In the three decades from the uprising of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue in 1791 to the recognition of Haitian independence by France in 1825, even amid the bitterest struggles, theatrical productions never fully stopped. When Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence, many of the officers surrounding him were directly involved in the theatre, as playwrights, actors, or both. Looking at figures such as Juste Chanlatte, Guy-Joseph Bonnet, Pierre-Charles Lys, Antoine Dupré and Jules Solime Milscent, this chapter makes a case for the importance of the theatre in the early years of Haitian independence as a reflection of the country’s evolving society, but also as a mirror and vector of domestic and international politics. A source of public entertainment and information designed and utilized for the most part by the country’s elites, the theatre was a prime tool in shaping and projecting idealized representations of the new nation and its leaders, within the country and to the outside world.

This chapter reads twentieth-century Haitian fictions of the Haitian Revolution to address how the political uses of Haiti’s independence war have made it a difficult literary subject for Haitian writers. The political custom of using Haitian revolutionists to express partisan political aims is prevalent in Haiti, so much so that it is the socio-political context animating Haitian narratives of the Revolution. I read Marie Chauvet’s novel, Dance on the Volcano (1957); René Depestre’s Vodou epic, A Rainbow for the Christian West (1967); Évelyne Trouillot’s novel, The Infamous Rosalie (2003); and Jean-Claude Fignolé’s novel, Quiet Dawn (1990), fictional autobiography, I, Toussaint Louverture, with the Complicit Pen of the Author (2004), and novel, One Hour for Eternity (2008), and consider how each of these works addresses the exploitative uses of the Revolution in the prevailing political discourses of their time. I examine the painful intimacies of socio-political disunity presented in their writings, showing how creative treatment of the Revolution requires, at worst, questioning the Revolution’s success and, at best, resigning oneself to its unfinished nature.

This chapter seeks to revisit Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella, a foundational fiction of the Haitian Revolution which is considered to be the first novelistic representation of the event written by a Haitian author. This nineteenth-century novel gives rise to an infinite number of themes yet to be explored. The narrative design that examines the Slave Revolution of 1791 highlights the conflict between Blacks and mulattoes through two main protagonists, the brothers Romulus and Rémus. It focuses on the filiation that the Black Revolution maintains with the French Revolution by evacuating the question of agency among the revolutionaries and instead favors a purely providential approach through the white heroine Stella. The chapter attempts to offer a contrapuntal reading of Bergeaud’s figurative rendition of the Revolution by contrasting two dominant views, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized.

This chapter examines the effort against the establishment of the West India Regiments in the 1790s. The spectre of insurrection in Saint-Domingue was a constant presence and critics of the regiments frequently likened them to Haitian soldiers, formerly enslaved insurgents, Maroons and other ‘brigands’ that opposed the British across the Caribbean in this period. Yet, White West Indians were not opposed to the arming of African men per se but favoured the use of irregular ‘black shot’, a form of military service that remained constrained by the bonds of slavery. In this way, the chapter not only explores the deeply held prejudices and phobias that made the West India Regiments so feared but also the contradictions in White West Indian and broader pro-slavery thought revealed by attitudes to military service.

States’ attempts to translate the messy realities of revolutionary-era coerced mobilities into orderly categories of law were met with efforts to define legal statuses by those forcibly removed. Focusing on revolutionary-era political refugees, the chapter shows how governments’ responses led to a proliferation of so-called alien laws across the Americas and Europe and how, despite their seemingly universal and neutral character, these laws reflected the ambiguous status and multiple mobilities during this period. As can be seen in a major legal battle involving a family of refugees of Haitian origin in Jamaica, the regulation of alien status had long-standing ramifications during a period in which the terms of political membership and state belonging were in full transformation across the Atlantic world. Both in mundane administrative interactions and legal battles, refugees engaged with the law and sought to shape and negotiate their status. In doing so, they could also rely on “vernacular” uses in other relevant branches of the law, such as legal distinctions governing freedom and slavery. As with freedom, belonging was not just granted or asserted by state authorities but could also be claimed and recrafted by those who sought it.

The Atlantic was, for centuries, crisscrossed by continuous fluxes of people moving either by choice or under pressure. These mobilities forged a complex web of relationships not only between the two shores of the Atlantic but also within the American space. Using a voluminous correspondence between two Saint-Domingue refugees, Jean Boze, a resident of New Orleans from 1809 until his death in 1842, and Henri de Sainte-Gême, who lived in New Orleans between 1809 and his relocation to France in 1818, this chapter examines the role played by the Saint-Domingue refugees in repositioning the city within the Atlantic and Greater Caribbean. It contends that by studying a group of people who migrated under pressure (the refugees from the Haitian Revolution), we can develop conceptual frameworks (in this case, the Greater Caribbean) and spur fertile historical reinterpretations (of, in the present case, New Orleans’s position in the Americas).

This chapter underscores the central arguments of this volume by emphasizing the need for a simultaneous analysis of multiple flows of forced migrations. Focusing on the 1790s, it first looks at the transportation of convicts, vagrants, and deserters from Peninsular Spain and the Northern African presidios to the garrisons and the military outposts of Spanish America. Then it examines the flows of war captives, refugees, and convicts that originated from the Haitian Revolution and spread out across the Spanish Caribbean. The concluding section reflects on continuities and discontinuities in the regimes of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire in the Early Modern period and the nineteenth century. From this perspective, the chapter suggests the need for an integrated study of all punitive relocations and for the investigation of those processes whereby the “political” nature of punishment and the punished was construed or marginalized.

Chapter 5 studies the “problem of evil.” Violence is a learned behavior; peaceful interventions and de-escalation disrupt the learning cycles of violence. By 1859, Black and White abolitionists had been attempting to bring about peaceful interventions to stop slavery since the nation’s founding. But southern slaveholders were not going to give up their slave property. In the Civil War enslavers refused President Lincoln’s offer of compensated emancipation (being paid market price per slave in exchange for setting slaves free) time and again. This is the problem of evil. How does one disrupt a violent institution when, in this case, slaveholders refused peaceful means of abolishing it? John Brown understood this dynamic and he challenged the greatest enabler of slavery in the United States, the federal government. This chapter explores understandings of Black violence and Black authority (threats to the hostile differences of liberal society), the legal mechanisms used to deploy troops against slave uprisings, and interprets Brown’s interracial Virginia attack as an attempt to fashion a government that backs the enslaved over the slaveholder.

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.

This conclusion returns to Saint-Domingue, which by the 1790s was rife with Jacobin sentiment, rebellions of enslaved Black laborers and free people of color, and intra-military disaccord. Provided are several short case studies of soldier violence and political action, which offer several limitations and conclusions to the eighteenth-century military–theatrical complex. Unlike the expansive national–military theatrical phenomenon in metropolitan France, the continued commitment to inequality and segregation in Saint-Domingue led to the disintegration of its white-centric theatrical institutions and practices – an important step in what would become the Haitian Revolution.

Saint-Domingue was at the center of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, because people enslaved in this French Caribbean colony launched the Haitian Revolution, which ended slavery, defeated French colonialism, and created Haiti, the second independent nation-state in the Americas. Beyond this extraordinary achievement, the factors that helped bring about the Haitian Revolution were also important in other aspects of the Atlantic revolutionary age. Saint-Domingue had the largest enslaved population in the Caribbean and developed a white superiority ideology that was unique in the region. It had an unusually large free population of color, with leaders who tried to claim their civil rights. The colony’s planters had a unique preoccupation with slave poisoning, which they traced to an escaped slave named Macandal. The colony experienced unique environmental stresses, including an anthrax outbreak that killed thousands of people. Saint-Domingue’s sugar and molasses tempted North Americans to break British colonial trade laws, which helped produce the American Revolution. The colony also led the Caribbean in the capitalistic production of sugar and coffee, which were at the heart of Europe’s consumer revolution. Saint-Domingue’s indigo dye and cotton helped launch industrial textile manufacturing.

The death of Spain’s sickly and heirless King Carlos II in 1700 began the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714), which brought the French House of Bourbon to the Spanish throne and initiated a series of wars that would shape much of Spain’s eighteenth century. Spanish-British conflict was at the center of the subsequent War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1749); and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). The desire to control Spanish American markets for consumer goods and for African slaves were at the center of these conflicts, and also shaped the eighteenth-century reform agenda known as the Bourbon reforms, which included measures designed to liberalize trade within the Spanish empire, streamline imperial administration, and transform indigenous Americans into productive workers and consumers of Spanish goods. The chapter also examines the early Age of Revolutions in Spanish America, surveying the indigenous rebellions in Peru that are often referred to as “the Túpac Amaru rebellion,” but were actually three separate, overlapping conflicts. It briefly examines Spain’s contributions to the American Revolutionary War, and concludes by discussing Spain’s involvement in and reaction to the Haitian Revolution.

Focusing on a comparative study of diverse socio-political movements and rebellions that developed in the Caribbean coast of New Granada and Venezuela during the last decade of the eighteenth century, this chapter will analyze the complex and distinctive reverberations of Saint Domingue’s rebellion in the Spanish American mainland. The vast and exposed Caribbean coast of New Granada and Venezuela with its vibrant port cities and coastal towns allowed for the emergence of multicultural and multilingual hubs for Atlantic encounters and exchange. The open, varied, and dynamic configuration of port societies facilitated the flow of information about the Atlantic Revolutions, but especially about the Haitian Revolution. Of the three Atlantic Revolutions—the American, the French, and the Haitian—the Haitian one became the most tangible for the inhabitants of coastal Venezuela and New Granada, who used the impressions of the turbulent Caribbean insurgency as shared knowledge, an everyday reference point that was exploited by insurgents during negotiations with the colonial state and, at the same time, by those very elites and state agents to justify repression or, alternatively, to make concessions to “calm the spirits” of rebellion in the region.

This essay analyzes a central problem of both the U.S. and Haitian revolutions: namely, establishing governments based on enlightened principles, while maintaining economies dependent on Atlantic plantation regimes. The unique contours of this predicament in revolutionary Saint-Domingue had significant consequences for the United States. Like their North American peers, leaders in the French colony were committed to the production of plantation commodities. But in contrast to the United States, slavery was abolished, and citizenship granted to black men. During the 1790s, free and enslaved observers in North America tried to discern what each stage of the Haitian revolutionary experiment portended for the future of slavery, emancipation, black citizenship, and the economy in the United States. With independence in 1804, Haiti became a beacon for people of African descent, in part, because the new nation renounced the plantation regime, concluding that it was incompatible with universal freedom and citizenship. But most white North American rulers actively resisted this conclusion—and the Haitian example—for decades, until the paradox of a slaveholding republic reached its breaking point in the U.S. Civil War.

As elsewhere in the Atlantic World, the revolutionary processes in France and the French Antilles of the late eighteenth century had a tremendous impact in Iberian America. It was particularly intense in the Caribbean and the circum-Caribbean, but it could also be noticed in regions as distant as Chile and Brazil. Given the different geographical emplacements and the diverse socio-racial composition of the Iberian-American societies, that impact experienced great variations in time, nature, and scope. Bearing this in mind, this chapter studies the different echoes, entwinements and connections between Brazil and the Spanish-speaking territories with the French Atlantic during the revolutionary period and beyond. Particular attention is paid to the way those ties and links affected or influenced the local political ideas and sentiments, especially regarding the racial scope of citizenship and the debates on slavery.

Britain had a substantial Atlantic empire during the era of the Atlantic Revolutions. Only some of their Atlantic colonies joined in the colonial rebellion that led to the creation of the United States. The end of the American Revolution signaled a new period in the history of the British Empire, but it was far from a period in which the Empire’s geographic center moved decisively to the East from the West. The British colonies in the Atlantic World that either remained or were acquired during the Atlantic Revolutions were vital parts of a changing geopolitical and economic order in which Britain solidified its global dominance in the period economic historians have termed the Great Divergence (when the West overtook the East in economic power). The British West Indies and Canada were central to the Atlantic Revolutions from the period of the Seven Years’ War until the end of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834. Expansion in the British Atlantic after 1783 showed how valuable West Indian colonies continued to be to British geopolitical and economic policies and how Canada was rapidly becoming a set of colonies that were developing into vibrant settler societies.

This introduction maps out the local, national, regional and world-historical implications and motivations for Arming Black Consciousness. It begins with an examination of Khotso Seatlholo and his motivations for joining and leading the Soweto Uprising in 1976. It then moves to a discussion of how little we know about the armed wings of the Black Consciousness Movement, suggests some reasons why and engages with Steve Biko and his coyness around the question of armed struggle. The introduce then proceeds to map out the importance of the Haitian Revolution to the theoretical concept of the Black Radical Tradition and African Liberation Struggles. This is a perspective that is not engaged with much in the literature on the liberation struggles in Africa so some detail is given to its intricacies here. This is followed by a brief literature review on Black Consciousness, armed struggle, Black Power and some engagement with the Cold War. The introduction closes by discussing the importance in centring Black women in these narratives of revolution, makes some interventions around methodology and then discusses the various sources used to construct this narrative.

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.

The Introduction examines the trope of revolution as theatre, which took shape during the 1790s as the “horrors of St. Domingo,” a spectacle of violence and play. Blending horror and pleasure, theatre brought the Haitian Revolution into the Atlantic consciousness and established formats and tropes that shaped representations of Haiti for the next half century.

Langston Hughes has earned iconic status in the history of African American letters. However, Hughes should also be understood as a radical political thinker and writer who sought to promote international anti-imperialism, Pan-Africanism, and a hemispheric understanding of Black diasporic history and culture. This chapter considers Langston Hughes’s writings on the Haitian Revolution – the play Emperor of Haiti (1936) and the opera libretto Troubled Island (1949) – as well as the presence of Haiti in Hughes’s poetry and journalism. These writings demonstrate that Haiti served as a pivot point in Hughes’s thinking, with Haitian history supplying Hughes with a heroic counter-narrative of Black freedom. Casting fresh light on the cultural currency of Haiti’s history of anticolonialism within radical African American circles, the chapter argues that Hughes’s Haitian writings carry a powerful message of an unfinished revolution, renegotiate diasporic relationships to Haiti, and proudly celebrate Black historical achievement in the Americas.