Silencing the Past: Layers of Meaning in the Haitian Revolution

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

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.

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.

Universal History Upside Down

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (46) ◽  
pp. 28-39
Author(s):  
Susan Buck-Morss
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
World Order ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Universal History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Blind Spots

Universal history as traditionally understood emerged out of the semi-secularization of Biblical history that followed Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s attempt to think the whole of religion, philosophy, and history as a cosmological system of modernity. That was the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, universal history became an attempt to include all so-called civilizations within an academic canon. By unearthing the central significance of the Haitian Revolution for Hegel’s idea of freedom, the author argues for an inversion of historical understanding: the alleged margins of history are central, the alleged divisions between histories are mythical, and the goal of a universal history of humanity is to be achieved by dismantling the topology in which the past has been framed and passed down to us. The goal is to disrupt the intellectual order by exposing the blind spots that hinder conceptual, hence political, imagination—a writing of universal history upside down. A universal history worthy of the name will go far beyond the notion of correcting the Eurocentricity of history writing; it will need to be based on a deprivatized, denationalized structure of collective memory, effecting nothing short of a different world order. If the present is imagined not as the culmination of the past but rather as its rescue, then a radical pedagogy practices this gesture in its mode of historical recuperation. Theoretical pragmatics as a method of universal history, the transitory visibility of truth, respects the past’s lack of closure and welcomes the past’s intrusion in the present. It views history as a gift, given to all of us, without restrictions.

Voyage to the Marvelous: A Traveler’s Guide to The Kingdom of This World

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-68
Author(s):  
Ali Tal-mason
Keyword(s):  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

Following a legacy of four and a half centuries of literature written by foreign travelers landing on Haiti’s shores, Alejo Carpentier’s seminal novel about the Haitian Revolution is predicated upon Carpentier’s voyage to Haiti six years earlier. This article attends to the role of voyage in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, revealing the ways in which Carpentier’s storytelling and rendering of Haiti in both the novel and its prologue, and his accompanying theory of the marvelous real, adhere to Eurocentric conceptions of time that reinscribe this neocolonial space as anachronistic space. Because Carpentier can only perceive Haiti in the past, he replicates the role of the imperial travel writer in fashioning metropolitan conceptions of colonial spaces and reproduces the imbalance of power between visitor/visited. This perspective reinforces a dominant Euro-American image of Haiti as a strange and magical object of consumption and fails to imagine it as an independent, post-revolution state.

scholarly journals The Vulture of History in The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Fernando Valerio-Holguín
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Alejo Carpentier ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Paul Klee ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Angel Of Death

In thesis IX of the Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin indicates, from the painting “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee, that the Angel of History has his face turned back, contemplating a catastrophe. He wants to stay, but the great wind of progress is pushing him forward into the future, leaving rubble on its pass. The new historical novel The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier narrates the long and tortuous process of the Haitian Revolution and beyond. At the end of the novel, there is a great green wind that sweeps across the Northern Plain and the ruins of the old sugar mill. In Carpentier's novel, there is a “wet vulture”, which I will call the Vulture of History, which is thrown over Bois Caïman, the sacred space where the revolution originated. My purpose in this essay is to explore the Vulture of History as a baroque allegory of the Haitian Revolution. Unlike the angel from Benjamin's thesis, who wants to go back to the past to reconstruct history, Carpentier's vulture is an angel of death who feeds on the detritus of history.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document