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  • Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 by Marlene L. Daut
  • Tomaz Cunningham
Marlene L. Daut. Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press 2015. Pp. 692.

Tropics of Haiti is an ambitious project that explores various racial tropes that are repeated in American, British, and French literature between 1789 and 1865. Marlene Daut suggests that the true nature of the Haitian Revolution, a struggle for liberty and human rights, has been clouded by a recurring literary and historical theme which she calls “the mulatto/a vengeance narrative” (4). Using several texts, Daut closely analyses and deconstructs the elements of this narrative, which is based on the supposed desire for revenge on the part of the “mixed race” population against their French colonial ancestors (4).

Daut divides this twelve-chapter book into four sections, each of which explores a particular “trope” or literary incarnation of the mulatto/a vengeance narrative. In the first section, entitled “From ‘Monstrous Hybridity’ to Enlightenment Literacy,” Daut traces the origin of the mulatto/a vengeance narrative to pseudo-scientific racial taxonomies, developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that portrayed people of “mixed race” as duplicitous, violent, and vengeful (78). Daut argues that these ideas of “mulattoes” influenced the several novels and plays published or staged throughout the Atlantic World (152).

The bulk of literary criticism is contained in the second and third portions of this book. The second portion, “Transgressing the Trope of the ‘Tropical Temptress,’ Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue,” explores various literary representations of women of color. [End Page 146] These images present a unique challenge due to the work of writers such as Hilliard d’Auberteuil and Moreau de Saint-Méry, who stereotyped la mulâtresse as a libidinous creature dedicated to sensual pleasure. As Daut notes, “Female agency is complicated by the fact that women of color are simultaneously the ultimate symbols of female resistance to patriarchal authority and of inescapable sexual repression.” (263).Throughout this section, Daut examines what she calls the “literary sisters” of the tropical temptress, namely, the “female revolutionary, the benevolent resister, and the anti-slavery muse” (218). The third section, entitled “The Trope of the Tragic Mulatto/a and the Haitian Revolution,” explores several representations of the mulatto/a as “depressed, suicidal, fratricidal and / or patricidal” (330).

In the fourth section, “Requiem of a Colored Historian,” Daut explores the power struggle that supposedly existed between “mulattoes” and “blacks.” After tracing the origin of this idea to the writing of British abolitionist John R. Beard (The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, The Negro Portrait of Hayti, 1853), Daut examines the influence of this idea on such writers as novelist William Wells Brown (Clotel, 1853) and the twentieth-century historian David Nicholls (From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti, 1979).

Tropics of Haiti is an incredibly well-organized and meticulously researched work, supported by the scholarship of authorities in literary criticism and history such as Chris Bongie, Doris Garraway, Wernor Sollors, and Pierre Boulle. By examining several texts ranging from the well-known to the fairly obscure, Marlene Daut demonstrates how the “mulatto/a vengeance narrative” has affected traditional scholarship on the literature of the Haitian Revolution. Scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature will find Tropics of Haiti a valuable addition to their libraries.

Tomaz Cunningham
Jackson State University
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