“The French Name Still Haunts Our Land”: Plantation Economies of American Knowledge

The starting point for my inquiry into the French Atlantic and the American nineteenth century lies in the present, with the arrests, grand jury deliberations, and civil rights demonstrations associated with the place names of Ferguson, Staten Island, and Cleveland.¹ Though local and contemporary, these events are also translocal and transhistorical, connecting us more acutely and more phenomenologically to the deep time of racial history in the United States: past the narrative of the twentieth-century civil rights movement to the darker history of racial segregation, race-based criminal justice, and racial peonage that W. E. B. Du Bois extrapolated from the nineteenth century. Prodded by Du Bois and an ever vital black radical historiographical tradition, we have come to know the slave plantation as the historical ground for a capitalist modernity that emerged from the colonial development of America but which continues to shape the democracy of the nation.²

For the purpose of this forum, and for connecting the temporality of our racial history to emerging configurations of our literary field, I propose that we embrace the foreign signifier “French Atlantic” not just as geographical figure but as chronotope for the plantation time that charges contemporary events with historical meaning. As described by Christopher Miller, the French Atlantic lies at the nexus of modern economic production and Enlightenment literary production, fatally infusing Eurocentric knowledge with structural requirements for racial inequality, exploitation, and the monopolization of violence. As a critical mode of temporality, the French Atlantic illuminates the legacy of a French colonial modernity that is both historically unique and omnipresent, geographically linked to the institutions of racial capitalism that reached their apogee on St. Domingue but generative of the world system that Quijano and Wallerstein aptly call “Americanity.”³

Our guide for reconstructing this French colonial time within American space is the daemon of the plantation, Jean-Jacques Dessaline, who had the revolutionary audacity to call out the name of the imperial force that deformed his country but which remains latent within the Americanist field as an ideological and institutional foundation: “The French name still haunts our land … everything still carries the stamp of the French.”⁴ Dessaline’s words, I suggest, haunt the study of America, reminding us of the presence of a French colonial system whose most violent and profitable epicenter lay outside the United States but whose American epistemologies and literatures constitute an intellectual inheritance so vast that they constitute our notional meaning of the national. We begin to come to terms with the presence of France’s colonial modernity in our hemisphere and the legacy of its Caribbean economies of Americanist knowledge when we take our bearings from Dessaline’s words and recognize in St. Domingue the America that the United States would become. Firmly linked to the postcolonial future of the American hemisphere, the formation of Euro-Creole American nation-states, and economic policies of capitalist extraction, the French plantation order of St. Domingue was strong enough to survive the fall of St. Domingue and ensure that Dessaline’s national campaign to “avenge America” would not just be exceptional but abhorrent—the rationale for a still stronger, permanent transnational state of counter-insurgency that continues to inform contemporary determinations of both acceptable violence and acceptable resistance.⁵

I hope to give a name to France’s hegemonic presence in the post-revolutionary American hemisphere by reintroducing M. L. E. Moreau de St. Mery, the St. Domingue Creole administrator and polymath who looms large in the most influential histories of the French Caribbean, as an Americanist. He is both expositor and artifact of a French Americanist triangle trade that enriched the intellectual capital of the French state and the undercapitalized research institutions of the United States with a system of knowledge production that imitated the French Caribbean’s system of economic production. Though the articles of this French Americanist triangle trade were books and authors and grants and loans, Moreau de St. Mery’s knowledge production intertwined the life of the mind with the tragic fates of African bodies, the production of...