small axe 27 October 2008 p 113 ISSN 0799-0537

Interpreting 2004:
Politics, Memory, Scholarship
Charles Forsdick
ABSTRACT: This article refects on the presence (and absence) of references to Haiti in the events
surrounding the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Great Britain. It suggests that
a growing public awareness of and media attention to Haiti is associated with an increased inter-
est among academic researchers. The article concludes with a refection on the impact and the
implications of the intensive scholarly engagement with Haiti since 2004, outlining reservations
and suggesting elements of a future research agenda.
Two related quotations serve as an epigraph to this article, both of them refecting the debt
to two key Caribbean historians of many scholars and readers with interests in the Haitian
Revolution, as well as in its wider impact and implications. Te underlying presence of Michel-
Rolph Trouillot and C. L. R. James will be apparent throughout the refections that follow:
Commemorations sanitize further the messy history lived by the actors. Tey contribute to the
continuous myth-making process that gives history its more defnite shapes: they help to create,
modify, or sanction the public meanings attached to historical events deemed worthy of mass
celebration. As rituals that package history for public consumption, commemorations play the
numbers game to create a past that seems both more real and more elementary.
Te small whites, as soon as they heard of the fall of the Bastille, had deserted their friends the
bureaucracy and joined the revolution. Tere was only one hope for the bureaucratsthe Mulat-
toes, and the governor instructed the commandants of the districts to adopt a new attitude towards
them. . . . Te retreat of race prejudice had begun. Sad though it may be, that is the way that
humanity progresses. Te anniversary orators and the historians provide the prose-poetry and the
fowers.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 1. Silencing the Past (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 116.
C. L. R. James, 2. Te Black Jacobins: Toussaint LOuverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; reprint, London:
Allison and Busby, 1980), 63.
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SX27 Interpreting 2004: Politics, Memory, Scholarship
Trouillot, focusing here not explicitly on Haiti but on the quincentenary of 1492, describes
the pitfalls of the commemorative process, suggesting that, although memorial maneuvering
brings historical events to public attention, it often denies the complexity of those events,
as well as the multidirectional memories on which their contemporary persistence depends.
James had already illustrated this observation in the 1930s by specifcally addressing the
opening stages of the Haitian Revolution. He highlights the ways in which subsequent inter-
pretations of early inter-ethnic alliances during the revolutionary events in Saint-Domingue
dress up such a reconfguration of pigmentocratic structures with new meanings (with what
he calls the prose-poetry and the fowers) that counter the actual contemporary expediency
and pragmatism of such moves. Trouillot and James privilege, therefore, the potentially dis-
abling implications of much commemoration, seeing the consensus towards which it aims as a
paradoxical distancing or obfuscation of the past. What is striking at the same time, however,
as will become apparent below, are the potentially enabling efects of diferent forms of recol-
lecting the pastforms of recollection that permit fresh engagement with the complexity of
historical process, and trigger renewed awareness of the place and role of the colonial past in
the postcolonial present.
Te bicentenary of the Haitian Revolution, although marked in Haiti itself by social unrest
leading to the ousting and enforced exile of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was commemorated inter-
nationally by a series of conferences that sought to develop historical and cultural knowledge
of this often silenced series of events. Without wanting to be drawn into the self-referential
hall of mirrors that is implied by the commemoration of a commemoration, what follows
constitutes a refection on the various subsequent impacts of the bicentenary of Haitian inde-
pendence, and of a variety of events and other phenomena that marked it. Te central subject
is, therefore, an introductory refection on 2004 and its own subsequent aftershocks. As such,
the article alludes to the various events (planned and unplanned; ofcial and unofcial; in
Haiti itself and elsewhere) by which this bicentenary was marked, thinking about what they
represent, what their wider repercussions might be, and what traces they have left. At the same
time, it invites refection on the wider contexts in which those events are, retrospectively, to
be situated.
Any such project merits a series of preliminary reservations or caveats. Firstly, there is
a need to acknowledge that the still-close proximity of the events of 2004, as well as their
fundamentally unfnished nature, makes any refection on them potentially hazardous. Te
refections that follow are accordingly characterized by an inevitable provisionality. Secondly,
just as the decade of historical upheaval that led to 1804 cannot be seen as a single event,
neither can 2004 itself, as a commemoration of Haitian independence, be reduced to one
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meaning: in Haiti, the disrupted celebration of the Bicentenary alluded to above acquired
such political overtones that, in the aftermath of January and February 2004, commemora-
tive events elsewhere took on a new and often unexpected signifcance. Despite its often
meticulous choreography, commemorationlike memory itselfremains polyvocal and
unpredictable. Finally, it is important to recognize that the 2004 bicentenarywithout
denying its individual signifcancewas, and remains, part of a wider cluster of commemo-
rative processes, many of which permitted refection on the revolutionary events that shaped
the later eighteenth century and the modern Atlantic world that then emerged: 1989, the
bicentenary of the French Revolution; 1994, the bicentenary of the frst abolition of slavery
in the French colonial empire; 2003, the bicentenary of Toussaint Louvertures death; 2007,
the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire . . . Together with 1998, the sesquicen-
tenary of the (second) abolition of slavery in the French colonial empire, these interwoven
commemorative moments have ensured that slavery and its legacies have acquired a necessary
prominence in debates about the political, philosophical, social, and cultural manifestations
of post-Enlightenment modernity. Within such a cluster of commemorations, remembering
Haiti nevertheless serves a key role. An inspiration as much as a warning, the second republic
of the Americas reveals the blind spots of the French and North American revolutionary
and republican projects, refecting not only the wider independence that might, had history
evolved diferently, have shaped the early nineteenth-century Caribbean, but also the post-
colonial or neocolonial dilemmas that such independence would have engendered. In Robin
Blackburns terms, Te Haitian Revolution is rarely given its due, yet without it there is
much that cannot be accounted for. At the same time, the case of Haiti permits investiga-
tion of what postcoloniality (and perhaps a specifcally francophone postcoloniality) might
mean, of what its defnitional and historical limits might be, and of how and when such a
condition might be considered to have emerged.
In the context of a memorial turn in much arts and humanities research, increasing
numbers of scholars are focusing on the strategic importance of commemoration as a means
of carving out, delineating, and (re-)asserting areas of public debate and of academic schol-
arship. In Great Britain, the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade has had such an
infuence, ensuring thatas a result of media, literary, and cinematic representations, as well
as through prominent acts of public commemoration, the opening of new institutions, and
associated debatesquestions of slavery, of its abolition, and of its persistence have achieved a
prominence they are often systematically denied in Europe. Although the ofcial recognition
Robin Blackburn, Haiti, Slavery and the Age of Democratic Revolution, 3. William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4
(2006): 643.
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SX27 Interpreting 2004: Politics, Memory, Scholarship
of the parliamentary act of abolition occurrednot without controversyon 25 March 2007,
discussion around the forms that ongoing commemoration might take continued throughout
the year and there is little sign of debate petering out. Te date 23 August 2007 increas-
ingly became an alternative focus of commemoration: its status as International Day for the
Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition, and its focus on the persistent resistance
of enslaved people, both acquired a renewed signifcance in the context of the bicentenarys
overt political instrumentalization and its systematic adoption of what David Scott dubs a
rhetoric of evasion and disavowal.4 In the light of this special issues theme, it is illuminating
to foreground the place of Haiti in this current commemorative processa process that, it
must be acknowledged from the outset, has taken very diferent forms and adopted difer-
ent emphases throughout the English-speaking world, most notably in West Africa and the
Anglophone Caribbean.5
In Britain, dissident voices have nevertheless highlighted the importance, both historical
and symbolic, of the Haitian Revolution in questions of abolition. Te mayor of London,
Ken Livingstone, claimed in a public intervention in March 2007 that the state failure to issue
an apology for a crime as monstrous as the slave trade had the efect of diminishing Britain
in the eyes of the world. In a piece entitled Why I am saying sorry for Londons role in this
horror, Livingstone emphasized the importance of an account of slavery and its abolition that
foregrounds both continual resistance and the assertion of the historical agency of enslaved
people.6 Focusing on C. L. R. Jamess Te Black Jacobins (still a key text for the British Left),
Livingstone cites the examples of Jamaica in 1760, Saint-Domingue in 1791, Barbados in
1816, Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica again in 1831. Following James and Eric Williams, he
concludes: No one denigrates William Wilberforce, but it was black resistance and economic
development that destroyed slavery, not white philanthropy. In this reference to Wilberforce,
and the relationship of black resistance to white philanthropy, Livingstone encapsulates
those debates relating to history and historiography that have characterized various public
exchanges regarding the meanings of 2007exchanges that were equally apparent in France
See David Scott, Preface: Soul Captives Are Free, 4. Small Axe, no. 23 (2007): v.
See, for instance, Africa 2007, a program organized by the British Council in Ghana and launched on 15 February 5.
2007 by John Prescott, the then deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, and Alhaji Aliu Mahama, vice-
president of the Republic of Ghana. Styled a celebration of culture and identity, this series of events, inspired by
the bicentenary of abolition of the slave trade, was more concerned with a celebratory exploration of the relation-
ship between Africa and UK in its many manifestations, past, present and future, focused on the period after the
formal abolition of the slave trade. Details are available at http://www.britishcouncil.org/ghana-arts-and-culture-
africa-2007-main.htm (accessed 25 September 2007).
See Ken Livingstone, Why I am saying sorry for Londons role in this horror, 6. Guardian, 21 March 2007, http://
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/mar/21/comment.society (accessed 31 October 2007).
SX27 October 2008 Charles Forsdick
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5
in 1998, when commemorations were complicated by questions over where, in 1848, history
actually took place.7
Te acrimonious exchanges triggered by Livingstones text about the relative merits of apol-
ogy risk eclipsing key questions about the continuing legacies of transatlantic slavery in Britain
and the contemporary Caribbean, and the ways in which the tendency towards consensus of of-
cial commemoration might or might not accommodate multi-directional memories of the past.
Toyin Agbetus disruption of the ofcial bicentenary service at Westminster Abbey in late March
2007 was motivated, he claims, by protest against the commemorative ritual of appeasement and
self-approval marking the bicentenary of the British parliamentary act to abolish what they disin-
genuously refer to as a slave trade. 8 Agbetus actions brought to public attention criticism of the
2007 commemoration, dismissed variously as a Wilberfest and even, by the Operation Truth
2007 campaign, as a Wilberfarce. His protest was indeed, in part, a reaction to the queens
laying of a wreath at the foot of a giant statue to William Wilberforce in the Abbeyand it is
Wilberforce who is central to Amazing Grace, the Michael Apted flm that has been instrumental
in bringing one narrative of abolition to the attention of a wider British public.
Without engaging with criticism of the flm, which has for instance focused on the hagi-
ography of Wilberforce and the downplaying of the role of Tomas Clarkson in the legislative
processes of abolition, I would like to focus on the single scene in which Haiti merits a feet-
ing mention.9 In 1806, as Wilberforces campaign entered its fnal phase, Apteds flm shows
the abolitionist lawyer James Stephen, author of an early biography of Toussaint Louverture,
referring to recent events in Saint-Domingue.0 Stephen describes a scene in which an enslaved
Before news of the parliamentary act of abolition (27 April 1848) reached Martinique (3 June), a slave rebellion 7.
in Saint-Pierre (20 May) had already forced the governor to announce a generalized local emancipation (repeated
shortly afterwards in Guadeloupe). In much the same way, Lger-Flicit Sonthonax was obliged by local circum-
stances to abolish slavery in Saint-Domingue (29 August 1793) before the ofcial legislation of the Convention
(4 February 1794). In Romuald Fonkouas terms, in his refections on the sesquicentenary of 1848 and the haziness
of its focus: Who, in fact, is the subject of abolition? Which abolition is this all about? Besides, did abolition really
happen? Of what? By whom? See Romuald-Blaise Fonkoua, Ecrire labolition de lesclavage aux Antilles fran-
aises, in Christiane Chaulet-Achour and Romuald-Blaise Fonkoua, eds., Esclavage: Librations, abolitions,
commmorations (Paris: Sguier, 2001), 21561 (266; translations mine).
See Toyin Agbetu, My protest was born of anger, not madness, 8. Guardian, 3 April 2007, http://www.guardian.
co.uk/theguardian/2007/apr/03/features11.g2 (accessed 31 October 2007).
For a discussion of the relative roles of Clarkson and Wilberforce in the commemoration of the abolition of British 9.
transatlantic slavery, see J. R. Oldfeld, Chords of Freedom: Commemoration, Ritual, and British Transatlantic Slavery
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
See James Stephen, 10. Buonaparte in the West Indies or, Te History of Toussaint Louverture, the African Hero, 3 vols
(London: Hatchard, I, 1803). On Stephens and Toussaint, see David Geggus, Haiti and the Abolitionists: Opin-
ion, Propaganda and International Politics in Britain and France, 18041838, in David Richardson, ed., Abolition
and Its Aftermath: Te Historical Context, 17901916 (London: Frank Cass, 1985), 11340; and Charles Forsdick,
Situating Haiti: On Some Early Nineteenth-Century Representations of Toussaint Louverture, International
Journal of Francophone Studies 10, no. 1 (2007): 1734.
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SX27 Interpreting 2004: Politics, Memory, Scholarship
mother tells her child about King Wilberforce coming across the sea to free them. Although
Aptedaddressing the question of the absence of black actors in his flmhas explained
that he did not intend to make another flm such as Amistad, but instead to explore the par-
liamentary and legislative battle from the point of view of Wilberforce and other antislavery
campaigners in Britain, this single reference to slave rebellions in Saint-Domingue still man-
ages to credit Wilberforce as the inspiration of revolution, contributing to the wider denial of
the agency of enslaved people that underpins the flm.
Tis example of Haitis continued silencing in the commemoration of abolition is to be
contrasted with another event in 2007, this time in Liverpool, from which an alternative nar-
rative of the persistence of the past in the present emerged. In preparation for the inauguration
of the International Slavery Museum in August, Merseyside Maritime Museum was the frst
venue to display in February the sculpture Freedom!, an original work by a group of Port-
au-Prince artists from the Cit-Soleil area of the city, working in collaboration with Mario
Benjamin. Representing the continuing Haitian struggle for freedom and human rights, the
sculpture was commissioned by Christian Aid and National Museums Liverpool to mark the
bicentenary of abolition. Made of everyday, recycled materials, the work situates contemporary
Haiti frmly at the center of the current commemoration, inviting refection on the unfnished
nature of the Haitian Revolution as part of a continuing struggle for freedom and human
rights. Tese are issues that were refected more widely in the displays of the International
Slavery Museumin which Haiti, historical and contemporary, plays a key rolewhen it
opened in August 2007.
Tis simultaneous presence and absence of Haiti in the 2007 commemorations in Britain
form the basis of the wider refections in the following sections of this article. Te British
silence surrounding Haiti is not surprising. Whereas the French mediathrough a series of
recent developments, ranging from the Debray report in 2004, via the activity of the Comit
pour la Mmoire de lEsclavage, to Nicolas Sarkozys vague campaign pledge concerning
Toussaint Louvertures presence in the French Panthoncontinues to play close attention
to Haiti, the country often remains for the British press an exotic anomaly, still routinely
associated with Graham Greene and the Duvaliers. Haiti still tends to exemplify and even
permit the accentuation of certain pejorative assumptions about postcolonial cultures that are
perhaps summed up in the seemingly inexorable logic of the subtitle to Paradise Lost (2005), by
See Rgis Debray, 11. Hati et la France (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2004), and, for the activities and publications of Comit
pour la mmoire de lesclavage, http://www.comite-memoire-esclavage.fr/ (accessed 11 September 2008). Sarkozys
speech was interpreted as a call for the Pantheonization of Toussaint, although as I argue elsewhere such a move is
not only unfeasible but alsoparadoxicallyalready partially undertaken. See Charles Forsdick, Te Black Jacobin
in Paris, Journal of Romance Studies 5, no. 3 (2005): 924.
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Philippe Girard: Haitis Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Tird World Hotspot.
Tis narrative of colonial prosperity transformed into postcolonial chaos is a common one,
refected in what Antony Maingot has described as a terrifed consciousness of Haiti, and
what Michael Dash has dubbed a repulsive otherness or predetermined strangeness. In
the development of such a national image, the role of travel writers, indulging in seemingly
obligatory references to an exoticized Vodou, to zombifcation, and even (especially in earlier
texts) to cannibalism, is not insignifcant. A clear example is the work of Ian Tomson, the
popularity of whose Bonjour Blanc was refected in its re-issue as a new, supplemented edition
to coincide with 2004.4 Indeed, in the accounts of their journeys, many travelers to Haiti
exemplify in a Caribbean context the same archival and textual sedimentationdependent
more on accumulated stereotypes than on any direct observationthat is central to the thesis
of key postcolonial works such as Edward Saids Orientalism.5 Tere has been little, if any
evidence of recognition of the costly British involvement in the struggle over Saint-Domingue
in the 1790s.6 Similarly, there is a failure to acknowledge Haitis emblematic status as the
site at which emergedto borrow Nick Nesbitts termstwo of the processes that came to
distinguish the twentieth century . . . : decolonization and neocolonialism.7
Te occlusion of the catalytic contribution of Haiti, both symbolic and actual, to abolition-
ism is part of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously dubbed, in his 1995 volume cited at the
outset of this article, silencing the past. Trouillots study has had an important and pervasive
infuence in Haitian studies, as well as in studies of colonial history more generally. At the same
time, however, the silencing that Trouillot demonstrates has, in this frst decade of the twenty-
frst century, and as my examples suggest, developed into a new dynamics of presence and
absence, voicing and silencing. Silencing the Past tracked the occlusion of Haiti at various stages
of the production of history, specifcally at what Trouillot calls four crucial moments:
the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of
archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective
signifcance (the making of history in the fnal instance).8
See Philippe Girard, 12. Paradise Lost: Haitis Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Tird World Hotspot
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
See Antony Maingot, Haiti and the Terrifed Consciousness of the Caribbean, in Gert Oostindie, ed., 13. Ethnicity in
the Caribbean: Essays in Honor of Harry Hoetink (London: Macmillan, 1986), 5380; and J. Michael Dash, Haiti and
the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (1988; reprint, London: Macmillan, 1997), x, 10.
See Ian Tomson, 14. Bonjour Blanc: A Journey through Haiti (1992; reprint, London: Vintage, 2004).
See 15. Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
On this campaign, see in particular David Geggus, 16. Slavery, War and Revolution: Te British Occupation of Saint
Domingue 17931798 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982).
See Nick Nesbitt, Te Idea of 1804, 17. Yale French Studies, no. 107 (2005): 6.
Trouillot, 18. Silencing the Past, 26 (emphasis in original).
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SX27 Interpreting 2004: Politics, Memory, Scholarship
It is the fourth of these moments in which commemoration might be included, seen as an
ofcial means of consolidating pre-existing narratives. In exploring the ways in which the
contemporary unthinkability of the Saint-Domingue Revolution has marked implications
for the international visibility of Haiti in the present, Trouillot expands a point made by a
number of historiansranging from C. L. R. James to Yves Benotabout the ways in which
dominant French revolutionary historiography had reduced the Haitian events to the status
of an exotic sideshow in the transatlantic upheavals of the later eighteenth century.
Yves Benot and Louis Sala-Molins were two of the most vociferous critics, during 1989
and its aftermath, of Frances own partial blindness to the role of Haiti in illuminating the
limitations of the French Revolution, whose bicentenary was celebrated that yearpartial
because there was some evidence of an awareness of Haitis signifcance, not least in the
exhibition devoted to La Rvolution franaise sous les Tropiques, held at the Muse des
Arts Africains et Ocaniens, to which a young Edouard Duval Carri made a signifcant
contribution. Te Haitian Revolution was nevertheless absent from such seminal reference
works as the Dictionnaire critique de la Rvolution franaise or the Histoire et dictionnaire de la
Rvolution, and the 1989 Pantheonization in France of the Abb Grgoire, which cultivated
a revisionist narrative of revolutionary abolitionism from whichonce againthe agency
of enslaved people was absent. What we see more recently, however, istwo centuries after
independencea persistent sense of the spectrality of Haiti in French politics and culture.
Edouard Glissant, returning to Toussaint Louverture in La Cohe du Lamentin (2005),
the ffth volume of his Potique, describes the revolutionary as a forgotten specter who
nevertheless wanders ungoverned in France, around the ramparts at Joux.9 Tis sense of
haunting, or of a persistent presence, is apparent in one of the earliest literary representa-
tions of Toussaint, in Samuel Whitchurchs long poem Hispaniola (1804), which describes
the ghost of Toussaint present at Napoleons bed: O rise, and haunt thy murderers bed, /
And thus assail in accents dread / His ears oft soothed with fattrys poisoned breath.0 And
Whitchurch anticipates more recent manifestations: just to give three examplesJean Rouchs
Libert, galit, fraternit . . . et puis aprs?, in which Toussaint, an unwanted presence at the
French bicentenary celebrations of 1989, is ultimately reconciled with Napolon in a Vodou
ceremony at les Invalides; more recently, the Guadeloupean playwright Jean-Michel Cussets
1802, ou Le dernier jour (2002), in which the ghosts of Toussaint and Louis Delgrs attend
Napolons fnal moments at Longwood on Saint Helena; or the Haitian novelist Fabienne
Pasquets Deuxime vie de Toussaint Louverture (2001), in which Toussaint is a wandering
Edouard Glissant, 19. La Cohe de Lamentin: Potique V (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 24041 (translation mine).
Te poem is included in Marcus Wood, ed., 20. Te Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology, 17641865
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 16880.
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soul still present in the prison when Heinrich von Kleist is incarcerated there several years
following Toussaints death.
Laurent Dubois, in an article focused on late-twentieth-century France, characterized
France as a rpublique mtisse, a hybridized republic, whose ofcial failure to address
questions of ethnicity in a republican frame may be tracked back to the trauma of the Haitian
Revolution, and this is a thesis developed by Marcel Dorigny in his contribution to the infu-
ential 2005 volume on La fracture coloniale, the epistemological dislocation of metropolitan
France and its colonial territories that is associated with the postcolonial dilemmas of identity
and belonging faced by the twenty-frst-century republic. Engaging with Trouillots notion
of silencing the past, Sibylle Fischer has recently suggested that such processes might be part
of an alternative model of fear or disavowal of the Haitian Revolution. What is becoming
increasingly clear, however, in this frst decade of the twenty-frst century, is the growing cen-
trality of Haiti to a range of felds of study and areas of debate. Without aiming to ofer an
exhaustive catalogue of the studies of Haiti that have emerged in a range of felds since 2004,
it is possible to signal nevertheless a proliferation of publications that reveal of real sense of
urgency in contemporary scholarly engagement with Haiti.4 As is often the case, the peri-
odical has proved to be a key means of rapidly disseminating the results of and reactions to
2004, as is witnessed by a series of special issues of journals, such as Yale French Studies, the
Journal of Haitian Studies, Small Axe, Research in African Literatures, and Ethnologies.5 All of
See 21. Libert, galit, fraternit . . . et puis aprs?, dir. Jean Rouch, Comit du flm ethnographique, 1990; Jean-Michel
Cusset, 1802, ou Le dernier jour (Matoury: Ibis Rouge, 2002); and Fabienne Pasquet, Deuxime vie de
Toussaint Louverture (Arles: Actes Sud, 2001).
See Laurent Dubois, 22. La Rpublique Mtise: Citizenship, Colonialism, and the Borders of French History, Cultural
Studies 14, no. 1 (2000): 1534; and Marcel Dorigny, Aux origines: Lindpendance dHati et son occultation, in
Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La fracture coloniale: La socit franaise au prisme de
lhritage colonial (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2005), 4555. Tis interconnectedness is also explored illuminatingly in
two articles in a discussion titled Teaching National and Regional History in a Global Age that appeared in 2000
in French Historical Studies 23, no. 2: Alice Conklins Boundaries Unbound: Teaching French History as Colonial
History and Colonial History as French History (21538), and in particular John Garriguss White Jacobins/Black
Jacobins: Bringing the Haitian and French Revolutions Together in the Classroom (25975).
See Sibylle Fischer, 23. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004).
Robin Blackburn provides an incisive survey of scholarship on Haiti published around 2004. See Haiti, Slavery and 24.
the Age of Democratic Revolution, and also David Geggus, Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean:
Recent Scholarship, in Juanita de Barros, Audra Diptee and David Trotman, eds., Beyond Fragmentation: New
Directions in Caribbean Scholarship (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2006), 334.
See Te Haiti Issue: 1804 and Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Deborah Jenson, ed., 25. Yale French Studies,
no. 107 (2005); special bicentennial issue on history and politics, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Robert Fatton, eds.,
Journal of Haitian Studies 10, no. 1 (2004); special bicentennial issue on the arts, Edwidge Danticat and LeGrace
Benson, eds., Journal of Haitian Studies 10, no. 2 (2004); Profondes et Nombreuses: Haiti and the Revolution,
18042004, Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, eds., Small Axe, no. 18 (2005); Haiti, 18042004:
Literature, Culture, and Art, Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2 (2004); and HatiFace au pass / Hati
Confronting the Past, Carlo Avierl Clius, ed., Ethnologies 28, no. 1 (2006).
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these reveal the richness of contemporary research on Haiti, reassessing the past, exploring the
present, and endeavoring to illuminate connections between the two. At the same time, there
has been a succession of monographs, edited volumes of essays, and conference proceedings
that have appeared in 2004 and subsequently. Tese publications refect an ongoing process
of historical and cultural enquiry, triggered by the wave of revolutionary bicentennials and
other commemorations mentioned at the opening of my articlea ferce challenge to whose
celebratory overtones can be seen in the conferences organized to explore the bicentenary of
Napolons re-imposition of slavery in 2002, refected in a substantial volume on this subject
published the following year by Benot and Dorigny.6
Several volumes have similarly emerged, or are about to emerge, from bicentenary confer-
ences in 2004, most notably Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaws Reinterpreting
the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks, but also forthcoming collections, such as
Doris Garraways Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World
and David Geggus and Norman Fierings Te World of the Haitian Revolution.7 In the feld of
francophone postcolonial studies, readings of Haitian literature have developed rapidly, not
least addressing key authors such as Dany Laferrire and Edwidge Danticatboth of whom
continue to disturb the frames of what is understood not only by the term francophone
literature but also by that of Haitian literature itself.8 Te increasing prominence of and
interest in Haitian culture, aided no doubt by the flms Vers le sud / Heading South (Laurent
Cantets popular adaptation of Laferrires La chair du matre) and Asger Leths controversial
Te Ghosts of Cit-Soleil, are matched by increasing interest in contemporary Haitian art, both
that of artists resident outside Haiti (such as Edouard Duval Carri, an important exhibition
of whose work for the bicentenary took place at UCLA in 2004, and Ulrick Jean-Pierre, whose
paintings illustrate the 2006 volume Revolutionary Freedoms: A History of Survival, Strength
and Imagination in Haiti),9 and thoseas interest in the Liverpool sculpture Freedom! makes
clearstill active in Haiti itself. Te already rich historiography of Haiti has been supple-
mented by a series of very diferent works by Sybille Fischer, Laurent Dubois, John Garrigus,
See Yves Benot and Marcel Dorigny, eds., 26. Rtablissement de lesclavage dans les colonies franaises 1802: Ruptures et
continuits de la politique coloniale franaise (18001830) (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003).
Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, eds., 27. Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural After-
shocks (Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies Press, 2006); Doris Garraway,
Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 2008); and David Geggus and Norman Fiering, Te World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
See, e.g., Martin Munro, 28. Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrire, Danticat
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007).
See Donald J. Cosentino, 29. Divine Revolution: Te Art of Edouard Duval-Carri (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Fowler
Museum of Cultural History, 2005); and C. Accilien, J. Adams, and E. Meleance, eds., Revolutionary Freedoms:
A History of Survival, Strength and Imagination in Haiti (Coconut Creek, FL: Caribbean Studies Press, 2006).
SX27 October 2008 Charles Forsdick
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11
Madison Smartt Bell, and Doris Garraway.0 Finally, there have appeared a series of books
and flms with a specifc focus on contemporary Haiti, recently supplemented with Peter
Hallwards Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment.
Tis mere sample of material will be supplemented, over the next few years, with a vari-
ety of other volumes ranging across diverse disciplines: in addition to the further collections
of essays inspired by conferences organized in 2004 that I have mentioned already, there are
volumes soon to appear by Deborah Jenson, on nineteenth-century francophone narratives
of slavery (including Toussaint Louvertures writings); by Chris Bongie, on the commemora-
tion and commodifcation of the Haitian Revolution; by Nick Nesbitt, on the idea of 1804;
by Jeremy Popkin, on eyewitness accounts of the Haitian insurrection; by Michael Dash,
on travel writing and the Caribbean, with a clear focus on Haiti itself; by Sue Peabody, on
enslavement, emancipation, and related legal issues in the Atlantic world; by Kaima Glover
and Rachel Douglas, on the Spiralistes. Tis catalogue is clearly restricted to the anglophone
academy, and were further special issues of journals, material in French, and, of course, recent
and new studies forthcoming from Haiti itself to be included, the snapshot list would become
even more unwieldy.
In conclusion, refecting on the impact and the implications of this intensive scholarly
engagement with Haiti post-2004, this article returns to some of its opening comments and
reservations. Te intention has been to underline the inevitable limitations of what can be
discussed in a survey of this type, and then to suggest the ways in which those limitations
might be pushed in order to suggest new directions in research. Firstly, much of the recent
activity outlined represents the work of outsiders looking in. Not least to avoid the risks of
exoticization, there is need for sustained dialogue between researchers and writers outside
Haiti and those within the country, and an awareness of the potential of such dialogue to
develop into a set of genuinely globalized research practices that challenge existing modes of
See Sybille Fischers 30. Modernity Disavowed; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: Te Story of the Haitian
Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship
in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006); Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A
Biography (New York: Pantheon, 2007); and Doris Garraway, Te Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French
Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2005).
See Noam Chomsky, Paul Farmer, Amy Goodman, and Democracy Now!, 31. Getting Haiti Right Tis Time (Monroe,
ME: Common Courage Press, 2004); Pat Chin, ed., Haiti: A Slave Revolution; 200 Years After 1804 (New York:
International Action Center, 2004); Alex Dupuy, Te Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International
Community, and Haiti (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefeld, 2006); Randall Robinson, An Unbroken Agony:
Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2007); Nicolas Rossiers flm
Aristide and the Endless Revolution (New York: Baraka Productions, 2006); and Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood:
Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (London: Verso, 2008).
Signifcant among such works are Claude Moses corrective 32. Dictionnaire de la Rvolution hatienne (17981804)
(Montreal: Images/Cidihca, 2003); and Nadve Menards forthcoming edited collection, Ecrire Hati aujourdhui.
12
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SX27 Interpreting 2004: Politics, Memory, Scholarship
constructing knowledgethis is one of the aims of the Small Axe collective, and may be seen
in a South American context in the work of Walter Mignolo and others, whose decolonial
option is in marked contrast to the institutional and epistemoloigical conservatism of much
postcolonial criticism. Secondly, there is a need to acknowledge concerns that the increas-
ing ubiquityin scholarship and in commemorationof key fgures of Haitian history,
in particular of Toussaint Louverture, should neither lead to a reduction of their historical
complexity nor to an overplaying of their symbolic signifcance. Michel-Rolph Trouillot
described the ways in which much literature on Haiti remains excessively respectful of the
revolutionary leaders, refecting the need for an engagementclear in Carolyn Ficks work, as
well as in the earlier writings of Etienne Charlierwith the role of the Haitian people in his-
tory and culture.4 Associated with this issue is clearly a question of the representativity of the
Haitian heroes themselves. Toussaints portability and acceptability in an international frame
have been increasingly well documented and closely questioned. Tere is a lesser interest in
Henri-Christophe, whose Armorial gnral du Royaume dHayti appeared in 2006 in facsimile
edition produced by the College of Arms of London. Largely absent, however, from the com-
memoration and its aftermath, is the liberator himself, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, despite his
foundational role in the 1804 events. In the midst of the slew of commemorations discussed
above, the bicentenary of his death17 October 2006passed with little comment.5 And
thirdly and fnally, although examples have been cited above of work that persistently brings
contemporary Haiti to public attention, overturning the stereotypes and received ideas that
dominate much media coverage, there is a need to ensure that a privileging of the past does
not eclipse the continued importance of discussing the present, namely, that the privileging
of Haiti then is not detrimental to any acknowledgment, exploration, and highlighting of
the dilemmas of Haiti now.
Te envoi to Te Stone Tat the Builder Refused, the concluding volume of Madison Smartt
Bells trilogy, constitutes a poetic engagement with the forms of connectedness between past
and present on which this article depends. Riau, a rare survivor amongst Bells remarkable
cast of characters in the aftermath of revolution and independence, provides a prophetic, hal-
lucinatory list of the names of many who have gone beneath the waters or will go, ranging
On postcolonialism as a marketing of the margins, see Graham Huggan, 33. Te Postcolonial Exotic (London:
Routledge, 2001).
See Etienne Charlier, 34. Aperu sur la formation historique de la nation hatienne (Port-au-Prince: Presses Libres, 1954);
and Caroline E. Fick, Te Making of Haiti: Te Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1990).
A notable exception is the bicentenary publication, edited by Eric Sauray, 35. Lettres ouvertes Dessalines (Paris:
Dauphin noir, 2004).
SX27 October 2008 Charles Forsdick
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13
from Macandal, Boukman, Moyse, and Toussaint, to more recent fgures such as Jean Domi-
nique.6 It is with this idea of connectedness that this article concludes, not suggesting any
straightforward narrative of cause and efect that oversimplifes recognition of the legacies
of the past in the present, but urging instead a thorough exploration of transhistorical links
and their contemporary manifestations. Last year saw another Haitian tragedy of the Turks
and Caicos Islands, with the capsizing of a boat leading to the deaths of over sixty Haitian
migrants. Ofcial reports of investigation into survivors claims that this was not an accident
but the result of a deliberate act remained inconclusive, but news of the drownings and their
aftermath, which attracted little attention in the international media, recall the line in David
Rudders Haiti: Tey say the middle passage is gone / So how come overcrowded boats
still haunt our lives?7 In refecting on such connections between colonial history and the
postcolonial or often neocolonial contemporary period, the task for those with a genuinely
constructive interest in Haiti is to elaborate an approach that permits a move from memorial-
izing and compartmentalizingeven romanticizing and exoticizingthe past, toward engag-
ing critically with the present. Tis is the very shift that should be central to the ambitions of
any student of Haitis past, of its present, or of its future.
Acknowledgments
Tis article was written while its author was in receipt of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. Te support of the
Leverhulme Trust is gratefully acknowledged.
See Madison Smartt Bell, 36. Te Stone Tat the Builder Refused (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 700.
David Rudder, Haiti, included on David Rudder and Charlies Roots, 37. Haiti, LP (Barbados: West Indies Records,
1988).