2025 Theses Doctoral

Transnational Afterlives of the Haitian Revolution: Between History and Fiction

Limare, Soraya

My dissertation engages with the fields of Caribbean History and Literature, Theater and Performance Studies, Women and Gender Studies and Critical Translation Theory. It examines the global afterlives of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) in the 20th and 21st centuries. It contributes to Haitian Revolutionary Studies through an interdisciplinary lens that traces reciprocal influences that connect historical and imaginative approaches to the past. I also highlight the transnational circulation of Haiti as a symbol of resistance and independence across different time periods and geographies. Renowned authors such as Edouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Langston Hughes and Maryse Condé all turned to the events of the Haitian Revolution in their works, and in scholarship grounded in diverse views of historical forces and the role of the historian. The anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously wrote about the “silencing” of the history of the Haitian Revolution, not just through omission but also through banalization (i.e., misleading and trivializing representations that amount to a form of silencing) but since the 1990s, a lot more attention has been given to this history. My dissertation analyzes these recent directions and considers whether and in what sense we can observe Silencing.

The Haitian Revolution is the site of numerous historiographical questions that I address through my study of works of history and literature: What is the relationship between the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolution? What makes the Haitian Revolution a world-historical event? Does the Haitian Revolution need a hero? How has Toussaint Louverture been singled out as a charismatic leader? How can we reflect and respond to the limits of archival traces of the lives of subaltern subjects, including enslaved women and free women of color? I show that the Haitian Revolution is a world-historical event that lies at the crossroads of history and literature, by engaging with authors like CLR James or Aimé Césaire who oscillate between historical and fictional accounts of this revolution and by considering its afterlives in world literature from the wider Caribbean, Africa, the Americas and Europe.

In my dissertation, I think of literature as a different (complementary but also contestatory) site of engagement with archival traces. I consider, notably, how writers in several historical moments, national and linguistic contexts and genres have sought to ‘flesh out’ the lives and psychological experiences of women in the orbit of the Haitian Revolution. In my first chapter, I focus on a corpus of plays by Bernard Dadié, Aimé Césaire, Ina Césaire, Edouard Glissant and Maryse Condé to distinguish the dramatization of the Haitian Revolution from its narrativization.

My second chapter examines the ambivalent construction of Toussaint Louverture as a heroic yet dictatorial figure to show that Toussaint is simultaneously a historical actor and a mythical legend. My third chapter focuses on the question of whether and on what terms we can depict and comprehend the intimate physical and mental experiences of women living in a system of legally-sanctioned rape to show how authors like Evelyne Trouillot mobilize invention as a way to respond to archival silences. My last chapter studies the phenomenon of cultural translation as writers and artists from Poland, the United States and the wider Caribbean return to the Haitian Revolution as a symbol for their own struggles for freedom and independence to reveal the ethical and political stakes of exporting the Haitian Revolution outside of its original context. My methodology for this project combines close readings with theoretical reflections on historiography, race and gender and the conceptualization of the archive.