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 Eight - Between the Family and the Nation: Lamartine, Toussaint Louverture, and the “Interracial” Family Romance of the Haitian Revolution
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
‘Où trouver ailleurs une patrie, s’écriaient la plupart d'entre eux les larmes aux yeux, l'esclave en retrouve une dans la vaste Afrique, le maître dans les trois autres parties du monde, et nous enfants de cette terre, espèce nouvelle d'hommes, nulle part.’
—Antoine Métral, Histoire de l'insurrection des esclaves dans le nord de Saint-Domingue (1818)‘Es-tu fou? puis-je l'empêcher d’être mulâtre? puis-je lui donner un père, une mère, en faire un enfant légitime?’
—Oxiane; ou la révolution de Saint-Domingue (1828)Ronald Paulson, Lynn Hunt, and Françoise Vergès have described many literary, visual, and political inscriptions of revolution as having had the kind of inherently Oedipal representational structures that we have seen in Victor Séjour's ‘Le Mulâtre.’ Lynn Hunt has written that Oedipal metaphors of revolution were abundant in the early modern world because ‘most Europeans in the eighteenth century thought of their rulers as fathers and of their nations as families writ large’ (xiv). In the mind of the populace of ancien régime France, she suggests, the French Revolution necessarily entailed overthrowing the father-king, much the same way that for those who wrote about the Haitian Revolution, a slave rebellion metaphorically and often literally entailed overthrowing the father-master. Hunt calls these Oedipal fantasies of rebellion against the state, ‘family romances,’ and tells us that they were essentially ‘metaphors for political life, metaphors that developed in response to changing events … but also metaphors that drove the revolutionary process forward’ (199).
Vergès, like Garraway after her (2005a, 224), borrows the term ‘family romance’ from Hunt to describe the Oedipal significations of colonial revolutions. According to Vergès, it was Sigmund Freud who had used the term ‘family romance’ to evoke ‘the fiction developed by children about imagined parents,’ whom they imagine replacing their own parents (Vergès, 3; see also Freud, 2003, 39). In Vergès's adaptation of both Freud and Hunt's usage of the term, what she calls the ‘colonial family romance’ in Africa and the Caribbean, helped government officials to create a ‘fable’ about France being ‘La Mère-Patrie’ and the slaves being her colonized, rebellious, and ungrateful children (4).
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- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 373 - 411Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015