically necessary elements for their future well-being, now more than ever.

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