Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The “Mulatto/a” Vengeance of ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Part One From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy
- Part Two Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- Part Three The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction: The “Mulatto/a” Vengeance of ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The “Mulatto/a” Vengeance of ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Part One From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy
- Part Two Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- Part Three The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Haiti is just like everyplace else … except it's Haiti.’
—Herbert Gold, Haiti: Best Nightmare on Earth (1991)‘Haiti, like most of the world's poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized … We're all supposed to politely respect each other's cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.’
—David Brooks, ‘The Underlying Tragedy’ (2010)‘Haiti is not that weird. It is the fiction of Haitian exceptionalism that is weird.’
—Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘The Odd and the Ordinary’ (1990)It is by now rather commonplace in academic circles to refer to the idea that the Haitian Revolution has been ‘silenced’ for the past two centuries in both scholarship and popular history. The concept of ‘silencing’ refers to the work of the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who, in his landmark Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), argued that through both a ‘formula of banalization’ and a ‘formula of erasure,’ the ‘silencing’ of the Haitian Revolution has become merely one ‘chapter within a narrative of global domination’ (96). This form of ‘silencing,’ he writes—‘“It” did not really happen; it was not that bad, or that important’ (96)—is ‘a part of the history of the West, and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world’ (107). While acknowledging that these silences exist has proved to be extraordinarily important to restoring the Haitian Revolution to its proper place among the most world-historical events of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World, in recent years a proliferation of writings have challenged Trouillot's premise of ‘silencing’ itself. Ada Ferrer, for example, has written:
if Trouillot has provided a much-needed and powerful condemnation of the relative silence that has surrounded the Haitian Revolution to the present, other authors have shown that at the time, as news of the slaves’ actions erupted onto the world stage, everyone seemed to be talking and thinking about events in Saint-Domingue.
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- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 1 - 48Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015