Introduction

I want to tell a story. The time is the 1850s. The place? Haiti. The narrative of the story foregrounds the political life of Faustin I, a forgotten Haitian monarch, his performance(s) of sovereignty and the ways that his machinations during this era would impact on the widespread use of images and objects that sought to transform Haitian sovereignty from parody to power. It is a narrative that also looks forward to the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries as it links activities from the past that challenged Haiti’s sovereignty under Faustin I to contemporary moments that illuminate the complexity of black sovereignty's constraints. Although the nineteenthcentury encounters described within this chapter occurred nearly half a century after Haiti's declaration of independence, they echo the unfinished sovereign encounters outlined in Chapters 1 and 2. These flashpoints highlight literary historian Michael Drexler's musings above about the ways that Haiti is tied to remnants of its colonial history as a perfect plantation machine, even as its revolutionary life challenged chattel slavery, colonialism and black nullification. It is not surprising if somewhere lost in those grand skirmishes is the Haitian state. As noted in earlier chapters, this book fills this gap and draws together a range of materials, perspectives, objects and political thought in order to delineate the forms and fractures of black sovereignty. Although much of this book focuses on the ways that Haitian officials, cultural workers and ancillary friends (and foes) made black sovereignty legible, contested its existence, or continued to fight for its relevancy in global politics, it also argues that black sovereignty was and is an unstable, unfinished figuration.

As tempting as it may be to wish for a teleological narrative of becoming that sees Haitians and others of African descent breaking off chains of enslavement and figurations of political dispossession before emerging as full sovereign agents, the figurations of black sovereignty, as chronicled in this project, resist such formulations.

Introduction

This chapter reads the web of meanings that surround labouring bodies and the lands that contain them in particular places and at particular temporal moments in Haiti. Combining my background in transnational American, Caribbean and critical race studies and postcolonial governance allows me to weave hemispheric shifts, development rationales and racialised notions of difference together in order to chart the changing power dynamics and political implications that lend the land—and especially soil—legibility and translatability across national and racial lines. In tracing this arc, I read ecologies (and capital) through a racial lens, engaging in what literary critic and American studies scholar Rob Nixon describes as Caribbean environmental studies—an area he notes is a “particularly fertile domain of interdisciplinary enquiry.” The interdisciplinary nature of these inquiries informs much of the richness of this scholarship. As a way of engaging in research, interdisciplinarity is an essential tool for tracing how racialisms live through and within the land and transform articulations of place into hierarchies of possibility and control that can transform certain black bodies into commodities that can be substituted for power—especially sovereign power.

There is a way to unveil these shadowy practices: retrace the “disturbances” within and of the land. According to Caribbeanist and sociologist Mimi Sheller, “land has been one of the key sites of social struggle in postslavery societies.” She continues, noting that “social relations of power, resistance, and oppositional culture building are inscribed into living landscapes of farming, dwelling, and cultivation” that mark out or “proclaim use-rights, ownership, or the sacrality of particular places” onto regions, territories, and entities such as roads, trees, and even soil. Reading Sheller's comments through the lens of black sovereignty, then, it is possible to comprehend how black space(s) can become imbued with power and how certain black bodies negotiate a complex path within and through these networked sites. In essence, black spaces trouble black bodies and the performance(s) of black sovereignty in intriguing ways.

What I am proposing, though, is more than just a call for further investigations into Caribbean landscapes. According to Martinican poet, philosopher and cultural critic Édouard Glissant, “describing the landscape is not enough” to understand its dynamism and intricacy in human–nature relationships. For him, “the individual, the community, [and] the land are inextricable in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process.”

Introduction

Philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe, in writing about “practices of zoning” that trouble Blackness and beingness in the world, notes how “in some cases such practices are subtracted from all forms of national sovereignty,” existing within the lines of authority that populate extragovernmental entities. In other cases, these practices “remain under the control of foreign armies or of international organisations operating under the pretext of, or on behalf of, humanitarianism.” For Mbembe, these are forms of engagement linked to disorganisation, disaster and other forms of structural violence geared toward multiplying “states of exception nearly everywhere.”

This framing of black presents meets up with Mbembe's search for black futures in which he ponders how power will emerge from these moments in the black world. “Power comes to those who can dance with the shadows,” he argues, weaving “tight links between their own vital strength and other chains of power always situated in an elsewhere.” As if speaking about Haiti and its unfinished black sovereignty, Mbembe continues, noting that “power cannot be enclosed within the limits of a single, stable form,” mainly because all power—and specifically black power—“is power thanks only to its capacity for metamorphosis.” Haiti and its leaders have been engaged in this process of being, constraint, loss and metamorphosis since its revolutionary beginnings. In resisting disavowal and totalising nullification, Haiti maintains its “unfinishedness” by refusing destruction—even as it remains enchained to certain modes of interaction with international bodies that, contrary to their rhetoric, seem engaged in a process of “imperialism by disorganization.”

Throughout this book, I have argued for a way to grapple with the unfinished project of Haiti's black sovereignty. In earlier chapters, I discussed the ways that fungible transnational black labour set up a performance of black sovereignty that sought to accrete capital through racio-political kinship and black sweat. In presenting black sovereignty's mutations, I highlighted certain attempts by US newspapers and company representatives to (con)figure black sovereignty as a burlesque, while Haitian leaders (re)configured Haiti and its black sovereignty with imagery of power, generating a new currency that found an audience across the Atlantic Ocean in Britain.

Introduction

Haiti's initial invitation to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 coincided with another moment of expansion and control: diplomatic negotiations between the USA and Haiti for control of a particular harbour in the north-western corner of the republic—the Môle-Saint-Nicolas. Although acknowledged by all parties that the harbour remained under the clear sovereign control of Haiti, the area nevertheless continued to play a starring role in the USA's plans for control of the shipping lanes leading to the proposed isthmus canal on the mainland. Haitian diplomat Hannibal Price highlights this harbour in The Haytian Question, noting that it pointed “like a cannon upon what must necessarily be the European line [or American coal-fuelling stopover point] to the inter-oceanic canal, whether this be completed at Panama, or eventually, at Nicaragua.” So central was this harbour to US expansion efforts that abolitionist, activist and writer Frederick Douglass, in his role as US Minister Resident to Haiti, potentially tried to influence the intense diplomatic negotiations with Haiti’s Foreign Minister Anténor Firmin over the USA acquiring (or even leasing) this harbour. Rather than put undue pressure on Firmin through the use of force or coercion—such as that displayed by other US officials during the negotiations—Douglass extended an invitation to Haitian President Hyppolite to the Chicago World's Fair from US President Harrison. As a fleet of US gunships patrolled the Haitian bay on supposed “routine” manoeuvres, Haitian leaders’ stance in the negotiations did not change. Firmin responded to the USA's “request” to acquire Haitian territory with a firm “no.” The Fair invitation prompted a different response: Haitian officials enthusiastically agreed to participate.

US newspapers, at the time, described Douglass as more Haitian than American after negotiations for the harbour broke off; although they used this description as a way of linking the failure successfully to negotiate the acquisition of the harbour to Douglass's racial connections with (black) Haiti. In these claims, Douglass did not fight for US interests, but for those of his racial kin. Supportive of Haiti and emboldened by what its presence meant for the futures of people of African descent in the Atlantic world, Douglass was equally supportive of the USA's right to acquire territory and “foothold[s]” in the Caribbean—bringing the USA in line with “every other great nation in the world.”

Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic contains only a few lines about Haiti. In a text sharply concerned with articulating the after-effects of displacement and dislocation for people of African descent in the Atlantic world, Gilroy’s turn to and away from Haiti is both startling and intentional. As seen in the lines above, while Gilroy's text might eschew a focus on national particularities, he clearly understands that any construction of black political thought must engage with Haiti, the nation and its revolutionary beginnings. Gilroy pushes for this recognition but turns his lens in The Black Atlantic to chronotopic rhythms and supranational connectivities—such as the dispersals and displacements of Atlantic racial slavery—that have shaped African Atlantic peoples.

Yet, the above goes further than merely calling for more scholarship on an understudied nation-state. Gilroy's assertion that periodising modern black politics requires fresh thinking about Haiti makes clear that politics for those within the black Atlantic resides not merely in transnational radical antislavery movements or circulating geographies of black resistance, but also in the presence and continued reality of black nation-states. This stress and opening stands out in a text that argues against reducing blackness to a reductive national identity. While a laudable and important call, the rest of The Black Atlantic leaves unaddressed Gilroy's demand for fresh thinking about a self-avowed nation-state that emerged from years of bloodied struggle in 1804 as the first republic of people of African descent, the second republic in the Americas and the only nation successfully to emerge from a slave rebellion. As the epigraph above shows, understanding the political routes—and roots—of people of African descent in the Atlantic world means returning to nations—and specifically Haiti—in order to reassess black politics by placing Haiti at its centre. In the 25 years since Gilroy offered up this challenge, critics have responded with a variety of reassessments of Haiti and its revolution that illuminate the vitality of studies into black power, radical antislavery movements, resistance and Haitian history—and the fresh thinking still needed on black nation-states.

Introduction

In 1804, British abolitionist and lawyer James Stephen discussed what he presented as “The Opportunity.” Published in London, this document presented an assessment of England's opportunities—given the declaration of independence of Haiti—to marshal its commercial interests and, importantly, to recognise Haiti's sovereignty and protect the new nation from French interference. Stephen, who spent time gaining first-hand experience in the Caribbean of the atrocities of Atlantic racial slavery, positions this critical moment in 1804 as a choice—actually more like a political path— that could help Britain and Haiti form a lasting and economically beneficial relationship. Importantly, this path would slight the French and position the influencers in public who meddled in these moves as they steered the conversation about Haiti and sovereignty.

A pivotal figure in British anti-slavery, Stephen may not be as well-known as his contemporaries, William Wilberforce or Thomas Clarkson, but he was well connected—and influential—even eventually marrying Wilberforce’s sister. Born in Dorset, but having worked in St. Kitts and travelled throughout the Caribbean for a time, Stephen returned to England, settling in London. A member of a group of Anglicans focused on philanthropy and service, known as the Clapham Sect or “Saints,” Stephen and “this well-connected, pious, and activist group was the creative center of an extraordinary range of missionary, social, and philanthropic initiatives that would leave an enduring mark on British society”—including the creation of a colony in Sierra Leone.

Stephen, with his African Institution membership, advocacy, writing and links to anti-slavery societies in England, presents an important example of the types of anti-slavery supporters of Haiti. Although this chapter will make clear Stephen's advocacy, it is less interested in charting how he and other English abolitionists thought through and formed their moral obligations against slavery and for freedom. Many scholars have covered the work, thought, agitation and politicking of the Clapham Sect, the African Institution, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, radical anti-slavery in Britain and French and British intrigues at the start of the nineteenth century.

Instead of retreading this known ground, this chapter draws together two disparate voices—James Stephen's and Prince Saunders’s—in order to highlight the related links in their writings on sovereignty, recognition, trade and bodies—and how those terms and issues would be manipulated by Haitian officials, notably Henri Christophe, as a way to legitimate his monarchical state.