Bloomsbury Academic Haiti’s Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution

Haiti’s Literary Legacies unpacks the theoretical, historical, and political resonance of the Haitian revolution across a multiplicity of European and American Romanticisms, including Haitian, British, French, and German traditions. Often referred to as the only successful slave uprising in history, the Haitian revolution at once fulfilled and surpassed Enlightenment conceptions of freedom and universality in ways that were crucial to global Romanticism, and yet these effects are only beginning to be studied by scholars and historians of Romanticism. This volume works at the intersection of Romantic and Caribbean studies to outline the myriad ways that the politicized literature of Romantic period engages the revolution in Haiti. Demonstrating the centrality of the Haitian revolution to the larger configuration of transnational Romantic writing, this collection articulates a literary legacy that speaks to our contemporary moment and our ongoing attempts to come to terms with the political, historical, and ecological genealogies of the present. Review "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 1791-1804 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. Haiti's 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 volume's 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 About the Author Kir Kuiken is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Albany, USA, and the author of Imagined Sovereignties: Towards a New Political Romanticism (2014). He has published essays on romanticism and critical theory in a range of journals including Oxford Literary Review, Essays in Romanticism, Postmodern Culture, Keats-Shelley Journal, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature and Research in Phenomenology.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). Sh