A Place in the Sun: Haiti, Haitians, and the Remaking of Quebec by Sean Mills (review)

Without a doubt, readers of French Studies who work on Québécois history will find much in Sean Mills's new book to inform their thinking. His lucid prose establishes the crucial contribution of Haitian activists, intellectuals, and/or workers to the burgeoning social upheaval in post-Second World War Quebec, notably in 1960s 80s Montreal. In particular, Mills ensures that the flurry of Haitian organizations, campaigns, and movements that engaged diasporic Haitians and Québécois people alike are front and centre. For instance, Mills is at his strongest when detailing the political work of the Maison d'Haïti and various associated anti-racist, feminist groups, as well as the work of the Collectif des chauffeurs de taxi noirs du centre-ville, whose high-profile activism against racism in the taxi industry led to the Quebec Human Rights Commission's first-ever public hearing in 1983. Nevertheless, the near-complete erasure of the long, entangled history of the two former French colonies is a notable disappointment. Despite gesturing towards an analysis of the 'afterlives' of slavery in Quebec—in keeping with the work of Saidiya Hartman (for example, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux))—readers could reasonably conclude that relations between Quebec and Haiti only began in earnest around the Second World War. Yet, Quebec's memorial and cartographic landscapes suggest otherwise. As we know, many of the enslaved Africans in New France had previously toiled in Saint-Domingue, while several of its vaunted administrators—whose names now adorn cities, towns, streets, parks, and monuments in Quebec—were intimately involved in the administration of Saint-Domingue, among some of France's other slave colonies. Beside these more evident connections, trade between New France and Saint-Domingue was a prominent and still-growing phenomenon of economic and social life halted only by the British Conquest. Any analysis of the 'afterlives' of slavery must graft the regime of terror in the French Atlantic onto the subsequent organization of anti-blackness and racial violence across the region. How do centuries-old imperial relations lead to the migration of Haitians to Quebec in the late twentieth century? To answer such a question, we would likely consider how Duvalier's rise to power was linked to the debilitating century-long 'independence' debt forced onto Haiti by France and its allies in 1825 and the eventual adoption of 'structural adjustment' policies in the latter part of the twentieth century, which depopulated the countryside and created an urban underclass rife for economic subjugation in the global economy. Instead of considering these continuities, Mills constructs a historical narrative that largely erases the less salutary history of French/Québécois (settler) involvement in racial violence. My concern, then, is that one could read this book and conclude that Haiti is naturally chaotic—a trope that is all too common in the West. Mills could have avoided these pitfalls by adopting a much broader French Atlantic perspective that contests dominant national evocations.