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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2015
Black sovereignty in the Atlantic world pivots, as in the case of Haiti, from a haunting apparition to a haunting recognition, never quite forming a tangible, and legal, sovereignty unto itself. Haiti's tangled and complicated geopolitical positioning within the Atlantic world gives this spectral state of being meaning. Sovereignty, or, as I will suggest, the processes of recognizing sovereignty and the material shape of its appearance, imbues Haiti's sovereign claims with a specific racialized threshold. Reading along Haiti's racio-national edge also illuminates the tenuous position on the international stage of Liberia and Abyssinia – two nations, along with Haiti, that represented the only nation-states in the Atlantic world by the end of the nineteenth century with a majority black population and independence. Although a small representative group, these sites deserve far more scrutiny within the fields of race and sovereignty studies by legal scholars and scholars of transnational American studies, especially because of the ways the nations battled for recognition and respect amongst other nation-states who may have attached derogatory notions of humanity onto the political work and rights of these self-avowed black nations. Haiti is an important example of this phenomenon.
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8 Ulysse, Gina Athena, “Sibylle Fischer” (interview), BOMB Magazine, 90 (Winter 2005)Google Scholar, available at http://bombmagazine.org/article/2712.
9 For more on this vast scholarship see the classic James, C. L. R., The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Penguin, 2001)Google Scholar; in addition to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Books, 1997); Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and, more recently, White, Ashli, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.
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17 I explore this concept in far more detail in my forthcoming monograph, All Hail the Queen: Haiti, Black Sovereignty, and the Power of Recognition in the 19th Century Atlantic World.
18 The rare instances of entreaties of recognition (such as that offered by France in 1825) tended to come with enchaining capital conditions and fees.
19 In other places, I have categorized how Haitian leaders responded to these views of absurdity by enchaining racialized labour to Haitian soil. See Salt, Karen, “Haitian Soil for the Citizen's Soul,” in Adamson, Joni and Ruffin, Kim, eds., American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons (New York: Routledge, 2013), 37–49Google Scholar.
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24 Examples of this include note 25 and Huggan, Graham and Tiffin, Helen, eds., Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar, and the new journal Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities.
25 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and Handley, George B., “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth,” in DeLoughrey and Handley eds., Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 3–39, 4.
26 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)Google Scholar, xix.
27 My conceptualization of twilight islands in the Caribbean context is informed by anthropologist Marc Augé's conceptualization of non-places. For more on this see Augé, Marc, Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso Books, 2009)Google Scholar.
28 Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean, 36.
29 Navassa Phosphate Company, Report of Dr. G. A. Liebig (Baltimore: Navassa Phosphate Company, 1864), 5.
30 Ibid., 8.
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35 Cushman, Gregory, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 39.
36 Burnett, “The Edges of Empire,” 799, original emphasis.
37 “48 USC 1411 Guano Districts,” Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School, at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/48/1411, accessed Sept. 2013, emphasis added.
38 Mr. Cooper to the President, 24 June 1858, letter, S. Ex. Doc. No 37, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. (1860). Valuation listed also comes from the same executive document.
39 Ibid., italics mine.
40 Ibid.
41 Commander Turner to Mr. Toucey, 16 August 1858, letter, S. Ex. Doc. No 37, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. (1860).
42 See Clark, B. C., A Plea for Hayti, with a Glance at Her Relations with France, England and the United States, for the Last Sixty Years (Boston: Eastburn Press, 1853)Google Scholar; and Clark, B. C., Remarks upon United States Intervention in Hayti, with Comments upon the Correspondence Connected with It (Boston: Eastburn Press, 1853)Google Scholar.
43 Mr. Clark to Mr. Cass, 13 Nov. 1858, letter. S. Ex. Doc. No 37, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. (1860).
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Mr. Appleton to Mr. Clark, 17 Nov. 1858, letter, S. Ex. Doc. No 37, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. (1860).
47 For more on the riot see Cashman, John, “‘Slaves under Our Flag’: The Navassa Island Riot of 1889,” Maryland Historian, 24, 2 (Fall/Winter 1993), 1–21Google Scholar.
48 Spadi, Fabio, “Navassa: Legal Nightmares in a Biological Heaven?”, IBRU Boundary and Security Bulletin, 9, 3 (2001), 115Google Scholar.
49 “Arguing over an Island of Biological Treasures,” UNESCO Courier, 51, 12 (1999), 13.
50 Bauduy, Jennifer, “US, Haiti Face off over a Tiny Island's ‘Green Gold,’” Christian Science Monitor, 90, 228 (20 Oct. 1998),Google Scholar 1.
51 For more on this see Crosby, Alfred, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 For more on a planetary sovereign see Wainwright, Joel and Mann, Geoff, “Climate Leviathan,” Antipode, 45, 1 (2013), 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
53 For a more detailed consideration of the term “slow violence” see Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
54 Ted Widmer, “Little America,” New York Times, 30 June 2007.
55 For more see Bruyneel, Kevin, Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of US–Indigenous Relations (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
56 Dash, J. Michael, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998)Google Scholar, 45.