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
Introduction 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
Part II, “Creating Enlightened Citizens: The Periodicals of Saint-Domingue in the 1760s,” begins at the end of the Seven Years War. An era of deep colonial discontent, many colonists were also confident that their colony had turned the page on an earlier tumultuous history to enter a future of civilized amenities and cultural achievement. Part II explores their cultural aspirations through the colony’s new periodicals: the long-running Affiches Américaines and its ephemeral siblings, the Journal de Saint-Domingue and the Iris Américaine. Together they advanced a coherent, gendered Enlightenment project that urged readers to identify themselves as French and American, patriots and citizens, and connected those identities with the Enlightenment practices of civil discourse and civilized taste. The introduction considers the meaning of Habermas’s “public sphere” in a slave society of hardening racial barriers; it concludes by briefly sketching the political, social, and economic situation of the colony at war’s end and the tensions between planters and merchants, colonists and royal governance that generated controversy and crisis in the postwar years.
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- A Caribbean EnlightenmentIntellectual Life in the British and French Colonial Worlds, 1750–1792, pp. 97 - 107Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023