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Paul Youngquist and Frances Botkin | Lindsay J. Twa | Lissette Lopez Szwydky | Joselyn Almeida | Dustin Kennedy | Michele Speitz
The whiteness of Romantic studies is a symptom of amnesia. It bespeaks a massive act of forgetting on the part of contemporary scholarship, an institutional disavowal of the economic conditions that help make cultural production during the Romantic Era possible: the maritime economy of the Atlantic. Black Romanticism deterritorializes British national identity and the culture of the Romantic era, reimagining them as the effect of myriad economic and cultural exchanges circulating throughout the Atlantic. It remembers the forgotten ancestry of British culture, recovering the vital role Africans and other diasporic commoners play in the cultural production called Romanticism, and practices counter-literacy, reading the works of nation, empire, and colony against themselves to liberate the common cultures they occlude. This volume focuses on Jean-Jacque Dessalines, Jack Mansong, Juan Manzano, John Gabriel Stedman, and Mary Prince, Caribbean figures whose biographies have over the past two centuries become part of a constellation of stories about slavery and colonialism, following a circuitous route that began in Africa and traveled from Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, Suriname, Bermuda, and Antigua to corresponding points in England, America, and the continent. Each narrative has endured transformations that render the “original” story less significant than the ways they have changed, been changed, or changed the stories connected with them. Each of these figures has acquired multiple and contradictory reputations in part due to changing audiences and media.
This essay examines how popular representations of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a Haitian Revolutionary general and Haiti’s first head of state, have shaped his legacy for various political, creative, and ritualistic purposes. After an overview of Dessalines’s biography, the essay examines negative representations of Dessalines, from nineteenth-century pro-slavery tracts, to twentieth-century publications during the U.S. Occupation of Haiti. These representations are then compared against those created by African American writers who, in particular, represent Dessalines as a dramatic and powerful black hero, but omit from their accounts his more brutal actions. The essay concludes with an examination of the Haitian folk religion, Vodou, and how it is one of the few arenas that actually recognizes and celebrates the contradictory nature of this mercurial historic figure.
The story of Three-Fingered Jack (the escaped slave who terrorized the British colonists in Jamaica from 1780 to 1781) appeared in England in at least five major versions between 1799 and 1830. These adaptations included Benjamin Moseley’s
Almeida examines the translations of Juan Manzano’s
The current multiplex configuration of Stedman's
Speitz demonstrates how Prince’s narrative attests to the importance of salt, a central product of slave labor in the British-held West Indies. Although its overall value is largely ignored in literary scholarship, Speitz demonstrates how harvesting salt proved harmful enough to inspire Prince’s rendition of a horrific contortion of being. Her repeated detrimental exposure to salt transforms Prince’s body, consciousness, and ultimately, of course, her narrative--making it tantamount to a material history and psychological case study of a forced merger of landscape, labor, body, and mind. Prince’s text records how lethal amounts of salt seep through the skin, forging a visceral, literal, and grotesque union between salt, the commodified substance, and the slave, the commodified worker. Further, buttressing the vast amount of scholarship on the historical significance of luxury consumables which could easily impede international or regional revenue streams if boycotted, Speitz brings to light the unacknowledged history of Caribbean salt raking relative to not only British colonial economies and politics, but also to the revolutionary history of the United States, in which it plays a pivotal role.