Can't Stand Up for Falling Down: Haiti, Its Revolutions, and Twentieth-Century Negritudes

The repercussions of the Haitian Revolution have been the subject of much historical, economic, and political scholarship. Less attention has, however, been paid to the cultural after-effects of Haiti's anticolonial victory. This essay calls for a more thorough critical re-evaluation of how the Revolution impacted cultures in the Caribbean, in the New World, and globally. As a contribution to this process, the essay revisits and re-interprets the work of the three central figures of the Negritude movement—Senghor, Damas, and Césaire—and considers how Haiti shaped their respective visions of "blackness." In tracing references to Haiti in Negritude poetry, prose, and theater, it argues that the Revolution is of only marginal importance to the African Senghor, while for the Caribbeans Damas and Césaire, the first black republic in the New World is a persistent, if often ambiguous and contradictory, point of reference.