Echoes of the Haitian Revolution 1804-2004

The bicentenary of Haitian independence in 2004 triggered a renewed interest in Haitian history and culture. In many ways, however, much work is still required in this fertile field. Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks, the first collection of essays edited by Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, addressed the repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Haiti, the Caribbean, North America and Europe. This present volume develops and complements the previous collection to meet the growing demand for original scholarly work on Haiti. Widening the cultural lens to include diasporic studies, art, and questions of race and gender, Echoes of the Haitian Revolution exposes how the history of Haiti has shaped our ideas of race, nation and civilization in ways that we are often unaware of. Haiti=s lessons continue to engage us in a dynamic dialogue that compels us to question and revisit received arguments. The essays collected here provoke and stimulate these necessary conversations by approaching the legacies and repercussions of the revolution from a cultural perspective. The authors explore the cultural echoes of the revolution in Haiti, the Caribbean, the United States and Europe. There are chapters on race and German literature, the silencing of the revolution in North American historiography, the experiences and cultural influence of Saint-Domingue refugees in New Orleans, postcolonial interpretations of Toussaint Louverture, images of white Creole women during the revolution, and the work of the African-American artist Jacob Lawrence.

Martin Munro is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature at Florida State University. He is the author of Shaping and Reshaping the Caribbean: The Work of Aime Cesaire and Rene Depestre (2000) and Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferriere, Danticat (2007). He is a member of the Small Axe editorial collective, and is currently working on rhythm in New World cultures. Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is Lecturer of Francophone Caribbean Literature and Nineteenth-century French Poetry at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. She is the author of articles on the Caribbean cultural landscape as presented in the works of Gisele Pineau, Yanick Lahens, Edwidge Danticat and Marie Chauvet. Her first collection of short stories, Four Taxis Facing North, was published in 2007.