Adrianna M. Paliyenko  (Colby College)
A Purloined Black Hero:The Transnational Toussaint-Louverture and his Postcolonial Double

Nineteenth-century narratives invariably filter the Haitian revolution (1791-1801) through the figure of the provocative Toussaint-Louverture and recall with ambivalence the advent of the "Black Terror." This powerful chapter in French colonial history seized in diametrically opposed ways the imagination of scores of 19th-century men and women in France, England, and the United States. Figures of the (in)famous black hero, which transcended national boundaries, proliferated throughout the century that saw the British, French and American abolitions of slavery. Representations of "le Premier des Noirs" we have inherited from 19th-century historians and literary thinkers shift, as J.A. Ferguson has observed, "from the hagiographical to the demonological, according to political motivation and subjective parti pris" (395).¹ In this paper, I shall treat two principal questions concerning the transnational body of writing on the (post)colonial figure of Toussaint Louverture. Do colonial representations of Toussaint Louverture by men and women reproduce the political inflections of these historic emancipations in different ways? Does the postcolonial figure of Toussaint Louverture displace or resolve--on a narrative level--larger cultural anxieties concerning gender and race?

¹ Ferguson, J.A. "'Le Premier des Noirs': The Nineteenth-Century Image of Toussaint Louverture.'" Nineteenth-Century French Studies 15.4 (Summer 1987): 394-406.