Deborah Jenson  (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
A "French" Tradition of Black Atlantic Radicalism'

Nick Nesbitt writes that "Two of the processes that came to distinguish the twentieth-century were invented in Haiti: decolonization and neo-colonialism." These "twentieth-century" processes were, of course, introduced with the inauguration of the independent postcolonial state of Haiti in 1804. In this presentation I will summarize arguments I have made elsewhere for broader recognition of nineteenth-century postcoloniality, but I will focus on the scholarly urgency not only of moving between hexagonal France and the former French colonial sites of the African diaspora, but also of moving between twentieth-century negritude, pan-African, and Black Atlantic movements, and the texts of black radicalism from the Haitian Revolution and Independence.

The Haitian Revolutionary figure whose (transcribed) writings best exemplify early nineteenth-century black radical thought is Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the former slave and leader of newly independent Haiti. Observers noted that Dessalines had an anti-assimilationist, anti-colonial politics, emblematized in his rejection of the French language and his promotion of Creole, as well as in his paradoxical use of the term "indigenous" to contrast the diasporan population from the colonial French. There has to date been no sustained analysis of Dessalines's anti-colonial politics, however, perhaps because his "writings" were transcribed by prominent mixed race secretaries including Juste Chanlatte, Boisrond Tonnerre, and Baron de Vastey, which raises the question of the "authenticity" the proclamations and addresses issued by the black General. I will argue however that as all three of these secretaries produced anti-colonial analyses of colonial history and racial politics, their work can be read in conjunction with that of Dessalines to show a larger movement in identarian thought, but also that Dessalines' own documents show a consistent tone of voice and style. I will survey key texts issued by Dessalines: the Declaration of Independence, a "journal de campagne" describing the campaign against the French forces led by Rochambeau, an Independence proclamation to the Spanish inhabitants of neighboring Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), as well as two addresses by Dessalines first published in the United States. Dessalines' rhetoric, which has been dismissed by Joan Dayan as a parroting of Jacobin rhetoric, in my reading contains many philosophical innovations in formulating sensitive policies on topics like the relationship of the revolutionary Haitians to slaves in neighboring Antillean communities. My presentation will conclude with a consideration of how we would have to read the French/Francophone canon differently, both in itself and in its relationship to the Anglophone world, if we read Dessalines as a precursor to Malcolm X.