Alphonse de Lamartine's Toussaint Louverture and the Staging of White Masculinity

Though ostensibly a play about Haiti and about black masculinity, Lamartine's Toussaint Louverture puts white masculinity center stage. A reading of the five-act drama informed by a psychoanalytic theory of hegemonic masculinity reveals that Toussaint's black body functions in the text as a fetish and that a white masculine anxiety subtends the very notion of a racial difference grounded in the body. Moreover, a consideration of how the presumptive nineteenth-century readers understood this text and how the 1850 spectators experienced the premiere blackface performance of the drama suggests further how gender and race intersected within the prevailing ideology of the period. (AFS-A)