fall under the title of “French Caribbean” either, as do Martinique and Guadeloupe, for example,
where Napoleon’s efforts to reinstate slavery were successful and which remain to this day
French overseas departments. In terms of literary studies, Haiti’s nineteenth century is
frequently left out of “francophone” or “postcolonial” discussions, as these fields are largely
considered to be a twentieth-century, or perhaps now a twenty-first century, phenomenon. Only
in the last few years have critics begun to challenge these long-established categories. Deborah
Jenson, in 2005, prefaces the “Haiti Issue” of Yale French Studies with the following:
The Haiti Issue is the first publication to invite scholars to make and break
paradigms of specifically nineteenth-century French post/colonialism in relation
to the Haitian Independence [...] Nineteenth-century French studies has never
been a domain particularly marked by post/colonial theory, and the outcome of
the Haitian Revolution may hold the key to the mystery of that noninscription:
whereas the former French colony of Saint-Domingue was post/colonial in the
nineteenth century, nineteenth-century France was not.^2The studies in the two aforementioned publications contain incomparable and ground-breaking insights into history, sociology, linguistics, and literature, many of which I will refer to
throughout the chapters of this dissertation. By now, and certainly in the few years since my
own inquiries into Haitian literature began, many scholars have both captured and debated the
significance and implications of the Haitian Revolution. Studies by David Geggus and Laurent
Dubois are among the most prominent recent works to detail the various events, leaders, and
influences which culminated in the destruction of France’s most prosperous colony.^3 These
historical studies provide the contextual backing for theorizing Haiti’s import in a myriad of new
venues. It was in a “post/colonial revision of identity,” as Jensen notes, that Jean-Jacques
(^2) Deborah Jenson, “Editor’s Preface: Nineteenth Century postcolonialités at the Bicentennial of the Haitian
Independence,” Yale French Studies 107 (2005): 2-3.
(^3) For recent studies on the Haitian Revolution, see David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2002) and the work he edits titled The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic
World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001) which contains the work of many contributors. Many
studies reference the work of Eugene Genovese, specifically From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave
Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).