The Race for America

The Race for America

Author: R. J. Boutelle

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2023-10-03

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As Manifest Destiny took hold in the national consciousness, what did it mean for African Americans who were excluded from its ambitions for an expanding American empire that would shepherd the Western Hemisphere into a new era of civilization and prosperity? R. J. Boutelle explores how Black intellectuals like Daniel Peterson, James McCune Smith, Mary Ann Shadd, Henry Bibb, and Martin Delany engaged this cultural mythology to theorize and practice Black internationalism. He uncovers how their strategies for challenging Manifest Destiny's white nationalist ideology and expansionist political agenda constituted a form of disidentification—a deconstructing and reassembling of this discourse that marshals Black experiences as racialized subjects to imagine novel geopolitical mythologies and projects to compete with Manifest Destiny. Employing Black internationalist, hemispheric, and diasporic frameworks to examine the emigrationist and solidarity projects that African Americans proposed as alternatives to Manifest Destiny, Boutelle attends to sites integral to US aspirations of hemispheric dominion: Liberia, Nicaragua, Canada, and Cuba. In doing so, Boutelle offers a searing history of how internalized fantasies of American exceptionalism burdened the Black geopolitical imagination that encouraged settler-colonial and imperialist projects in the Americas and West Africa.


Haiti’s Literary Legacies

Haiti’s Literary Legacies

Author: Kir Kuiken

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-11-04

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1501366335

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The essays gathered in Haiti's Literary Legacies unpack the theoretical, historical, and political resonance of the Haitian revolution across a multiplicity of European and American Romanticisms, and include discussion of Haitian, British, French, German, and U.S. American traditions. Often referred to as the only successful slave revolt in history, the revolution that forged Haiti at once fulfilled, challenged, and ultimately surpassed Enlightenment conceptions of freedom and universality in ways that became crucial to transnational Romanticism, yet scholars and historians of Romanticism are only beginning to take the measure of its impact. This collection works at the intersection of Romantic and Caribbean studies to move that project forward, showing the myriad ways that literatures of the Romantic period respond to-and are transformed by-the Revolution in Haiti. Demonstrating the Revolution's centrality to romantic writing, Haiti's Literary Legacies urges an enlarged understanding of Romanticism and of its implications for the political, historical, and ecological genealogies of the present.


Awakening the Ashes

Awakening the Ashes

Author: Marlene L. Daut

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2023-10-17

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Haitian Revolution was a powerful blow against colonialism and slavery, and as its thinkers and fighters blazed the path to universal freedom, they forced anticolonial, antislavery, and antiracist ideals into modern political grammar. The first state in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery, outlaw color prejudice, and forbid colonialism, Haitians established their nation in a hostile Atlantic World. Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the rest of the Americas and foreign nations and empires repeatedly attacked Haitian sovereignty. Yet Haitian writers and politicians successfully defended their independence while planting the ideological roots of egalitarian statehood. In Awakening the Ashes, Marlene L. Daut situates famous and lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.


Encountering Revolution

Encountering Revolution

Author: Ashli White

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2010-04

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0801894158

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Encountering Revolution looks afresh at the profound impact of the Haitian Revolution on the early United States. The first book on the subject in more than two decades, it redefines our understanding of the relationship between republicanism and slavery at a foundational moment in American history. For postrevolutionary Americans, the Haitian uprising laid bare the contradiction between democratic principles and the practice of slavery. For thirteen years, between 1791 and 1804, slaves and free people of color in Saint-Domingue battled for equal rights in the manner of the French Revolution. As white and mixed-race refugees escaped to the safety of U.S. cities, Americans were forced to confront the paradox of being a slaveholding republic, recognizing their own possible destiny in the predicament of the Haitian slaveholders. Historian Ashli White examines the ways Americans—black and white, northern and southern, Federalist and Democratic Republican, pro- and antislavery—pondered the implications of the Haitian Revolution. Encountering Revolution convincingly situates the formation of the United States in a broader Atlantic context. It shows how the very presence of Saint-Dominguan refugees stirred in Americans as many questions about themselves as about the future of slaveholding, stimulating some of the earliest debates about nationalism in the early republic.


Haitian History

Haitian History

Author: Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0415808677

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Despite Haiti's proximity to the United States, and its considerable importance to our own history, Haiti barely registered in the historic consciousness of most Americans until recently. Those who struggled to understand Haiti's suffering in the earthquake of 2010 often spoke of it as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, but could not explain how it came to be so. In recent years, the amount of scholarship about the island has increased dramatically. Whereas once this scholarship was focused on Haiti's political or military leaders, now the historiography of Haiti features lively debates and different schools of thought. Even as this body of knowledge has developed, it has been hard for students to grasp its various strands. Haitian History presents the best of the recent articles on Haitian history, by both Haitian and foreign scholars, moving from colonial Saint Domingue to the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. It will be the go-to one-volume introduction to the field of Haitian history, helping to explain how the promise of the Haitian Revolution dissipated, and presenting the major debates and questions in the field today.


Theorizing Anti-Racism

Theorizing Anti-Racism

Author: Abigail Bakan

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2014-11-21

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1442620021

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

p>Over the last few decades, critical theory which examines issues of race and racism has flourished. However, most of this work falls on one side or the other of a theoretical divide between theory inspired by Marxist approaches to race and racism and that inspired by postcolonial and critical race theory. Driven by the need to move beyond the divide, the contributors to Theorizing Anti-Racism present insightful essays that engage these two intellectual traditions with a focus on clarification and points of convergence. The essays in Theorizing Anti-Racism examine topics which range from reconsiderations of anti-racism in the work of Marx and Foucault to examinations of the relationships among race, class, and the state that integrate both Marxist and critical race theory. Drawing on the most constructive elements of Marxism and postcolonial and critical race theory, this collection constitutes an important contribution to the advancement of anti-racist theory.


Against Wind and Tide

Against Wind and Tide

Author: Ousmane K Power-Greene

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2014-09-05

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 147983825X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Against Wind and Tide tells the story of African American’s battle against the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 with the intention to return free blacks to its colony Liberia. Although ACS members considered free black colonization in Africa a benevolent enterprise, most black leaders rejected the ACS, fearing that the organization sought forced removal. As Ousmane K. Power-Greene’s story shows, these African American anticolonizationists did not believe Liberia would ever be a true “black American homeland.” In this study of anticolonization agitation, Power-Greene draws on newspapers, meeting minutes, and letters to explore the concerted effort on the part of nineteenth century black activists, community leaders, and spokespersons to challenge the American Colonization Society’s attempt to make colonization of free blacks federal policy. The ACS insisted the plan embodied empowerment. The United States, they argued, would never accept free blacks as citizens, and the only solution to the status of free blacks was to create an autonomous nation that would fundamentally reject racism at its core. But the activists and reformers on the opposite side believed that the colonization movement was itself deeply racist and in fact one of the greatest obstacles for African Americans to gain citizenship in the United States. Power-Greene synthesizes debates about colonization and emigration, situating this complex and enduring issue into an ever broader conversation about nation building and identity formation in the Atlantic world.


Evangelicals, Catholics, and Vodouyizan in Haiti

Evangelicals, Catholics, and Vodouyizan in Haiti

Author: Celucien L. Joseph

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-04-04

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1350351717

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Exploring the subject through many different theoretical frameworks and epistemological traditions, this book confronts the history of Haiti's three major practicing religious faiths: Vodou, Roman Catholicism, and Protestant Evangelicalism. Scholars, researchers, and faith practitioners have often depicted relations between these traditions as antagonistic, conflicting, unproductive, and lacking in mutual understanding. With the aim of exploring the possibility of nation building in Haiti and the benefits of interreligious collaboration, contributors to this book consider topics such as the obstacles to interfaith dialogue, religious conflict, interreligious dialogue in schools, race and identity, and religious pluralism. This book will be beneficial to scholars, practitioners, historians, and sociologists of religion, as well as the religious communities themselves in Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora.


The Black Romantic Revolution

The Black Romantic Revolution

Author: Matt Sandler

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1788735455

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers - enslaved and free - allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism - lyric poetry, prophetic visions - to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and U.S. imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery’s sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe’s stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics’ cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.