Unleashing the Loas
Unleashing the Loas
The Literary Legacy of the Haitian Revolution in the U.S. South and the Caribbean
This chapter surveys the ways in which the Haitian Revolution was made a taboo subject in the U.S. South, as slave owners feared a similar conflagration; concurrently, however, appearances of the conflict in Southern letters is surveyed, leading to a comparison of the guarded nature of such presentations with subsequent settings of the conflict by Caribbean writers. Nineteenth-century works by Victor Séjour, Charles Gayarré, Sherwood Bonner, George Washington Cable, and Grace King are noted, followed by extended readings of texts by twentieth-century writers such as Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and William Faulkner, who are placed in company with Caribbean writers - Alejo Carpentier, Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James, Derek Walcott, Édouard Glissant - who dramatized the conflict. The chapter concludes with a reading of Madison Smartt Bell’s All Soul’s Rising. All these sections are supported by a discussion of relevant histories and critical analysis by figures such as J. Michael Dash, Sybille Fischer, Franz Fanon, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot; special attention goes to vodoun, the interplay of colonial powers in the basin, varying portrayals of leaders such as Macandal, Toussaint, and LeClerc, and the contrasting roles of enslaved characters, who mount the “revolution from below.”
Keywords: Haitian Revolution, Plantation Systems, Slavery, Caribbean empires, Creolization, African religions
North Carolina Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
