Since the bicentennial of Haitian independence in 2004, the field of Haitian literary and cultural studies has expanded considerably. It is no longer possible to claim with the same degree of urgency that Haitian history and literature are being ignored in North Atlantic academe. Not only have Haitian literature panels become a central part of the often social science-focused Haitian Studies Association (which has been in existence for more than thirty years), but numerous conferences and colloquia on both sides of the Atlantic have now been devoted almost singularly to the topic of Haitian literary studies.1 We are witnessing, in fact, something of a revival in Haitian literary studies. Various scholars from both French and Francophone Studies, as well as English, History, and American Studies, are turning their attention to Haiti’s robust literary culture.

This chapter delves into the profound interplay between Haitian revolutionary history, literature, and the broader context of global romanticism. Drawing on the pivotal work Le Romantisme en Haïti: La vie intellectuelle, 1804-1915 by Dolcé, Dorval, and Casthely, it critiques the dominance of Western thought and the triumph of Eurocentrism in global romanticism. Through a meticulous exploration of Haiti’s post-independence history and its relationship to French colonialism, it asserts the emergence of a distinctly national form of romanticism deeply entrenched in the country’s intellectual and literary evolution. Tracing the trajectory of Haitian romanticism from its roots in the Haitian Acte de l’Indépendance to the commencement of the US Occupation, it argues that Haitian poets’ blending of politics, history, and literary creation resonated with, at the same time as it transcended, romantic ideals popular in the British and French traditions. Fusing historical scholarship and literary critique, the chapter aims to reshape perceptions of Haitian intellectual history, unearthing the obscured ties between revolutionary actions, poetic expression, and the global romantic movement.

Marlene Daut’s chapter focuses on Haiti as diasporic crossroads and argues that Haiti is both a geographical and an intellectual meeting place for African American writers at mid-century. For Daut, the stakes are at least twofold, one being to acknowledge African American writing as transnational, thereby altering the geography of American literature, and, second, what the Americas come to be when the Haitian Revolution appears at the center, as it did for these writers. The result, she argues, is to “expose the inherent Africanness of all American literature,” to consider African American literary tradition as multiple and linked to spaces beyond the nation, and finally to understand all American literature as diasporic, as determined not by borders and the geopolitical they assert but “by people and their movements.” In doing so, Daut examines Martin Delany’s Blake, Oneida Debois’s oratory, George Vashon’s and Pierre Faubert’s poetry, the first-known Trinidadian novel by Maxwell Phillip, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, “St. Domingo, Its Revolutions and Its Patriots,” John Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Baron de Vastey’s Réflexions, and the work of James McCune Smith and Henry Bibb.

Since the West Indies saw the forced introduction of the most enslaved Africans in all of the Americas, the most written about element of pre-twentieth-century Caribbean writing in contemporary scholarship is without a doubt plantation slavery, including abolition and slave revolt and rebellion. However, even while drawing attention to these concerns, much of nineteenth-century Caribbean writing, in the works of Cuba’s Félix Varela, Haiti’s Émeric Bergeaud, and Puerto Rico’s Ramón Emeterio Betances, for example, also shows distinct concerns with ideas of sovereignty. Rather than illustrating an obsessive concern with racialized revolution or at once idyllic and treacherous scenes of tropical paradise, the Caribbean writers under discussion in this essay demonstrate a clear shift towards trying to determine the meaning of freedom in a life after slavery, and what kinds of new identities the inhabitants of a post-slavery Caribbean might take on.

The essays in this volume assess the field of early Caribbean literary studies at a moment when it is undergoing important transitions. Our contributors study genres of writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; genres of fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads; non-elite memoirs and letters, such as the narratives of the enslaved and the working classes, especially women. Contributors focus on the multilingual, multi-imperial, and regional literatures of the Caribbean, in keeping with the comparative emphasis in contemporary literary studies. Our contributors infer the cultural presence of non-elite groups within the texts of the dominant classes: can the worlds made by enslaved and indentured people be reconstructed by reading texts that enslavers created? Our contributors move back and forth between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements together in ways that exceed traditional notions of literary influence. The analysis of Caribbean literature before 1920 is a vital exercise in understanding our present moment.

If historical, editorial, and biographical racializations of the life of Louverture by writers like Lacroix and Métral influenced Alphonse de Lamartine in his portrayal of the downfall of the revolutionary hero as a tragic “interracial” family romance, Eméric Bergeaud's narration in Stella (1859) of the divisions between two fictional revolutionaries as a shameful ‘quarrel between brothers’ (137) was influenced by some of the same tropologies that made Louverture's struggle with his children appear Oedipal. Instead of using the “interracial” family romance and its language of patricide to describe Toussaint Louverture and his children, in Stella, Bergeaud focuses on what he paints as an unfortunate, but in the end redemptive, fratricidal conflict between two brothers with different skin colors, Romulus, whose skin color could be ‘compared to the blackest of ebony,’ and Rémus, whose skin Bergeaud said was the ‘pale shade of mahogany’ (8). Bergeaud, for his part, wrote that he had used the names of these Roman figures ‘less with the thought of establishing a one-to-one analogy between them and the historical twins, but because they were brothers’ (20).

In this chapter, through a reading of Louisiana-born author Victor Séjour's representation of the Haitian Revolution in ‘Le Mulâtre’ or ‘The Mulatto,’ originally composed in French and first published in Paris in 1837, I consider the conflation of the literary history of the tragic “mulatto/a” with the literary history of the Haitian Revolution in one of the first short stories written by an American author of African descent. Séjour's role in the development of the important and controversial figure of the tragic “mulatto/a” is crucial because, as David O'Connell has observed, ‘“The Mulatto” was Séjour's personal contribution to the French and U.S. American antislavery movements’ and was thus ‘not simply … a blow struck for the cause of abolition in the French colonies, but … also one of the first manifestations of a “literature of combat” written by an American black’ (O'Connell, 1972, 61). Yet, even more importantly, with this story, Séjour—a man whose father was born in Saint-Domingue, but who lived the majority of his own life in metropolitan France—once again links the U.S. African American literary tradition to a Francophone origin and ultimately to the literary history of the Haitian Revolution. The contribution of ‘Le Mulâtre’ to the same transatlantic print culture of the Haitian Revolution that had posthumously claimed Phillis Wheatley as its poet laureate thus suggests that a Franco-Haitian grammar of resistance to slavery continued to be one of the most abiding ways that the Atlantic hemisphere's people of color turned references to the Revolution into a trans-historical language for the political aspirations and frustrations of their own days.

While the European and U.S. American authors whose writings comprise a great deal of the literary history of the Haitian Revolution certainly dominated what scholar Nick Nesbitt has called the ‘global discursive sphere’ (2005, 29) when it came to writing about the Haitian Revolution, people of color, and especially those who would come to call themselves Haitians, hardly stood by in silence. Many free people of color in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, like André Rigaud, Toussaint Louverture, and Julien Raimond, as we have seen, contested the insulting terminology used to describe people of color as well as the monstrous characterizations of people of “mixed race” as vengeful “mulattoes” who were primarily responsible for the bloody quality of the Revolution. Post-independence Haiti, too, would see its fair share of authors who sought to contest the dominant image produced in European writing of “Africans” and all of their descendants as hopelessly inferior and degraded. Much of early Haitian literature and historiography was, in the words of Vèvè Clark, ‘designed to reflect or radically alter political realities’ by celebrating what Pierre Nora has called the ‘lieux de mémoire’ (Nora, 7) and by showcasing the ‘other side of history’ (Clark, 241). David Scott has called such a form of writing ‘vindicationism’ and defines the term as writing which describes the ‘practice of providing evidence to refute a disagreeable or incorrect claim and a practice of reclamation, and, indeed, of redemption of what has been denied’ (Scott, 83, italics in the original).

In his Haïti: ses progrès et son avenir (1862), which would incidentally appear with the same publisher (E. Dentu) as Stella, the nineteenth-century French literary critic Alexandre Bonneau listed Eméric Bergeaud's novel in his bibliography of works about Haiti that his readers might consult for additional information about the country. Bonneau's bibliography, which contained just over 55 works by travel writers, former French colonists, and Europeans as well as Haitian historians and memoirists, comprised in the mind of its author the most ‘essential, important, or interesting’ works on the subject of Haiti. Bonneau explained that this list, in any case, was not meant to be exhaustive, since ‘[t]he bibliography of Haiti would fill an entire volume if we wanted to cite all of the works relating thereto’ (165). While many of Bonneau's entries contain no annotations at all, the brief note he included after mentioning Bergeaud's novel explained that Stella is ‘a historical and political novel about Haiti’ wherein ‘the author personifies the black race [race noire] under the name of Romulus, and the mulatto class [classe de mulâtre] under the name of Rémus’ (172). This description comes in spite of the fact that, as we have seen, Bergeaud never once uses the term ‘mulatto’ or any other “racial” taxonomic marker in his novel of over 300 pages.

While in some respects ‘Theresa, a Haytien Tale’ (1828) is quite conventional in its portrayal of a free woman of color living in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, Madame Paulina, who seeks to preserve the virtue of her daughters at all costs, in other respects, the serialized short story is quite radical in its suggestion that this same woman's daughter, Theresa, was ultimately responsible for the independence of Haiti. While Zelica uses female revolutionaries of color largely to critique the violence of the Haitian Revolution and to express anxieties about “miscegenation,” ‘Theresa’ uses what is described by its author as the very ‘agency’ (644) of its eponymous female protagonist of color in order to enter into a conversation about the place of “non-white” women in both the Haitian Revolution and the pre-Civil War project of “racial” uplift in the United States. As one of the first two short stories written in publication outlets designed primarily for writers of color, and both of which are set in Saint-Domingue, ‘Theresa’ punctuates the interest and relevance of Haiti for the antebellum African American community; but by portraying its heroine, Theresa, as the hero of the Haitian Revolution and thus as responsible for the subsequent independence of Haiti, the tale fills a lacuna in writing about the Haitian Revolution circulating in the U.S., as well as in the broader Atlantic World, which often remained silent on the subject of female revolutionaries who fought on the side of the Haitian revolutionists.

As an anonymously published short story that takes a heroic woman of color as its primary protagonist and was published in a primarily African American venue, ‘Theresa’ is probably one of the least well-known nineteenth-century representations of the Haitian Revolution. Because of its content and the circumstances under which it was published, however, it is also perhaps one of the most important.

My research into the vast world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionary print culture reveals that literary texts dealing with the Haitian Revolution from 1789 to 1865, whether published as fiction or nonfiction, had a broad influence on not only early understandings of the events, but on later popular historiographies like C.L.R James's widely consulted The Black Jacobins (1938). James's highly influential text, which explicitly references the writings of some of the most infamous promoters of taxonomic thinking with respect to “race” in Saint-Domingue, such as Moreau de Saint-Méry, Baron de Wimpffen, Hilliard D'Auberteuil, and Pamphile de Lacroix, also bears the uncanny influence of the British naval officer Marcus Rainsford's An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805). Even though James refers to Rainsford's history as a ‘panegyric’ and a ‘propaganda pamphlet,’ like Rainsford long before him, James famously promulgated the idea that Toussaint Louverture's ascent to leadership depended in great part on the act of literacy, and specifically, on the act of Louverture's reading and interpretation of the famous ‘Black Spartacus’ passage contained in works signed by the abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal.

The most salient and widely utilized example of the ‘Black Spartacus’ comes from Raynal's celebrated compilation, Histoire des deux Indes (1770–1780), wherein he foreshadowed that a ‘grand homme’ would liberate the slaves and lead them towards revenge. Raynal writes: