This book has charted the emergence of a mediated Haitian literature composed of the texts produced by leaders of the Haitian Revolution, notably Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and lyrical representations of courtesans’ experience that correlate to contemporaneous accounts of the popular oraliture of Afro-diasporic women. On the level of authorship, it is a tradition marked by striking slippage between conceptual voice, scribal or editorial practice, and French and Creole (Kreyòl). “Pure” categories of author and scribe undergo a mutual reconstitution in this corpus, one that parallels that of literature and politics in the textual arena, as well as that of master and slave in the Haitian Revolution. The French colonies did not, as noted in the introduction, yield a slave narrative; but Saint-Domingue/ Haiti yielded one of the most prolific and meaningful bodies of early Afrodiasporic literature anywhere in the black Atlantic.

The material cited in this book only confirms the need for further scholarly work on an impressive scale. Consider our partial knowledge of the correspondence produced by Toussaint Louverture alone. The most voluminous anthology of his letters, edited by Gérard Mentor Laurent, contains the Haitian general's correspondence with a single individual only, the revolutionary general and colonial governor Etienne Laveaux; based on three volumes of archival letters at the Bibliothèque nationale in France, it features more than one hundred often lengthy examples. Other correspondents with whom Toussaint had frequent and sustained exchanges included Napoleon Bonaparte, General Leclerc, Colonel Vincent, the French agents to Saint-Domingue (especially Commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax), fellow military officers such as Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and his sons Isaac and Placide, as well as their tutor, Coisnon, in Paris. Beyond the Laurent anthology, Louis Marceau Lecorps provided an anthology of a small but significant sampling of Toussaint's correspondence relating to his negotiations with the American Consul in Saint-Domingue, Edward Stevens, between 1799 and 1800 in La Politique extérieure de Toussaint Louverture. An important if slim recent anthology, edited by F. Nick Nesbitt, provides the most diverse representation yet of Toussaint's letters of any existing collection. These existing anthologies, however important in themselves, only hint at Toussaint Louverture the epistolary producer.