Translated Subjects: Visions of Haiti in 19th-Century Literary Exchange Mary Grace Albanese Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ! © 2017 Mary Grace Albanese All rights reserved ! ABSTRACT Translated Subjects: Visions of Haiti in 19th-Century Literature Mary Grace Albanese Haiti’s public image has long vacillated between extremes: from democratic beacon to shadow of insurrection; from space of racial uplift to pit of economic exploitation; from bearer of Enlightenment ideals to dark land of “voodoo.” Indeed the two taglines most commonly associated with Haiti are: “first black republic” and “poorest country in the Western hemisphere.” These opposing taglines fit within a critical paradigm that has long viewed Haiti in terms of example (as a site of universal emancipation and racial equality) and exception (or, in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s memorable words, the notion that Haiti is “unnatural, erratic, and therefore unexplainable.”)1 This dissertation engages these two competing figures of Haitian exemplarity and Haitian exceptionalism in early 19th-century literatures of the black Americas. In doing so, I examine Haiti both as an imagined space and as a site of literary production whose products circulated in various and sometimes misleading translations. This network of what I call “translations of Haiti’ re-navigate, and mark with difference, traditional narratives of race and nation. My project reveals how the idea of Haiti flickered through many complex forms in the early 19th-century. Some of these forms fall into the rubric of exception/example but others do not: from sister in democracy, to vanguard of black internationalism, to potential site of exploitation, to occasion for domestic reflection. By nuancing the binary between example and !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Haiti: State Against Nation: Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990). 6. exception, I question critical accounts that depict early representations of the first black republic as either symptomatic of white anxieties or an ideal site for the realization of black nationalist projects. These accounts, I argue, often overlook how national and racial categories failed to overlap; they occlude Haitian (and especially Kreyòl) literary production; and, most importantly, they ignore the complex transnational movements occasioned by this production. I argue that when we consider translation as a metaphor (for example, the notion of translation as an analogical model or heuristic) we must also consider translation as a practice with material consequences. I negotiate between Haiti’s powerful abstraction(s) and a material network of constantly circulating, translated and re-translated texts. These texts, I argue, provoked fears and anxieties, but also speculations, hopes, and visions amongst constantly changing constituents of groups that may or may not be usefully labeled (for example, free U.S. blacks; mulâtres; noirs; U.S. northerners; etc.) Using this shifting international stage as a point of departure, “Translated Subjects” takes Haitian cultural production seriously – that is to say, as more than a convenient metaphor – to reveal new channels of literary exchange. ! Table of Contents Introduction 1-14 Ouanga nouveau: Jean-Pierre Ibo and the Shifting Face of Revolution Chapter I: “A Vehement Cotillion”: Archival Dance Through the Black South 15-50 i. “Cette danse est opposée à la pudeur”: Tracing the Calenda ii. The Living Monument of Congo Square iii. “This Calenture of the National Brain”: Poe’s Nostalgic Fever Chapter II: Alternative African American Genealogies in “Theresa, A Haytien Tale” and “Le Mulâtre” 51-104 i. The Locus Amoenus of Haiti ii. Mapping God iii. “She Saw with the Mind’s Eye”: Prophecies of Justice iv. Internationalism and the Broken Bonds of Kinship v. Revolutionary History and Séjour’s Assymetric Frames vi. A Genealogy d’Outre Tombe Chapter III: Uncle Tom Across the Sea (and Back): Pierre Faubert and the Haitian Response to Harriet Beecher Stowe 105-157 i. “Sentiments favorable to freedom”: Stowe’s Liberia and Stowe’s Haiti ii. Madiou, Le Moniteur Haïtien and the “génie d’Haïti” iii. "Et vous tomberez tous, des̀ ce monde, en enfer!": Saint-Rémy, Faubert, and the Limits of Universalism iv. The fugitive and the manguier Chapter IV: “Rivière , président:” William Wells Brown, Émeric Bergeaud, and the Rhyming Newspaper 158-195 i. Foundational bricolage ii. Translations of the Black Spartacus iii. Comment zot vous oublié Toussaint, Dessalin, Christophe et Boyer? Conclusion 196-198 “Le nom français lugubre encore nos contrées” Bibliography 198-215 ! ! i! Albanese Ouanga nouveau: Jean-Pierre Ibo and the Shifting Face of Revolution Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri-Christophe, Vincent Ogé: every amateur student of Haitian Revolutionary history is familiar with this pantheon of national heroes. If this revolution was “unthinkable” and hence interstitially recorded, unevenly remembered, and effectively silenced, to use Michel Rolph Trouillot’s influential framework, part of that silencing was paradoxically undertaken by the forces of myth making which created many of these figures.1 From the noble “black Spartacus” of Toussaint Louverture to the blood thirsty ferociousness of Jean-Jacques Dessalines to the mulâtre martyr Ogé, Haiti has been affected as much by archival invisibility as it has from an excess of visibility, as much from exemplarity as it has from exceptionalism – by which I mean, the exaggerated and often racialized caricatures, pious hagiographies, and conflicting ideological decoys generated by romantic historicism. Indeed, certain contemporary commentators have been unexpectedly alive to Haiti’s origins: from the evangelical Pat Robertson’s bizarre claim that Haitian poverty was engendered by a revolutionary pact made with the devil to New York Times columnist David Brooks’ slovenly pontifications on “voodoo” and “progress resistance” in wake of the 2010 earthquake.2 Haiti’s past, one might venture, is only too visible to some. I would like to open this project under the aegis of another character in this canon of mythic men (and they are often, but not always, men), half-fictive and half-real: Jean-Pierre Ibo. Yet unlike Dessalines or Toussaint, Jean-Pierre Ibo’s influence on Haitian culture cannot be unearthed in official correspondences, governmental acts, communiqués, deeds, or newspaper reports. Insofar as an archive is aggregate of institutional forces that select, mediate, and give !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Michel Rolph Trouillot. Silencing the Past: Power and Production in History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 2 David Brooks. “The Underlying Tragedy.” The New York Times 15 January 2010. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opinion/15brooks.html ! 1! Albanese shape to social and historical processes, he has left but one official trace: his name appears fleetingly in a 19 September 1789 issue of the Le Cap based colonial newspaper Affiches américaines as one of four escaped slaves: “Jean-Pierre Ibo, âgé d’environ 45 ans, fort laid.”3 Almost exactly two years before the first stirrings of the events that would come to be historicized as the Haitian Revolution, Ibo’s fleeting appearance in the Affiches américaines points to a much deeper history. Affiches américaines de Saint-Domingue. 19 September 1789. 1020. Digital Library of the Caribbean http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00000449/00022/1019j To official histories of the archive, Jean-Pierre Ibo is identified and measured by three metrics: his ugliness; the slave-holding time which both fixes his age and renders it impersonal; and perhaps most disturbingly the proprietary name which scars him: B. Villard. These descriptive terms collude to dehumanize Ibo: they render him a “laid” physicality, temporally insignificant !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 For colonial accounts of Ibo, see B.H.C., p. 69. – Cabon A., «Un siècle et demi de journalisme en Haïti», Proceedings of the American antiquarian society, n° XLIX (1939), p. 121-205 (p. 125-138); Menier M. A. et Debien G., «Journaux de Saint-Domingue», Revue d'histoire des colonies, n° XXXVI, 127-128 (1949), p. 424-475 (p. 427-435); Moreau de Saint Méry M., Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l'isle Saint-Domingue, Philadelphie, 1797, rééd. Paris, 1958, p. 493-496. ! 2! Albanese ‘âgé environ; italics mine), and mostly strongly identifiable by the violent markings of possession. Yet Jean-Pierre Ibo exist in other, less concrete archives, which push against and beyond these critical narratives, turning from the violent regulatory power of slavery and toward other nebulous formations of subjecthood. The archival trace cited above is merely one of many material remainders in a wider network of oral traditions, vodou songs, folk tales, rumors, beliefs, and visions. Limning the contours of official histories, Ibo is uncataloguable, undocumented, and almost entirely outside the French language: but he exists in and around materials that most archival formations do not select for. In the early twentieth-century, ethnographers and oral historians, began to register the presence of this figure “Jean-Pierre Ibo” in oral traditions, narratives which, some speculate, have persisted from the time of