This chapter focuses on the political commitments of the Cénacle, a group of authors whose writings appeared in Haitian print culture in the 1830s. Among the Cénacle’s political aims was the development of a unique national literature structured around a democratic romanticization of Black and Indigenous figures. While scholars have traditionally historicized the Haitian Cénacle as merely imitative of French romanticism, this chapter argues that the writings of the Cénacle instead reveal the limitations of idealized European romantic citizenship. In particular, Haitian romanticism’s engagement with Vodou, and specifically Vodou as practiced by women and gender fluid people, offers a different way of imagining collective historical memory, albeit one that cannot be fully embraced by the writers of the Cénacle. Through readings of Haitian print culture, this chapter demonstrates how the Cénacle mobilized Haitian Vodou practices in order to reshape the nation’s political future, and in doing so, attends to the unnamed Vodouwizans abandoned in the margins of romantic history.

This chapter examines René Depestre’s epic poem Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien. It contextualizes Vodou as a cultural and spiritual lieu de mémoire that was a major turning point leading to the Haitian Revolution. It analyzes the monumental role that the Vodou religion played in creating a sense of collective identity and consciousness that would eventually lead to the Ceremony of Bois Caïman. I argue that Vodou was at the heart of the resistance movement and provided agency for the enslaved. This agency allowed them to question the colonized Christian white god and embrace their own African spirituality. In so doing the enslaved were able to come together to create community and affirm their identity/ies. I then argue that the five sections of the poem depict Vodou as a framework for denouncing racism in the US South, as various lwas travel to Alabama, where lynching was commonplace, to decry the US’s political and religious hypocrisy and to avenge the enslaved and their families in the face of the wickedness and hatred associated with slavery. Depestre decries the hypocrisy of the white god and suggests to readers that the lwas show true humanity.

Histories of colonial energy tend to emphasize the development of the steam engine, the rise of electric power, or the beginnings of industrial agriculture, through the rise of cash crops such as indigo, cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Chapter 1, “Powering the Soul: Queer Energies in Haitian Vodou,” argues that any history of colonial energy production must also recognize that nonhuman forms of power were dependent on the human energy of enslaved labor, particularly reproductive labor. Yet far from considering enslaved labor as the flexible, malleable unit of energy desired by capitalist production, this chapter instead argues that Vodou radically disrupted the logics of racial capital and coerced biological reproduction. Vodou personhood is antithetical to the calculus of racial capitalism, and its porosity, I argue, helped reconfigure the plantation’s structures of power to resist imperialist extraction. Through an archive that ranges from colonial treatises to Vodou practices and epistemologies, this chapter highlights the ways in which Haitians expanded the category of gender and reimagined the energies of labor and birthwork under conditions of biocapitalist violence.