Haiti in the British Imagination

Haiti in the British Imagination

Author: Jack Daniel Webb

Publisher:

Published: 2021-03

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1800348223

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In 1804, Haiti declared its independence from France to become the world's first 'black' nation state. Throughout the nineteenth century, Haiti maintained its independence, consolidating and expanding its national and, at times, imperial projects. In doing so, Haiti joined a host of other nation states and empires that were emerging and expanding across the Atlantic World. The largest and, in many ways, most powerful of these empires was that of Britain. Haiti in the British Imagination is the first book to focus on the diplomatic relations and cultural interactions between Haiti and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. As well as a story of British imperial aggression and Haitian 'resistance', it is also one of a more complicated set of relations: of rivalry, cultural exchange and intellectual dialogue. At particular moments in the Victorian period, ideas about Haiti had wide-reaching relevancies for British anxieties over the quality of British imperial administration, over what should be the relations between 'the British' and people of African descent, and defining the limits of black sovereignty. Haitians were key in formulating, disseminating and correcting ideas about Haiti. Through acts of dialogue, Britons and Haitians impacted on the worldviews of one another, and with that changed the political and cultural landscapes of the Atlantic World.


Haiti in the British Imagination

Haiti in the British Imagination

Author: Jack Daniel Webb

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2020-11-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1800346743

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In 1804, Haiti declared its independence from France to become the world’s first ‘black’ nation state. Throughout the nineteenth century, Haiti maintained its independence, consolidating and expanding its national and, at times, imperial projects. In doing so, Haiti joined a host of other nation states and empires that were emerging and expanding across the Atlantic World. The largest and, in many ways, most powerful of these empires was that of Britain. Haiti in the British Imagination is the first book to focus on the diplomatic relations and cultural interactions between Haiti and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. As well as a story of British imperial aggression and Haitian ‘resistance’, it is also one of a more complicated set of relations: of rivalry, cultural exchange and intellectual dialogue. At particular moments in the Victorian period, ideas about Haiti had wide-reaching relevancies for British anxieties over the quality of British imperial administration, over what should be the relations between ‘the British’ and people of African descent, and defining the limits of black sovereignty. Haitians were key in formulating, disseminating and correcting ideas about Haiti. Through acts of dialogue, Britons and Haitians impacted on the worldviews of one another, and with that changed the political and cultural landscapes of the Atlantic World.


Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930

Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930

Author: Deborah Epstein Nord

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0231137044

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Deborah Epstein Nord traces the nearly ubiquitous British preoccupation with Gypsies in imaginative works by John Clare, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and D. H. Lawrence. She also exhumes lesser-known literary, ethnographic, and historical texts, exploring the fascinating histories of the nomadic writer George Borrow, the Gypsy Lore Society, Dora Yates, and other rarely examined figures and institutions. These textual representations are characterized by a tension between Gypsies as an alien, often despised "race" and the psychic or aesthetic desire to dissolve the boundary between English and Gypsy worlds. Nord suggests that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, romantic identification with Gypsies hardened into caricature and served to obscure the realities of Gypsy life and history. This phenomenon is reflected most famously in The Virgin and the Gipsy, in which D. H. Lawrence both exploits and criticizes the myth of Gypsies' unfettered sensuality, closeness to nature, and opposition to the oppressive strictures of modern life.


The Black Republic

The Black Republic

Author: Brandon R. Byrd

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2019-10-11

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0812296540

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In The Black Republic, Brandon R. Byrd explores the ambivalent attitudes that African American leaders in the post-Civil War era held toward Haiti, the first and only black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Following emancipation, African American leaders of all kinds—politicians, journalists, ministers, writers, educators, artists, and diplomats—identified new and urgent connections with Haiti, a nation long understood as an example of black self-determination. They celebrated not only its diplomatic recognition by the United States but also the renewed relevance of the Haitian Revolution. While a number of African American leaders defended the sovereignty of a black republic whose fate they saw as intertwined with their own, others expressed concern over Haiti's fitness as a model black republic, scrutinizing whether the nation truly reflected the "civilized" progress of the black race. Influenced by the imperialist rhetoric of their day, many African Americans across the political spectrum espoused a politics of racial uplift, taking responsibility for the "improvement" of Haitian education, politics, culture, and society. They considered Haiti an uncertain experiment in black self-governance: it might succeed and vindicate the capabilities of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination or it might fail and condemn the black diasporic population to second-class status for the foreseeable future. When the United States military occupied Haiti in 1915, it created a crisis for W. E. B. Du Bois and other black activists and intellectuals who had long grappled with the meaning of Haitian independence. The resulting demand for and idea of a liberated Haiti became a cornerstone of the anticapitalist, anticolonial, and antiracist radical black internationalism that flourished between World War I and World War II. Spanning the Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, and Jim Crow eras, The Black Republic recovers a crucial and overlooked chapter of African American internationalism and political thought.


Haiti for the Haitians

Haiti for the Haitians

Author: Brandon R. Byrd

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2023-08-01

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 1802075674

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An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. The world-historical significance of the Haitian Revolution is now firmly established in mainstream history. Yet Haiti’s nineteenth-century has yet to receive its due, this despite independent Haiti’s vital importance as the first nation to permanently ban slavery and its ongoing struggle for sovereignty in the Atlantic World. Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855–1911) is one of the foremost Haitian intellectuals and diplomats of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His prolific oeuvre offered enduring challenges to racist slanders of Haiti and critiques of the global inequalities that arose from European colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Through his writings, Janvier influenced the international debates about slavery, race, nation, and empire that shaped his era and, in many ways, remain unresolved today. Arguably his most powerful work, Haiti for the Haitians (1884) provides a searing critique of European and U.S. imperialism, predatory finance capitalism, and Haiti’s domestic politics. It offers his vision of Haiti’s future expressed through a remarkable phrase: Haiti for the Haitians. Haiti for the Haitians is the first major English translation of Janvier. Accompanied by an introduction, annotations, and an interdisciplinary collection of critical essays, this volume offers unprecedented access to this vital Haitian thinker and an important contribution to the scholarship on Haiti’s nineteenth century.


Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History

Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History

Author: Susan F. Buck-Morss

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 2009-02-22

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 0822973340

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In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a "new humanism," one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.


The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World

The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World

Author: David P. Geggus

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2020-02-14

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1643361139

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The effect of Saint Domingue's decolonization on the wider Atlantic world The slave revolution that two hundred years ago created the state of Haiti alarmed and excited public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. Its repercussions ranged from the world commodity markets to the imagination of poets, from the council chambers of the great powers to slave quarters in Virginia and Brazil and most points in between. Sharing attention with such tumultuous events as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, Haiti's fifteen-year struggle for racial equality, slave emancipation, and colonial independence challenged notions about racial hierarchy that were gaining legitimacy in an Atlantic world dominated by Europeans and the slave trade. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World explores the multifarious influence—from economic to ideological to psychological—that a revolt on a small Caribbean island had on the continents surrounding it. Fifteen international scholars, including eminent historians David Brion Davis, Seymour Drescher, and Robin Blackburn, explicate such diverse ramifications as the spawning of slave resistance and the stimulation of slavery's expansion, the opening of economic frontiers, and the formation of black and white diasporas. They show how the Haitian Revolution embittered contemporary debates about race and abolition and inspired poetry, plays, and novels. Seeking to disentangle its effects from those of the French Revolution, they demonstrate that its impact was ambiguous, complex, and contradictory.


Tell My Horse

Tell My Horse

Author: Zora Neale Hurston

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 0061847399

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“Strikingly dramatic, yet simple and unrestrained . . . an unusual and intensely interesting book richly packed with strange information.” —New York Times Book Review Based on Zora Neale Hurston’s personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica, where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer of voodoo practices during her visits in the 1930s, this travelogue into a dark world paints a vividly authentic picture of the ceremonies, customs, and superstitions of voodoo.


There Is No More Haiti

There Is No More Haiti

Author: Greg Beckett

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-02-26

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0520300246

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This is not just another book about crisis in Haiti. This book is about what it feels like to live and die with a crisis that never seems to end. It is about the experience of living amid the ruins of ecological devastation, economic collapse, political upheaval, violence, and humanitarian disaster. It is about how catastrophic events and political and economic forces shape the most intimate aspects of everyday life. In this gripping account, anthropologist Greg Beckett offers a stunning ethnographic portrait of ordinary people struggling to survive in Port-au-Prince in the twenty-first century. Drawing on over a decade of research, There Is No More Haiti builds on stories of death and rebirth to powerfully reframe the narrative of a country in crisis. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Haiti today.


Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism

Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism

Author: Marlene L. Daut

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-10-31

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1137470674

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Focusing on the influential life and works of the Haitian political writer and statesman, Baron de Vastey (1781-1820), in this book Marlene L. Daut examines the legacy of Vastey’s extensive writings as a form of what she calls black Atlantic humanism, a discourse devoted to attacking the enlightenment foundations of colonialism. Daut argues that Vastey, the most important secretary of Haiti’s King Henry Christophe, was a pioneer in a tradition of deconstructing colonial racism and colonial slavery that is much more closely associated with twentieth-century writers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire. By expertly forging exciting new historical and theoretical connections among Vastey and these later twentieth-century writers, as well as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black Atlantic authors, such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, Daut proves that any understanding of the genesis of Afro-diasporic thought must include Haiti’s Baron de Vastey.