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 Eleven - Victor Schoelcher, ‘L'imagination Jaune,’ and the Francophone Genealogy of the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
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
‘La révolution de Saint-Domingue semble n'avoir effrayé personne. Il existe en France des colons qui croient toujours pouvoir recouvrer leurs biens dans cette île. Les journaux font même circuler en ce moment le bruit d'un projet de conquête et de recouvrement.’
—Mme Gabrielle de P****, Le Nègre et la Créole ou Mémoires d'Eulalies D*** (1825)‘Thy coming fame, Ogé! is sure!/Thy name with that of L'Ouverture.’
—George B. Vashon, ‘Vincent Ogé’ (1854)‘… personne ne songeait à se demander si la nuance de l'héroïsme est noire, blanche ou jaune, pas plus que si les organes qui le servent, quand il excite notre admiration, justifient tel système d'anthropologie plutôt que tel autre.’
—Pierre Faubert, Ogé, ou le préjugé de couleur (1856)While Beard, Brown, and Redpath may have all, in their own ways, ensured the transatlantic circulation of the trope we have come to recognize as the “colored historian,” continuing to trace the genealogical relationship of this nineteenth-century trope to the ‘mulatto legend of history’ and, specifically, to the part of Nicholls's claim that involves discussing how ‘mulatto histories’ were legendary because they could ‘explain and justify the predominant position of the mulatto elite’ (1979, 86), leads us to the world of the French abolitionist, Victor Schoelcher. Like the Anglophone abolitionists studied in the previous chapter, Schoelcher was one of the most visible contributors to the literary history of the Haitian Revolution in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World. Through his discussions of Haiti in his Colonies étrangères et Haïti (1843), Schoelcher would play an enormously prominent role in the dissemination of the trope of the “colored historian.” In fact, Schoelcher was probably the first of the nineteenth-century contributors to the literary history of the Haitian Revolution to suggest that Boyer-era Haitian writers had created a legendary history designed to legitimate their own rule. If you recall, Nicholls had defined the histories created by Ardouin and Saint-Rémy as legendary because this ‘version of the past,’ he said, had been presented for its ‘exemplary value’ in the present. Nicholls explained that the ‘mulatto histories’ of Ardouin and Saint-Rémy could be called legendary precisely because, ‘The past is being used as a weapon in the present’ (1979, 86).
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- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 524 - 567Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015