dictionnaire de la révolution haitienne

small axe 27 • October 2008 • p 1–13 • ISSN 0799-0537

Interpreting 2004: Politics, Memory, ScholarshipCharles Forsdick

AbstrAct: This article reflects on the presence (and absence) of references to Haiti in the events surrounding the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Great Britain. It suggests that a growing public awareness of and media attention to Haiti is associated with an increased inter-est among academic researchers. The article concludes with a reflection on the impact and the implications of the intensive scholarly engagement with Haiti since 2004, outlining reservations and suggesting elements of a future research agenda.

Two related quotations serve as an epigraph to this article, both of them reflecting the debt to two key Caribbean historians of many scholars and readers with interests in the Haitian Revolution, as well as in its wider impact and implications. The underlying presence of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and C. L. R. James will be apparent throughout the reflections that follow:

Commemorations sanitize further the messy history lived by the actors. They contribute to the continuous myth-making process that gives history its more definite shapes: they help to create, modify, or sanction the public meanings attached to historical events deemed worthy of mass celebration. As rituals that package history for public consumption, commemorations play the numbers game to create a past that seems both more real and more elementary.1

The small whites, as soon as they heard of the fall of the Bastille, had deserted their friends the bureaucracy and joined the revolution. There was only one hope for the bureaucrats—the Mulat-toes, and the governor instructed the commandants of the districts to adopt a new attitude towards them. . . . The retreat of race prejudice had begun. Sad though it may be, that is the way that humanity progresses. The anniversary orators and the historians provide the prose-poetry and the flowers.2

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 1. Silencing the Past (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 116.C. L. R. James, 2. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; reprint, London: Allison and Busby, 1980), 63.

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Trouillot, focusing here not explicitly on Haiti but on the quincentenary of 1492, describes the pitfalls of the commemorative process, suggesting that, although memorial maneuvering brings historical events to public attention, it often denies the complexity of those events, as well as the multidirectional memories on which their contemporary persistence depends. James had already illustrated this observation in the 1930s by specifically addressing the opening stages of the Haitian Revolution. He highlights the ways in which subsequent inter-pretations of early inter-ethnic alliances during the revolutionary events in Saint-Domingue dress up such a reconfiguration of pigmentocratic structures with new meanings (with what he calls “the prose-poetry and the flowers”) that counter the actual contemporary expediency and pragmatism of such moves. Trouillot and James privilege, therefore, the potentially dis-abling implications of much commemoration, seeing the consensus towards which it aims as a paradoxical distancing or obfuscation of the past. What is striking at the same time, however, as will become apparent below, are the potentially enabling effects of different forms of recol-lecting the past—forms of recollection that permit fresh engagement with the complexity of historical process, and trigger renewed awareness of the place and role of the colonial past in the postcolonial present.

The bicentenary of the Haitian Revolution, although marked in Haiti itself by social unrest leading to the ousting and enforced exile of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was commemorated inter-nationally by a series of conferences that sought to develop historical and cultural knowledge of this often “silenced” series of events. Without wanting to be drawn into the self-referential hall of mirrors that is implied by the commemoration of a commemoration, what follows constitutes a reflection on the various subsequent impacts of the bicentenary of Haitian inde-pendence, and of a variety of events and other phenomena that marked it. The central subject is, therefore, an introductory reflection on 2004 and its own subsequent aftershocks. As such, the article alludes to the various events (planned and unplanned; official and unofficial; in Haiti itself and elsewhere) by which this bicentenary was marked, thinking about what they represent, what their wider repercussions might be, and what traces they have left. At the same time, it invites reflection on the wider contexts in which those events are, retrospectively, to be situated.

Any such project merits a series of preliminary reservations or caveats. Firstly, there is a need to acknowledge that the still-close proximity of the events of 2004, as well as their fundamentally unfinished nature, makes any reflection on them potentially hazardous. The reflections that follow are accordingly characterized by an inevitable provisionality. Secondly, just as the decade of historical upheaval that led to 1804 cannot be seen as a single event, neither can 2004 itself, as a commemoration of Haitian independence, be reduced to one

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meaning: in Haiti, the disrupted celebration of the Bicentenary alluded to above acquired such political overtones that, in the aftermath of January and February 2004, commemora-tive events elsewhere took on a new and often unexpected significance. Despite its often meticulous choreography, commemoration—like memory itself—remains polyvocal and unpredictable. Finally, it is important to recognize that the 2004 bicentenary—without denying its individual significance—was, and remains, part of a wider cluster of commemo-rative processes, many of which permitted reflection on the revolutionary events that shaped the later eighteenth century and the modern Atlantic world that then emerged: 1989, the bicentenary of the French Revolution; 1994, the bicentenary of the first abolition of slavery in the French colonial empire; 2003, the bicentenary of Toussaint Louverture’s death; 2007, the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire . . . Together with 1998, the sesquicen-tenary of the (second) abolition of slavery in the French colonial empire, these interwoven commemorative moments have ensured that slavery and its legacies have acquired a necessary prominence in debates about the political, philosophical, social, and cultural manifestations of post-Enlightenment modernity. Within such a cluster of commemorations, remembering Haiti nevertheless serves a key role. An inspiration as much as a warning, the second republic of the Americas reveals the blind spots of the French and North American revolutionary and republican projects, reflecting not only the wider independence that might, had history evolved differently, have shaped the early nineteenth-century Caribbean, but also the post-colonial or neocolonial dilemmas that such independence would have engendered. In Robin Blackburn’s terms, “The Haitian Revolution is rarely given its due, yet without it there is much that cannot be accounted for.”3 At the same time, the case of Haiti permits investiga-tion of what postcoloniality (and perhaps a specifically francophone postcoloniality) might mean, of what its definitional and historical limits might be, and of how and when such a condition might be considered to have emerged.

In the context of a “memorial turn” in much arts and humanities research, increasing numbers of scholars are focusing on the strategic importance of commemoration as a means of carving out, delineating, and (re-)asserting areas of public debate and of academic schol-arship. In Great Britain, the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade has had such an influence, ensuring that—as a result of media, literary, and cinematic representations, as well as through prominent acts of public commemoration, the opening of new institutions, and associated debates—questions of slavery, of its abolition, and of its persistence have achieved a prominence they are often systematically denied in Europe. Although the official recognition

Robin Blackburn, “Haiti, Slavery and the Age of Democratic Revolution,” 3. William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 643.


of the parliamentary act of abolition occurred—not without controversy—on 25 March 2007, discussion around the forms that ongoing commemoration might take continued throughout the year and there is little sign of debate petering out. The date 23 August 2007 increas-ingly became an alternative focus of commemoration: its status as International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition, and its focus on the persistent resistance of enslaved people, both acquired a renewed significance in the context of the bicentenary’s overt political instrumentalization and its systematic adoption of what David Scott dubs a “rhetoric of evasion and disavowal.”4 In the light of this special issue’s theme, it is illuminating to foreground the place of Haiti in this current commemorative process—a process that, it must be acknowledged from the outset, has taken very different forms and adopted differ-ent emphases throughout the English-speaking world, most notably in West Africa and the Anglophone Caribbean.5

In Britain, dissident voices have nevertheless highlighted the importance, both historical and symbolic, of the Haitian Revolution in questions of abolition. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, claimed in a public intervention in March 2007 that the state failure to issue an apology for a “crime as monstrous as the slave trade” had the effect of diminishing Britain in the eyes of the world. In a piece entitled “Why I am saying sorry for London’s role in this horror,” Livingstone emphasized the importance of an account of slavery and its abolition that foregrounds both continual resistance and the assertion of the historical agency of enslaved people.6 Focusing on C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (still a key text for the British Left), Livingstone cites the examples of Jamaica in 1760, Saint-Domingue in 1791, Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica again in 1831. Following James and Eric Williams, he concludes: “No one denigrates William Wilberforce, but it was black resistance and economic development that destroyed slavery, not white philanthropy.” In this reference to Wilberforce, and the relationship of “black resistance” to “white philanthropy,” Livingstone encapsulates those debates relating to history and historiography that have characterized various public exchanges regarding the meanings of 2007—exchanges that were equally apparent in France

See David Scott, “Preface: Soul Captives Are Free,” 4. Small Axe, no. 23 (2007): v.See, for instance, “Africa 2007,” a program organized by the British Council in Ghana and launched on 15 February 5. 2007 by John Prescott, the then deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, and Alhaji Aliu Mahama, vice-president of the Republic of Ghana. Styled a “celebration of culture and identity,” this series of events, inspired by the bicentenary of abolition of the slave trade, was more concerned with a celebratory exploration of “the relation-ship between Africa and UK in its many manifestations, past, present and future,” focused on the period after the formal abolition of the slave trade. Details are available at http://www.britishcouncil.org/ghana-arts-and-culture-africa-2007-main.htm (accessed 25 September 2007).See Ken Livingstone, “Why I am saying sorry for London’s role in this horror,” 6. Guardian, 21 March 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/mar/21/comment.society (accessed 31 October 2007).


in 1998, when commemorations were complicated by questions over where, in 1848, history actually took place.7

The acrimonious exchanges triggered by Livingstone’s text about the relative merits of apol-ogy risk eclipsing key questions about the continuing legacies of transatlantic slavery in Britain and the contemporary Caribbean, and the ways in which the tendency towards consensus of offi-cial commemoration might or might not accommodate multi-directional memories of the past. Toyin Agbetu’s disruption of the official bicentenary service at Westminster Abbey in late March 2007 was motivated, he claims, by protest against “the commemorative ritual of appeasement and self-approval marking the bicentenary of the British parliamentary act to abolish what they disin-genuously refer to as a ‘slave trade.’ ”8 Agbetu’s actions brought to public attention criticism of the 2007 commemoration, dismissed variously as a “Wilberfest” and even, by the Operation Truth 2007 campaign, as a “Wilberfarce.” His protest was indeed, in part, a reaction to the queen’s laying of a wreath at the foot of a giant statue to William Wilberforce in the Abbey—and it is Wilberforce who is central to Amazing Grace, the Michael Apted film that has been instrumental in bringing one narrative of abolition to the attention of a wider British public.

Without engaging with criticism of the film, which has for instance focused on the hagi-ography of Wilberforce and the downplaying of the role of Thomas Clarkson in the legislative processes of abolition, I would like to focus on the single scene in which Haiti merits a fleet-ing mention.9 In 1806, as Wilberforce’s campaign entered its final phase, Apted’s film shows the abolitionist lawyer James Stephen, author of an early biography of Toussaint Louverture, referring to recent events in Saint-Domingue.10 Stephen describes a scene in which an enslaved

Before news of the parliamentary act of abolition (27 April 1848) reached Martinique (3 June), a slave rebellion 7. in Saint-Pierre (20 May) had already forced the governor to announce a generalized local emancipation (repeated shortly afterwards in Guadeloupe). In much the same way, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax was obliged by local circum-stances to abolish slavery in Saint-Domingue (29 August 1793) before the official legislation of the Convention (4 February 1794). In Romuald Fonkoua’s terms, in his reflections on the sesquicentenary of 1848 and the haziness of its focus: “Who, in fact, is the subject of abolition? Which abolition is this all about? Besides, did abolition really happen? Of what? By whom?” See Romuald-Blaise Fonkoua, “Ecrire l’abolition de l’esclavage aux Antilles fran-çaises,” in Christiane Chaulet-Achour and Romuald-Blaise Fonkoua, eds., Esclavage: Libérations, abolitions, commémorations (Paris: Séguier, 2001), 215–61 (266; translations mine).See Toyin Agbetu, “My protest was born of anger, not madness,” 8. Guardian, 3 April 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/apr/03/features11.g2 (accessed 31 October 2007).For a discussion of the relative roles of Clarkson and Wilberforce in the commemoration of the abolition of British 9. transatlantic slavery, see J. R. Oldfield, Chords of Freedom: Commemoration, Ritual, and British Transatlantic Slavery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).See James Stephen, 10. Buonaparte in the West Indies or, The History of Toussaint Louverture, the African Hero, 3 vols (London: Hatchard, I, 1803). On Stephens and Toussaint, see David Geggus, “Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opin-ion, Propaganda and International Politics in Britain and France, 1804–1838,” in David Richardson, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790–1916 (London: Frank Cass, 1985), 113–40; and Charles Forsdick, “Situating Haiti: On Some Early Nineteenth-Century Representations of Toussaint Louverture,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 10, no. 1 (2007): 17–34.


mother tells her child about “King Wilberforce” coming across the sea to free them. Although Apted—addressing the question of the absence of black actors in his film—has explained that he did not intend to make another film such as Amistad, but instead to explore the par-liamentary and legislative battle from the point of view of Wilberforce and other antislavery campaigners in Britain, this single reference to slave rebellions in Saint-Domingue still man-ages to credit Wilberforce as the inspiration of revolution, contributing to the wider denial of the agency of enslaved people that underpins the film.

This example of Haiti’s continued silencing in the commemoration of abolition is to be contrasted with another event in 2007, this time in Liverpool, from which an alternative nar-rative of the persistence of the past in the present emerged. In preparation for the inauguration of the International Slavery Museum in August, Merseyside Maritime Museum was the first venue to display in February the sculpture Freedom!, an original work by a group of Port-au-Prince artists from the Cité-Soleil area of the city, working in collaboration with Mario Benjamin. Representing the continuing Haitian struggle for freedom and human rights, the sculpture was commissioned by Christian Aid and National Museums Liverpool to mark the bicentenary of abolition. Made of everyday, recycled materials, the work situates contemporary Haiti firmly at the center of the current commemoration, inviting reflection on the unfinished nature of the Haitian Revolution as part of a continuing struggle for freedom and human rights. These are issues that were reflected more widely in the displays of the International Slavery Museum—in which Haiti, historical and contemporary, plays a key role—when it opened in August 2007.

This simultaneous presence and absence of Haiti in the 2007 commemorations in Britain form the basis of the wider reflections in the following sections of this article. The British silence surrounding Haiti is not surprising. Whereas the French media—through a series of recent developments, ranging from the Debray report in 2004, via the activity of the Comité pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage, to Nicolas Sarkozy’s vague campaign pledge concerning Toussaint Louverture’s presence in the French Panthéon—continues to play close attention to Haiti, the country often remains for the British press an exotic anomaly, still routinely associated with Graham Greene and the Duvaliers.11 Haiti still tends to exemplify and even permit the accentuation of certain pejorative assumptions about postcolonial cultures that are perhaps summed up in the seemingly inexorable logic of the subtitle to Paradise Lost (2005), by

See Régis Debray, 11. Haïti et la France (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2004), and, for the activities and publications of Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, http://www.comite-memoire-esclavage.fr/ (accessed 11 September 2008). Sarkozy’s speech was interpreted as a call for the Pantheonization of Toussaint, although as I argue elsewhere such a move is not only unfeasible but also—paradoxically—already partially undertaken. See Charles Forsdick, “The Black Jacobin in Paris,” Journal of Romance Studies 5, no. 3 (2005): 9–24.


Philippe Girard: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hotspot.12 This narrative of colonial prosperity transformed into postcolonial chaos is a common one, reflected in what Antony Maingot has described as a “terrified consciousness” of Haiti, and what Michael Dash has dubbed a “repulsive otherness” or “predetermined strangeness.”13 In the development of such a national image, the role of travel writers, indulging in seemingly obligatory references to an exoticized Vodou, to zombification, and even (especially in earlier texts) to cannibalism, is not insignificant. A clear example is the work of Ian Thomson, the popularity of whose Bonjour Blanc was reflected in its re-issue as a new, supplemented edition to coincide with 2004.14 Indeed, in the accounts of their journeys, many travelers to Haiti exemplify in a Caribbean context the same archival and textual sedimentation—dependent more on accumulated stereotypes than on any direct observation—that is central to the thesis of key postcolonial works such as Edward Said’s Orientalism.15 There has been little, if any evidence of recognition of the costly British involvement in the struggle over Saint-Domingue in the 1790s.16 Similarly, there is a failure to acknowledge Haiti’s emblematic status as the site at which emerged—to borrow Nick Nesbitt’s terms—“two of the processes that came to distinguish the twentieth century . . . : decolonization and neocolonialism.”17

The occlusion of the catalytic contribution of Haiti, both symbolic and actual, to abolition-ism is part of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously dubbed, in his 1995 volume cited at the outset of this article, “silencing the past.” Trouillot’s study has had an important and pervasive influence in Haitian studies, as well as in studies of colonial history more generally. At the same time, however, the “silencing” that Trouillot demonstrates has, in this first decade of the twenty-first century, and as my examples suggest, developed into a new dynamics of presence and absence, voicing and silencing. Silencing the Past tracked the occlusion of Haiti at various stages of the “production of history,” specifically at what Trouillot calls “four crucial moments”:

the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).18

See Philippe Girard, 12. Paradise Lost: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hotspot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).See Antony Maingot, “Haiti and the Terrified Consciousness of the Caribbean,” in Gert Oostindie, ed., 13. Ethnicity in the Caribbean: Essays in Honor of Harry Hoetink (London: Macmillan, 1986), 53–80; and J. Michael Dash, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (1988; reprint, London: Macmillan, 1997), x, 10.See Ian Thomson, 14. Bonjour Blanc: A Journey through Haiti (1992; reprint, London: Vintage, 2004).See 15. Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).On this campaign, see in particular David Geggus, 16. Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue 1793–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982).See Nick Nesbitt, “The Idea of 1804,” 17. Yale French Studies, no. 107 (2005): 6.Trouillot, 18. Silencing the Past, 26 (emphasis in original).


It is the fourth of these moments in which commemoration might be included, seen as an official means of consolidating pre-existing narratives. In exploring the ways in which the contemporary unthinkability of the Saint-Domingue Revolution has marked implications for the international visibility of Haiti in the present, Trouillot expands a point made by a number of historians—ranging from C. L. R. James to Yves Benot—about the ways in which dominant French revolutionary historiography had reduced the Haitian events to the status of an exotic sideshow in the transatlantic upheavals of the later eighteenth century.

Yves Benot and Louis Sala-Molins were two of the most vociferous critics, during 1989 and its aftermath, of France’s own partial blindness to the role of Haiti in illuminating the limitations of the French Revolution, whose bicentenary was celebrated that year—“partial” because there was some evidence of an awareness of Haiti’s significance, not least in the exhibition devoted to “La Révolution française sous les Tropiques,” held at the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens, to which a young Edouard Duval Carrié made a significant contribution. The Haitian Revolution was nevertheless absent from such seminal reference works as the Dictionnaire critique de la Révolution française or the Histoire et dictionnaire de la Révolution, and the 1989 Pantheonization in France of the Abbé Grégoire, which cultivated a revisionist narrative of revolutionary abolitionism from which—once again—the agency of enslaved people was absent. What we see more recently, however, is—two centuries after independence—a persistent sense of the spectrality of Haiti in French politics and culture.

Edouard Glissant, returning to Toussaint Louverture in La Cohée du Lamentin (2005), the fifth volume of his Poétique, describes the revolutionary as a “forgotten specter” who nevertheless “wanders ungoverned” in France, around the ramparts at Joux.19 This sense of haunting, or of a persistent presence, is apparent in one of the earliest literary representa-tions of Toussaint, in Samuel Whitchurch’s long poem Hispaniola (1804), which describes the ghost of Toussaint present at Napoleon’s bed: “O rise, and haunt thy murderer’s bed, / And thus assail in accents dread / His ears oft soothed with flattry’s poisoned breath.”20 And Whitchurch anticipates more recent manifestations: just to give three examples—Jean Rouch’s Liberté, égalité, fraternité . . . et puis après?, in which Toussaint, an unwanted presence at the French bicentenary celebrations of 1989, is ultimately reconciled with Napoléon in a Vodou ceremony at les Invalides; more recently, the Guadeloupean playwright Jean-Michel Cusset’s 1802, ou Le dernier jour (2002), in which the ghosts of Toussaint and Louis Delgrès attend Napoléon’s final moments at Longwood on Saint Helena; or the Haitian novelist Fabienne Pasquet’s Deuxième vie de Toussaint Louverture (2001), in which Toussaint is a “wandering

Edouard Glissant, 19. La Cohée de Lamentin: Poétique V (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 240–41 (translation mine).The poem is included in Marcus Wood, ed., 20. The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology, 1764–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 168–80.


soul” still present in the prison when Heinrich von Kleist is incarcerated there several years following Toussaint’s death.21

Laurent Dubois, in an article focused on late-twentieth-century France, characterized France as a “république métissée,” a “hybridized republic,” whose official failure to address questions of ethnicity in a republican frame may be tracked back to the trauma of the Haitian Revolution, and this is a thesis developed by Marcel Dorigny in his contribution to the influ-ential 2005 volume on La fracture coloniale, the epistemological dislocation of metropolitan France and its colonial territories that is associated with the postcolonial dilemmas of identity and belonging faced by the twenty-first-century republic.22 Engaging with Trouillot’s notion of “silencing” the past, Sibylle Fischer has recently suggested that such processes might be part of an alternative model of fear or “disavowal” of the Haitian Revolution. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, in this first decade of the twenty-first century, is the growing cen-trality of Haiti to a range of fields of study and areas of debate.23 Without aiming to offer an exhaustive catalogue of the studies of Haiti that have emerged in a range of fields since 2004, it is possible to signal nevertheless a proliferation of publications that reveal of real sense of urgency in contemporary scholarly engagement with Haiti.24 As is often the case, the peri-odical has proved to be a key means of rapidly disseminating the results of and reactions to 2004, as is witnessed by a series of special issues of journals, such as Yale French Studies, the Journal of Haitian Studies, Small Axe, Research in African Literatures, and Ethnologies.25 All of

See 21. Liberté, égalité, fraternité . . . et puis après?, dir. Jean Rouch, Comité du film ethnographique, 1990; Jean-Michel Cusset, 1802, ou Le dernier jour (Matoury: Ibis Rouge, 2002); and Fabienne Pasquet, Deuxième vie de Toussaint Louverture (Arles: Actes Sud, 2001).See Laurent Dubois, “22. La République Métisée: Citizenship, Colonialism, and the Borders of French History,” Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2000): 15–34; and Marcel Dorigny, “Aux origines: L’indépendance d’Haïti et son occultation,” in Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La fracture coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 45–55. This interconnectedness is also explored illuminatingly in two articles in a discussion titled “Teaching National and Regional History in a Global Age” that appeared in 2000 in French Historical Studies 23, no. 2: Alice Conklin’s “Boundaries Unbound: Teaching French History as Colonial History and Colonial History as French History” (215–38), and in particular John Garrigus’s “White Jacobins/Black Jacobins: Bringing the Haitian and French Revolutions Together in the Classroom” (259–75).See Sibylle Fischer, 23. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).Robin Blackburn provides an incisive survey of scholarship on Haiti published around 2004. See “Haiti, Slavery and 24. the Age of Democratic Revolution,” and also David Geggus, “Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean: Recent Scholarship,” in Juanita de Barros, Audra Diptee and David Trotman, eds., Beyond Fragmentation: New Directions in Caribbean Scholarship (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2006), 3–34.See “The Haiti Issue: 1804 and Nineteenth-Century French Studies,” Deborah Jenson, ed., 25. Yale French Studies, no. 107 (2005); special bicentennial issue on history and politics, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Robert Fatton, eds., Journal of Haitian Studies 10, no. 1 (2004); special bicentennial issue on the arts, Edwidge Danticat and LeGrace Benson, eds., Journal of Haitian Studies 10, no. 2 (2004); “Profondes et Nombreuses: Haiti and the Revolution, 1804–2004,” Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, eds., Small Axe, no. 18 (2005); “Haiti, 1804–2004: Literature, Culture, and Art,” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2 (2004); and “Haïti—Face au passé / Haïti—Confronting the Past,” Carlo Avierl Célius, ed., Ethnologies 28, no. 1 (2006).


these reveal the richness of contemporary research on Haiti, reassessing the past, exploring the present, and endeavoring to illuminate connections between the two. At the same time, there has been a succession of monographs, edited volumes of essays, and conference proceedings that have appeared in 2004 and subsequently. These publications reflect an ongoing process of historical and cultural enquiry, triggered by the wave of revolutionary bicentennials and other commemorations mentioned at the opening of my article—a fierce challenge to whose celebratory overtones can be seen in the conferences organized to explore the bicentenary of Napoléon’s re-imposition of slavery in 2002, reflected in a substantial volume on this subject published the following year by Benot and Dorigny.26

Several volumes have similarly emerged, or are about to emerge, from bicentenary confer-ences in 2004, most notably Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw’s Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks, but also forthcoming collections, such as Doris Garraway’s Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World and David Geggus and Norman Fiering’s The World of the Haitian Revolution.27 In the field of francophone postcolonial studies, readings of Haitian literature have developed rapidly, not least addressing key authors such as Dany Laferrière and Edwidge Danticat—both of whom continue to disturb the frames of what is understood not only by the term “francophone” literature but also by that of “Haitian” literature itself.28 The increasing prominence of and interest in Haitian culture, aided no doubt by the films Vers le sud / Heading South (Laurent Cantet’s popular adaptation of Laferrière’s La chair du maître) and Asger Leth’s controversial The Ghosts of Cité-Soleil, are matched by increasing interest in contemporary Haitian art, both that of artists resident outside Haiti (such as Edouard Duval Carrié, an important exhibition of whose work for the bicentenary took place at UCLA in 2004, and Ulrick Jean-Pierre, whose paintings illustrate the 2006 volume Revolutionary Freedoms: A History of Survival, Strength and Imagination in Haiti),29 and those—as interest in the Liverpool sculpture Freedom! makes clear—still active in Haiti itself. The already rich historiography of Haiti has been supple-mented by a series of very different works by Sybille Fischer, Laurent Dubois, John Garrigus,

See Yves Benot and Marcel Dorigny, eds., 26. Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises 1802: Ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale française (1800–1830) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003).Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, eds., 27. Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural After-shocks (Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies Press, 2006); Doris Garraway, Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2008); and David Geggus and Norman Fiering, The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).See, e.g., Martin Munro, 28. Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).See Donald J. Cosentino, 29. Divine Revolution: The Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2005); and C. Accilien, J. Adams, and E. Meleance, eds., Revolutionary Freedoms: A History of Survival, Strength and Imagination in Haiti (Coconut Creek, FL: Caribbean Studies Press, 2006).


Madison Smartt Bell, and Doris Garraway.30 Finally, there have appeared a series of books and films with a specific focus on contemporary Haiti, recently supplemented with Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment.31

This mere sample of material will be supplemented, over the next few years, with a vari-ety of other volumes ranging across diverse disciplines: in addition to the further collections of essays inspired by conferences organized in 2004 that I have mentioned already, there are volumes soon to appear by Deborah Jenson, on nineteenth-century francophone narratives of slavery (including Toussaint Louverture’s writings); by Chris Bongie, on the commemora-tion and commodification of the Haitian Revolution; by Nick Nesbitt, on the idea of 1804; by Jeremy Popkin, on eyewitness accounts of the Haitian insurrection; by Michael Dash, on travel writing and the Caribbean, with a clear focus on Haiti itself; by Sue Peabody, on enslavement, emancipation, and related legal issues in the Atlantic world; by Kaima Glover and Rachel Douglas, on the Spiralistes. This catalogue is clearly restricted to the anglophone academy, and were further special issues of journals, material in French, and, of course, recent and new studies forthcoming from Haiti itself to be included, the snapshot list would become even more unwieldy.32

In conclusion, reflecting on the impact and the implications of this intensive scholarly engagement with Haiti post-2004, this article returns to some of its opening comments and reservations. The intention has been to underline the inevitable limitations of what can be discussed in a survey of this type, and then to suggest the ways in which those limitations might be pushed in order to suggest new directions in research. Firstly, much of the recent activity outlined represents the work of outsiders looking in. Not least to avoid the risks of exoticization, there is need for sustained dialogue between researchers and writers outside Haiti and those within the country, and an awareness of the potential of such dialogue to develop into a set of genuinely globalized research practices that challenge existing modes of

See Sybille Fischer’s 30. Modernity Disavowed; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006); Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 2007); and Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2005).See Noam Chomsky, Paul Farmer, Amy Goodman, and Democracy Now!, 31. Getting Haiti Right This Time (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004); Pat Chin, ed., Haiti: A Slave Revolution; 200 Years After 1804 (New York: International Action Center, 2004); Alex Dupuy, The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Randall Robinson, An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007); Nicolas Rossier’s film Aristide and the Endless Revolution (New York: Baraka Productions, 2006); and Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (London: Verso, 2008).Significant among such works are Claude Moïse’s corrective 32. Dictionnaire de la Révolution haïtienne (1798–1804) (Montreal: Images/Cidihca, 2003); and Nadève Menard’s forthcoming edited collection, Ecrire Haïti aujourd’hui.


constructing knowledge—this is one of the aims of the Small Axe collective, and may be seen in a South American context in the work of Walter Mignolo and others, whose “decolonial option” is in marked contrast to the institutional and epistemoloigical conservatism of much postcolonial criticism.33 Secondly, there is a need to acknowledge concerns that the increas-ing ubiquity—in scholarship and in commemoration—of key figures of Haitian history, in particular of Toussaint Louverture, should neither lead to a reduction of their historical complexity nor to an overplaying of their symbolic significance. Michel-Rolph Trouillot described the ways in which much literature on Haiti remains excessively respectful of the revolutionary leaders, reflecting the need for an engagement—clear in Carolyn Fick’s work, as well as in the earlier writings of Etienne Charlier—with the role of the Haitian people in his-tory and culture.34 Associated with this issue is clearly a question of the representativity of the Haitian heroes themselves. Toussaint’s portability and acceptability in an international frame have been increasingly well documented and closely questioned. There is a lesser interest in Henri-Christophe, whose Armorial général du Royaume d’Hayti appeared in 2006 in facsimile edition produced by the College of Arms of London. Largely absent, however, from the com-memoration and its aftermath, is the liberator himself, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, despite his foundational role in the 1804 events. In the midst of the slew of commemorations discussed above, the bicentenary of his death—17 October 2006—passed with little comment.35 And thirdly and finally, although examples have been cited above of work that persistently brings contemporary Haiti to public attention, overturning the stereotypes and received ideas that dominate much media coverage, there is a need to ensure that a privileging of the past does not eclipse the continued importance of discussing the present, namely, that the privileging of “Haiti then” is not detrimental to any acknowledgment, exploration, and highlighting of the dilemmas of “Haiti now.”

The envoi to The Stone That the Builder Refused, the concluding volume of Madison Smartt Bell’s trilogy, constitutes a poetic engagement with the forms of connectedness between past and present on which this article depends. Riau, a rare survivor amongst Bell’s remarkable cast of characters in the aftermath of revolution and independence, provides a prophetic, hal-lucinatory list of “the names of many who have gone beneath the waters or will go,” ranging

On postcolonialism as a “marketing of the margins,” see Graham Huggan, 33. The Postcolonial Exotic (London: Routledge, 2001).See Etienne Charlier, 34. Aperçu sur la formation historique de la nation haïtienne (Port-au-Prince: Presses Libres, 1954); and Caroline E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990).A notable exception is the bicentenary publication, edited by Eric Sauray, 35. Lettres ouvertes à Dessalines (Paris: Dauphin noir, 2004).


from Macandal, Boukman, Moyse, and Toussaint, to more recent figures such as Jean Domi-nique.36 It is with this idea of connectedness that this article concludes, not suggesting any straightforward narrative of cause and effect that oversimplifies recognition of the legacies of the past in the present, but urging instead a thorough exploration of transhistorical links and their contemporary manifestations. Last year saw another Haitian tragedy off the Turks and Caicos Islands, with the capsizing of a boat leading to the deaths of over sixty Haitian migrants. Official reports of investigation into survivors’ claims that this was not an accident but the result of a deliberate act remained inconclusive, but news of the drownings and their aftermath, which attracted little attention in the international media, recall the line in David Rudder’s “Haiti”: “They say the middle passage is gone / So how come overcrowded boats still haunt our lives?”37 In reflecting on such connections between colonial history and the postcolonial or often neocolonial contemporary period, the task for those with a genuinely constructive interest in Haiti is to elaborate an approach that permits a move from memorial-izing and compartmentalizing—even romanticizing and exoticizing—the past, toward engag-ing critically with the present. This is the very shift that should be central to the ambitions of any student of Haiti’s past, of its present, or of its future.

Acknowledgments

This article was written while its author was in receipt of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. The support of the Leverhulme Trust is gratefully acknowledged.

See Madison Smartt Bell, 36. The Stone That the Builder Refused (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 700.David Rudder, “Haiti,” included on David Rudder and Charlie’s Roots, 37. Haiti, LP (Barbados: West Indies Records, 1988).

dictionnaire de la révolution haitienne

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