Modernity Disavowed

Fischer Sibylle Fischer

Description

Modernity Disavowed is a pathbreaking study of the cultural, political, and philosophical significance of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Revealing how the radical antislavery politics of this seminal event have been suppressed and ignored in historical and cultural records over the past two hundred years, Sibylle Fischer contends that revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal are central to the formation and understanding of Western modernity. She develops a powerful argument that the denial of revolutionary antislavery eventually became a crucial ingredient in a range of hegemonic thought, including Creole nationalism in the Caribbean and G. W. F. Hegel's master-slave dialectic.Fischer draws on history, literary scholarship, political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory to examine a range of material, including Haitian political and legal documents and nineteenth-century Cuban and Dominican literature and art. She demonstrates that at a time when racial taxonomies were beginning to mutate into scientific racism and racist biology, the Haitian revolutionaries recognized the question of race as political. Yet, as the cultural records of neighboring Cuba and the Dominican Republic show, the story of the Haitian Revolution has been told as one outside politics and beyond human language, as a tale of barbarism and unspeakable violence. From the time of the revolution onward, the story has been confined to the margins of history: to rumors, oral histories, and confidential letters. Fischer maintains that without accounting for revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal, Western modernity-including its hierarchy of values, depoliticization of social goals having to do with racial differences, and privileging of claims of national sovereignty-cannot be fully understood.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Haití
• History of the Americas
• Haiti

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822385509
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

modernity disavowed

A John Hope Franklin Center Book

Sibylle Fischer

Modernity Disavowed

haiti and the cultures of slavery

in the age of revolution

Duke University Press

Durham & London

2004

∫2004 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Scala with Franklin Gothic display

by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Fischer, Sibylle.

Modernity disavowed : Haiti and the cultures of slavery in

the age of revolution / by Sibylle Fischer.

p. cm.

Includes index.

isbn0-8223-3252-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

isbn0-8223-3290-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Haiti—History—Revolution, 1791–1804—Literature

and the revolution. 2. Slave insurrections. 3. Blacks—

Cuba—History. 4. Blacks—Dominican Republic—

History. 5. Literature and history. 6. Slavery in literature.

I. Title.

f1923.f57 2004

972.94%03—dc22

2003017792

for liam

Contents

Prefaceix Introduction: Truncations of Modernity

1

pa rt i c u ba 1 The Deadly Hermeneutics of the Trial of José Antonio Aponte 41

2 Civilization and Barbarism: Cuban Wall Painting 3 Beyond National Culture, the Abject: The Case of Plácido 77 4 Cuban Antislavery Narratives and the Origins of Literary Discourse 107

pa rt i i san to d o m i n g o / t h e d o m i n i c an r e p u b l i c 5 Memory, Trauma, History 131 6 Guilt and Betrayal in Santo Domingo 155 7 What Do the Haitians Want? 169 8 Fictions of Literary History 180

57

pa rt i i i sa i n t d o m i n g u e / h a i t i 9 Literature and the Theater of Revolution 201 10 ‘‘General Liberty, or The Planters in Paris’’ 214

11 Foundational Fictions: Postrevolutionary Constitutions I 227 12 Life in the Kingdom of the North 245 13 Liberty and Reason of State: Postrevolutionary Constitutions II 260 Conclusion 273

Appendix A. Imperial Constitution of Haiti, 1805 Appendix B. Chronology283 Notes287 Index355

viii Contents

275

Preface

It was no doubt one of the most extraordinary events of the Age of Revolution: the overthrow of the slaveholding regime in the French colony of Saint Domingue, the ‘‘pearl of the Antilles,’’ by insurgent slaves and their free allies and the establishment of an independent black state in 1804. One might have expected that the Haitian Revo- lution would figure prominently in accounts of the revolutionary period, on a par with the revolution in France and the events that led to the foundation of the United States of America. That is not so. To this day, most accounts of the period that shaped Western modernity and placed notions of liberty and equality at the center of political thought fail to mention the only revolution that centered around the issue of racial equality. Why did this happen? And what does it mean for the ways in which we conventionally think about Western modernity? Some- times it takes longer to arrive at a question than to produce an answer. This project started as a study of nineteenth-century Carib- bean literatures and the beginnings of national cultures. Eventually I came to feel that at the core of many literary texts and literary and cultural histories there was a certain mystery: a suspended contra- diction, an unexpected flight into fantasy where one might have expected a reckoning with reality, an aesthetic judgment too harsh to be taken at face value, or a failure to deal with what we know to have been the main issues of concern. I came to think that there were more, and more complex, connections between these odd moments and the ‘‘horrors of Saint Domingue’’ than the cursory references to the fears of the Creole population in most literary histories sug- gested. To be sure, the fear of a repetition of the events in Haiti led to denials of their transcendence and the suppression of any informa- tion relating to them. But silence and fear are not beyond interroga- tion. Was this fear directed at the same prospects in all slaveholding areas? Moreover, is it not the case that our fears often have a greater hold over us than our positive beliefs and commitments? There is by