23614: Jenson: UW-Madison Haiti Symposium (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: DEBORAH C JENSON <djenson@wisc.edu>

A University of Wisconsin-Madison Symposium

« 1804 in 2004 :
Legacies of the Haitian Revolution »

November 12, 2004, Pyle Center Rm. DE235, 9 :30-5 :00

In the Haitian Revolution, former slaves overthrew French colonial rule
and declared independence in 1804. This event, described by Aravamudan
as « a fourth major, if often forgotten, revolution with global
implications, in addition to the Industrial, American, and French
Revolutions, » and by Césaire as « the first epic of the New World, »
has produced wildly contrasting legacies.
This one-day symposium will bring contributors to Yale French Studies’
forthcoming Haiti Issue together to address these legacies in
philosophy, abolitionism, Caribbean literary representations of the
Haitian Revolution, post/colonial Haitian texts, Creole linguistics,
and patterns of neo-colonial violence.

SCHEDULE
9:15 - 9:30	Welcome and coffee

9:30 - 10:25 	Daniel Desormeaux, University of Kentucky, “The First of
the (Black) Memorialists: Toussaint Louverture”

10:30 - 11:25	Deborah Jenson, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “From
the Kidnapping(s) of the Louvertures to the Alleged Kidnapping of
Aristide: Legacies of Slavery in the Post/Colonial World”

11:30 - 12:25	Doris Kadish, University of Georgia-Athens, “Haiti and
Abolitionism in 1825: The Example of Sophie Doin”

12:30 - 1:25	Lunch

1:30 - 2:25	Albert Valdman, Indiana University, “Creole at the Dawn of
the Haitian Independence”

2:30 - 3:25	Chris Bongie, Queens University, “’Monotonies of History’:
Baron Vastey and the Mulatto Legend of Derek Walcott’s Haitian Trilogy”

3:30 - 3:45	Break

3:50 - 4:45	Nick Nesbitt, Miami University of Ohio, “The Idea of 1804”

With a Reception, including live music by Atimevu Drum and Dance with
dramatic readings of Haitian Revolutionary texts, to follow at the
French House, 633 N. Frances St.

A Symposium Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian
Co-Sponsors :
Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies
AfricanDiaspora Studies Research Group
The Center for International French Studies
The Professional French Master’s Program

For further information contact Deborah Jenson at djenson@wisc.edu.

ABSTRACTS

1. Daniel Desormeaux
Is Toussaint Louverture a French memorialist? This talk considers the
historical, political, judicial, and literary impact of Toussaint
Louverture’s Mémoires. Composed during Toussaint’s capitivity at the
Fort de Joux in 1803, but later annotated, transliterated into a more
modern French, and published posthumously in Paris in 1853 by Joseph
Saint-Rémy, an exiled Haitian lawyer and author of a biography of
Toussaint, the text may be the first example of memoirs written by a
Haitian historical figure. What would push a former slave (and fast
learner) to write his Memoirs? If M. Fumaroli, in Les Lieux de mémoire,
is right to classify the practice of memoir writing as an aristocratic
form and the genre français par excellence, francophone critics must
rethink the ideological status of Toussaint Louverture’s final words.
While revisiting the traditional function of this distinctive genre in
nineteenth century France, I will explore Toussaint’s Mémoires in the
context of the Revolutionary events in Saint-Domingue, but also in
their very complex connection to French identity. I will situate the
peculiar language used by Toussaint in the mouvance of modern
historiography, and I will examine the question of “colonial memory” at
the very moment of the collapse of the republican myth in 1852.

2. Deborah Jenson
In the hours following Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s reported resignation
from the Haitian presidency on Sunday February 29, 2004, rumors began
to circulate in the Haitian community that his departure had been a
kidnapping. Once his plane landed in Bangui, Aristide reiterated that
allegation and adapted to his own situation a famous line pronounced by
the Haitian Revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture at the time of
the latter’s kidnapping by the French in 1802: they have “chopped down
the tree of peace, but it will grow again, as its roots are
Louverturian.” In this year of the bicentennial of the Haitian
Independence, the unexpected recurrence of the trope of political
kidnapping brings up the specter of the kidnapping that was fundamental
to the workings of the slave trade. In my talk I contextualize current
violent upheavals in Haiti before examining the complex details of
kidnappings of members of the Louverture family and their political,
mediatic, familial, and literary legacies.

3. Doris Kadish
Writers viewed Charles X’s recognition of Haiti’s independence in 1825
as a symbol of hope and the end of France’s illegal slave trade and
inhuman treatment of slaves in the remaining French colonies. My
presentation focuses on Sophie Doin, who placed Haiti at the center of
an abolitionism that gave voice to persons of color and women. It also
addresses two other works: Clarkson’s Cries of Africa, which brought
evidence of the abuses of the slave trade; and L’Histoire de la
catastrophe de Saint-Domingue, published by Bouvet de Cressé and
written by Chanlatte, Henry Christophe’s secretary. I argue that Doin
reconfigures mastery, as did those authors, as deriving from sources
that were literary and non-literary, black and white, masculine and
feminine, European and Haitian. Her writing thereby expresses the
freedom from domination that Haiti as a locus of freedom and black
empowerment embodied in the nineteenth century.

4. Albert Valdman
By the 1987 Constitution, Haitian Creole has been declared co-official
language with French. The article in the constitution states that
“Creole unites the Haitian people.” This raises the interesting
question of the use of Creole during the transition between the
colonial regime and independent nationhood. That the language already
marked Saint-Domingue and Haitian identity at the dawn of independence
is reflected by texts in several general descriptions of the colony,
notably  Moreau de Saint-Méry and, especially, post-independence plays
authored by Juste Chanlatte, secretary to Dessalines and Christophe and
court poet to the latter ruler. This talk, through references to later
18th and early 19th century texts in Creole, will discuss the status
and role of the language, as reflected by these texts.  Broadening the
scope to antebellum Louisiana, it will sketch out the diglossic
colonial situation as described in a plantation novel.  Finally, it
will examine current survivals of Saint-Domingue Creole in northern
Haiti.

5. Chris Bongie
During the 1810s, Baron Vastey, “the official ideologist” of King Henry
Christophe, produced a substantial number of books and pamphlets in
which he voiced many of the anti-colonial arguments that, in the next
century, would come to be associated with Caribbean intellectuals such
as C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon; in his attention to Haiti’s ongoing
civil wars during that same decade, moreover, Vastey also provided a
compellingly symptomatic portrait of the political divisions that have
plagued Haiti since independence. This talk interrogates, in two
different ways, the ambivalent legacy of this neglected outrider of the
Black Atlantic tradition: first, by providing a much needed critical
overview of his oeuvre; and second, by examining Derek Walcott’s
ideologically fraught representation of Vastey in particular, and of
the Haitian Revolution in general, in his recent collection of plays,
The Haitian Trilogy (2002).

6. Nick Nesbitt, “The Idea of 1804”
This talk examines the Haitian Revolution as a fundamental event in
modernity's dialectic of enlightenment. As a radical insurgency in the
form of a categorical universalism, the world's first successful slave
revolution forcibly extended the “Rights of Man” beyond the compass of
European provincialism, compelling the reticent Parisian elites to
confront the problem of slavery in 1793. These former slaves, both
literate and illiterate, participated from 1789 on in a transnational
public sphere of ideas; at stake was the fundamental human right to
autonomy. The former slaves of Saint Domingue called for its extension
not merely to male property holders, but universally, to all humans.
The slaves of Saint Domingue were no passive receptors of ideas
imported from Europe; the 1789 Déclaration was never intended to apply
to African slaves. Instead, Toussaint and his colleagues actively
redefined the content and meaning of human rights in the greatest event
of the age of Enlightenment.

THE PARTICIPANTS

CHRIS BONGIE is the author of two books published with Stanford
University Press: Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin
de Siècle (1991) and Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/
Colonial Literature (1998). He has recently (2004) published with
Broadview Press a translation/critical edition of Victor Hugo’s 1826
novel about the Haitian Revolution, Bug-Jargal, and is currently
working on an edition of another French novel about Haiti, Jean-
Baptiste Picquenard’s Adonis, ou Le bon nègre (1798), for Harmattan’s
Autrement mêmes series. He is a Full Professor and Queen’s National
Scholar in the Department of English at Queen’s University, Ontario.
DANIEL DESORMEAUX, Assistant Professor of French and Caribbean literary
history at the University of Kentucky, is the author of La figure du
bibliomane: histoire du livre et stratégie littéraire au XIXè siècle
(2001). He has published numerous articles on the history of the book,
of reading, and of ideas in France in the nineteenth-century in
publications including L’esprit créateur, Romanic Review, and
Romantisme.  He is currently completing a collection of articles on
literary history in the Mémoires of Alexandre Dumas, as well as further
research on the Mémoires of Toussaint Louverture and other documents
linked to the Haitian Revolution.
DEBORAH JENSON is Associate Professor of French at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of a book on nineteenth-century
French literature and culture, Trauma and Its Representations: The
Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France (Johns Hopkins,
2001), and editor and co-translator of Hélène Cixous’s “Coming to
Writing” and Other Essays (Harvard, 1992). She is completing a
monograph on France and Haiti in the post/colonial nineteenth-century,
and has written articles on early Creole poetry, diasporan
consciousness in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, and Haitian « bovarysme.
»
DORIS Y. KADISH is Professor of French and Women’s Studies at the
University of Georgia. In addition to her extensive writings on
nineteenth- and twentieth-century French novels, she has published
numerous books, articles, and translations related to French slavery.
They include Translating Slavery (1994), Slavery in the Caribbean
Francophone World (2000), and Sophie Doin: La famille noire, suivie de
trois nouvelles blanches et noires (2002).
NICK NESBITT is an Associate Professor of French at Miami University,
Ohio. His book Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French
Caribbean Literature was published by the University of Virginia Press
(New World Studies) in 2003. He is currently completing a book on the
Haitian Revolution and the Enlightenment.
ALBERT VALDMAN is Emeritus Rudy Professor of French/Italian and
Linguistics and continuing director of the Creole Institute at Indiana
University. His research interests range from second language
acquisition, with focus on French instruction, to overseas varieties of
French and French-based Creoles. In the latter area his major
publications are Le français hors de France, Le créole: structure,
statut et origine, several bilingual dictionaries for Haitian Creole
and A Dictionary of Louisiana Creole. Currently, he is directing
projects aimed at producing a dictionary of Louisiana Cajun French and
a bilingual Creole-French/French-Creole school dictionary in support of
the reform educational program in Haiti.