archives@tulane.edu / Using newly discovered sources from Spanish and French archives, “Subjects of the King: Royalism and the Origins of the Haitian Revolution, 1763-1806,” re-examines the social, political, and cultural history of the Haitian Revolution. Specifically, I explore the royalist origins of the August 1791 slave revolts in the French colony of Saint Domingue that sparked the famous 1791-1804 Revolution. In addition to tracing the movements of multilingual border crossers of uncertain loyalty, I document a royalist counterrevolutionary movement that sought to destroy the republican ideals of the French Revolution and restore Louis XVI to the throne. The current scholarly consensus posits that important causal factors in igniting the revolts were French Republicanism and Enlightenment-era abolitionism. I do not refute these claims, but I contest their centrality, filling a historiographical void by pointing to royalism, a venerable phenomenon with African as well as European roots, as a counterintuitive emancipatory model. I show that Saint Dominguan revolutionaries were part of a long-entangled history on the shared island of Hispaniola within which African descendants acted as pivot points between the two colonies, often crossing the border and manipulating both French and Spanish institutions. In doing so, they fashioned a multifaceted royalist viewpoint that paradoxically depended on monarchical articulations of rights and freedoms. Ultimately, my study calls upon scholars to rethink the way in which the enslaved in Saint Domingue conceptualized freedom, challenging the assumption that royalism was a rigid historical counterpoint to Enlightenment ideals. / 1 / Jesus G. Ruiz

This dissertation examines the ways that slaves and free blacks participated in and shaped the Bourbon Reforms in New Spain (Mexico and Central America) during the period of 1750-1808. By framing the Bourbon Reforms in this part of the Americas through an Atlantic World perspective, centered on the importance of slavery to European empire-building efforts in the eighteenth century, this dissertation argues that the politics of difference was vital to these imperial ambitions even in places where the slave population was relatively small. In the context of the slave and free black populations, the Spanish Empire determined its politics of difference on prejudices against blacks informed by skin color. Slaves and free blacks, nonetheless, actively participated in Bourbon imperial projects through litigation, forcing negotiations by escaping slavery, giving service in the militias defending the frontiers, borderlands, and imperial cities, and forging important kinship ties that shaped their identities and social networks that they used to negotiate their position in the imperial order. I argue that a pivotal moment when racism exacerbated the relationships of slaves and free blacks with the Crown was the Haitian Revolution. Although racist attitudes were already present against blacks, the Haitian Revolution demonstrated that slaves could eradicate slavery and the colonial order associated. The impact of this revolution was profound and even affected regions of the Americas that had small slave populations.

This thesis examines two crises that occurred in Philadelphia in the middle of the 1790s: the arrival of refugees from the revolution in the French West Indian colony of Saint-Domingue and the outbreak of yellow fever the followed their arrival. These crises are studied together in order to understand the challenges that they posed to the post-Revolutionary culture of sensibility and to the sympathetic construction of social order that drew upon this culture. Philadelphians’ post-Revolutionary sentimental project – the reorganization of society along lines of fellow-feeling, benevolence, and emotional parity – was strained by the arrival of refugees from Saint-Domingue and by the outbreak of epidemic disease. Both of these events were opportunities to actuate sympathetic ideologies, and in both cases, action fell short of rhetoric. This thesis examines why this was the case. Central to Philadelphians’ ambivalence in creating sympathetic social bonds was the presence of people of color – American and foreign – in the city. When asked to extend fellow-feeling to black Philadelphians and black Saint-Domingan refugees, white Philadelphians equivocated. The reorganization of society in the post-Revolutionary period had presumed emotional equality among Americans, but the issue of race repeatedly demonstrated weaknesses in the application of this ideology. The crises examined within this work demonstrate the enduring appeal of sensibility in 1790s Philadelphia. They also demonstrate its weaknesses. As more and more groups use the language of sympathy and benevolence to voice their demands, sensibility faltered. This thesis builds upon a growing scholarship that examines the effect of the Haitian Revolution on the United States to argue that the arrival of refugees from that revolution to Philadelphia highlighted fundamental ambivalences and fault lines in the United States’ post-Revolutionary sentimental project.

<p>"Utopian (Post)Colonies: Rewriting Race and Gender after the Haitian Revolution" examines the works of French women authors writing from just before the first abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1794 to those writing at the time of the second and final abolition in 1848. These women, each in different and evolving ways, challenged notions of race and gender that excluded French women from political debate and participation and kept Africans and their descendants in subordinated social positions. However, even after Haitian independence, French authors continued to understand the colony as a social and political enterprise to be remodeled and ameliorated rather than abandoned. These authors' rewritings of race and gender thus played a crucial role in a more general French engagement with the idea of the colony-as-utopia.</p><p>In 1791, at the very beginning of the Haitian Revolution--which was also the beginning of France's unexpected first postcolonial moment--colonial reform, abolitionism, and women's political participation were all passionately debated issues among French revolutionaries. These debates faded in intensity as the nineteenth century progressed. Slavery, though officially abolished in 1794, was reestablished in 1802. Divorce was again made illegal in 1816. Even in 1848, when all men were granted suffrage and slavery was definitively abolished in the French colonies, women were not given the right to vote. Yet, throughout the early nineteenth century, the notion of the colony-as-utopia continued to offer a space for French women authors to imagine gender equality and women's empowerment through their attempts to alter racial hierarchy.</p><p>My first chapter examines the development of abolitionism through theatre in the writings of Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793). At a time when performance was understood to have influential moral implications, de Gouges imagines a utopian colony to be possible through the power of performance to produce moral action. In my second chapter, I analyze how, during the slowly re-emerging abolitionist movements of the 1820s, Sophie Doin (1800-1846) and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) expose the individual emotional suffering of slaves in an effort to make the violence of enslavement visible. In the process of making this violence visible, Doin's <italic>La Famille noire suivie de trois nouvelles blanches et noires</italic> (1825-6) and Desbordes-Valmore's <italic>Sarah</italic> (1821), in contrast with Claire de Duras's <italic>Ourika</italic> (1823), mobilize respect for motherhood to bolster their abolitionist claims. My third chapter analyzes the colonial novels of Madame Charles Reybaud (1802-1870), a forgotten but once-popular novelist, who uses the idea of the colony to develop a feminist re-definition of marriage involving the emancipation of males from their own categories of enslavement. Influenced by the Saint-Simonian thought of the July Monarchy, Reybaud imagines a utopian colony organized by a feminized French humanitarianism that attempts to separate French racial identity from that of the "Creole" colonizer. My final chapter compares this French desire to yoke utopia to colony with nineteenth-century Haitian attempts to reveal the opposite synergy: the inseparability of the institutions of slavery and colonialism. Haiti's first novel, <italic>Stella</italic> (1859) by Émeric Bergeaud (1818-1858), opposes racial hierarchy and defends Haitian independence in the face of harsh discrimination from an international community whose economies still depended on colonialism and slavery. In contrast with the previous texts studied in this dissertation, <italic>Stella</italic> imagines Haiti to have the potential to become a utopian postcolony, a nation freed from the constraints of colonialism in such a way as to serve as a model for a future in which racial hierarchy has no power.</p> / Dissertation

In this thesis, I seek to understand the historical process by which Haiti has become a site of economic exploitation and labor coercion. I identify a remarkable continuity in the justification of economic oppression at three historical junctures: the reestablishment of plantation production under Toussaint Louverture in 1800, the agrarian development projects implemented by the American occupation 1918 and 1929, and the IMF agricultural liberalization measures implemented in between 1986/87 and 1993/94. I argue that a violent and chronically unstable juxtaposition between “civilized” elites and “uncivilized” masses creates and sustains a political system of brutal exploitation. A racialized logic lies at the heart of the civilization fantasy and maintains the economic, political and cultural configurations of peasant and proletariat oppression in Haiti.

Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-119).

No description available.

The purpose of this study is to produce an Africological model that lends attention to epistemological questions in African diaspora research through theoretical and culturally based analysis, ultimately to aid the historical and psychological restoration of Africans in diaspora. This work reflects the theoretical and historic stream of scholarship that centers geographic Africa as the adhesive principle of study in shaping and understanding the cultural and political ally-ship between different African diasporic communities. My aim is to illustrate what Africa represents in diaspora and how it was shaped in the conscious minds and actions of early Africans in diaspora from their own vantage point. Secondly, through a case study of the intra-diasporic relationship between Haiti and free Africans of Philadelphia following the Haitian Revolution, this work lays precedence for the expansion of an African diasporic consciousness. The significance of the intra-diasporic relationship is in the mutual recognition that Haitians and Africans in North America considered themselves a common people. Moreover, they developed an international relationship during the early 19th century to serve their mutual interest in African freedom and autonomous development despite Western expansion. My research locates Africa as the place of origin for dispersed and migrating African diasporic communities, operating as a binding source. In this study Africa is explored as a cognitive and geo-political cultural location for African people in diaspora. I support that African diasporic communities exist as extended African cultural locations of awareness which can and have been negotiated by communities depending on their agency, support, and circumstance to achieve collective goals. / African American Studies

Throughout the history of western academia, there have been scholars who have interpreted and examined various aspects of human history. Within their “objectivity,” European historians and other Eurocentric scholars make it a point to universalize their own interpretations of different people’s histories and cultures. This type of scholarship tends to ignore or omit the contributions and historical realities of Afrikan people. This case is especially true of the scholars who have interpreted the historiography around the Afrikan revolution in Ayiti (Haiti/Hayti). The purpose of this study is to provide an Afrocentric re-examination and interpretation around the historiography of the Afrikan Revolution in Ayiti. As a result, this study seeks to highlight several essential Afrikan aspects and their overall impact on the Afrikan revolutionary war's totality in Ayiti. How can Ayisyen Vodou/Vodun and the more extensive system of Afrikan spirituality help better shape the interpretation and the historiography around the Afrikan revolution in Ayiti? Secondly, how have Eurocentric historiographies about different Afrikan histories been used to minimize Afrikan agency? Specifically, how did Afrikan people's dislocation caused by the European plantation play into the minimization of Afrikan agency in Ayiti during and after the revolution? Other relevant questions posed include: what is the relevance of utilizing Afrocentric historiography to teach young black children the stories and victories of Afrikan people in Ayiti? Furthermore, how can Afrocentric historiography be used as an analytical tool to discuss the theoretical issue of agency reduction formation and cognitive hiatus in Ayiti? These are the major research questions this study will attempt to answer, with the hope that this work may potentially raise the consciousness of young Afrikan people in Ayiti and abroad. / African American Studies

This thesis discusses the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the United States as a lens through which to view the transnational nature of American exceptionalism. It concludes with an articulation of the necessity of incorporating this relational nature of United States identity development into high school coursework, and advocates for teaching about the Haitian Revolution as an effective means through which to do this.