Tropics of Haiti 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’
- Chapter Ten The Color of History: The Transatlantic Abolitionist Movement and the ‘Never-to-be-Forgiven Course of the Mulattoes’
- Chapter Eleven Victor Schoelcher, ‘L'imagination Jaune,’ and the Francophone Genealogy of the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Chapter Twelve ‘Let us be Humane after the Victory’: Pierre Faubert's ‘New Humanism’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Ten - The Color of History: The Transatlantic Abolitionist Movement and the ‘Never-to-be-Forgiven Course of the Mulattoes’
from Part Four - Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- 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’
- Chapter Ten The Color of History: The Transatlantic Abolitionist Movement and the ‘Never-to-be-Forgiven Course of the Mulattoes’
- Chapter Eleven Victor Schoelcher, ‘L'imagination Jaune,’ and the Francophone Genealogy of the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Chapter Twelve ‘Let us be Humane after the Victory’: Pierre Faubert's ‘New Humanism’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Vive le roi! Vive la France, à bas les mulâtres, et reprenons Saint-Domingue!’
—M.D.A.L.F., La vérité sur Saint-Domingue et les mulâtres (1824)‘… the Haytian Revolution is also the grandest political event of this or any other age.’
—James Theodore Holly, A vindication of the capacity of the Negro race for self-government, and civilized progress, as demonstrated by historical events of the Haytian Revolution (1857)‘Although the whites and the free colored men were linked together by the tenderest ties of nature, there was, nevertheless, a hatred to each other, even stronger than between the whites and the blacks. In the earlier stages of the revolution, before the blacks under Toussaint got the ascendency, several attempts had been made to get rid of the leaders of the mulattoes, and especially Rigaud. He was hated by the whites in the same degree as they feared his all-powerful influence with his race, and the unyielding nature of his character, which gave firmness and consistency to his policy while controlling the interests of his brethren.’
—William Wells Brown, The Black Man, His Antecedents and His Genius (1863)In 1853, the British abolitionist and Unitarian minister John R. Beard published what would become one of the most widely adapted biographies of Toussaint Louverture to circulate in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World, The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture: The Negro Patriot of Hayti. At the time of its publication, following upon the abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848, the almost singular focus of the transatlantic abolitionist movement had become the abolition of slavery in the United States. For a British anti-slavery activist like Beard, the goal of abolition in the U.S. was plainly connected to the history of the Haitian Revolution and, more specifically, to the life of Toussaint Louverture. In the opening pages of the biography Beard wrote:
THE life which is described in the following pages has both a permanent interest and a permanent value. But the efforts which are now made to effect the abolition of slavery in the United States of America, seem to render the present moment specially fit for the appearance of a memoir of TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE.
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- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 474 - 523Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015