Haiti and the Literature of Revolution

It is no longer possible for scholars of english-language literature to teach the Age of Revolution without Haiti. Finally recognized by historians, and Atlantic historians in particular, as a central, epoch-shaping event of the period, the Haitian Revolution only recently has been understood as an important event for literary scholars of the Anglophone world more accustomed to highlighting the ripple effects of the white bourgeois revolutions in France and the United States. Such scholars have indeed understood that Wordsworth romanticized Toussaint Louverture in a sonnet, and that Melville chose the name San Dominick for the ship in Benito Cereno. But compared to the response among English writers to the crisis in France, or, for Americanists, to the Emersonian imperative to establish an independent American literature after Independence, Haiti has remained mostly tangential, marginal. This has been true despite scholarship in African American Studies that has for decades demonstrated the strong and complicated presence of Haiti in the writings of figures like David Walker, Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, and the nineteenth-century Black press. C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins has always been important in African American Studies but rarely for scholars who focus mainly on British or American literary history. Susan Buck-Morss's explosive essay "Hegel and Haiti," of particular interest to Romanticists, was largely an outlier in its argument that a European philosopher was influenced by news of the slave revolt in Saint Domingue and the founding of the first Black sovereign state in the New World.¹

A few overlapping and interconnected historicist developments over the last two decades have combined to make Haiti more necessary for scholars of British and American literature than ever before. These include the rise of transatlantic, Black Atlantic, and comparative frameworks for understanding the literature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the recognition of the importance of slavery, the slave trade, and racial ideology to the literature of the period; the increasingly canonical status of African American writers and white writers (such as Leonora Sansay) who wrote about Haiti; and a renewed effort of scholars of the Haitian Revolution to show its relevance and influence. It is not incumbent upon historians of Haiti to prove the importance of the Revolution with reference to European figures like Hegel or to cultural movements in Britain or the United States. However, many scholars—some from inside Haitian/Francophone studies, some from American Studies—have done exactly that, including the books under review in this essay. Formerly enslaved people in Haiti accomplished the "only successful slave revolt in history" as James memorably put it.² They also changed the direction of US and British political, cultural, and literary history. As the books I consider here also suggest, the Revolution and its legacy are subjects of great interest across many distinct but overlapping academic disciplines.

We might begin with Louverture, the icon of the Revolution. In 1803 Wordsworth called him a "miserable Chieftain," albeit a friend of "Man's unconquerable mind"; while in 1855 William Wells Brown hailed his "inward and prophetic genius" and said he "los[es] nothing by a comparison with … Washington."³ A new biography by Sudhir Hazareesingh, a political historian of France, begins by grappling with Louverture...