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' under discussion in
this literary history reveals that enlightenment racial 'science' was
the primary vehicle through which the Haitian Revolution was
interpreted 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 tropes - the 'monstrous hybrid', the 'tropical temptress',
the 'tragic mulatto/a', and the 'colored historian' - 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 coincide with present-day desires to
render insignificant and 'unthinkable' the second independent
republic of the New World.
