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
- Chapter Seven “Black” Son, “White” Father: The Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour's ‘Le Mulâtre’
- Chapter Eight Between the Family and the Nation: Lamartine, Toussaint Louverture, and the “Interracial” Family Romance of the Haitian Revolution
- Chapter Nine A ‘Quarrel Between Two Brothers’: Eméric Bergeaud's Ideal History of the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Seven - “Black” Son, “White” Father: The Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour's ‘Le Mulâtre’
from Part Three - The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- 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
- Chapter Seven “Black” Son, “White” Father: The Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour's ‘Le Mulâtre’
- Chapter Eight Between the Family and the Nation: Lamartine, Toussaint Louverture, and the “Interracial” Family Romance of the Haitian Revolution
- Chapter Nine A ‘Quarrel Between Two Brothers’: Eméric Bergeaud's Ideal History of the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Perhaps the first chapter of this history, which has begun in St. Domingo, and the next succeeding ones, which will recount how all the whites were driven from all the other islands, may prepare our minds for a peaceable accommodation between justice, policy and necessity; and furnish an answer to the difficult question, whither shall the colored emigrants go? and the sooner we put some plan under way, the greater hope there is that it may be permitted to proceed peaceably to its ultimate effect. But if something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children.’
—Thomas Jefferson to St. John Tucker (August 28, 1797)‘So it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you can't bear.’
—William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936)In this chapter, through a reading of Louisiana-born author Victor Séjour's representation of the Haitian Revolution in ‘Le Mulâtre’ or ‘The Mulatto,’ originally composed in French and first published in Paris in 1837, I consider the conflation of the literary history of the tragic “mulatto/a” with the literary history of the Haitian Revolution in one of the first short stories written by an American author of African descent. Séjour's role in the development of the important and controversial figure of the tragic “mulatto/a” is crucial because, as David O'Connell has observed, ‘“The Mulatto” was Séjour's personal contribution to the French and U.S. American antislavery movements’ and was thus ‘not simply … a blow struck for the cause of abolition in the French colonies, but … also one of the first manifestations of a “literature of combat” written by an American black’ (O'Connell, 1972, 61). Yet, even more importantly, with this story, Séjour—a man whose father was born in Saint-Domingue, but who lived the majority of his own life in metropolitan France—once again links the U.S. African American literary tradition to a Francophone origin and ultimately to the literary history of the Haitian Revolution. The contribution of ‘Le Mulâtre’ to the same transatlantic print culture of the Haitian Revolution that had posthumously claimed Phillis Wheatley as its poet laureate thus suggests that a Franco-Haitian grammar of resistance to slavery continued to be one of the most abiding ways that the Atlantic hemisphere's people of color turned references to the Revolution into a trans-historical language for the political aspirations and frustrations of their own days.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 345 - 372Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015