Toussaint Louverture: Repensar un icono ed. by Mariana Past and Natalie M. Léger (review)

The goal of Mariana Past and Natalie M. Léger's edited collection Toussaint Louverture: Repensar un icono is stated in the title: to rethink the iconography of Louverture, en español. As a work of translation, this volume exemplifies two contrary yet intertwined realities. Although Louverture's legacy clearly transcends national and linguistic borders, collections such as this one are crucial bridges across these divides. Accordingly, this collection complements María Teresa Ortega's English translation of Cuban scholar Emilio Jorge Rodríguez's Haiti and Trans-Caribbean Literary Identity (2011), which serves as a connection across the same borders—both linguistic and geopolitical—and promises to catalyze future scholarship on the importance of Haiti and Louverture in the Hispanophone Caribbean, its diasporas, and beyond.¹

In addition to Past's and Léger's contributions, the collection includes essays by Marlene L. Daut, Victor Figueroa, Charles Forsdick, Doris L. Garraway, Deborah Jenson, Paul B. Miller, and Nick Nesbitt. Editorial del Caribe, an imprint of Casa del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba, published the book. Figueroa's essay originally appeared in Spanish. David González and Jorge Luis Hernández translated the remaining pieces from English and French. And Past—herself the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant for translation—acted as liaison between contributors and translators. Although English, Kreyòl, and French editions of the volume would certainly prove valuable, there are currently no plans to publish the collection in other languages.

The nine pieces collected represent extant, revised, and new scholarship. Past's essay originally appeared in the Journal of Haitian Studies in 2004. Garraway includes her contribution to Tree of Liberty (2008). Daut and Forsdick revise and expand essays already in print: Daut's chapter first appeared in the South Atlantic Review in 2009, and Forsdick's essay forms part of Sylvie Brodziak's edited collection Haïti: Enjeux d'écriture (2013).² The remaining contributions are new: Léger and Miller provide excerpts from forthcoming books, while Figueroa, Jenson, and Nesbitt offer original work not slated for publication elsewhere at the time of this review. Because access through translation to ideas across national and linguistic borders is one of the primary contributions of this collection, the remainder of this review focuses on the five essays currently unavailable in languages other than Spanish.

Léger's essay, "La contextualización de un icono" (The contextualization of an icon), introduces the collection and provides a preview of material from her forthcoming book Envision Otherwise: Haiti and the Decolonial Imaginary.³ She opens with an overview of the Haitian Revolution's impact on contemporary literature and critical theory and lays out the framework for the collection, explaining that

está edición accede a la importancia duradera de Haití como idea dentro de las Américas por la vía de pensar a través y alrededor de la figura más mencionada de Haití, Toussaint Louverture: un enigma tan incongruente desde el punto de vista conceptual para despliegues críticos y artísticos regionales como lo es el propio Haití. (10)

(this volume approaches the enduring importance of the idea of Haiti in the Americas by thinking through and about the most discussed revolutionary figure of Haiti, Toussaint Louverture: an enigma as incongruous from a conceptual point of view for critical and artistic movements of the region as Haiti itself.)

Léger positions Louverture's contradictions as a lens for examining

las dificultades que enfrentarían todas las colonias y personas caribeñas y latinoamericanas de la posindependencia: ¿cómo ser libre y no francés, español, inglés u holandés de mente, de cuerpo y de ser? ¿Cómo ser libre y verdaderamente comenzar de nuevo, sin los grilletes ideológicos del colonialismo y, peor aún, la toxicidad...