From Revolution to Sovereignty on the Island of Kiskeya

In his foreword to Gina Athena Ulysse's, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives (2015), Robin D.G. Kelley writes, "In my circles, there are two Haitis. There is Haiti the victim, the broken nation, the failed state, the human tragedy, the basket case … undermined by its own immutable backwardness, or destroyed by imperial invasion." "The other Haiti, of course," he says, "is the Haiti of the revolution, of Toussaint, Dessalines. … This is the Haiti that led the only successful slave revolt in the modern world. … Rarely do these two Haitis share the same sentence" (p. xiii). Even though the revolutionary Haiti of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines paints the country in an exceedingly positive light, for Kelley both of these narratives are problematic because, in his words, they primarily "treat Haiti as a symbol, a metaphor, rather than see Haitians as subjects and agents, as complex human beings with desires, imaginations, fears, frustrations, and ideas about justice, democracy, family, community, the land, and what it means to live a good life."¹

Naturally, there are also many Haitis and many Haitians in between the two historical moments Kelley describes. These other narratives may have remained relatively unknown to the majority of U.S. scholars, researchers, and students, because until very recently, most of the scholarship on Haiti emanating from U.S. universities has traditionally concerned itself with U.S. and western European reactions to and readings of the Haitian Revolution, and especially, with what Mimi Sheller has called the "Haytian Fear."² Overburdened attention to Atlantic World anxieties about the meaning and consequences of the Haitian Revolution has come most often at the expense of analyzing nineteenth-century Haitian interpretations of this history and especially Haitians' own reactions and responses to U.S and European policies of non-recognition of their sovereignty, as well as the contributions of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Haitian historians to the field of Haitian revolutionary historiography itself.³ For example, although the Revue de la Société haïtienne d'histoire, de géographie et de géologie, which was founded in Port-au-Prince in 1925, is without a doubt the richest source of Haitian-produced historiography about both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the over 1300 articles the journal contains are rarely cited by U.S. scholars.³

Following on the heels of several U.S.-based scholars of Haiti who have centered Haiti and Haitians in their scholarship—Bellegarde-Smith, Dupuy, Trouillot, Ramsey, and Dubois, for example—two new books in Caribbean Studies deal with the concept of sovereignty on the island of Kiskeya in the nineteenth century (renamed Hispaniola by Christopher Columbus in the fifteenth century). Both Anne Eller and Julia Gaffield have happily taken up the mandate of studying the many different sides of Haiti that cohere when we focus on what Haitian politicians, writers, and journalists did and said in the nineteenth century, rather than simply what was said, done, and written to, for, or about them.⁴ Paying attention to Haitians as world-historical actors with agency who are and have been in control of their own destiny, and interpretations of their political realities, since independence highlights their largely unacknowledged role in the shaping of Atlantic World political history.

Julia Gaffield's Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World picks up right at the moment when the French colony of Saint-Domingue is declared independent from France, which is to say on 29 November 1803. Haiti's first declaration of independence was signed by the future emperor of Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the future king of Haiti, Henry Christophe, and the Haitian revolutionary general, Augustin Clervaux. A longer and more formal Acte de l'indépendance would be issued on 1...