Abstract

Tropics of Haiti is a richly documented, thoroughly researched, and deeply insightful study of nineteenth-century transatlantic print culture surrounding the Haitian Revolution. At once literary history, historiography, and compendium, the book offers a detailed analysis of whatMarleneDaut argues is the racialized mischaracterization of the Revolution as a “ ‘mulatto/a’ vengeance narrative”—an Œdipal struggle between “colored” children and their “white” fathers—rather than a political revolt led by the enslaved. Not only, she contends, did pseudoscientific narratives based on “racial” taxonomy circulate widely throughout the years leading up to, during, and following the Revolution, but these narratives have made their way, largely unchallenged, into the foundations of present-day scholarship. Daut examines a vast and diverse archive of historical texts, personal memoirs, political tracts, and prose fiction works authored by U.S., European, and Caribbean writers between 1789 and 1865. Many of these texts have, she maintains, remained unexamined by scholars. Thus, her project, though not one of rehabilitation, explores their importance for current understandings of Haitians and their history. Daut’s aim is threefold: to show how popular and vernacular tropes become integrated into official legal and political discourse in the nineteenth century; to question “the effects of ‘racial’ thinking” (p. 17) on the individual subjectivities of so-called “mixed-race”Haitians during the pararevolutionary moment; and to expose the extent to which racialized discourse from this period has informed academic writing ever since. She argues that the Revolution “has been (mis)read as a ‘racial’ revolution” (p. 461) and convincingly showshow theunquestioned circulation of certain realities of theHaitian past have detrimentally impacted Haiti’s present. In Part One, Daut looks at configurations of “mulatto/a/s” as degenerate hybrids, unstable in their allegiance and ontologically violent. Analyzing the “racialized vocabulary of revolution” (p. 56) in works by Julien Raimond, Harriet Martineau, Baron de Vastey, Victor Hugo, and others, she demonstrates how “those who created eighteenthand nineteenth-century ‘racial’ terminologies ... helped to produce a biology of being ‘negro,’ ‘mulatto,’ or ‘white’ ” (p. 16), citing the singular influence of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s 1797 Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’ isle Saint-Domingue on nineteenth-century Atlantic writing about the Revolution. Part Two examines stereotypical depictions of “mixed race” women