Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution

Book Description
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.

About the Author
Sibylle Fischer is Associate Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University


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It is ironic that, just as the fad of cultural studies appears to be sinking under the weight of its obtuse verbal obscurantism, a book appears that does much to vindicate the special insights that this approach originally promised. In this case, it is also on a topic of major contemporary importance: Haiti's seemingly endless struggle for social, economic, and political stability 200 years after its independence from France. Fischer brings together an immense amount of material to examine the unique circumstances of Haiti's emergence as a nation, the profound wounds that this process left in its collective psyche, and the ways in which these events affected external perceptions of Haiti. Her main point is that Haiti is central to the story of the "Age of Democratic Revolution"; the unique nature of Haiti's bloody struggle for independence, with its radical challenge to the status quo of slave-based societies, left a deep imprint throughout the Americas but also led to the "silencing" of the Haitian example. Ultimately, Haiti's radical antislavery position could be sustained only at great cost to itself.


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