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
Part Two - Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- 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
‘Wendell Phillips says that he was once in Faneuil Hall, when Frederick Douglass was one of the chief speakers. Douglass had been describing the wrongs of the Negro race and as he proceeded he grew more and more excited and finally ended by saying that they had no hope of justice from the whites, no possible hope except in their own rights to arms. It must come to blood! They must fight for themselves. Sojourner Truth was sitting, tall and dark, on the very front seat facing the platform, and in the hush of feeling when Douglass sat down she spoke out in her deep, peculiar voice, heard all over the hall: “Frederick, is God dead?”’
—W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Damnation of Women’ (1920)‘I do not consider that we, as females, as individuals, are blamable for the faults of government. It is not for us to attempt assuming even a slight hold of the reins; our impotent hands could not without masculine force propel the wheels of the state.’
—Frances Hammond Pratt, La Belle Zoa; or the Insurrection in Hayti (1854)‘Am I not a woman and a sister?’
—motto adapted from the seal of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1787In her 1992 book Haiti, History and the Gods, Colin (Joan) Dayan writes of the lack of attention given to women of color in dominant histories of Haiti:
What happened to actual black women during Haiti's repeated revolutions, as they were mythologized by men, metaphorized out of life into legend? It is unsettling to recognize that the hyperbolization necessary for myths to be mutually reinforcing not only erases these women but forestalls our turning to their real lives. (48)
Dayan's question about what happens to the ‘real lives’ of women of color when they are filtered through the lens of what she calls the ‘familiar conceit of the double Venus … beneficent or savage, virginal or polluted’ (48), reflects the fact that in much of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing from Saint-Domingue there persists an obvious tropology of women of color as highly dangerous “tropical temptresses.” John Garrigus writes, in fact, that ‘no account of Saint-Domingue was complete without an account of tropical temptresses’.
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- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 197 - 219Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015