Dubois on the historiography of Haiti's 19th century

Dubois, Laurent. “Thinking Haiti’s Nineteenth Century.” small axe. 2014. 18.2. 44: 72-79.            

Since it is still the first half of 2015, I’m not egregiously too late in reading Laurent Dubois’ “Thinking Haiti’s Nineteenth Century” from last year. Probably it’s best to consider this short essay an historiographic postscript to Dubois’ Aftershocks (2012).

Anglophone historians, academics, etc., are now paying attention to Haiti. This attention is mostly to the spectacular moment of revolution and independence—one thinks here of Buck-Morss’ influential Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History—or to the recent history of the country, including inglorious coups and a devastating earthquake. Perhaps we (duly noted) go back to the first US occupation in the earlier 20^th century. But what about the 19^th century? What about the century after revolution and independence? For Dubois, this period is defined by the remarkable success of the “counterplantation system” in bringing a higher quality of life in particular to the rural “masses.” This is why, as Dubois points out, more people moved to Haiti than left it in these years. Haiti in the 19^th century was a successful society, but successful in a way that is largely absent from archival sources—which, Dubois emphasizes, in fact do exist in Haiti for these years, and remain to be worked. This is because, in an important sense, it was the goal of this rural society to escape the control of the state.

Reading Dubois, this historiographical field seems wide open and important. His own Aftershocks was a suggestive synthesis (and, from personal experience, very useful in the classroom). A few things to note about the shape of this historiographical field. First, for Dubois, a key part of new thinking about both the revolution and its legacy will be research on land ownership and production patterns. This is intuitive, on a certain level—after all, the revolution was in part against forced plantation labor—but is not the way the story has typically been told. There’s a nice echo of Marc Bloch and French peasant farming in Dubois’ account of the pioneering work by here be Georges Anglade. Other essential historiographic points of reference here, and throughout the essay, are Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Jean Casimir. The story of post-revolutionary society, also, will be one that foregrounds the activity of women in organizing and maintaining the lakou system. This rural society, after all, is organized to avoid a state that is militarized and male. So historians will need to attend more creatively, and make use of other archives. Dubois suggests, following Dayan and others, the large body of vodou song.

Which brings me to a larger point about language and historiographic community. The point of “Thinking Haiti’s Nineteenth Century,” is to highlight certain aspects of the historiography of Haiti in this period, and in particular what is missing or remains to be done. Many of the books that are most important to Dubois are decades old, but were written in French, and several of them in Haiti. One gets the sense of monumental thèses left to languish on the shelves of perhaps 12 libraries in the world...Fundamental primary research remains to be done, to be sure, but so too does the integration of existing historiography into the Anglophone field. Historians of France working in the United States are of course, to varying degrees, aware of the various ouvrages de base on their subject in French. But this is quite a different thing from a functional integration of the two historiographic systems. And I say system because historiography is not just a set of books, but also the scholars, patronage links, conferences, journals, etc, that produce them and keep them in motion. That there is a gap between the Anglophone world and the French one here is surely unavoidable and probably all to the best. In this case, though, the space between French, Anglophone, and Caribbean historiographies seems—at least to this relative outsider—less of a productive gap than a yawning abyss.  

In any case, perhaps the fundamental point made by Dubois here is very much a welcome one: the capacity of a given social arrangement to bring autonomy and satisfaction to those who inhabit it is often not something well-recorded in conventional archives, and often--not always!--because this capacity has existed outside and against the makers of archives. 

Brown v Agamben

V. Brown, 'Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery', The American Historical Review, 114, (2009), pp 1231-1249.

This essay is most straightforwardly a corrective to what Brown sees as the misuse (overuse) of Orlando Patterson’s categorical definition of slavery as social death. According to Brown, historians have often taken what Patterson meant as an ideal type definition to be a description of reality itself. Historians have long rejected, however, the basic result of such a definition: that it would strip slaves of agency. Manifestly, historians have pointed out, slaves had agency. One need look no further than the continuous rebellions and occasional revolutions to emerge from new world slavery to see this.

Brown’s real goal, though, is deeper than this. In step with his historical work in The Reaper’s Garden, Brown wants to retell the story of slavery from the perspective of what we might call the micro-politics, or cultural politics, of everyday life. Brown argues that what he calls mortuary politics, conflict and negotiation over death, burial, and associated rituals, are of the greatest importance. One might make this argument in many contexts, but Caribbean slavery is a privileged field. Increasingly, it the worldview forged in the 18th century experience of slavery and revolution has come to be recognized as central to modernity as such (European, Atlantic, or even if you like, Capitalist). Mortuary politics is found to be central to the world of slavery, to the movement of the Haitian Revolution, and thus to modernity.

One effect of Brown’s argument, or rather one consequence of the argument that he wants to make, is a firm and empirically-oriented rejection of Giorgio Agamben. Brown deals with this in a few paragraphs explaining the limits of an Agambenian perspective such as that taken in Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic. Agamben’s notion of bare life, for Brown, is piggybacked into the historical study of slavery as a sort of compliment to and intensification of Pattersonian social death. Brown doesn’t exactly want to re-open old debates about agency (vs structure!), but he does want to argue that it is plainly wrong to see Caribbean slaves as without culture, in the sense of without resources or community. He cites William Sewell’s recent definition of culture, commenting, “practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to be lost.”

There are several somewhat separable issues here. First, there is the methodological question of how one should think about culture and agency. In this, I simply agree with Brown. I prefer to treat culture (or, qua intellectual historian, unit ideas) as a bundle of tools to be manipulated—tools that empower, but also limit, channel, and react upon, those that wield them. Then there is the more empirical question of the admissibility and utility of the notion of ‘social death’ in the study of slave systems, say specifically in the Caribbean. Not having read all the relevant texts, I defer with enthusiasm to Brown. What I have read leads me to believe that he is entirely correct. Finally, there is the added question of Agamben. I again agree, but would like to ask how far Brown’s critique can be extended. I have read Homo Sacer, and various political-theory mobilizations of Agamben, and find the whole thing, to say the least, confused, distasteful, and not a useful way to think about politics. There are issues of disciplinary division of labor here—Brown correctly points to the differing imperatives and skill-sets of literary scholars and historians approaching this material—and perhaps one answer is that Agamben is useful for what literary scholars do, and not for what historians do. This is never a very satisfying conclusion, and all the less so in a world of perfectly transparent (but still foreboding) disciplinary fortifications. I had thought that Agamben was increasingly becoming a reference-point among historians and theorists—perhaps I can interpret Brown’s intervention as a sign that I was mistaken? I suppose there is a deep divide here, between, we might say, those who think that we humans speak language, and those who think that it speaks us. Maybe this is too much a 1975-vintage way of seeing things, or at least of expressing them, but it does seem to me that the fundamental difference between Brown and Baucom, for instance, is there. They look at the same thing, and the one sees the struggle for communities, fragile and fleeting, but real; the other sees the de-realizing force of commodity fetishism and in a tone of high moralism allows a-historical discourse to disintegrate human being.

Thornton on the Ideology of the Haitian Revolution

J. K. Thornton, '"I Am the Subject of the King of Congo": African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution', Journal of World History, 4, (1993), pp 181-214.

I have finally gotten to this essay, which was left over from the past semester; glad that I did so. Not surprising, exactly, since I’ve heard about it several times, but satisfying.

Thornton’s argument in this essay is straightforward. Since perhaps as many as two thirds of the people in San Domingue in 1791 had been born and socialized in Africa, historians should look at least in part to political discourse in Africa in seeking to explain their actions. The continual civil wars in the Kongo over the course of the 18^th century meant that, especially in the later part of the century, a large number of defeated soldiers were enslaved, and sold across the Atlantic. Thornton has demonstrated elsewhere clear tactical continuities between the Kongolese civil wars and fighting in what would become Haiti during the revolution. Soldiers who had fought in the first fought again in the second. In the essay under discussion here, Thornton continues to discuss this particular group, though he points out that it is far from the only one.

The civil wars in Kongo, Thornton tells us, were in part fought over (or put another way, generated) two conceptions of kingship. One is autocratic, linked to conquest and a strong centralized state. The other is more limited and puts the king in the role of blacksmith, which is to say mediator, rather than amoral warrior. Thornton suggests in this article that the latter limited conception of kingship developed mostly as an alternative to the continual warfare generated by the un-winnable contest for hegemony between “two great family-based alliances, the Kimpanzu and the Kimulaza” (186). Thornton runs through several forms of evidence and consequence, finishing off with the following Revolution-era ‘war chant’ that has been interpreted in various ways:

Eh! Eh! Bomba, hen! hen!

Canga bafio té

Canga moune dé lé

Canga doki la

Canga li.

Unsurprisingly, the crucial word for Thornton is ‘Canga,’ or kanga, which can mean ‘to bind,’ ‘to kill,’ and also can carry the connotation of Christian salvation, as for instance it did in the 18^th century Kongo, which officially became a Christian kingdom in the early 16^th century. Historians who see the Haitian Revolution in purely racial terms tend to read these words as declarations of race war. Thornton, looking to Kongo, sees something very different. Similarly, he points out that the smaller leaders who resisted Louverture and Christophe were mostly Kongolese who had fought for a decentralized and mediatory kind of monarchy in the Kongo. This is to say that these people fought in part for a certain understanding of political right opposed strongly to the authoritarianism manifested by Louverture and others. The idea, suggested by the likes of C.L.R. James, that this rebelliousness was the result of immaturity or savagery, is simply wrong and stems not from analysis but from ignorance. This is, in no small measure, Thornton’s historiographical punch—though, interestingly, he argues against Fick (though agreeing with her bottom-up approach) on several points.

What does the Europeanist think of all this? At first I was concerned that Thornton was only going to point out that these people, coming from Africa, would bring African ideas with them, but that he would fail to bring specifics to the table. In fact, this essay makes clear that the specifics are available, even if its architecture is interpretive rather than empirical. It makes me want to read his book on Africa and the Atlantic. It would be interesting to look more closely at Thornton's methodological presuppositions, and no doubt one could pick some holes. In particular, what is this ideology? For instance, why is it that we (and they) continue to speak about monarchy even when the king is elected? No doubt for no very good reason. What are the modes of discourse in which this Kongolese ideology perpetuates itself? More prosaically put, why do these people continue to fight about these things, and not something else? To what extent?