Beyond the Slave Narrative Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution, despite what Michel-Rolph Trouillot described as its unthinkable” nature, has generated a vital corpus of response in areas ranging from philosophy to historiography to 20th century literary and artistic representations. But what about the work generated at the time, by Haitians? This book is the first to present an account of a specifically Haitian literary tradition in the Haitian Revolutionary era. Beyond the Slave Narrative shows the emergence of two separate strands of textual innovations, both evolving from the new consciousness and new dialogues prompted by the revolution: the political texts produced by Haitian revolutionary leaders, and transcriptions of popular Creole poetry from the libertine culture in Saint-Domingue. Wildly divergent in their nature, these two kinds of texts nevertheless document growing cultural autonomy and influence of literary voice among non-white populations in the increasingly destabilized colony. Generals and courtesans alike presented paradigms of legitimate independence. These Haitian revolutionary texts have been neglected as a crucial foundation of Afro-diasporic literature in the Atlantic world for 2 reasons; 1) they do not fit the generic criteria of the slave narrative, with its structural assumptions of a defining autobiographical experience of enslavement, and 2) they are mediated texts, in which the speech acts of partly or wholly unschooled thinkers were relayed to the print cultural Atlantic domain by either secretaries or refugee colonists. As such, this corpus of work requires a more flexible consideration of the constitutive links between authorial voice, writing, print culture, and cultural autonomy among the formerly enslaved. At the same time, the texts produced by Jean-Jacques Dessalines and others require reassessment of numerous points of our historical understanding of the Haitian Independence and its relationship to an international world of contemporary readers.

Deborah Jenson is Professor of Romance Studies, a Global Health Institute faculty affiliate; co-director of the Franklin Institute "Haiti" Lab at Duke University; author of Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France (The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001), The Haiti Issue: 1804 and 19th-century French Studies (Yale UP, 2005); editor with Anderson & Keller of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma and Global Sovereignties (Duke UP, 2011).