Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865

Posted in Books, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs on 2015-12-22 04:08Z by Steven

Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865

Liverpool University Press
May 2015
848 pages
234 x 156mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781781381847
Paperback ISBN: 9781781381854

Marlene L. Daut, Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was an event of monumental world-historical significance, and here, in the first systematic literary history of those events, Haiti’s war of independence is examined through the eyes of its actual and imagined participants, observers, survivors, and cultural descendants. The ‘transatlantic print culture of the Haitian Revolution’ that this literary history shows was created by novelists, poets, dramatists, memoirists, biographers, historians, journalists, and eye-witness observers, revealing enlightenment racial ‘science’ as the primary vehicle through which the Haitian Revolution was interpreted, historicized, memorialized, and fictionalized by nineteenth-century Haitians, Europeans, and U.S. Americans alike.

Through its author’s contention that the Haitian revolutionary wars were incessantly racialized by four constantly recurring racial tropes—the ‘monstrous hybrid’, the ‘tropical temptress’, the ‘tragic mulatto/a’, and the ‘mulatto legend of history’, Tropics of Haiti shows the ways in which the nineteenth-century tendency to understand Haiti’s revolution in primarily racial terms has affected present day demonizations of Haiti and Haitians. In the end, this new archive of Haitian revolutionary writing, much of which has until now remained unknown to the contemporary reading public, invites us to examine how nineteenth-century attempts to paint Haitian independence as the result of a racial revolution coincides with present-day desires to render insignificant and ‘unthinkable’ the second independent republic of the New World.

CONTENTS

  • PRELUDE: On “Haitian Exceptionalism”
  • INTRODUCTION: From Enlightenment Literacy to Mulatto/a Vengeance
  • PART ONE: THE MONSTROUS HYBRIDITY OF MULATTO/A VENGEANCE
    • 1. Baron de Vastey, Colonial Discourse, and the Global “Scientific” Sphere
    • 2. Monstrous Testimony and Baron de Vastey in 19th-Century Historical Writing About Haiti
    • 3. Victor Hugo and the Rhetorical Possibilities of Monstrous Hybridity in Revolutionary Fiction
  • PART TWO: TRANSGRESSING THE TROPE OF THE TROPICAL TEMPTRESS
    • 4. Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Daughter and La Mulâtre comme il y a beaucoup de blanches (1803)
    • 5. “Born to Command:” Leonora Sansay and the Paradoxes of Female Resistance in Zelica; the Creole
    • 6. Theresa to the Rescue!: African American Women’s Resistance and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution
  • PART THREE: THE TROPE OF THE TRAGIC MULATTO/A AND THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION
    • 7. “Sons of White Fathers”: The Tragic Mulatto/a and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre”
    • 8. Between the Family and the Nation: Toussaint L’Ouverture and The Interracial Family Romance of the Haitian Revolution
    • 9. Romance and the Republic: Eméric Bergeaud’s Ideal History of the Haitian Revolution
  • PART FOUR: REQUIEM FOR THE “MULATTO LEGEND OF HISTORY”
    • 10. The Color of History: The Transatlantic Abolitionist Movement and William Wells Brown’s “Never-to-be-forgiven-course-of the-mulattoes”
    • 11. Victor Schoelcher, “L’Imagination Jaune,” and the Francophone Geneaology of the “Mulatto Legend of History”
    • 12. “Let us Be Humane after the Victory: Pierre Faubert’s New Humanism
  • CODA : Today’s Haitian Exceptionalism
  • Works Cited
  • Index
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Louisiana Creole Literature: A Historical Study

Posted in Biography, Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Louisiana, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2013-12-05 20:01Z by Steven

Louisiana Creole Literature: A Historical Study

University Press of Mississippi
2013-10-17
256 pages
6 x 9 inches, bibliography, index
Hardback ISBN: 9781617039102

Catharine Savage Brosman, Professor Emerita of French
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Louisiana Creole Literature is a broad-ranging critical reading of belles lettres—in both French and English—connected to and generally produced by the distinctive Louisiana Creole peoples, chiefly in the southeastern part of the state. The book covers primarily the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the flourishing period during which the term Creole had broad and contested cultural reference in Louisiana.

The study consists in part of literary history and biography. When available and appropriate, each discussion–arranged chronologically–provides pertinent personal information on authors, as well as publishing facts. Readers will find also summaries and evaluation of key texts, some virtually unknown, others of difficult access. Brosman illuminates the biographies and works of Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Adolphe Duhart, among others. In addition, she challenges views that appear to be skewed regarding canon formation. The book places emphasis on poetry and fiction, reaching from early nineteenth-century writing through the twentieth century to selected works by poets still writing in the early twenty-first century. A few plays are treated also, especially by Victor Séjour. Louisiana Creole Literature examines at length the writings of important Francophone figures, and certain Anglophone novelists likewise receive extended treatment. Since much of nineteenth-century Louisiana literature was transnational, the book considers Creole-based works which appeared in Paris as well as those published locally.

Catharine Savage Brosman, Houston, Texas, is professor emerita of French at Tulane University. She is the author of numerous books of French literary history and criticism, two volumes of nonfiction prose, and nine collections of poetry.

Contents

  • Preface
  • Chapter One. Louisiana and Its Population: The Historical Background
  • Chapter Two. Features of Early Louisiana Literature and the Cultural Milieu
  • Chapter Three. Pere Rouquette and Other Early Francophone Poets
  • Chapter Four. Mercier and Other Novelists Born in the Early Nineteenth Century
  • Chapter Five. Mid-Nineteenth-Century Immigrant Francophone Authors
  • Chapter Six. Fiction and Drama by Mid-Nineteenth-Century Free People of Color
  • Chapter Seven. Poetry by Mid-Nineteenth-Century Free People of Color
  • Chapter Eight. Cable and Hearn
  • Chapter Nine. Late Francophone Figures: de la Houssaye, du Quesnay, Dessommes
  • Chapter Ten. Kate Chopin
  • Chapter Eleven. King, Stuart, and Others
  • Chapter Twelve. Some Twentieth-Century Louisiana Prose Writers
  • Chapter Thirteen. Louisiana Creole Poets of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
  • Notes
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Index
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Science of desire: Race and representations of the Haitian revolution in the Atlantic world, 1790-1865

Posted in Dissertations, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Slavery on 2012-04-15 16:09Z by Steven

Science of desire: Race and representations of the Haitian revolution in the Atlantic world, 1790-1865

University of Notre Dame
July 2008
489 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3436234
ISBN: 9781124353197

Marlene Leydy Daut, Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation reads representations of the Haitian Revolution with and against the popular historical understanding of the events as the result of the influence of enlightenment philosophy or the Declaration of the Rights of Man on Toussaint L’Ouverture; or what I have called a “literacy narrative.” This understanding is most visible in texts such as C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) and reproduces the idea that Toussaint read Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (1772) and thus became aware that slavery was contrary to nature and was inspired to lead the revolt. Instead, I show how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of the Revolution were most often mediated through the discourse of scientific debates about racial miscegenation–an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century obsession with what happens when white people produce children with black people–making the Revolution the result of the desire for vengeance on the part of miscegenated figures, whose fathers refused to recognize or defend them, rather than a desire for the ideals of liberty and equality; or what I have called the “mulatto vengeance narrative.”

Chapter one examines the figure of the “tropical temptress” in the anonymously published epistolary romance La Mulâtre comme il y a beaucoup de blanches (1803). Chapter two takes a look at “evil/degenerate mulattoes” in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1855) and Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826). In chapter three I analyze the trope of the “tragic mulatto/a” in French abolitionist Alphonse de Lamartine’s verse drama Toussaint L’Ouverture (1850); the Louisiana born Victor Séjour’s short story, “The Mulatto” (1837); and Haitian author Eméric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859). Chapters four and five look at the image of the “inspired mulatto” in French novelist Alexandre Dumas’s adventure novel, Georges (1843); black American writer William Wells Brown’s abolitionist speech turned pamphlet, “St. Domingo; its Revolutions and its Patriots” (1854); and the Haitian poet and dramatist Pierre Faubert’s play, Ogé; ou le préjugé de couleur (1841; 1856). By insisting on a discourse of science as a way to understand these representations, I show how these texts contributed to the pervasive after-life of the Haitian Revolution in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World, on the one hand, but also created an entire vocabulary of desire with respect to miscegenation, revolution, and slavery, on the other.

CONTENTS

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
    • Part 1: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution
    • Part 2: Literacy Narratives and the Haitian Revolution
    • Part 3: Notes on Terminology
  • Chapter 1: Tropical Temptresses: Desire and Repulsion in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue
    • Part 1: The Color of Virtue
    • Part 2: Colonialism and Despotism
    • Part 3: Desire and Abolition
  • Chapter 2: Black Son, White Father: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”
    • Part 1: Victor Hugo’s Parricide
    • Part 2: Melville’s “Usher of the Golden-Rod”
  • Chapter 3: Between the Family and the Nation: Parricide and the Tragic Mulatto/a in 19th-century Fictions of the Haitian Revolution
    • Part 1: Séjour’s Oedipal Curse
    • Part 2: Toussaint’s Children
    • Part 3: Bergeaud’s Romantic Vision
  • Chapter 4: The “Inspired Mulatto:” Enlightenment and Color Prejudice in the African Diaspoa
    • Part 1: Alexandre Dumas and the Haitian Revolution
    • Part 2: Economics and Civilization
    • Part 3: The “Never-to-be-forgiven course of the mulattoes”
  • Chapter 5: “Let Us Be Humane After the Victory:” Pierre Faubert’s New Humanism
  • Conclusion
  • Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Sons of White Fathers”: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2011-01-01 21:53Z by Steven

“Sons of White Fathers”: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

Nineteenth-Century Literature
Volume 65, Number 1 (June 2010)
Pages 1–37
DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2010.65.1.1

Marlene L. Daut, Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

Although many literary critics have traced the genealogy of the tragic mulatto/a to nineteenth-century U.S. letters, in this essay I argue that the theme of tragedy and the mixed-race character predates the mid-nineteenth-century work of Lydia Maria Child and William Wells Brown and cannot be considered a solely U.S. American concept. The image can also be traced to early-nineteenth-century French colonial literature, where the trope surfaced in conjunction with the image of the Haitian Revolution as a bloody race war. Through a reading of the Louisiana-born Victor Séjour’s representation of the Haitian Revolution, “Le Mulâtre” or “The Mulatto,” [Read the entire text in French here.] originally composed in French and first published in Paris in 1837, this essay considers the implications of 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.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: , , , , ,

Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

Posted in Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2010-11-16 06:39Z by Steven

Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

Southern Spaces
An interdisciplinary journal about regions, places, and cultures of the American South and their global connections
2007-08-28

Ed Piacentino, Professor of English
High Point University, High Point, North Carolina

This essay examines Victor Séjour’sThe Mulatto” (1837), a short story acknowledged as the first fictional work by an African American. Through its representation of physical and psychological effects, Séjour’s story, a narrative of slavery in Saint-Domingue, also inaugurated the literary delineation of slavery’s submission-rebellion binary. The enslaved raconteur in “The Mulatto” voices protest and appeals to social consciousness and sympathy, anticipating the embedded narrators in works of later writers throughout the Plantation Americas.

Sections:

  • Introduction
  • Liberated Narrative Voice
  • Restricted Space
  • Clotel’s Rebellion
  • Local Color
  • Conclusion & Notes
  • Recommended Resources
  • “The Mulatto”

Introduction

A little-known story first translated into English in 1995 by Philip Barnard for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, “Le Mulâtre” (“The Mulatto”) by Victor Séjour (1817-1874), a New Orleans free man of color, was initially published in the March 1837 issue of Cyrille Bisette’s Parisian abolitionist journal La Revue des Colonies. La Revue was a monthly periodical of “Colonial Politics, Administration, Justice, Education and Customs” owned and sponsored by a “society of men of color.” A recent immigrant to Paris, Séjour was in an amenable environment among kindred spirits who shared his sentiments about slavery.

…Although little known in its era, “The Mulatto” presents the binary of submission and rebellion that became a motif in U.S. based slave narratives and novelized autobiographies treating racialized sexual harassment and/or exploitation of mulattas such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, antislavery novels such as William Wells Brown’s Clotel or; The President’s Daughter and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, and even late nineteenth-century southern local color stories with embedded former slave storytellers, such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius. In exposing the brutality of the slave system, such as the impact of miscegenation on persons of mixed race; the sexual violation of enslaved persons; and the physical and psychological brutalities of slavery—particularly the devastating effects on family life of whites as well as on blacks—“The Mulatto” deploys strategies for antislavery protest writing that will appear in antebellum slave narratives and anti-slavery novels and in postbellum fiction about slavery…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , ,