Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (review)

To write an over-three-hundred-page text based on traces, inaccuracies, and silence is, to say the least, a daunting endeavor. Yet it is a task that Sibylle Fischer handles masterfully in Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. In effect, Fischer's project depends entirely on her skills at reading the unwritten and articulating the unspoken. This, she argues convincingly, is the only effective means of accounting for the political and discursive significance of the Haitian Revolution, an event largely excluded from or misrepresented in discussions of modernity and nationhood. Fischer's study refuses nineteenth-century master narratives of nation-state formation and challenges twentieth-century recuperations of Haiti's revolution by broader internationalist constructions. Dialoguing critically with canonical theorists of the Haitian Revolution and related fields, Fischer flushes out the sum and substance of scholarship on radical antislavery. With extreme attentiveness to the nuances and lacunae surrounding Haiti's struggle for independence, Fischer exposes the many ways in which the complex modernity of the revolutionaries has been misunderstood, ignored, and, of course, disavowed.

In a study that pieces together scattered fragments of information culled from an enormous breadth of primary and secondary sources, Fischer eschews disciplinary limitations as well as all boundaries of language, geography, and class. She moves from Cuba to the Dominican Republic to Haiti itself, identifying the breaks and denials in cultural productions as diverse as Cuban wall paintings, Dominican poetry, and several versions of the Haitian Constitution. She reads these "texts" from the perspective of postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and literary theory, pointing out the spectral and de-centered presence of revolutionary Haiti in all of them. Her analysis thus explores the tension between the psychosocial centrality of Haiti's revolution and its explicit absence from contemporary discourse—both elite and popular, both colonial and metropolitan. The specificity of revolutionary Haitian modernity, Fischer contends, was its inextricable linkage of independence goals to the objectives of radical abolitionism. Haiti's "contestatory potential" (37) lay in its implicit challenging of a Euro-American nationalist rhetoric that refused to acknowledge the unsustainability of race-based enslavement in a modern(izing) world.

Looking at nineteenth-century Cuba, Fischer begins her inquiry with the trial of the free black antislavery conspirator José Aponte and then continues with a discussion of Cuban popular and elite artistic expression of the period. In part 2 of her study, she uses a psychoanalytic lens to examine the Dominican response to the trauma of "having been modernized by those who were meant to be slaves" (168). The third and final part of Fischer's study concerns Haiti itself. Here Fischer sets out to counter past dismissiveness and to establish the Haitian Revolution as intrinsically modern. Emphasizing the complexity of Haiti's postrevolutionary agenda—its juxtaposing of universalism and particularism, engagement in acts of renaming, and explicit politicization of racial categories—Fischer reveals the at once republican and pan-Africanist objectives at the heart of Haitian nationalism. In effect, Modernity Disavowed reconciles these and other strands of Haitian modernity, highlighting the Revolution's profound historical resonance and refusing to accept the long history of its disavowal.