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’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- 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
‘Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power. In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt … Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost.’
—Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1969)‘At the end of the eighteenth century, the large maroon community in Haiti lent its support to the general slave revolt that drove out the European occupiers and brought about the formation of an unstable, violence-prone black-and-mulatto republic.’
—Frederick B. Pike, The United States and Latin America: Myth and Stereotypes of Civilization (1992)‘In a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the dominant power, has to justify what it's doing. There is only one way to do it—become a racist. You have to blame the victim. Once you've become a raving racist in self-defense, you've lost your capacity to understand what's happening.’
—Noam Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (2002)The problem with ‘Haitian exceptionalism’ and all of the various tropologies and narratives that form its powerful and influential discourse is not only the fact that it perpetuates the old prejudices of “mulatto/a” vengeance, but that it keeps us from creating ‘new narratives’ about Haiti (Ulysse, 2015). This is partly because we must be ever-watchful to destroy the old ones as they continue to resurface in new ways, and partially because the forceful vocabulary of such a narrative has confused reality with representation to such an extent that we can no longer be sure which is which. While the “colored historian” is the most persistent of the tropologies to be found in today's scholarship about Haiti, in the popular media, “monstrous hybridity” prevails. Indeed, Haiti remains the punching bag for those looking for easy examples of “racial” prejudice even though they might better concentrate on the ones undoubtedly to be found in their own countries. Haiti also serves as a case study for the dangers of religious and linguistic hybridity as well as of political incomprehensibility (what Nicholls referred to as la politique de doublure [1979, 79]) in both U.S. and international political discourse.
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- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 605 - 612Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015