Haitis Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution

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The essays gathered in Haitis 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 toand are transformed bythe 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.

Reviews

This pioneering volume traces compellingly how the Haitian Revolution left a profound mark on transatlantic Romanticism, which transcended genres, disciplines, languages, and races. It forms a ground-breaking contribution both to Romantic and Haitian Revolutionary Studies. * Raphael Hoermann, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Black Atlantic Research, University of Central Lancashire, UK *
It is hard to imagine an historical event that more complexly or forcefully announces that Black lives matter than the Haitian Revolution, born amid the depravities of the most profitable plantation economy in the Caribbean. The events of 17911804 augured an unprecedented intervention in the modern world: a society for which an unqualified and universal right to freedom was not a theoretical abstraction but a political and moral practice. This volume, brimming with elegantly written and deeply researched scholarship, traces the layered transnational literary afterlives of the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue, an insurrection that did much more than smash the slave system. As the scholars gathered here amply demonstrate, the revolution in Haiti has never ceased calling for the transformation of the very idea of revolution, as it does Romantic and Enlightenment conceptions of personhood, liberality, freedom, and literature. Haitis Literary Legacies responds to that summons with uncommon rigor and imagination, reading the still unfolding aftermaths of Romanticism and Haiti through each other. This compelling volume leaves us with a wonderfully generative problem: what the 21st century makes of the Haitian Revolution will depend largely on what the Haitian Revolution makes of us. * David L. Clark, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Canada *
At a time when the Haitian Revolution is being taught in history and literature classrooms more than ever before, this volume on the relationship of these world-historical events to literary romanticism could not be more timely. The volumes transnational scope and focus on writerly engagements with Haiti throughout the 19th century provides much-needed breadth and will ensure its enduring appeal. * Marlene L. Daut, Professor of African Diaspora Studies, University of Virginia, USA *

Author Bio

Kir Kuiken is Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY, USA, and the author of Imagined Sovereignties: Towards a New Political Romanticism (2014) as well as essays on Kleist, Wordsworth, Derrida, Rancire and others. Deborah Elise White is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Emory University, USA, and the author of Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History (2000) as well as essays on Coleridge, Derrida, Freud, Hugo, and Marx.