in the nineteenth century constituted a deliberate practice in the construction, legitimization, and
expression of national identity.
I limit this dissertation to Haitian Romantic poetry from the 1830s to the late 1890s.Historically speaking, it is during this time frame that Haiti is geographically and politically
unified: from the period after the Haitian Revolution to 1825, “Haiti” was parceled into three
different parts, each with their own leaders and separate claims to legitimacy. Pétion maintained
a mulatto republic in the south, Henri Christophe ruled a black kingdom in the north, and the
maroon leader Goman controlled an area to the west. Prior to 1825, France, along with other
European nations and the United States, had refused to recognize the sovereignty of any of these
areas. French attempts to reclaim Haiti remained an imminent possibility. It is also during this
time I believe, and partly due to these consolidating events, that Haitians most profoundly
conceive of themselves as modern subjects; the lucid statements in the eclectic journals L’Union
and Le Républicain of the 1830s speak to this new and concerted effort to participate in the
global economic and political exchanges necessary to maintaining sovereignty and forging
national progress on all fronts. It was undoubtedly European industrialism, politics, and
aesthetics, and not associations with African customs and culture, which represented modernity
to Haitian intellectuals.^21 Paul Bénichou’s The Consecration of the writer: 1750-1830 provides
excellent insight into the evidence that in France, and consequently I contend for much of Haiti
in the nineteenth century, that it was even the word Romanticism which expressed the feeling of
modernity as something new.^22 Although not even revolutionary in its connotation of its earliest
years, Bénichou specifies, Romanticism’s modern spirit suggested a “recent coming to
(^21) Dash argues that while racial pride did feature prominently in the construction of a national identity in the wake of
independence, Africa did not represent modernity for Haiti’s leaders. Dash, The Other America 44.
(^22) Paul Bénichou, The Consecration of the Writer: 1750-1830, trans. Mark K. Jensen (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999) 88.