Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Staging the Haitian Revolution: Performing Blackness and the Role of the Mulatta/o

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Performing Race and Erasure

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History ((PSTPH))

  • 293 Accesses

Abstract

Well before the US occupation of Haiti, the “Black Republic” was important to reimagining the sign of blackness and throughout the Americas, its long and ultimately successful revolution stoked the possibility of gaining freedom from slavery by force. On January 1, 1804, the once enslaved Jean Jacques Dessalines declared the former colony independent of French rule and in several powerful gestures, marked Haiti’s decolonial stance. He recouped the Taino name for the island, “Haiti,” and in an 1804 proclamation after the “massacre of the white French,” declared, “I have avenged America.”(J. Michael Dash, The Disappearing Island: Haiti, History, and the Hemisphere, Cerlac Colloquia Paper (2004), 2. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Dessalines declared Haiti independent on November 29, 1803 and more famously on January 1, 1804; the statement of avenging America was made in a proclamation after the “massacre of the white French” in the spring of 1804. Philippe R. Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2012): 569–70; 580.) In a gesture that seemed to thumb its nose at colonial categories of racial difference, he authorized an 1805 constitution that declared all Haitians black, including the Polish population who had helped fight Napoleon. (Dash, Disappearing Island, 2; Girard, “Reappraisal,” 570.) His performative declarations made a powerful statement not only for the people of the newly formed Republic of Haiti but also for, and against, the international community of nations and empires. (Girard describes Dessalines as a savvy international statesman who was “well aware of the naval, commercial, and diplomatic requirements for victory” and who did not wage war on nearby slave-owning colonies, but promised non-aggression in exchange for weapons and other trade. ———, “Reappraisal,” 569.) Yet Dessalines’ performatives were partly “unhappy” within Austin’s formulation of speech acts—neither true nor false, performatives are considered happy or unhappy depending on the outcome or uptake and whether the intended enactment is achieved. (J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).) Haiti was indeed free of French rule, but the international community largely refused recognition of its sovereign status and the internal racial and class problems between the formerly enslaved, many of whom had been born in Africa, and the gens de couleur, or free people of color, persisted despite his symbolic and political declarations of Haiti’s blackness. (See Chap. 1. France recognized Haiti in1825 on the condition that Haiti pay 150 million gold francs as reparations for lost “property.” Philippe R. Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence 1801–1804 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2011), 342. The US granted recognition in 1862. Laurent Dubois translates gens de couleur as “free people of color” or “free-coloreds.” The term was favored by politically active members of that group in Haiti in the late eighteenth century and as Dubois notes, was a more complicated designation than the term, “mulatto.” Dubois, Avengers, 6, 70.)

Haiti is black, and we have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black [applause] or forgiven the Almighty for making her black. [Applause.]

—Frederick Douglass, 1893 (Frederick Douglass, “From Lecture on Haiti. The Haitian Pavilion Dedication Ceremonies Delivered at the World’s Fair, in Jackson Park, Chicago, Jan. 2d, 1893,” in African Americans and the Haitian Revolution, ed. Maurice Jackson, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 203).

Long live free and independent Haiti, the pride of the black race of the Western world.

—Marcus Garvey, 1924 (Marcus Garvey, “Letter to President Louis Borno of Haiti,” Negro World, August 3 1924).

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    J. Michael Dash, The Disappearing Island: Haiti, History, and the Hemisphere, CERLAC Colloquia Paper (2004), 2. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Dessalines declared Haiti independent on November 29, 1803 and more famously on January 1, 1804; the statement of avenging America was made in a proclamation after the “massacre of the white French” in the spring of 1804. Philippe R. Girard, “Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the Atlantic System: A Reappraisal,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2012): 569–70; 580.

  2. 2.

    Dash, Disappearing Island, 2; Girard, “Reappraisal,” 570.

  3. 3.

    Girard describes Dessalines as a savvy international statesman who was “well aware of the naval, commercial, and diplomatic requirements for victory” and who did not wage war on nearby slave-owning colonies, but promised non-aggression in exchange for weapons and other trade. ———, “Reappraisal,” 569.

  4. 4.

    J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

  5. 5.

    See Chap. 1, above. France recognized Haiti in 1825 on the condition that Haiti pay 150 million gold francs as reparations for lost “property.” Philippe R. Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence 1801–1804 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2011), 342. The US granted recognition in 1862. Laurent Dubois translates gens de couleur as “free people of color” or “free-coloreds.” The term was favored by politically active members of that group in Haiti in the late eighteenth century and as Dubois notes, was a more complicated designation than the term, “mulatto.” Dubois, Avengers, 6, 70.

  6. 6.

    Michael L. Nicholls, Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel’s Conspiracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012); Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Maurice Jackson et al., “Fever and Fret: The Haitian Revolution and African American Responses,” in African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents, ed. Maurice Jackson, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 14. According to the latter, L’Ouverture influenced Gabriel.

  7. 7.

    Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 147–51.

  8. 8.

    On 1811, see Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (New York: Harper, 2011); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). On Aponte, Dubois, Avengers, 305; Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 41–56.

  9. 9.

    This is only a sample of how the Revolution inspired action in the US over the next few decades. John Lofton et al., Denmark Vesey’s Revolt: The Slave Plot That Lit a Fuse to Fort Sumter (Kent: Kent State University, 2013); David F. Allmendinger Jr., Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Patrick Breen, H., The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  10. 10.

    Matthew Pratt Guterl, “The New Race Consciousness: Race, Nation, and Empire in American Culture, 1910–1925,” Journal of World History 10, no. 2 (1999).

  11. 11.

    J. Michael Dash, “The Theater of the Haitian Revolution/the Haitian Revolution as Theater,” Small Axe 18 (2005).

  12. 12.

    Dave Riehle, “‘300 Afro-American Performers’: The Great Cuba Pageant of 1898 and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” Ramsey County History (1999): 19.

  13. 13.

    “Crisis for Negro Race: T. Thomas Fortune Declares It Is Coming to His People. Southern Whites the Cause Declares at John Brown Anniversary That the Negro Should Die for His Rights, If Need Be,” New York Times, June 4 1900. Fortune (1856–1928) was born in Florida to enslaved parents of African, Native American, and Irish ancestry. In 1923, he became editor for the UNIA organ, Negro World. He advocated use of the term, “Afro-American.” Rayford M. Logan et al., Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1983), 236–38.

  14. 14.

    William Edgar Easton, Dessalines: A Dramatic Tale; a Single Chapter from Haiti’s History (Galveston: J.W. Burson Co. Publishers, 1893); ———, Christophe: A Tragedy in Prose of Imperial Haiti (Los Angeles: Press Grafton Publishing Company, 1911); Helen Webb Harris, “Genifrede: The Daughter of L’Ouverture,” in Negro History in Thirteen Plays, ed. Willis Richardson, et al. (Washington D.C.: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1935); Leslie Pinckney Hill, Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Dramatic History (Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1928); Langston Hughes, “Emperor of Haiti” in Black Heroes: Seven Plays, ed. Errol Hill (New York: Applause Books, 1989); William Grant Still, Troubled Island: An Opera in 3 Acts / by William Grant Still; Libretto by Langston Hughes (New York: Leeds Music Corp., 1949); John Frederick Matheus, “Tambour [1929],” Black Drama: Alexander Street Press; ———, “Ti Yette,” in Plays and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, ed. Willis Richardson (Washington D.C.: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1930); ———, “Ouanga: A Musical Drama of Haiti,”(1932); May Miller, “Christophe’s Daughters,” in Negro History in Thirteen Plays, ed. Willis Richardson, et al. (Washington D.C.: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1935); Christine Ames et al., “Black Empire: A Drama in a Prologue and Three Acts,” (Fairfax: Library of Congress Federal Theatre Project Archives at George Mason University, 1932); William DuBois, “Haiti,” in Federal Theatre Plays, ed. U.S. Federal Theatre Project, et al. (New York: Random House, 1938); C. L. R. James, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History; a Play in Three Acts [1934], ed. Christian Hogsbjerg (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). I count Hughes’s play as a single work under several titles, but take the opera, Troubled Island: An Opera in 3 Acts (1949), as a distinct work. On New Negro era periodization, see Henry Louis Gates et al., eds., The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  15. 15.

    Hill’s Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Dramatic History (1928) appears to be the only unstaged play on the Revolution.

  16. 16.

    “Public Reading of the Book of Dessalines,” Freeman, April 22 1893. On Freiberg’s, Errol G. Hill et al., A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 138.

  17. 17.

    Douglass was US consul to Haiti when the US tried to acquire the Mole. Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 26. Hill et al., History of African American Theatre, 88; William Seraile, “Henrietta Vinton Davis and the Garvey Movement,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 7 (1983). Davis became a famous actress/orator and a major UNIA leader who regularly presided over the “monster rallies” at Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall. Louis J. Parascandola, ‘Look for Me All around You’: Anglophone Caribbean Immigrants in Harlem (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 17–18, 39 n.11; Seraile, “Henrietta Vinton Davis and the Garvey Movement.”

  18. 18.

    Hill et al., History of African American Theatre, 138. Some mistakenly claim it was performed at the Pavilion. James Hatch, “Some African Influences on the Afro-American Theatre,” in The Theater of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Errol Hill, 14; Bernard L. Peterson Jr., Early Black American Playwrights and Dramatic Writers: A Biographical Directory and Catalog of Plays, Films, and Broadcasting Scripts (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1990), 7, 76.

  19. 19.

    Frederick Douglass, “Oration of Hon. Frederick Douglass, Ex-United States Minister Resident to the Republic of Haiti. Delivered on the Occasion of the Dedication of the Haitien [sic] Pavilion at the World’s Fair,” in Dessalines: A Dramatic Tale, ed. William Edgar Easton (Galveston: J.W. Burson Co., 1893); Hon. Norris Wright Cuney, “A Tribute to Haïtian Heroism,” in Dessalines: A Dramatic Tale, ed. William Edgar Easton (Galveston: J.W. Burson Co., 1893).

  20. 20.

    “Chicago Theatrical Notes. Colored Artists of the Concert and Vaudeville Stage by Cue,” Illinois Record, November 20 1897. Hill et al., History of African American Theatre, 138.

  21. 21.

    Easton, Christophe. Peterson Jr., Early Black American Playwrights, 76. A 1910 article in the Indianapolis Freeman states Easton wrote the play for Davis to direct and perform the role of Valerie. Another Freeman article from 1912 claims Davis was producing the play in New York. R.W. Thompson, “Short Flights,” Freeman, February 19 1910; Sylvester Russell, “Musical and Dramatic,” Freeman, March 2 1912. Hill mentions a performance at Harlem’s Lenox Casino (1912), likely the Davis production. Errol Hill, Black Heroes: Seven Plays (New York: Applause Books, 1989), 4. Hill et al., History of African American Theatre, 88, 139.

  22. 22.

    Matheus, “Tambour [1929].”

  23. 23.

    An event program gives the revised title. See also Maud Cuney-Hare, “Letter from Maud Cuney Hare to W.E.B. Du Bois, May 28, 1930,” (1930), http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b054-i047. Maud Cuney Hare was a Crisis music columnist, author of Negro Musicians and Their Music (1936), and founder of the Musical Art Studio in Boston, part of the Little Theatre Movement. Logan et al., Dictionary 152. Hill et al., History of African American Theatre, 216, 222–30. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement,” The Crisis 32 (1926).

  24. 24.

    Matheus, “Ouanga.” According to the Black Drama site, Matheus published the play privately in 1931. On the 1932 audition, Vernon H. Edwards et al., “Clarence Cameron White,” The Black Perspective in Music 9, no. 1 (1981): 61. A NYT article dated May 29, 1932, reports it was scheduled for Paris with an “all-Negro cast, and if successful may be given in America.” “Cincinnati Summer Opera,” New York Times, May 29 1932. The Illinois Symphony Orchestra performed the prelude in February 1938. Edwards, et al., “Clarence Cameron White,” 64. It was first produced and staged by the HT Burleigh Musical Association in June 1949 in South Bend Indiana. Ibid. Concert versions were given at Carnegie Hall and the National Negro Opera Company in New York (1956). Michael Largey, “Ouanga!: An African-American Opera About Haiti,” Lenox Avenue—A Journal of Interartistic Inquiry 2 (1996): 35. American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers, ASCAP Biographical Dictionary (New York: R.R. Bowker Co., 1980), 539. “Clarence Cameron White,” in Notable Black American Men, ed. Jessie Carney Smith (Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1999), 1207.

  25. 25.

    Hughes, “Emperor.” The play’s title and production history are complex: written c. 1930, Hughes confirms the play was performed in Detroit after he returned from his 6-month stay in Haiti (1932), although he does not give a title. Hughes confirms he revised the play based on the Detroit production; the revision was performed at Karamu in 1936 (he mistakenly says “about 1935”). ———, “‘Troubled Island:’ The Story of How an Opera Was Created,” The Chicago Defender, March 26 1949. Probably drawing from Hughes’s 1949 article, Hill claims the play was first staged in 1935 as The Drums of Haiti and was published (1936) as Emperor of Haiti. Hill, Black Heroes, 75. Another source mentions a production by Roxborough in Detroit as The Drums of Haiti (April 15 1937). Joseph McLaren, Langston Hughes, Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921–1943 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997), 101. In the 1949 article, Hughes claims the Karamu production was staged as Emperor of Haiti, but a 1936 review gives the title, Troubled Island. “Gilpin Players Stage Life of Emperor,” The Capitol Plaindealer, November 22 1936. In 1949, it was produced as an opera, Troubled Island: An Opera in 3 Acts, with music by William Grant Still, the first Negro to conduct a professional symphony in the US. The premiere was March 31 at the City Center of Music and Drama, New York. Olin Downes, “Halasz Presents New Still Opera,” New York Times, April 1 1949. Hughes confirms white performers in blackface sang the leading roles. Langston Hughes et al., Black Magic, a Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970), 147. Hill et al., History of African American Theatre, 185.

  26. 26.

    Harris, “Genifrede”; “Howard Players Appear in Their Own Plays,” Chicago Defender, June 3 1922.

  27. 27.

    Miller, “Daughters”; “Three Historical Plays Merit High Praise History Week,” The Afro-American, February 23 1935.

  28. 28.

    Ames et al., “Black Empire”; William DuBois, “Haiti,” ed. National Service Bureau (Fairfax: Federal Theatre Project Records, George Mason University, 1938); ———, “Haiti.”

  29. 29.

    It ran for 16 performances from March 16 to 19 at the Mayan Theatre in LA for over 5000 audience members; at the Lincoln Theatre in LA for three shows in April for almost 1500; the Playhouse in Hollywood for 16 shows in May for over 4500; and the Greek in LA for 7 shows in July with over 10,000 in attendance. Georgia S. Fink et al., “Synopsis and Production Notes for ‘Black Empire’,” in Library of Congress Federal Theatre Project Archive (Fairfax: George Mason University, 1936).

  30. 30.

    John O’Connor et al., “Haiti and Black Empire,” in Free, Adult, Uncensored, ed. John O’Connor, et al. (Washington D.C.: New Republic Books, 1978), 118.

  31. 31.

    “‘Haiti’ Viewed by 74,000,” Daily Mirror, May 22 1938. Library of Congress, “Federal Theatre Project Collection: A Register of the Library of Congress Collection of U.S. Work Progress Administration Records [Finding Aid],”(2005), http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/eadmus.mu995001. John O’Connor et al., Free, Adult, Uncensored: The Living History of the Federal Theatre Project (Washington D.C.: New Republic Books, 1978), 117.

  32. 32.

    ———, “Haiti and Black Empire,” 118. On Daly’s: “Two Plays Ending Runs Here Tonight,” New York Times, July 9 1938; “Featured in WPA Play,” The Capitol Plaindealer, August 5 1938; Lorraine Brown, “Federal Theatre: Melodrama, Social Protest, and Genius,” Library of Congress: American Memory, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/fedtp/ftbrwn05.html. “Final Performance of ‘Haiti’ Tonight at Avery Memorial,” Hartford Courant, October 29 1938. While outside the scope of this study, American actor, Paul Robeson, also played the lead in C.L.R. James’s 1934 play, Toussaint Louverture, which was staged at London’s Westminster Theatre in 1936. John H. McClendon, CLR James’s Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism? (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004), 8. First published in 2013, James, Toussaint Louverture.

  33. 33.

    Dash, “Theater,” 18.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 19–20.

  35. 35.

    Clare Corbould, “At the Feet of Dessalines: Performing Haiti’s Revolution During the New Negro Renaissance,” in Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890–1930, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brandage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Kate Dossett, “Commemorating Haiti on the Harlem Stage,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 22, no. 1 (2010); Clare Corbould, Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Dash, “Theater.”; VèVè A. Clark, “Haiti’s Tragic Overture: (Mis)Representations of the Haitian Revolution in World Drama (1796–1975),” in Representing the French Revolution: Literature, Historiography and Art, ed. James Heffernan (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992). See also Hill et al., History of African American Theatre, 87–89; 138–39; 317.

  36. 36.

    Sotiropoulos, Staging Race, 26.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 28.

  38. 38.

    J. Michael Dash, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 55. While Dash capitalizes “Movement,” I have changed it to distinguish between the political/social organization known as the New Negro Movement, established by Hubert Henry Harrison (1916–17) and the largely apolitical literary and cultural movement (with a small “m”) associated with Alain Locke and which, for Gates, runs from 1892 to 1938. Dash is discussing the latter.

  39. 39.

    Gates et al., eds., The New Negro.

  40. 40.

    Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 166.

  41. 41.

    Douglass, “From Lecture on Haiti.”

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 203.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., 208.

  44. 44.

    Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 145.

  45. 45.

    Waldo E. Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 3.

  46. 46.

    Douglass, “From Lecture on Haiti,” 206.

  47. 47.

    L’Ouverture and Dessalines fought with the Spanish as well as the French revolutionary army, and for all of his documented militancy, Dessalines did not initially forsake France. Girard, “Reappraisal,” 555, 566. Nor did the gens de couleur immediately or always side with the enslaved; they initially aligned themselves with their French fathers. Nonetheless, the narrative is often reduced to a binary conflict. Even in Haiti, after the 1802 defection of most officers of color from the French Army, the story becomes increasingly reified as a “binary conflict” of black and mixed-race rebels versus the white French. Ibid., 564.

  48. 48.

    Douglass names the 90th anniversary, but Haiti became independent on January 1, 1804.

  49. 49.

    Douglass, “Oration,” 133.

  50. 50.

    James V. Hatch et al., eds., Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans: The Early Period 1847–1938 (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 2. Described as a verse-play in ibid.; Dickson D. Bruce Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Hill et al., History of African American Theatre, 138.

  51. 51.

    Easton, Dessalines, 8–9.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 13.

  53. 53.

    ———, “Preface,” in Dessalines: A Dramatic Tale (Galveston: J.W. Burson Co., 1893), vii.

  54. 54.

    ———, “Dramatis Personae,” in Dessalines: A Dramatic Tale (Galveston: J.W. Burson Co., 1893), xi.

  55. 55.

    ———, Dessalines, 81–82.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 11.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 4.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., 5.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., 11.

  60. 60.

    Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité, Dessalines’ consort and Empress of Haiti, 1804–06.

  61. 61.

    Easton, Dessalines, 9, 10.

  62. 62.

    Rigaud refers loosely to André Rigaud, a leader of the gens de couleur. Dubois, Avengers, 119–22.

  63. 63.

    Easton, Dessalines, 22.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., 26–27, 52–53.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., 51.

  66. 66.

    Ibid., 57.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 62.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., 61.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., 62.

  70. 70.

    Ibid.

  71. 71.

    Ibid., 74–75.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., 89.

  73. 73.

    Ibid., 113.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., 116.

  75. 75.

    La Marseillaise is the French national anthem; it was adopted as the Republic’s anthem in 1795 and therefore represents the idea of liberty and revolution, even in the context of Haiti. Since 1904, the Haitian national anthem is “La Dessalinienne.” Easton, Dessalines, 117.

  76. 76.

    Robert J. Fehrenbach, “William Edgar Easton’s Dessalines: A Nineteenth-Century Drama of Black Pride,” CLA Journal 19 (1975): 83.

  77. 77.

    Easton, “Preface,” vii.

  78. 78.

    Girard, “Reappraisal.”

  79. 79.

    Dubois, Avengers, 296–97.

  80. 80.

    Ibid., 303.

  81. 81.

    C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 256.

  82. 82.

    Dubois, Avengers, 306. There is no evidence to confirm manner or location of Dessalines’ death, but it is generally accepted that his men and mulatto rivals were responsible.

  83. 83.

    Hatch and Shine describe the work as “militant.” Hatch et al., eds., Black Theatre USA, 2.

  84. 84.

    Fehrenbach, “Easton’s Dessalines,” 83. Hill and Hatch call it “romantic melodrama.” Hill et al., History of African American Theatre, 138.

  85. 85.

    Hatch et al., eds., Black Theatre USA, 2. The preface is not available through the Black Drama website.

  86. 86.

    Du Bois, “Krigwa,” 134.

  87. 87.

    Easton, “Preface,” vii.

  88. 88.

    Guterl, “New Race Consciousness,” 351, n.85. ———, Color of Race.

  89. 89.

    William A. Edwards, “Racial Purity in Black and White: The Case of Marcus Garvey and Earnest Cox,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 15, no. 1 (1987); George Shepperson, “Pan-Africanism and ‘Pan-Africanism’: Some Historical Notes,” Phylon 23 (1962).

  90. 90.

    Guterl, Color of Race.

  91. 91.

    Delilah Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Book Jungle, 2007), 258–59; Hill et al., History of African American Theatre, 139; Fehrenbach, “Easton’s Dessalines.”

  92. 92.

    Easton, “Preface,” v.

  93. 93.

    Ibid., v–vi.

  94. 94.

    Ibid., vi.

  95. 95.

    Ibid., vii.

  96. 96.

    Anthony W. Neal, “Maud Cuney-Hare: Lifting the Race through the Arts,” The Bay State Banner (2012), http://baystatebanner.com/news/2012/nov/07/maud-cuney-hare-lifting-the-race-through-the-arts/

  97. 97.

    Logan et al., Dictionary, 151.

  98. 98.

    Ibid.

  99. 99.

    Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977), 85. Socialism emerged in the US from the antebellum communitarian movements in the decades preceding the Civil War; Marxism “arrived” in November 1851, “when Joseph Weydemeyer landed in New York.” Ibid., 3, 5. In 1879, George Mack was the “first colored man to wear the red badge” in New York. Ibid., 58. The US Socialist Party was established in 1901. Ibid., 93.

  100. 100.

    Ibid., 85.

  101. 101.

    Jacob S. Dorman, Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  102. 102.

    James, Black Jacobins, 309; Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), 195.

  103. 103.

    Vodou was not recognized as Haiti’s legitimate and official religion until the 1990s under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. ———, Toussaint Louverture, 289.

  104. 104.

    Ibid., 195.

  105. 105.

    Easton, Dessalines, 6.

  106. 106.

    Ibid., 102.

  107. 107.

    “Public Reading.”

  108. 108.

    Cuney-Hare, “Letter.”

  109. 109.

    Guterl, Color of Race; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  110. 110.

    Guterl, Color of Race, 5–6.

  111. 111.

    All three plays use the term voodoo therefore I use it in this section. On the “Dessalinian imaginary” in French language plays: Marie-Agnes Sourieau, “Dessalines in Historic Drama and Haitian Contemporary Reality,” Small Axe 9, no. 2 (2005).

  112. 112.

    Hughes, “Emperor,” 14.

  113. 113.

    Ibid., 31.

  114. 114.

    Matheus, “Ouanga,” 2, 21.

  115. 115.

    By creole, I refer to the enslaved born in the colony as opposed to those kidnapped from Africa.

  116. 116.

    Hughes, “Emperor,” 48.

  117. 117.

    Ibid., 72, 40.

  118. 118.

    Matheus, “Ouanga,” 2.

  119. 119.

    Jay Dearborn Edwards et al., A Creole Lexicon: Architecture, Landscape, People (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2004), 221, 219, 248.

  120. 120.

    Matheus, “Ouanga,” 15.

  121. 121.

    Hughes, “Emperor,” 10.

  122. 122.

    Ibid., 18–19.

  123. 123.

    Ibid., 19.

  124. 124.

    Ibid., 24.

  125. 125.

    Ibid., 20.

  126. 126.

    Ibid., 34.

  127. 127.

    Ibid., 30.

  128. 128.

    Ibid., 65.

  129. 129.

    Ibid., 74.

  130. 130.

    Matheus, “Ouanga,” 2, 22–23.

  131. 131.

    Ibid., 16.

  132. 132.

    Ibid., 3.

  133. 133.

    Parascandola, ‘Look for Me’, 17.

  134. 134.

    Qtd. in ibid., 125.

  135. 135.

    Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain [1926],” The Nation (2002), http://www.thenation.com/article/negro-artist-and-racial-mountain; Kenneth W. Warren, “Appeals for (Mis)Recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan, et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 397.

  136. 136.

    Dash, Haiti and the United States, 53.

  137. 137.

    Ibid., 52–53.

  138. 138.

    McLaren, Langston Hughes, Folk Dramatist, 103–04.

  139. 139.

    Matheus, “Ouanga,” 3.

  140. 140.

    Ibid.

  141. 141.

    Largey, “An African-American Opera,” 50.

  142. 142.

    Ibid., 42.

  143. 143.

    Alain Locke, ed. The New Negro (1925) (New York: Atheneum, 1968), xi–xii.

  144. 144.

    Qtd. in Largey, “An African-American Opera,” 50. The Julius Rosenwald Fund frequently sponsored White’s travels and the Harmon Foundation supported his trip to Haiti with Matheus. Rosenwald was the longtime president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company. White real estate developer, William E. Harmon established the Harmon Foundation to recognize the cultural achievements of Negroes.

  145. 145.

    Hughes qtd. in the editor’s introduction, Langston Hughes, “Havana Nights and Cuban Color Lines,” (1930) in The Reader’s Companion to Cuba, ed. Alan Ryan (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1997), 80–81.

  146. 146.

    Hughes qtd. in ibid., 82.

  147. 147.

    ———, “Emperor,” 30, 31.

  148. 148.

    Ibid., 23.

  149. 149.

    Dash, Haiti and the United States, 11.

  150. 150.

    Foner, American Socialism, 289.

  151. 151.

    Guterl, Color of Race, 6.

  152. 152.

    Foner, American Socialism, 291.

  153. 153.

    Ibid., 292.

  154. 154.

    Ibid.

  155. 155.

    Ibid., 312. These were the Communist Party and Communist Labor Party. Ibid., 304.

  156. 156.

    Ibid., 288.

  157. 157.

    Ibid., 298, 292–302. In reference to James Weldon Johnson, “The Truth About Haiti,” The Crisis 20 (1920). Johnson’s mother was of racially mixed Haitian ancestry. Logan et al., Dictionary, 353.

  158. 158.

    Foner, American Socialism, 301.

  159. 159.

    Fortune’s treatise was widely distributed among Negro farmers. Ibid., 89–90. Logan et al., Dictionary 236–38.

  160. 160.

    Harrison was born in the Danish West Indies. ———, Dictionary 292–93; Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Parascandola, ‘Look for Me’.

  161. 161.

    “The New Race-Consciousness,” in Hubert Henry Harrison, When Africa Awakes [1920] (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1997).

  162. 162.

    Foner, American Socialism, 302.

  163. 163.

    Ibid., 195. Parascandola, ‘Look for Me’, 132.

  164. 164.

    ———, ‘Look for Me’, 15.

  165. 165.

    Edwards, “Racial Purity,” 117.

  166. 166.

    “Howard Players.”

  167. 167.

    “25,000 Negroes Convene: International Gathering Will Prepare Own Bill of Rights,” New York Times, Aug 2 1920.

  168. 168.

    Jill Lane, “On Colonial Forgetting: The Conquest of New Mexico and Its Historia,” in The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan, et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 54.

  169. 169.

    “25,000 Negroes.”

  170. 170.

    See the poster, “‘Haiti’ a Drama of the Black Napoleon by William Du Bois with the New York Cast,” (Boston: Federal Theatre Project, 1938), loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3f05469/

  171. 171.

    Nicholas Mirzoeff, “‘Reckless Eyeballing’: Why Freddie Gray Was Killed,” https://wp.nyu.edu/howtoseetheworld/2015/05/30/auto-draft-46/

  172. 172.

    T. Lothrop Stoddard, The French Revolution in San Domingo (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), viii.

  173. 173.

    Ibid., ix.

  174. 174.

    Corbould, “Feet of Dessalines.”

  175. 175.

    W.E.B. Du Bois, “Hayti,” The Crisis 10 (1915); “Our Policy in Haiti Scored in Debate,” New York Times, December 22 1929; ———, “Haiti (1920),” in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995). Hubert Henry Harrison, “The Cracker in the Caribbean,” in When Africa Awakes [1920] (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1997); ———, “Help Wanted for Hayti,” in When Africa Awakes [1920]; ———, “‘Hands across the Sea,’ Negro World (September 10, 1921),” in A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. Jeffrey B. Perry, (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). James Weldon Johnson, “Self-Determining Haiti. I. The American Occupation,” The Nation, August 28 1920; ———, “Self-Determining Haiti. II. What the United States Has Accomplished,” The Nation, September 4 1920; ———, “Self-Determining Haiti. III. Government of, by, and for the National City Bank,” The Nation, September 11 1920; ———, “Self-Determining Haiti. IV. The Haitian People,” The Nation, September 25 1920. Rayford M. Logan, “James Weldon Johnson and Haiti,” Phylon 32, no. 4 (1971). Garvey, “Letter to President Louis Borno of Haiti.” See also Brenda Gayle Plummer, “The Afro-American Response to the Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934,” Phylon 2005, no. June 4 (1982).

  176. 176.

    Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 44.

  177. 177.

    Parascandola, ‘Look for Me’, 24.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. San Jose State University, USA, San Jose, CA, USA

    Shannon Rose Riley

Authors
  1. Shannon Rose Riley
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Riley, S.R. (2016). Staging the Haitian Revolution: Performing Blackness and the Role of the Mulatta/o. In: Performing Race and Erasure. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59211-8_6

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation