Doris L. Garraway  (Northwestern University)
Was the Haitian Revolution Postcolonial? Theorizing the Atlantic's Forgotten Revolution

In this paper, I will discuss the particular challenge posed by the Haitian Revolution to dominant theoretical tropes and analytical concepts in Anglophone postcolonial theory, particularly as they relate to the question of anticolonial nationalism. I will first analyze the spare treatment this revolution has received in postcolonial studies, in its discursive, political, and theoretical dimensions and implications. A close examination of many of the most influential recent works on colonialism and postcolonialism reveals few mentions of Haiti, or its revolution. In the rare instances where we do find references to Haiti or to the best-known Haitian revolutionary hero, Toussaint Louverture, a pattern emerges that is uncannily similar to the strategies of denial documented in Michel-Rolph Trouillot's account of the silencing of the Haitian Revolution in Western historiography; notably, the Haitian Revolution is inscribed under the figure of repetition and subordinated to the French Revolution, seen as the original signifier of the modern political values of human liberty, equality and natural right. I will provide a possible explanation for why the Haitian Revolution and Haiti more broadly has been largely ignored; that is, why postcolonial theory cannot account for the case of Haiti, by demonstrating the limitations of categories of nationalism through which scholars typically classify modern anticolonial movements. Looking at the specificity of the Haitian Revolution as a slave revolution rooted in abstract, universalizing claims to human freedom, I will examine the extent to which this event represents a limit case of an anticolonial revolution without nationalism, one that exceeds the conceptual alternatives presented by postcolonial theory. Finally, I will propose some consequences of this elision both for postcolonial studies and for francophone studies. I contend that the discourse of the Haitian Revolution runs completely counter to the dominant emphasis in postcolonial studies on postmodern and poststructuralist critiques of Enlightenment discourses of universal emancipation which Haitian Revolutionaries both adapted and radicalized, and I will consider the implications of including the Haitian Revolution and thus shifting the focus of the postcolonial to the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean for new directions in both Caribbean and postcolonial studies.