The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States ed. by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Michael Drexler (review)

Many undergraduate students in global civilization and US history courses do not have a grammar for the Haitian Revolution. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael Drexler’s timely edited volume The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States offers a corrective by demonstrating how imbricated these histories, geographies, and stories remain. In this collection, the authors link Haiti’s history with early US history. The volume is organized around the three major themes of history, geography, and textualities; this organization enables the reader to think through the ways that the Haitian Revolution and early American histories were and remain entwined.

The “Textualities” section asks readers to engage with a variety of texts that require a rethinking of the role of Haiti in American History. It behooves scholars to reject schematics that place these two textual traditions into discreet categories: here is Haiti and there is the United States. In “The Constitution of Toussaint: Another Origin of African-American Literature,” Michael Drexler and Ed White demonstrate that the Toussaint Constitution is a contextualizing document, an ethnography, and a narrative of larger Haitian and trans-Atlantic concerns. The scholars contributing to this section write about the interconnected nature of the Atlantic World using novels, political texts, newspapers, and plays as their sources. In so doing, they provide a wholly different understanding of the Atlantic World, romance and realism, the Toussaint Constitution, the sophisticated early American understanding of the Haitian Revolution, and American awareness of Haitian texts more broadly. By opening a conversation about countermemory and alternative archives, “this section invites future research on questions of Haitian and American archives, memory, and print culture.

The essays in the “Histories” section provide readers with thought-provoking analyses of the entwined nature of US and Haitian history. Ducan Faherty illustrates how rumor shaped Americans’ understandings of Haitians and the Revolution in the context of their own slaveholding society. Americans feared Haitian “infection” of the American slave population with rebellious slave “vectors,” whose rumored arrival brought forth quarantine orders and mobilized militias. The essays in this section also illuminate Haitian fears of imperial invasion and loss of autonomy, the American reception of the Haitian and French Revolutions, and American foreign policy in the aftermath of the Civil War. These projects engage what Laurent Dubois calls “the remarkable process of social and political transformation and reinvention that began in 1791 and culminated in Haitian independence” (98). Dubois’s contribution to this volume reveals the shortcomings of the related and unfinished revolutions in Haiti and the United States.

“Geographies,” the standout section of the collection, reveals an even richer awareness of the interwoven nature of Haitian and American geographic spaces and constructs. Cristobal Sandoval demonstrates how mapping is at its core socially constructed, showing readers how tropical diseases ignored national borders and made Haitians and Americans part of the same social body. David Geggus asks readers to reevaluate the multifaceted Atlantic World context that led to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The essays in this section reconfigure the mental maps of Haiti and the United States, requiring thoughtful engagement with the concepts of quarantine, social revolutions, disease, and geography.

The interdisciplinary nature, perspectives, and approaches of this collection provide scholars with a multiplicity of angles from which to unpack the history of the early United States and the Haitian Revolution. For scholars of colonial America and the early republic, many essays help reframe and thwart narratives of American exceptionalism and its triumphant westward expansion. These essays reveal the currents, nodes, and networks of exchange in the trans-Atlantic world. The essays in this volume remind this reviewer of Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986). This volume resonates with Mintz’s careful research and analysis of sugar as a social, political, and economic construct because of the ways that the essays reflect the multivalent networks between early America and the Haitian Revolution.

The book’s highly...