In July 2019, in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave, Brooklyn went dark. In 90-degree temperatures, over 55,000 customers in Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin, Bergen Beach, and Georgetown lost electricity in one of the largest power outages in New York’s history. Con Edison, the city’s power company, admitted that it deliberately disconnected these neighborhoods in order to prevent a widespread loss of power that would affect wealthier, whiter areas of the city. Although Black neighborhoods earn the highest scores in New York City’s heat vulnerability index (a ranking system that takes into account the proportion of green space to developed space, access to air conditioning, and the percentage of people living below poverty levels), they are the first on the line when the city’s infrastructure fails.Footnote ¹ What the index does not take into account, however, are the social and political risks to which these neighborhoods are also exposed during a blackout. After the lights went out, 200 police officers flooded Brooklyn, with the nebulous mandate to preserve order. A week earlier, the US Department of Justice had announced that it would not press charges against Daniel Pantaleo, the white police officer who killed Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014. Now law enforcement roamed the streets of Canarsie, policing Black children for splashing water in 90-degree heat.

Some residents in the affected areas may have found these conditions familiar: outside of Florida, Brooklyn is home to the largest community of Haitian Americans in the United States. As in the United States, power outages in Haiti are as much a sign of mechanical failure as they are of political failure. Due to an electric grid weakened by natural disasters, an overdependence on fossil fuels, and predatory international markets, Haiti often experiences blackouts. In 2018, Haiti’s energy vulnerability was exacerbated by the collapse of Petrocaribe, the Venezuelan aid program which had once provided heavily subsidized oil to Central America and the Caribbean. The results of Petrocaribe’s withdrawal from the area have been catastrophic: only 25 percent of the population in Haiti has access to electricity, and those that do frequently experience power outages. As the gas shortage worsened, hospitals, businesses, and schools closed; public transportation halted; and Haitians took to the streets to demand government accountability. The July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, accused of misappropriating over two billion dollars in Petrocaribe funds, has only exacerbated the crisis.

But the Petrocaribe scandal also reaches into a deeper history of power outages in Haiti, what is called in Kreyòl blakawout. As Greg Beckett has argued, the blakawout is a loss not just of electric but of political power.Footnote ² Darkness limns the contours of state violence and foreign intervention, most notably during the US-backed Duvalier regimes. During the blakawouts of the 1960s and 1970s, the paramilitary (known as the Tonton Macoutes) cut power to certain neighborhoods before conducting raids. Under the cover of darkness, the Tonton Macoutes carried out massacres, sexual assaults, and targeted assassinations on a vast scale. As Jean-Frantz Gation recalls in his childhood memoir of growing up in Port-au-Prince: “During the presidency of François Duvalier, the black-out every night was one of those inconveniences which one had to expect … the dictator kept Port-au-Prince in the dark in order to give his death troops free rein.”Footnote ³

The interconnected history of US imperialism, state violence, and the politics of energy emphasizes how the blakawout spreads far beyond the electric grid. Those diasporic Haitians who, in 2019, experienced the Brooklyn blackout understood all too well the power relationship between energy and violence. Yet, the blakawout can also be a condition for community formation. Edwidge Danticat, for example, recalls the blackouts of her childhood:

Danticat’s recollection of her childhood counterpoises the abuses of state power against intergenerational community building. Listening to stories from her elders, she converts the manipulated and misappropriated energies of the Duvalier regime into a space of collective memory-making and historical transmission. The darkness, she implies, does not efface the lives and experiences of those without power. Instead, she looks to other forms of power that emerge when she and her family “sit around a candle and listen to stories from the elders in the house.” This power enables the transmission of kinship, ancestral knowledge, and community history through human – not electrical – conduits.

The 2019 blackouts in Brooklyn and Haiti, two darkened nodes in a diasporic network, point toward the mutual constitution of energy and state violence under conditions of precarious life. Yet, as we saw in Danticat’s memoir, they also point toward somewhere unexpectedly subversive. This subversion can be traced on scales both small and large, domestic and transhistorical. In that respect, it is important to recall that the 2019 blackouts occurred just two weeks before the anniversary of Bwa Kayiman, the Vodou ceremony which purportedly launched the Haitian Revolution. Since 1996, Brooklyn’s Haitian population has commemorated Bwa Kayiman each August at the southeastern lakeside in Prospect Park. Celebrants engage in dance and drumming; they sing and share stories, and they ignore the police, who often surveil the proceedings. Although accounts of the ceremony differ, most Haitians agree on the general contours of the story: one night, in August 1791, a group of enslaved people secretly gathered in the darkness near Le Cap. The group engaged in a mutual possession by the lwa or god Ezili Dantò and planned a revolt of the Northern Plain, sparking the thirteen-year struggle which would culminate in Haitian independence. The annual Brooklyn celebration of Bwa Kayiman speaks to the communal strength of diasporic memory and the power of intergenerational relationality on scales both hemispheric and local. But when framed against the 2019 blackouts, it tells another story of energy, too. Although power has been used and abused in Haiti and the United States in order to monitor, manipulate, and exploit Black life, Bwa Kayman reminds us that energy moves at other frequencies and vibrations.

In its simplest iteration, Bwa Kayiman is the story of a blakawout: the obfuscatory conditions of darkness turned against the violence of plantation economies and instead directed toward emancipatory political ends. Bwa Kayiman is therefore an energy story and, moreover, a particularly gendered energy story. It is the tale of a Vodou possession in which enslaved Haitians channeled the energy of the female lwa Ezili Dantò, sparking a divine charge across a network of interconnected revolutionary fighters. While masculinist figures of the Haitian Revolution such as Toussaint Louverture have come to emblematize twentieth-century celebrations of Atlantic modernity, these romantic notions of male heroes obscure a wider network of people who lived, fought, and conducted cultural and spiritual power in Haiti.Footnote ⁵ Critics such as Jasmine Claude-Narcisse, Marlene Daut, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Colin Dayan, Arlette Gautier, and Nicole Willson have excavated these networks, which include the histories of female soldiers who dressed as men, revolutionary men who dressed as women (such as Romaine-la-Prophétesse, the military leader who claimed to be the nephew of the Virgin Mary, dressed as a woman, and claimed the name “Prophetess”), and the Vodou pantheon, which includes lwa (imperfectly translated as gods or spirits) who were believed to have inspired the revolution. And more broadly, this network includes the stories of unnamed people in Haiti who channeled spiritual and folk power in the Black Americas, including the cultivation and dissemination of plants, the circuitous labors of birthwork, the eccentric circuits of marronage, and the future-oriented conduits of prophecy.

Bwa Kayiman illustrates a history very different from the raids of Duvalier, the Petrocaribe scandal, or the violence of the NYPD. It draws attention away from natural gas, electric grids, and hydroelectric generators and instead toward alternative energy systems sustained by social and spiritual connections. I open this book with a triangulation of the blackouts in Brooklyn, the Petrocaribe scandal in Haiti, and the Black feminist history of the Haitian Revolution because this triad collectively decenters familiar narratives of power, energy, gender, and modernity. Without underestimating the very real challenges the contemporary fuel crisis presents to Black civic and social life throughout the diaspora, this book asks what can energy tell us – and not tell us – about the rise of modernity? What energy systems exist outside familiar narratives of industrial development and the dehumanization of human capital? What is lost when critics reduce the history of energy to a narrative arc of development, consumption, and quantifiable power? And what happens when we attune ourselves to the vibrations of other forms of energy that exceed the electric grid? In asking these questions, I follow Gina Athena Ulysse’s injunction to forge “new narratives” for Haiti, a country which has been “rhetorically and symbolically incarcerated” by centuries of misrepresentation by global northern powers.Footnote ⁶ In looking past the clichéd prison-house of developmentalist narrative, other energy stories emerge, stories which pulse with divine, prophetic, and collective power. Taking these practices as a point of departure, this book argues that Black political and spiritual life has long theorized and practiced energy not as an extractable commodity coerced from human stockpiles but instead as a force through which to reclaim one’s own body, organize political labor, and work toward emancipatory political futures.

Although the revolutionary nature of Black politics and spirituality have been extensively researched, fewer studies have situated these practices within a broader history of energy. This is understandable, given the relative novelty of what are now called the energy humanities.Footnote ⁷ In a groundbreaking special issue of PMLA, Patricia Yaeger first coupled energy consumption with literary production, arguing that “energy is already embedded in older and stranger histories than our own.” By recalibrating literary periodization around different modes of energy production, including tallow, wood, coal, oil, and human labor, Yaeger emphasized the co-constitutive roles of the human and nonhuman in cultural understandings of modernity. The body of scholarship inaugurated by Yaeger has developed over the past decade, drawing from literary study, political science, anthropology, history, sociology, and climate science. Anthologies such as Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer’s Energy Humanities and Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Szeman’s Petrocultures have helped to institutionalize the energy humanities as an academic subfield, while recent monographs from literary scholars, historians, and political scientists have expanded the remit of the energy humanities to include a wide range of methodological approaches. In many ways, the development of the energy humanities has been extremely timely; it has given a central place to environmental and energy justice in both scholarship and pedagogy; it has called for unique collaborative methodologies, with its injunction, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, to “rise above … disciplinary prejudices”; and it has even provided a framework for scholars such as Jennifer Wenzel to critique the cult of productivity in academia.Footnote ⁸

And yet, as scholars have increasingly attended to the concept of energy in order to address the consequences of extraction, consumption, climate crisis, and the capitolocene/anthropocene, many have reproduced developmentalist narratives of energy that remain limited to capitalist ideologies of fossil fuel. Such limitations are in part due to energy’s naturalization in wealthy global northern lifestyles, rendering it, in Jamie L. Jones’s words, “both everywhere and hard to see.”Footnote ⁹ This outsized interest in fossil fuels and global northern narratives of development overlook different strategies of living with, through, and against energy currents that cannot necessarily be channeled into the conduits of modern capitalist production.Footnote ¹⁰ While fossil fuels are certainly important in understanding contemporary energy infrastructures, climate crisis, and anthropogenic violence, they have also yoked the energy humanities to narratives of capitalist consumption which, as Shouhei Tanaka has argued, “enact the material conditions of dispossession, precarity, and violence for racialized bodies that in turn sustain the energy freedoms and uses of contemporary life for others.”Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, studies in the energy humanities often universalize these privileged others into a nebulously defined third-person plural. Consider, for example, Dominic Boyer and Imre Szeman’s argument in their introduction to the recent Energy Humanities: An Anthology: “We are citizens and subjects of fossil fuels through and through, whether we know it or not.”Footnote ¹²

Yet, I would like to put pressure on how Szeman and Boyer construct this collective form of belonging. Who, after all, is this “we” with seemingly unfettered (or at least naturalized) access to energy sources, who “takes for granted” their right to consume and enjoy the fruits of the “modern”? Citizenship is, after all, commonly defined as a set of exclusionary practices, and so I would like to ask: what stories are abandoned at the borders of this global state of fossil fuels? In asking this question, Energies of Resistance not only complicates the notion of citizenship as an analytic category but also turns its attention away from carbon-intensive practices which have come to overdetermine the energy humanities. I here take my cues from Cara New Dagget, who argues, “there are other ways of knowing and living energy … other energy epistemologies, ways of knowing and living with fuel.”Footnote ¹³ Following Dagget – as well as calls by scholars, activists, and artists including Kent Linthicum, Mikaela Relford, Julia C. Johnson, and the Black Quantum Futurism Collective, especially Rasheedah Phillips – I argue that traditional epistemologies of energy foreclose other relationships humans have developed with energy sources.Footnote ¹⁴ Specifically, such epistemologies exclude energy practices traditionally gendered as feminine (including rootwork, spiritual practices, birthwork, and carework), thus eliding the role of Black women and gender-variant people in the rise of modernity.

This elision leads to my project’s second contribution to the energy humanities. While studies of modern energy often center on cis-men, this book emphasizes the importance of Black diasporic women and gender-variant people within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haiti and the US. These revolutionary subjects served as conduits and conductors of collective power, including spiritual, plant, magnetic, electrical, and kinetic energy. While these energy practices were embraced by people of all gender identities (perhaps most famously, François Makandal, the houngan, botanist, and insurgent against French colonists), they were traditionally gendered as feminine. Cis-sexist and racist understandings of modern energy typically dismiss such practices as folkish. Yet, as Black feminist scholars – including Jennifer Morgan, Hazel Carby, Carole Boyce Davies, and Saidiya Hartman – have reminded us, the erasure of women from modernity impoverishes our understanding of Black diasporic cultures.Footnote ¹⁵ Drawing from Audre Lorde, Boyce Davies deploys the “‘sisters outside’” framework to call for the inclusion of women and especially Black women of the Caribbean in genealogies of Black radicalism, arguing that “Black women have become sisters outside the Black radical intellectual tradition; Caribbean women, sisters outside the Caribbean radical tradition and US African American civil rights discourse and sisters outside Pan-Africanist discourse.”Footnote ¹⁶ This “sisters outside” methodology calls attention to the radically modern labor of women in the US and the Caribbean, pointing toward energetic practices seldom incorporated into the Black radical tradition or studies of modernity. Following Boyce Davies, this book asks what it would mean to place diasporic women in a Black radical tradition and how might their inclusion change the contours of critical conversations around energy? What would it mean to think of practices often dismissed as feminine, queer, or “primitive” as modern forms of energy? How can scholars denaturalize national boundaries so that one might see a Haitian Revolutionary warrior, such as Marie Jeanne Lamartinière, fighting alongside the Black women of 1820s New York print culture? Or to read the wandering energy of Sojourner Truth within a lineage of Black female maroons throughout the Americas? Or to understand Pauline Hopkins as a chronicler of not only US Reconstruction but also the revolutionary Caribbean?

In asking these questions, this book forges a place for people of African descent within both the energy humanities and theories of modernity. This book also includes figures in the United States not generally taken to be part of a Haitian Revolutionary tradition but who were deeply shaped by the energetic practices of Afro-Caribbean resistance. Finally, this project takes into account many nameless figures: the gardeners, nurses, hairdressers, cooks, midwives, and priestesses who channeled diasporic energy throughout the Americas in unique and subversive ways. Through these “silenced” – to invoke Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s famous paradigm – genealogies, this book traces routes of power, which spread beyond the Haitian Revolution and illuminated the map of what we might now consider the modern Americas. While traditional accounts of energy have emphasized a limited understanding of modernity – one which reduces the modern to advancements in communication technologies, animal and fossil fuel extraction, and the rise of urban centers – I argue that people of African descent combated these violent regimes through an energetic counterdiscourse that centered survival, love, and care.

A historicized and multilingual understanding of “energy” will help to scaffold this counterdiscourse. In physics, “energy” and “power” are two distinct but interrelated concepts: while power is defined as the time rate of doing work, energy is the capacity of doing work or making change happen from one entity to another. In the context of social or political philosophy, power may be defined as the ideological structures which make possible (or impossible) the conditions for political change; disciplinary techniques in the service of producing compliant subjects; and strategies of management, punishment, and subjugation usually understood along the axes of class, gender, or racial/ethnic exploitation. This book revises more familiar Marxist or Foucauldian understandings of power as a disciplinary formation by instead restoring the conceptualization of power to the domain of energy. Etymologically, “energy” derives from the Greek ἐνέργεια or enérgeia to signify activity or labor but also supernatural and/or cosmic forces. For Aristotle, activity (enérgeia) is defined by its potentiality (dunamis). Energy is thus not merely an entity’s power to produce a change but rather its potential or capacity to be in an alternate state. In Haitian Kreyòl, these alternate potential states are apparent in everyday uses of both the terms pouvwa and enèji to describe the movements and desires of the lwa or gods (for example, in colloquial descriptions of the Gede lwa – a family of spirits that channel energies of death and fertility – as a Fòs pouvwa (force of power) or akimilasyon enèji (accumulation of energy)). In this respect, Haitian terminology is not unlike the original Greek understanding of energy: not only the product of labor but also spiritual and cosmic potential. In this book, “power” and “energy” are resources whose internal logics operate both within and outside of external structures of domination. Moreover, they are both ways of imagining potential futures that tendril into the spiritual world. Energy and power are thus not interchangeable but mutually constituted, spiritually sanctioned, and oriented toward futurity.

In analyzing this complex entanglement of energy and power, I do not reduce the lived experiences of Afro-diasporic subjects to their energetic output. Nor do I believe enslavement is analogous to contemporary forms of fossil fuel extraction, as critics such as Jean-François Mouhot and Marc Davidson have recently argued.Footnote ¹⁷ Such readings efface the lived experiences of enslaved people and their descendants and often have recourse to troubling assumptions about Black life and labor.Footnote ¹⁸ Similarly, I emphatically reject the widespread use of the expression “energy slave,” a term coined by the engineer Buckminster Fuller to denote the unit of energy which nonhuman infrastructure requires in lieu of an equivalent unit of human labor. For Fuller, “mechanization … is man’s answer to slavery.”Footnote ¹⁹ I object to this term, which is still widely used in environmental studies, because enslavement is not a useful heuristic, a stable point of comparison, or a clever analogic tool. The term, which reproduces the quantificatory violence of enslavement, effaces the lived experiences of enslaved people and overlooks historical differences across systems of enslavement. It is both unethical and ahistorical.

In turning away from the traditional paths of inquiry in the energy humanities, with their vexed and often racist legacies, this project recalls Amitav Ghosh’s argument that global northern manipulation of fossil fuels “reinforces Western power with the result that other variants of modernity came to be suppressed, incorporated, and appropriated into what is now a single dominant model.”Footnote ²⁰ Following Ghosh, I delineate the energetic practices of people of African descent in order to construct a counterdiscourse against global northern narratives that privilege the rise of fossil fuel extraction, externalized labor, anthropogenic climate crisis, and practices of consumption, exploitation, and unevenly distributed pleasure. Instead, forms of Afro-Caribbean spirituality, protest, and politics helped forge diasporic philosophies of energy and power, albeit philosophies that are not often considered profitable, valuable, quantifiable, easily extractible, or otherwise convenient within the calculus of white supremacy. Enslaved and formally free people, I argue, found ways to redirect and redefine their power, diverting their labor into spiritual and political energy systems with liberatory ends. Ultimately, Black energy did not keep the machine of white supremacy running smoothly. Instead, the spiritual, energetic, and communal experiences of people of African descent snagged and caught at the cogs of racial capitalism, leading (in the case of Haiti) to the creation of the first Black republic and the rejection of plantation and post-plantation ideologies.

It is precisely in this nexus of racial capitalism and the energy humanities where this project contributes to established histories of gender and power in the Americas. This book rethinks narratives of the modern, not only excavating what has been historicized as capitalist modernity (and by what mechanisms of institutional policing they have come to be included in “modernity”) but also asking why critics still invest in a term which has spurred reckless consumption, climate crisis, the destruction of traditional belief systems and kinship networks, and the exploitation of life, both human and nonhuman, across the globe. While contemporary political policy has attempted to address the crisis of anthropogenic climate change with alternative fuel strategies (solar, battery, lithium, etc.), this book instead explores the violent histories of energy from alternative perspectives. What would it mean to shift our understanding of energy – and with it, modernity – away from capitalist values of consumption, supply, demand, and ideologies of individualism? What would it mean to inhabit energy through collective action, spiritual communion, and practices of care? By unyoking imperialist conquest from narratives of energy and modernity – and with it, histories of biocapitalism and coerced labor – this book imagines alternative theorizations of power and new ways of inhabiting and understanding energy that reject the teleological insistence on modernity’s anthropogenic violence. In the face of racist structures of capitalist power, the subjects of this book safeguarded and rechanneled their energy and labor toward projects of community building and independence. This is not to deny the violence of institutional power, structured by modes of capital accumulation and the commodification of human beings. But it is to question the kinds of stories we tell about energy, from whose perspective, and why they matter. While traditional archival forms may disproportionately privilege tales of abjection (if recounted at all), this study expands our archive of hemispheric modernity to include the energetic pulses of Black lives.Footnote ²¹

Histories of colonial energy tend to emphasize the development of the steam engine, the rise of electric power, or the beginnings of industrial agriculture, through the rise of cash crops such as indigo, cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Chapter 1, “Powering the Soul: Queer Energies in Haitian Vodou,” argues that any history of colonial energy production must also recognize that nonhuman forms of power were dependent on the human energy of enslaved labor, particularly reproductive labor. Yet, far from considering enslaved labor as the flexible, malleable unit of energy desired by capitalist production, this chapter instead argues that Vodou radically disrupted the logics of the plantation. Vodou personhood is antithetical to the calculus of racial capitalism, and its porosity, I argue, helped reconfigure the plantation’s structures of power to resist imperialist extraction. Through an archive that ranges from colonial treatises to Vodou practices and epistemologies, this chapter highlights the ways in which Haitians expanded the category of gender and reimagined the energies of labor and birthwork under conditions of biocapitalist violence.

Chapter 2, “Marie Laveau’s Generational Arts: Healing and Midwifery in New Orleans,” turns from Saint-Domingue to Haitian diasporic, Afro-Caribbean and Creole communities of New Orleans. Through an excavation of the myth and legacy of New Orleans “voodoo queen” Marie Laveau, I argue that Laveau renegotiated her body as capital, resisting social, cultural, and legal forces that sought to commodify, exoticize, or criminalize her. Instead, she became a community leader, a healer, and possibly a midwife. Situating Laveau within a longer genealogy of Black women’s birthwork and midwifery, this chapter argues for alternative ways of imagining reproduction, kinship, and energy economies. Ultimately, it puts pressure on the myriad myths surrounding Laveau’s dynastic legacy, drawing attention away from white heteropatriarchal logics of touristic consumption, and instead allowing for bodily autonomy, love among women, and the notion of gestation and labor as an autoregenerating, independent economy.

Turning from Louisiana to New York City, Chapter 3, “Freedom’s Conduit: Spiritual Justice in ‘Theresa, A Haytien Tale,’” examines early African-American print culture, particularly the first African-American short story, the anonymously authored “Theresa, A Haytien Tale” (1828). While Haitian Revolutionary histories in the US have often centered on Toussaint Louverture, “Theresa” follows the travails of a young woman and her all-female family in their struggle for Haitian independence. A cross-dressing spy against the French, Theresa frequently experiences visitations, possessions, and visions from God. Theresa’s political and spiritual labor forms a complex network of spiritual cosmologies and Haitian Revolutionary iconographies that help expand colonized understandings of gender and sexuality. In doing so, the tale reroutes the energy systems of both colonial plantation violence and early African-American domesticity by imagining a prophetic form of female futurity tied to Haitian independence, not biological reproduction. Ultimately, I argue, “Theresa” transforms the cult of Mary, showing how the female body serves as an instrument of divine energies in which the final product is not a child but instead political sovereignty.

Chapter 4, “‘A Wandering Maniac’: Sojourner Truth’s Demonic Marronage” turns to a prophet seldom associated with the Caribbean. Yet, Sojourner Truth, who was born in 1797 in the predominantly Dutch Ulster County (New York), grew up in a world shaped by Atlantic empires; steeped in African, Native American, Caribbean, Spanish, Dutch, and French histories; and shaking with the tremors of the Haitian Revolution. Her first language was Dutch, her early spiritual beliefs were African, and her community was influenced by transatlantic and Caribbean channels of trade, labor, and revolution. This chapter examines the energy practices of Truth’s creolized milieu within a broader discourse on Truth’s celebrated mobility, historicizing her fugitivity within a transnational history of female marronage throughout the Americas. This hemispheric history of wandering evokes what Sylvia Wynter has understood as the “demonic grounds” of Black women’s liberation. Suturing the demonic (an energy force that emerges from Wynter’s critique of nineteenth-century physics) with Caribbean practices of marronage (a kinetic practice of flight against the immobilizing energy demands of chattel slavery), Truth, I argue, is not only an Atlantic subject but also expands critical understandings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean philosophy.

The final chapter, “Mesmeric Revolution. Hopkins’s Matrilineal Haiti”, extends the coordinates of Hopkins’s global commitments, charting an alternative geography beneath the Africa-oriented Of One Blood. By turning to the Caribbean, Hopkins reveals how Haiti emerges at key moments of energetic resistance. Moreover, she explicitly genders these moments of resistance as feminine. Focusing on the matrilineage of Hannah, Mira, and Dianthe, I argue that women in the novel carry specifically Haitian valences: from colonial Saint-Dominguan mesmerism, to the poison of Makandal, to the legacy of marronage. This muted Caribbean geography recenters women at the heart of the narrative, adumbrates Hopkins’s anti-imperialist politics, and subverts the dehumanizing energy politics of plantation genealogies.

Before concluding, I would like to offer a few brief notes on terminology, orthography, and the political stakes of this project. While this book is largely centered on the experiences of people whom we might now call “women,” it is also invested in destabilizing the cis-normativity of European imperialist projects. Enslaved people, as we shall see, found powerful ways to resist the violently gendered and ungendered logics of plantation economies. Although contemporary terminology is imperfect, what we might in a global northern idiom call cis-women, trans women, and gender-variant people all contributed to freedom projects throughout the Americas and redefined energy through their spiritual and political labor. I will sometimes use the term “women” to describe these individuals, especially when they described themselves as such (most famously in the case of Sojourner Truth). However, I would like to emphasize that not all the subjects of this book may have identified as “women” or understood the category of “woman” in ways identical to the way that terminology is deployed within a global northern contemporary framework.

With a few exceptions (most notably, the name Haiti itself), I will also cite Haitian terms in Kreyòl rather than French. This is an effort to respect the centrality of Kreyòl in Haitian history and recenter the experiences of the laboring classes, or what Michel-Rolph Trouillot might distinguish as the Haitian “nation” rather than the Haitian state.Footnote ²² Indeed, while this book is deeply invested in Haiti – as both a metaphor for diasporic freedom struggles and a real, material place – it is not particularly invested in the politics of statehood or institutional histories, which have traditionally overlooked women and gender-variant people. Rather, this book tells the story of people caught within multiple and sometimes imbricating scales of power and modes of belonging, which do not always include state politics.

It is also necessary to address the size and scope of these scales. The geographical and temporal framework of this book is admittedly large, drawing a complex network from Haiti to Louisiana to New York to Boston to Maryland over a period that stretches from 1791 to 1903. Yet, this vastness also has its limits: this book tells a story about the Haitian Revolution and its energetic reverberations in the continental United States. As such it contributes to scholarship on African-American and Haitian cultural histories, but it also recognizes that there are many diasporic energy stories which lie beyond the scope of this project. This is not to reinforce any notion of US or Haitian exceptionalism but instead to insist on the exemplarity of the Haitian Revolution, and particularly on its (often overlooked) significance to the histories and cultures of Black women and gender-variant people of the United States. Following influential scholars of Haiti and the United States, such as Marlene Daut, Brandon Byrd, J. Michael Dash, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, and Michael Drexler, this study expands the parameters of African-American literature to include transnational, hemispheric, and multilingual scales of relationality, which allowed people of African descent to build alliances across national lines.Footnote ²³ As such, this book will discuss several different systems of enslavement and (formal) freedom that cut across British, French, Dutch, and US imperial lines, each with its own unique jurisprudence, customs, and racist hierarchies. While carefully attending to the differences between geographically and temporally contingent class and racial markers, I am also concerned with finding common ground that would bring together revolutionaries in Haiti, gens de couleur of New Orleans, free communities of color in 1820s New York City, Black Dutch prophets of upstate New York, enslaved mothers of Maryland, and free Bostonian women only a generation removed from slavery.

I must also be clear about the ethical commitments of this project. The white supremacist mechanisms that perpetuated slavery continue to sustain themselves through violent and limited understandings of reproduction, property, and energy – or, as Saidiya Hartman argues, “gestational language has been key to describing the world-making and world-breaking capacities of racial slavery.”Footnote ²⁴ In the United States, these violent biocapitalist histories reverberate in more insidious forms of reproductive injustice, medical racism, police brutality, and public policy hostile to Black life. In a country where African-Americans are three times as likely to die in labor as white people, where they are twice as likely to experience difficulty conceiving and sustaining a pregnancy and less likely to receive assistance, where doctors consistently overlook Black pain, where cross-racial gestational surrogacy produces white babies from nonwhite bodies at higher rates than ever before, and where post-Roe, Black people are disproportionately likely to be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, we see the detritus of these biocapitalist histories, the remnants of the Code Noir, and the ever resonant threat of partus living and breathing in contemporary doctor’s offices, hospitals, and homes. While recognizing the continuing violence of these histories, I also want to foreground the unique, creative, and loving ways Black women and gender-variant people have challenged these ideologies of extraction and consumption across borders and forged alternative ways of living not under but against traditional understandings of energy.