Science of Desire: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865.

FAIN: FT-58061-10

Marlene Leydy Daut
Claremont Graduate University (Claremont, CA 91711-5909)

This project focuses upon the transatlantic literary history of the Haitian Revolution in the late 18th- to mid-19th-centuries, especially as depicted in novels, poetry, plays, memoirs, captivity narratives, and abolitionist pamphlets, and provides a revision to the popular historical understanding of the Haitian Revolution as being the outgrowth of Enlightenment philosophy. Instead, I show how 18th- and 19th-century writers most often used the language of scientific debates about race to explain the events of the Revolution. My study is most innovative in that it considers the writing of Haitian authors alongside U.S. American and colonial European writers. By bringing attention to an archive of materials that have often been overlooked in Haitian Revolutionary historiography, I hope to construct an alternative narrative of the events, one that exposes the deep connection between the image of the Haitian Revolution and 18th- and 19th-century understandings of race in the Atlantic World.