Haiti, History, and the Gods

by Dayan, Joan

• ISBN13: 9780520213685
• ISBN10: 0520213688
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

InHaiti, History, and the Gods,Joan Dayan charts the cultural imagination of Haiti not only by reconstructing the island's history but by highlighting ambiguities and complexities that have been ignored. She investigates the confrontational space in which Haiti is created and recreated in fiction and fact, text and ritual, discourse and practice. Dayan's ambitious project is a research tour de force that gives human dimensions to this eighteenth-century French colony and provides a template for understanding the Haiti of today. In examining the complex social fabric of French Saint-Domingue, which in 1804 became Haiti, Dayan uncovers a silenced, submerged past. Instead of relying on familiar sources to reconstruct Haitian history, she uses a startling diversity of voices that have previously been unheard. Many of the materials recovered here--overlooked or repressed historical texts, legal documents, religious works, secret memoirs, letters, and literary fictions--have never been translated into English. Others, such as Marie Vieux Chauvet's radical novel of vodou,Fonds des Negrave;gres, are seldom used as historical sources. Dayan also argues provocatively for the consideration of both vodou rituals and narrative fiction as repositories of history. Her scholarship is enriched by the insights she has gleaned from conversations and experiences during her many trips to Haiti over the past twenty years. Taken together, the material presented inHaiti, History, and the Godsnot only restores a lost chapter of Haitian history but suggests necessary revisions to the accepted histories of the New World.

Table of Contents

PROLOGUE	xi	(10)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	xxi	(2)
NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY	xxiii
PART ONE	3	(74)
1 Rituals of History	3	(74)
Romancing the Dark World	5	(2)
Black Skin, White Heart	7	(3)
Between Civilization and Barbarism	10	(3)
No Easy Liberty	13	(3)
Dessalines, Dessalines Demanbre	16	(13)
Dismemberment, Naming, and Divinity	29	(10)
Defilee	39	(15)
Ezili	54	(11)
Service	65	(12)
PART TWO	77	(66)
2 Fictions of Haiti	77	(66)
Writing Misery	79	(6)
A Rhetoric of Lament	85	(8)
Holy Earth, We Are among Your Children	93	(4)
Dying to Serve	97	(7)
Ezili, Marinet, Agwe, and Ogou	104	(13)
Marie-Ange, Claire, and Rose	117	(7)
"Hallelujah for a Garden-Woman"	124	(19)
PART THREE	143	(126)
3 Last Days of Saint-Domingue	143	(44)
The Paradise of the New World	147	(5)
Locked Up in Saint-Domingue	152	(10)
An American Adventure	162	(3)
Leonora Sansay, Aaron Burr, and the Love Letter	165	(5)
Dressed to Kill	170	(12)
A New World Theater	182	(5)
4 Gothic Americas	187	(82)
Romance and Race	189	(10)
The Black Code	199	(13)
Sade, Lejeune, and the Manual	212	(7)
Taxonomies of Enlightenment	219	(18)
Tools of Terror	237	(21)
The Long Road to Guinea	258	(11)
CHRONOLOGY	269	(18)
NOTES	287	(42)
INDEX	329