Book contents
- A Caribbean Enlightenment
- Ideas in Context
- A Caribbean Enlightenment
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Text
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 What Is a Caribbean Enlightenment?
- Part I Before Breadfruit
- Part II Creating Enlightened Citizens
- Introduction to Part II
- Chapter 4 Making the Affiches, Making Americans
- Chapter 5 American Exceptionalism, Political Economy, and the Postwar Order in the Journal de Saint-Domingue
- Chapter 6 A Slave Named Voltaire; or, Gender and the Making of American Taste
- Conclusion to Part II
- Part III Tristram in the Tropics: or, Reading in Jamaica
- Part IV Cultivating Knowledge
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion to Part II
from Part II - Creating Enlightened Citizens
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2023
- A Caribbean Enlightenment
- Ideas in Context
- A Caribbean Enlightenment
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Note on the Text
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 What Is a Caribbean Enlightenment?
- Part I Before Breadfruit
- Part II Creating Enlightened Citizens
- Introduction to Part II
- Chapter 4 Making the Affiches, Making Americans
- Chapter 5 American Exceptionalism, Political Economy, and the Postwar Order in the Journal de Saint-Domingue
- Chapter 6 A Slave Named Voltaire; or, Gender and the Making of American Taste
- Conclusion to Part II
- Part III Tristram in the Tropics: or, Reading in Jamaica
- Part IV Cultivating Knowledge
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The conclusion to Part II returns to the cultural aspirations expressed by colonists earlier in the decade by analyzing a debate over the viability of an academic society on the island published in the Affiches in 1769. Two White colonists took diametrically opposed positions on the question before a White author, who assumed the identity of the enslaved “Toussaint,” sharply satirized the debate. In the course of absurd boasts about his intellectual prowess, “Toussaint” countered the arguments in favor of establishing an intellectual society. His exaggerated rusticity traced unambiguously the charmed circle of a White public of allegedly rational citizens and their elegant White wives, which was simultaneously conjured and addressed by the periodicals of Saint-Domingue. In the context of hardening racial barriers in the colony, “Toussaint” held the line between a White public that could participate in informed debate and refined amusements and the Black masses who (his burlesque suggested) innately lacked the capacity to do the same.
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- A Caribbean EnlightenmentIntellectual Life in the British and French Colonial Worlds, 1750–1792, pp. 162 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023