Modernity Disavowed

A study of the ways that knowledge of the slave revolt in Haiti was denied/repressed/disavowed within the network of slave-owning states and plantation societies of the New World, and the effects and meaning of this disavowal.

Preface ix

Introduction: Tuncations of Modernity 1

Part I. Cuba

1. The Deadly Hermenuetics of the Trial of Jose Antonio Aponte 41

2. Civilization and Barbarism: Cuban Wall Painting 57

3. Beyon National Culture, the Abject: The Case of Placido 77

4. Cuban Antislavery Narratives and the Origins of Literary Discourse 107

Part II. Santo Domingo / The Dominican Republic

5. Memory, Trauma, History 131

6. Guilt and Betrayal in Santo Domingo 155

7. What Do the Haitians Want? 169

8. Fictions of Literary History 180

Part III. Saint Domingue / Haiti

9. Literature and the Theater of Revolution 201

10. “General Liberty, or The Planters in Paris” 214

11. Foundational Fictions: Postrevolutionary Constitutions I 227

12. Life in the Kingdom of the North 245

13. Liberty and Reason of State: Postrevolutionary Constitutions II 260

Conclusion 273

Appendix A. Imperial Constitution of Haiti 275

Appendix B. Chronology 283

Notes 287

Index 355