The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas by Sarah E. Johnson (review)

The title of the book, The Fear of French Negroes, is an oft-mentioned expression in contemporary accounts of the Haitian Revolution; the phrase draws attention both to the fears felt by blacks themselves and the implied anxiety of their oppressors (xx). With an emphasis of what the author has termed “transcolonial exchange,” the book uses various case studies to examine “the migration of people, ideas, and practices across colonial boundaries from 1790s to the 1840s” (xx). On one hand, Sarah Johnson stresses the importance of seeing the “French Negroes” of revolutionary Haiti “as subjects rather than objects and as the agents of radical change in hemispheric economic and social relations” (xxi). On the other hand, she argues that the transcolonial collaborations and relations between hemispheric blacks to contest the racialized violence endemic to European imperialism and creole-nation building projects were disparate and “not intrinsically emancipatory or progressive . . . their struggle to connect was where a hopeful politics existed, sometimes even thrived” (5). The term “transcoloniality” (or “transcolonial”) denotes both “a set of strategic practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and a methodological approach in the present to reconstruct how people understood and experienced their worlds” (124).

Chapter 1 is an analysis of the proslavery dimensions of transcolonial encounters. It provides the context to understand the master/slave dividing binary, a vital phenomenon that explains conflicting inter-Americanist visions. The author analyzes the colonial experience between inter-island blacks by linking seminal events in colonial Cuba, Jamaica, and territorial Florida with revolutionary events in Saint-Domingue. She observes that transcolonial and inter-American relations and alliances were used decisively for vicious and repressive objectives. The reader should remember that the slave system in the Americas was a “veritable state of war,” as the author highlights, between opposing factions: masters, and men and women who were forced to work as slaves. It is from this perspective that Johnson demonstrates how colonial powers (uniting across frontiers)—French, British, Spanish, and North-American slave-holding societies—collaborated and used warfare techniques such as canine torture (i.e. “bred dogs” trained by chasseurs) in the circum-Caribbean to terrorize African slaves, feed upon black flesh, and subdue non-white enemies. The objective was to ensure Euro-American continued continental hegemony and maintain white supremacy. Johnson relies on the eyewitness testimonies and writings of two Saint-Dominguan colonial historians and intellectuals: Moreau de Saint-Mery, who had written copiously about the Black life and white violence in the colony, and Baron de Vastey, who had also written about the Black experience, the bodily torture, and the perennial violence that were constitutive elements of slave societies in the Americas. The chapter delineates how Black hemispheric populations were engaged collaboratively against these various modes of struggle, white oppression, and colonial violence.

The objective of the second chapter is twofold. First, it stresses the centrality of the Haitian presence in nineteenth-century Dominican life by focusing on visual depictions of the Haitian experience in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic); second, it studies three historical moments of active mobilization to unite the islands of Haiti and Santo Domingo, and the debates about the meaning of freedom that occurred during each instance. The first occurred in 1801 when Saint-Domingue was still a French colony, under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture. The second occurred in 1805 in postcolonial Haiti, under the new imperial rule of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Finally, the last and most enduring era began in 1822 and ended in 1844, under the presidency of Jean-Pierre Boyer. These highlighted periods not only provide substantial insight into imperial politics but also shed light on the relations between these two neighboring countries.

Johnson states that the ideological representations of and imageries about revolutionary Haiti were salutatory, contradictory, and even ambiguous. Antislavery advocates glorified the Haitian Revolution by visually portraying the radical antislavery Haiti signified, a terrifying thing to regional slave-holding societies. Haiti...