The declarations of rights issued during the American and French revolutions are the most important outcomes of the eighteenth-century’s debates about natural rights. Concise and clear in their language, these declarations distilled decades of theorizing into easily understood axioms meant to make citizens aware of their rights and of their entitlement to participate in the making of the laws under which they lived. The eighteenth-century declarations on both sides of the Atlantic were drawn up by legislators determined to protect the institution of slavery that so flagrantly contradicted their sweeping statements about natural rights, and they were not intended to grant women equal rights with men. Their expansive language, however, provided a basis for excluded groups to formulate demands that rights be extended to them, even if the authors of the declarations had not intended to do so. The most influential of these documents, the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, used sweeping, universal language. Intended as temporary, it was swiftly canonized as the embodiment of the principles of the French Revolution. The more radical French Declaration of 1793 incorporated social rights to welfare, work, and education. Napoleon rejected the idea of including a declaration of rights in the constitution he imposed in France 1799, but the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights showed the lasting power of the tradition inaugurated with the Virginia Declaration of 1776.

As a result of French colonization, Haiti is a nation-state with a predominantly French-speaking written tradition. However, there is also a smaller body of Haitian texts written in Creole, dating back to the eighteenth century. Based on their linguistic and aesthetic characteristics, we can divide the corpus of Haitian Creole letters into two main chronological stages: the great period of emergence that stretches from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century, and the period of emulation. The first period was dominated by texts of a mainly religious, administrative, and political nature. Written for the most part by high-ranking white settlers, these texts, using the local language, were intended for Creole-speaking slaves with a poor command of French. The second period, that of the autonomy of Creole letters or the beginnings of an authentic Creole literary tradition, began in the mid-twentieth century, in parallel with linguistic work to standardize the written code of the national language. This advance in the standardization of Creole led to a significant development of the language’s written code, particularly in the field of literature.

The focus of this chapter is Francophone Haitian women writers. These are writers who are bound by a common idiom, French and/or Creole, and who share similar concerns. What is to be ascertained is whether they occupy a territory in which literature acquires its full meaning. Given the dominance of male writers in Haitian literature, women writers may appear as marginal figures or minor voices. However, what this chapter demonstrates is that women writers have, over many years, challenged the status quo by simply being present and making their voices heard. They offer a female-centered perspective on the tensions and contradictions of Haitian society and, as such, open new doors to imagination. Dealing with such themes as love, loss, otherness, memory, and empathy, Haitian women writers have effectively affirmed the humanistic value of literature. The term écriture de l’urgence, coined by Yanick Lahens to define Haitian literature in general, acquires a special meaning when considering women authors. Urgency does not equate haste. Rather, it refers to the direct confrontation of the writer with reality, history, and the endless possibilities of language.

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.

In July 2019, in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave, Brooklyn went dark. In 90-degree temperatures, over 55,000 customers in Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin, Bergen Beach, and Georgetown lost electricity in one of the largest power outages in New York’s history. Con Edison, the city’s power company, admitted that it deliberately disconnected these neighborhoods in order to prevent a widespread loss of power that would affect wealthier, whiter areas of the city. Although Black neighborhoods earn the highest scores in New York City’s heat vulnerability index (a ranking system that takes into account the proportion of green space to developed space, access to air conditioning, and the percentage of people living below poverty levels), they are the first on the line when the city’s infrastructure fails.1 What the index does not take into account, however, are the social and political risks to which these neighborhoods are also exposed during a blackout. After the lights went out, 200 police officers flooded Brooklyn, with the nebulous mandate to preserve order. A week earlier, the US Department of Justice had announced that it would not press charges against Daniel Pantaleo, the white police officer who killed Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014. Now law enforcement roamed the streets of Canarsie, policing Black children for splashing water in 90-degree heat.

The Bible remains the book of empire. The liberal project of the “the Bible as Literature” has engaged in mostly placing the Bible on a pedestal as an important cultural artifact of the Western imagination, worthy to be read and to be studied in schools or university contexts. The contention of my analysis is the Bible needs to be understood as an ambiguous text in terms of its position vis-à-vis empires. Not only does the Bible as a text is replete with both tendencies, it has also been used both as an instrument of terror and as a tool of liberation. The question of interest in this particular essay is how can one decolonize the Bible? To answer that question, I will use the Book of Revelation as my canvas to show how a particular biblical text may offer both liberative ways for confronting empire and its economic aspects as it can also serve to recolonize. I will situate some of the decolonial impulses of the Book of Revelation in the specific social and political contexts of Haiti, a place where the Bible has been used and continues to be used mostly for colonizing effects.

Accounts of the Age of the Atlantic Revolution generally identify Britain as the nation that lost the War of American independence but thereafter escaped both revolutionary change at home and overseas. Yet, over the half century after 1788 the British Parliament first outlawed what was then the largest slave trading business in the Atlantic world and then became the first imperial power to abolish slavery throughout its transatlantic possessions. In a pioneering exercise of civil society mobilization, the British created waves of demands for the ending of its slave trade and then its transatlantic slave colonies. This phenomenon has also been recently identified as the emergence of “the modern social movement.” Decade after decade the British government became the major agent in the creation of international sanctions against the slave trade. Its example inspired and encouraged similar, if usually less successful, civil society initiatives in Europe and the Americas. At home it formed a model for the expansion of popular participation for other social reforms, by many groups previously excluded from the public arena.

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was a key turning point in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The most successful rebellion by enslaved people in world history, it prompted the first direct colonial representation in a European legislature and created the second independent state in the Americas. Broad-based liberation from slavery won on the battlefield, ratified with the emancipation decrees of 1793-1794, and secured with the 1802-1803 war of independence, served as a continuing reminder of the possibility of emancipation while pressing key questions about the proper structure of post-slavery reconstruction. Haiti was also the first independent state in the Caribbean and Latin America, and the first in the Western Hemisphere to be led by people of African descent. Haitian approaches to governance also paralleled French, Latin American, and U.S. debates about monarchy and authority, liberty and empire, and popular sovereignty and social order. Meanwhile, white U.S. and French responses to Haiti’s successes prompted many revolutionaries in those countries to curtail their ideas about the universalism of revolution.

On 1 January 1804, General Jean Jacques Dessalines officially declared the independence of Haiti. The decades that followed were critical for the new country’s development and were a period of dynamic change as well as colonial continuities. The struggles and debates of the early decades illustrate the contentious post-colonial process of building a black nation-state in a world dominated by racialized slavery. Jean Jacques Dessalines, the first head of state, and subsequent leaders embarked on a political, economic, and social experiment in the Americas: to establish the first black state and fulfill the radical Age of Revolution promises of freedom and equality. This chapter examines how Haitians sought to interpret their revolution’s ideals, in particular the meaning of liberty, and the competing definitions that shaped the country’s political, social, cultural, and economic development. The chapter begins in 1804 and follows the development of the Haitian nation-state until the Revolution of 1843. Across these four decades, we see how various groups in the new country sought to define its economic and political direction as well as create a new culture. Integral to this work were questions of landownership, the organization of labor, and systems of government.

This chapter analyses the wars of independence in Spanish America from the perspective of the Caribbean coast of South America, arguing that this stretch of coast (the pardo coast) constituted a cohesive and coherent geographical space with dynamics that resulted from its demographic structure and geographical location. Because people of African descent constituted the majority of the population of Caribbean South America, a focus on the pardo coast reveals the central role they played during the conflicts that led to the creation of Colombia and Venezuela. Because the pardo coast was in such close proximity to the Caribbean islands, the independence process in the area was greatly determined by what its leaders could achieve in Jamaica and Haiti. Because it was the gateway to South America, the pardo coast was at the vanguard of some of the most modern political experiments of the era and was the center of some of the most violent confrontations of the wars. In short, a focus on the pardo coast offers a useful recalibration of scale that makes visible processes that often get lost in analyses that use national frameworks as units of analysis or that are perceived as uniquely local.

Chapter 5 is a brief history of Haitian indemnities to France. The chapter gives an overview of how France used gunboat diplomacy to negotiate a large indemnity in exchange for recognition of the Haitian state. Even though Haiti won its independence in 1804, transfer to France had to be paid until 1947. Haiti had to borrow from French banks to finance the transfers, which settled them with a crippling stock of sovereign debt for more than a century. I discuss how the debt can be considered odious.

This chapter ruminates on the multiple meanings of home/lakay in the Haitian context, paying close attention to the concept of home in relation to material and physical spaces. Building on the work of scholars who have theorized diaspora as process, condition, and project, it argues that the Haitian Kreyòl term lakay presents fertile ground for extending theories of diaspora. It explores how these dynamics unfold in three works by contemporary Haitian artists: the novel La dot de Sara (2002) by Marie-Célie Agnant, two short stories by Edwidge Danticat from Krik? Krak! (1995), and the song “Fo m Ale” (2000) by Emeline Michel. Taking an approach that is both multilingual (French, English, Kreyòl) and multi-genre (essay, short story, novel, song), the methodology advances a broader argument about approaches to analyzing Haitian literature while calling attention to the importance of how diaspora manifests itself with local specificity.

Despite having no such explicit mandate, IOM is one of the largest global actors in IDP response and protection. Yet, its activities on behalf of IDPs have been remarkably under-studied. This chapter appraises IOM’s obligations under the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (GPs), and assesses the extent to which IOM applies these in its work. The chapter does so in two main ways. First, by mapping references to IDPs and the GPs in IOM’s policies, and, second, by examining how these policies are implemented in practice in two country contexts – Haiti (disaster displacement) and Iraq (conflict-induced displacement). While important to recognise the positive impacts of IOMs IDP protection efforts, this chapter identifies and interrogates, with some concern, substantial inconsistencies between IOMs activities and the ethos of the GPs. In particular, the chapter is critical of IOMs almost exclusive camp-based focus and its predominant preference for return as a durable solution. Also troubling is an observed decline in IOM references to the GPs as the leading international standards for IDP protection. The chapter finds that IOM adherence with the GPs cannot thus be taken as a given - indeed, adherence to date is likely more by chance than by design.

Racial discrimination explains a large proportion of the racial differences in wages and employment. Native-born Non-Latinx African American men have a 20 percent weekly wage penalty and 9 percentage point employment penalty relative to native-born Non-Latinx White men; other groups of Black men have similar outcomes. Non-Latinx African American women have a 2 percent weekly wage penalty and 2 percentage point employment penalty relative to native-born Non-Latinx White women; other groups of Black women have similar outcomes.

Small wars, or guerrilla wars, had an enormous impact in the age of Napoleon. Fought by peasants with access to land and resources, guerrilla wars in Haiti and Spain, in particular, reshaped the world in ways as profound as any of the major regular campaigns. They bled and demoralized the French and set the stage for the emergence of new nations in the Americas. This essay examines the two successful guerrilla wars in Haiti and Spain and compares them to two failed guerrilla wars in Calabria and the Tyrol in order to identify the key factors determining success or failure by guerrilla forces. Among the keys to success were: the geo-strategic importance of the theater of war; mobilizing ideologies; the presence of imperial troops for a long period of time with all of the resulting violence that implies; the reliance of imperial troops on requisitions in the countryside; the presence of strong allies; the impact of disease; and, above all, the presence of socio-economic conditions that both motivated peasants to take up arms to defend their families, land, and resources against long odds and that supplied peasants with the wherewithal to survive the French counterinsurgency.

In 1801-1802 Napoleon dispatched the largest colonial venture of his reign to Haiti. His goal was to remove the famous revolutionary Toussaint Louverture from office and, possibly, restore slavery. But within two years, the remnants of Bonaparte’s once-proud army were evacuated in defeated, and Haiti declared its independence.