Transatlantic Representations of the Revolution in Saint-Domingue at the End of the Eighteenth Century and the Haitian Turn

This essay addresses a set of reflections and questions situated in the interstices between history and historiography, literary and cultural studies, as well as the history of science. These reflections arise from my work on texts that deal with the Haitian Revolution and related topics, such as the abolition of slavery, the precarious relationship between metropolis and colony, and between Enlightenment and colonialism, at the turn of the eighteenth century – more precisely, between 1792 and 1815.The complex set of events that has come to signify the Haitian Revolution1 – wars of independence, abolition of slavery, civil war – becomes, I will argue in the following, a paradigmatic example of current issues and significant changes in postcolonial (francophone) studies that emphasized and partly redefined the links to transnational and cultural studies, positively asking for interdisciplinary approaches. It shows the need to adopt a transnational perspective or, in other words, a perspective on entangled histories, as well as the tum to non-canonical texts in postcolonial studies. These ideologically ambivalent texts make explicit the colonial legacy of the post/colonial, while they do not lend themselves to an easy reading in line with established postcolonial tropes. (This paradigmatic status of the Haitian Revolution and associated matters is true for postcolonial studies in general but even more so for francophone post/colonial studies.)After a brief excursus into what I call somewhat emphatically ‘the Haitian tum’, I will focus on the work emerging from literary studies, particularly studies of (literary) texts in a number of publications and projects on the Haitian Revolution around its bicentenary. The scarcity of material on the event and the difficult access to parts of it, as well as its blatant ideological functions, raise conceptual and methodological questions for everybody aiming to undertake research on the Haitian Revolution. A prior search for suitable theoretical and methodological approaches would seem to be indispensable.A whole set of questions arises (which I will specify only for my fields of study): To what end can these texts be read in literary, cultural, and postcolonial studies and what does a postcolonial approach add to the understanding of colonial texts? A related issue concerns the ways in which knowledge about these events is produced. What role is ascribed to literary texts in the process of knowledge-production, and what role do literary studies assume in the interdisciplinary venture of mapping and analysing this production of knowledge? Finally, we have to take into account the new directions which literary and cultural studies can introduce when they creatively address the scarcity of accessible written sources.The Haitian Turn, or Post-2004 Scholarship on HaitiThis part of my essay’s title refers to the proliferation of studies on the Haitian Revolution as well as its paradigmatic readings in relation to interconnectedness, circulation, histoire croisee, which introduce a vision beyond bi-directional models of centre and periphery. The publications on the occasion of the bicentennial anniversary of the revolution in 2004 made this paradigmatic shift very clear and put Haiti back on the map of global history. These studies also shed light on certain pitfalls of postcolonial studies as addressed in recent critiques.2 As the British scholar Charles Forsdick points out,interwoven commemorative moments […] have insured that slavery and its legacies have acquired a necessary prominence in debates of political, philosophical, social and cultural manifestations of postenlightenment modernity.3Main concerns of this ‘Haitian tum’ or – putting it less emphatically – this new post-2004 awareness are to re-read the insufficiencies of the French Revolution and its unaccomplished universalism through the Haitian Revolution, to reconstruct the multiple relations in the so-called periphery of the Caribbean and the Americas and thus to subvert the centre-periphery model