Black heroes/white writers: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the literary imagination

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 32-62

  Kaplan, Cora ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 54649084994     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1998.46.33     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. This essay is a revised version of an Inaugural Lecture at the University of Southampton on 10 March 1998. In revision I have tried to retain something of its spoken address, while expanding parts of its argument. For their advice and comments at various stages of its production I would like especially to thank Simon Bainbridge, Stephen Bygrave, David Glover, Paul Gilroy, Catherine Hall, Stuart Hall, Mary Jacobus, Paul Kaplan, Ed Larrissey, Jacqueline Rose, Bill Schwarz and David Turley.
2. Psychoanalytic definitions and discussions of 'identification' underlie my use of the term throughout this essay. In contemporary psychoanalytic thought identification has increasingly come to be seen as the chief mode through which the human subject is constituted, both as the subject identifies her or his own self with the other, and in which the subject identifies the other with her or himself.
3. My account of Toussaint's career and the long struggle for independence in St. Domingue is largely drawn from Robin Blackburn's brilliant synthesis in The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848, London, 1988, especially chapters 5 and 6.
4. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass., 1993.
5. Stuart Hall, 'Cultural Identity and Diaspora', in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, London, 1990, pp. 222-37.
6. For a fascinating analysis of Romantic poets and the figure of Bonaparte, see Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, Cambridge, 1995.
7. My reading of Wordsworth's engagement with Bonaparte is greatly indebted to chapter 2, 'In such strength of usurpation: Wordsworth's Napoleonic imagination', pp. 54-94.
8. William Wordsworth, 'Poems in Two Volumes', and Other Poems, 1800-1807, Jared Curtis (ed.), Ithaca, 1983, p. 170. All citations to Wordsworth's 'Sonnets dedicated TO LIBERTY' are from this edition. Page numbers are in brackets in the text.
9. My discussion emphasizes the sonnet's first publication in the Morning Post, and subsequent revisions. The republication of 'I griev'd for Buonaparte' is of particular interest here.
10. On the question of reading and socialization, Bonaparte, reputed to be a 'passionate reader', may have the last laugh. A recent newspaper article reveals that his chosen reading while in exile on Elba included Fanny Burney's Camilla, Ann Radcliffe's Julia and Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee, and Priscilla Wakefield's Letters on Botany. Napoleon was similarly surrounded by literature during his second exile on St Helena from October 1815 until his death, where his crates of imported books from Europe were supplemented by 'hundreds' more volumes from the library of the British governor, General Sir Hudson Lowe. Ben Macintyre, 'Bookworm Boney loved English tales', The Times, 31 Jan. 1998, p. 20.
11. Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, p. 26.
12. Recueil général annoté des lois, décrets, ordonnances, etc. 1789-1830, 16 vols, Paris 1836.
13. The statute and its relevance to the sonnet is discussed in Judith W. Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women, Berkeley, 1994, p. 69. Page adds that 'a note [in the statute] refers specifically to sending these people to San Domingo, where Napoleon had reinstituted slavery in the summer of 1802 . . . there is also a clause forbidding intermarriage between whites and people of color'. In her excellent chapter on 'Wordsworth's French Revolution' Page analyses the sonnet and its revisions both in relation to Wordsworth's politics and his personal situation. Although we come to very different conclusions, our readings of the sonnet dovetail at several points.
14. Cited is the 1845 version.
15. Page argues that in the later revisions 'Wordsworth's presentation of both race and gender seems more general and formulaic'. Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women, p. 72.
16. Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women, pp. 73-74.
17. D. W. to Catherine Clarkson, October 24, 1821 in Alan G. Hill (ed.) The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 2nd edn, vol. 3, The Later Years, Part I, 1821-1828, Oxford, 1978, p. 87-91. Dorothy's own comments on the Clarksons' guests suggest her collusion with the poem's authors. If you could see the lively picture I shaped to myself of the sable Queen sitting with her sable daughters beside you on the sofa in my dear little Parlour at Playford you would thank the newspapers for being so communicative respecting your visitors! I placed them in the little parlour because it is always first in my thoughts when I turn them thither; but Sara says 'No, they will sit in the great room.' . . . I hope they are good and grateful - and know the value of such a Friend.
18. D. W. to Catherine Clarkson, 16 January 1822.
19. Harriet Martineau, The Hour and the Man, London, 1904, 'Appendix', pp. 348-49.
20. Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, London, [1877] 1983, vol. 2, pp. 238-239.
21. The Autobiography was written in 1855, at a time when Martineau believed herself to be dying, but was published only in 1877, the year after her death. For Wordsworth's pervasive influence on Martineau's thought see Shelagh Hunter, Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism, Aldershot, 1995, pp. 104-147.
22. Martineau, Autobiography, pp. 238-240.
23. Martineau, The Hour and the Man, p. 347.
24. Martineau, How to Observe Morals and Manners, London, 1838.
25. Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, London, 1838, Vol. 1, p. 232.
26. Martineau emphasizes this point in her Appendix. He pardoned his personal enemies . . . and he punished his followers, as the most unpardonable offence they could commit, any infringement of his rule of 'No Retaliation' . . . . All the accounts of him agree that, from his earliest childhood, he was distinguished by a tenderness of nature which would not let him hurt a fly (The Hour and The Man, p. 345). Martineau therefore condones Toussaint's execution of his General, Moyse (or Moïse), because he broke the rule by hating and killing whites. Later commentators would see Moïse's character and execution in a different light.
27. Cited by W. E. B. DuBois, 'Africa and the French Revolution', Freedomways 1, Summer, 1961,
28. reprinted as Toussaint L'Ouverture', in Eric J. Sundquist (ed.). The Oxford W. E. B. DuBois Reader, Oxford, 1996, p. 301. DuBois also quotes Wordsworth's sonnet.
29. 'I am sure that my nervous system was seriously injured, and especially that my subsequent deafness was partly occasioned by the exciting and vain-glorious dreams I indulged in for many years after my friend E. lost her leg.' Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 45.
30. See Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, pp. 46, 56. 'I happened to witness the martyr age of its [slavery's] reformers; and I am thankful that I did witness it. These were times when I was sorry that I was not the victim of the struggle, instead of Lovejoy, or some other murdered citizen.'
31. Martineau, The Hour and the Man, p. 351.
32. Thomas Carlyle to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 9 December 1840, in Charles Richard Sanders (ed.), The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Durham, N.C., 1985, p. 356.
33. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism in Selected Writings, Alan Shelston (ed.), Harmondsworth, 1986, p. 195.
34. For the context in which Douglass is compared to Toussaint, see David Turley, 'British Unitarians, Frederick Douglass and Race' in Martin Crawford and Alan Rice (eds), Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform, Atlanta, 1999, forthcoming.
35. Thomas Carlyle, 'The Nigger Question' [1849], in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols, London, 1899, vol. 4, pp. 348-83.
36. There was also an abortive plan to make a film about Toussaint, starring Robeson, and directed by Serge Eisenstein. For James and Robeson in England, see Bill Schwarz, 'Black Metropolis, White England', in Mica Nava and Alan O'Shea (eds), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, London, 1996.
37. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, London, 1980, pp. v and vi.
38. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, pp. ix and x.
39. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, p. x.
40. While Martineau rationalized Moïse's execution by charging him with a vengeful and murderous hatred of whites, James insists that Moïse was 'not anti-white'. The Black Jacobins, p. 278.
41. James's portrait of Toussaint allows for powerful, unreconcilable contradictions in his character, and this perhaps, more than anything else marks a break with nineteenth-century representations: Despite Toussaint's despotism, his ruthlessness, his impenetrability, his unsleeping suspicion of all around him, his skill in large-scale diplomacy and petty intrigue, to the end of his life he remained a man of simple and kindly feelings . . . His 'no reprisals' sprang from a genuine horror of useless bloodshed . . . He loved children and they loved him. (The Black Jacobins, pp. 254, 255.)
42. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, p. 287.
43. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, p. xi.
44. The play is later renamed The Black Jacobins, and so appears in its reprinting in Anna Grimshaw (ed.), The C. L. R. James Reader, Oxford, 1992, pp. 67-111.
45. Richard J. Powell, 'Re/Birth of a Nation' in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, Berkeley, 1997, p. 32.
46. For a discussion of Lawrence's style, see Patricia Hills, 'Jacob Lawrence's Expressive Cubism', in Ellen Harkins Wheat (ed.), Jacob Lawrence, American Painter, Seattle, 1986, pp. 15-22.
47. Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, London, 1997, pp. 26-27.
48. Ntozake Shange, for colored girls, pp. 27-29.
49. C. L. R. James, 'Three Black Women Writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange', in The C. L. R. James Reader, pp. 411-17.
50. Ingrid Pollard, 'Pastoral Interlude', in TEN.8 2:3, Spring 1992,
51. TEN.8, 'Critical Decade: Black Photography in the 90's', pp. 102-103. Only two of the five images comprising this essay are reprinted in TEN.8. Thanks to Ingrid Pollard not only for permission to reproduce part of her essay, but for directing me towards a reading of it that highlights the complex relationship between image and text.
52. TEN.8 1:16.
53. Editorial, TEN.8 2: 3, Spring 1992, 'Critical Decade: Black Photography in the 90's', p. 7.