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
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’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Haiti is in its infancy; and the population, formed out of discordant materials, is precisely in the state that might be anticipated by any one at all conversant with the history of mankind.’
—Charles Mackenzie, Notes on Hayti, made during a Residence in that Republic (1830)‘Haiti! ce nom seul résume tout le mal que les ennemis de l'abolition disent de la race africaine.’
—Victor Schoelcher, Colonies étrangères et Haïti (1843)‘Haïti est un argument … qui gêne et qui déplait.’
—Louis Joseph Janvier, La République d'Haïti et ses visiteurs (1883)In his Haïti: ses progrès et son avenir (1862), which would incidentally appear with the same publisher (E. Dentu) as Stella, the nineteenth-century French literary critic Alexandre Bonneau listed Eméric Bergeaud's novel in his bibliography of works about Haiti that his readers might consult for additional information about the country. Bonneau's bibliography, which contained just over 55 works by travel writers, former French colonists, and Europeans as well as Haitian historians and memoirists, comprised in the mind of its author the most ‘essential, important, or interesting’ works on the subject of Haiti. Bonneau explained that this list, in any case, was not meant to be exhaustive, since ‘[t]he bibliography of Haiti would fill an entire volume if we wanted to cite all of the works relating thereto’ (165). While many of Bonneau's entries contain no annotations at all, the brief note he included after mentioning Bergeaud's novel explained that Stella is ‘a historical and political novel about Haiti’ wherein ‘the author personifies the black race [race noire] under the name of Romulus, and the mulatto class [classe de mulâtre] under the name of Rémus’ (172). This description comes in spite of the fact that, as we have seen, Bergeaud never once uses the term ‘mulatto’ or any other “racial” taxonomic marker in his novel of over 300 pages.
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- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 459 - 473Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015