Author : Sibylle Fischer
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 15,93 MB
Release : 2004-04-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822332909
DIVA study of the ways that knowledge of the slave revolt in Haiti was denied/repressed/disavowed within the network of slave-owning states and plantation societies of the New World, and the effects and meaning of this disavowal./div
Author : Sibylle Fischer
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 34,48 MB
Release : 2004-04-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0822385503
Modernity Disavowed is a pathbreaking study of the cultural, political, and philosophical significance of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). Revealing how the radical antislavery politics of this seminal event have been suppressed and ignored in historical and cultural records over the past two hundred years, Sibylle Fischer contends that revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal are central to the formation and understanding of Western modernity. She develops a powerful argument that the denial of revolutionary antislavery eventually became a crucial ingredient in a range of hegemonic thought, including Creole nationalism in the Caribbean and G. W. F. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Fischer draws on history, literary scholarship, political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory to examine a range of material, including Haitian political and legal documents and nineteenth-century Cuban and Dominican literature and art. She demonstrates that at a time when racial taxonomies were beginning to mutate into scientific racism and racist biology, the Haitian revolutionaries recognized the question of race as political. Yet, as the cultural records of neighboring Cuba and the Dominican Republic show, the story of the Haitian Revolution has been told as one outside politics and beyond human language, as a tale of barbarism and unspeakable violence. From the time of the revolution onward, the story has been confined to the margins of history: to rumors, oral histories, and confidential letters. Fischer maintains that without accounting for revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal, Western modernity—including its hierarchy of values, depoliticization of social goals having to do with racial differences, and privileging of claims of national sovereignty—cannot be fully understood.
Author : Maria Cristina Fumagalli
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 30,5 MB
Release : 2009-11-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0813929997
Taking up the challenge of redefining modernity from a Caribbean perspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view of modernity is universal, Maria Cristina Fumagalli shows how the Caribbean's contributions to the modern world not only provide a more accurate account of the past but also have the potential to change the way in which we imagine the future. Fumagalli uses the myth of Medusa's gaze turning people into stone to describe the way North Atlantic modernity freezes its "others" into a state of perpetual backwardness that produces an ethnocentric narrative based on homogenization, vilification, and disempowerment that actively ignores what fails to conform to the story it wants to tell about itself. In analyzing narratives of modernity that originate in the Caribbean, the author explores the region's refusal to succumb to Medusa's spell and highlights its strategies to outstare the Gorgon. Reflecting a diversity of texts, genres, and media, the chapters focus on sixteenth-century engravings and paintings from the Netherlands and Italy, a scientific romance produced at the turn of the twentieth century by the king of the Caribbean island Redonda, contemporary collections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a historical novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptian rites, fairy tales, romances from England and Jamaica, a long narrative poem by the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and paintings by artists from Europe and the Americas spanning the seventeenth century to the present. Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity offers an original and creative contribution to what it means to be modern.
Author : Myriam J. A. Chancy
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 49,70 MB
Release : 2023
Category : Nature
ISBN : 1477327819
"The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 was a debilitating event that followed decades of political, social, and financial issues. Leaving over 250,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, and 1.5 million people homeless, the earthquake has had lasting repercussions on a struggling nation. In this book, Myriam Chancy encourages us to look at Haiti and to continue to examine the historical and present structures that have resulted in Haiti's post-earthquake conditions. And as Haiti is newly recovering from another 7.2 magnitude earthquake from August 2021, the questions that Chancy seeks to answer and the stories she aims to document seem all the more urgent. Originally presented at invited campus talks, published as columns for a newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago, or other venues, the essays in Harvesting Haiti respond to a particular moment and preserve the reactions and urgencies in the years following the 2010 disaster. As Chancy explains, this work "remains pertinent to discussions of Haiti today and to understand what was being discussed in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, which continues to mark the country today, is relevant to what may or may not be possible for its future." The volume is organized into five parts, each with a thematic focus that reveals an important element for the context of post-earthquake Haiti. Part I provides political contexts and background, and includes pieces on international aid, Haiti's exclusion from global trade, and overarching issues in the battle for sovereignty. In Part II, an interview and two essays based on invited talks problematize the media's portrayal of gendered issues in the wake of the disaster. Part III takes an artistic turn with a poem and photo essay. Part IV preserves essays originally published in a column in a discontinued magazine insert for The Trinidad Express. Part V looks to the impact of the earthquake on the already vexed relationship between Haiti and their neighbor, the Dominican Republic. The book concludes with a reflection from five years after the earthquake, and then the tenth anniversary of the disaster"--
Author : Doris Lorraine Garraway
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 32,86 MB
Release : 2008
Category : History
ISBN : 9780813926865
On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti, thus bringing to an end the only successful slave revolution in history and transforming the colony of Saint-Domingue into the second independent state in the Western Hemisphere. The historical significance of the Haitian Revolution has been addressed by numerous scholars, but the importance of the Revolution as a cultural and political phenomenon has only begun to be explored. Although the path-breaking work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Sibylle Fischer has illustrated the profound silences surrounding the Haitian Revolution in Western historiography and in Caribbean cultural production in the aftermath of the Revolution, contributors to this volume argue that, while suppressed and disavowed in some quarters, the Haitian Revolution nonetheless had an enduring cultural and political impact, particularly on peoples and communities that have been marginalized in the historical record and absent from the discourses of Western historiography. Tree of Liberty interrogates the literary, historical, and political discourses that the Revolution produced and inspired across time and space and across national and linguistic boundaries. In so doing, it seeks to initiate a far-reaching discussion of the Revolution as a cultural and political phenomenon that shaped ideas about the Enlightenment, freedom, postcolonialism, and race in the modern Atlantic world. Contributors: A. James Arnold, University of Virginia * Chris Bongie, Queen's University * Paul Breslin, Northwestern University * Ada Ferrer, New York University * Doris L. Garraway, Northwestern University * E. Anthony Hurley, SUNY Stony Brook * Deborah Jenson, University of Wisconsin, Madison * Jean Jonassaint, Syracuse University * Valerie Kaussen, University of Missouri * Ifeoma C.K. Nwankwo, Vanderbilt University
Author : Chua Beng Huat
Publisher : NUS Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 31,87 MB
Release : 2017-06-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9814722502
In Liberalism Disavowed, Chua Beng Huat examines the rejection of Western-style liberalism in Singapore and the way the People's Action Party has forged an independent non-Western ideology. This book explains the evolution of this communitarian ideology, with focus on three areas: public housing, multiracialism and state capitalism, each of which poses different challenges to liberal approaches. With the passing of the first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew and the end of the Cold War, the party is facing greater challenges from an educated populace that demands greater voice. This has led to liberalization of the cultural sphere, greater responsiveness and shifts in political rhetoric, but all without disrupting the continuing hegemony of the PAP in government.
Author : Branwen Gruffydd Jones
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 22,28 MB
Release : 2006-09-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0742576469
The modern discipline of International Relations (IR) is largely an Anglo-American social science. It has been concerned mainly with the powerful states and actors in the global political economy and dominated by North American and European scholars. However, this focus can be seen as Eurocentrism. Decolonizing International Relations exposes the ways in which IR has consistently ignored questions of colonialism, imperialism, race, slavery, and dispossession in the non-European world. The first part of the book addresses the form and historical origins of Eurocentrism in IR. The second part examines the colonial and racialized constitution of international relations, which tends to be ignored by the discipline. The third part begins the task of retrieval and reconstruction, providing non-Eurocentric accounts of selected themes central to international relations. Critical scholars in IR and international law, concerned with the need to decolonize knowledge, have authored the chapters of this important volume. It will appeal to students and scholars of international relations, international law, and political economy, as well as those with a special interest in the politics of knowledge, postcolonial critique, international and regional historiography, and comparative politics. Contributions by: Antony Anghie, Alison J. Ayers, B. S. Chimni, James Thuo Gathii, Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Sandra Halperin, Sankaran Krishna, Mustapha Kamal Pasha, and Julian Saurin
Author : Celucien L. Joseph
Publisher : University Press of America
Page : 195 pages
File Size : 30,37 MB
Release : 2013-12-20
Category : History
ISBN : 0761862579
Haitian Modernity and Liberative Interruptions investigates the intersections of history, literature, race, religion, decolonization, and freedom that led to the founding of the postcolonial state of Haiti in 1804. Particular attention is given to the place of religion in the Haitian Revolution, as well as to the interpretation and representation of this singular event in the work of Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes. This book not only examines the multiple legacies and the problems of Enlightenment modernity, imperial colonialism, Western racism, and hegemony, but also studies their complex relationships with the institutions of slavery, religion, and Black freedom. Topics range from Makandal’s postcolonial religious imagination to Boukman’s liberation theology to Langston Hughes’ discussion of the role of prophetic religion in the Haitian Revolution. Haitian Modernity and Liberative Interruptions also compares Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness with Fanon’s theory of decolonization and revolutionary humanism.
Author : Susan F. Buck-Morss
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
Page : 179 pages
File Size : 27,92 MB
Release : 2009-02-22
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0822973340
In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a "new humanism," one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.
Author : Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 428 pages
File Size : 22,80 MB
Release : 2017-05-16
Category : History
ISBN : 022640336X
A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
