12270: Book Review: Sheller Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and P easant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica. (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Karen F. Davis <kdavis@marygrove.edu>

Karen F. Dimanche Davis, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Head of Humanities Department
Marygrove College
Detroit, Michigan 48221 USA
Telephone: 313-927-1352
email: kdavis@marygrove.edu

>
> H-NET BOOK REVIEW
> Published by H-Atlantic@msu.edu (April, 2002)
>
> Mimi Sheller.  _Democracy After Slavery:  Black Publics and Peasant
> Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica_.  Gainesville: University of Florida
> Press, 2001.  270pp.  Index. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8130-1883-8.
>
> Reviewed for H-Atlantic by Stewart King, Mount Angel Seminary
>
> Historians over the two centuries since Haiti's independence have
> tended to portray the country as unique. Because it was the "first
> black republic," it has been depicted as somehow special or
> different--different in a negative way in the discourse of racist
> exclusion that dominated western intellectual reactions to the
> non-western world until the last few generations, and then different in
> a positive way to more progressive scholars. Haitian scholars liked to
> think of their country as different from the others, too. From Thomas
> Madiou to the present day, Haitian particularism has been the dominant
> theme in Haitians' view of themselves. Mimi Sheller has done historians
> of Haiti a favor by drawing the parallel between political developments
> there and in Jamaica in the decades after the end of slavery.
>
> The book even considers the possibility of a direct link between
> Haitian and Jamaican politics by investigating charges made at the time
> by elite opponents of the Morant Bay movement. The Jamaican leadership
> charged that Haitian agents had encouraged and supported the Morant Bay
> rebels, who were seeking to create a larger black state in the
> Caribbean. The "Haytian fear" allegations make an interesting but
> ultimately unconvincing argument for the existence of region-wide
> collective action by black peasants during the 19th century.
>
> Moreover, Dr. Sheller has given us a very useful analysis of the
> development of peasant agency in post-abolition societies in the
> Caribbean. Marxist and developmentalist schools of thought both
> stressed the _lumpen_ nature of the peasantry. Peasants were incapable
> of organization or progressive political opinions of their own, and
> could only act in the political sphere as the clients of political
> elites, or, at the very most, in defense of traditional rights and
> social structures. Politics in former slave societies could only follow
> the pattern of the other Latin American republics, where _caudillos_
> and urban elites competed for the support of the masses through
> patronage networks and fought each other on basically personalist
> grounds for the fruits of political power.
>
> _Democracy After Slavery_ rebuts these common assumptions by tracking
> the formation of peasant agency in Haiti and Jamaica after the end of
> slavery in those places. Dr. Sheller does not attempt to gloss over the
> very real differences between the two islands, the one an independent
> former French colony and the other a British colony. She points out,
> however, that the similarities in their economic situations, as places
> once at the core of the sugar and coffee plantation complex, and the
> frequent interactions between them, overshadow their differences and
> make comparison fruitful.
>
> And fruitful it is. The Haitian Liberal Rebellion and the associated
> Piquet movement of peasants in the southern peninsula bears comparison
> with the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica. The book demonstrates the
> formation of public opinion through newspapers and elite reaction
> through police and court records and public correspondence. Dr. Sheller
> has clearly done an impressive amount of research in a wide variety of
> archives and brings many different perspectives to bear on this subject.
>
> Bearing all this in mind, I have to say that _Democracy After Slavery_
> is not an easy read. It is clearly a dissertation re-worked, lightly,
> for publication. Theoretical concepts, expressed in language that is
> sometimes a little dense, come thick and fast. The most serious flaw is
> that there are few real human beings to identify with. This is
> especially true of the Haitian portion of the book, where the sources
> are a little less rich than for the Jamaican section. Obviously, the
> author cannot go beyond what her sources allow. Moreover, she clearly
> sees social groups instead of individuals as the important actors in
> history. However, the non-specialist reader would benefit from seeing
> how the broad social forces that Dr. Sheller talks about affected the
> lives of specific individuals.
>
> On balance, though, this is a very good book. I would encourage readers
> of H-Caribbean to read it. Anyone who wants a broader view of how the
> peasant societies of the twentieth-century Caribbean evolved out of the
> plantation societies of the eighteenth should read what Dr. Sheller has
> to say.
>
>         Copyright 2002 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
>         redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
>         educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
>         author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
>         H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
>         contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.