Reposted from The Black Agenda Review. Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s 8 April 1804 proclamation to the Haitian people is among the most stunning critiques of race, slavery, colonialism, and white barbarity to have emerged in modern history. It is also a profoundly radical statement on Black freedom and self-determination, and the morality of revolutionary violence. On January […]
Tag Archives: Dessalines
Revolutions and Revisions: An Interview with Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg
In Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto) Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg have produced what is arguably the most important biography of Louverture since CLR James’ magisterial Black Jacobins was first published in 1938. Kicking against the contemporary anti-Black and anti-radical revisionism that downplays the historical importance of the revolution while […]
Posted in Haiti
Also tagged 1804, 1938, archives, Black Jacobins, CLR James, Haiti, history, memory, representation, revolution
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Nat Turner and the Haitian Revolution
In consequence of the alarming increase of the Black population at the South, fears have been long entertained, that it might one day be the unhappy lot of the whites, in that section, to witness scenes similar to those which but a few years since, nearly depopulated the once flourishing island of St. Domingo of […]
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Also tagged 1791, 1804, 1831, archives, Haiti, Haitian Revolution, rebellion, sovereignty
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The Commander in Chief, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to the People of Hayti, Gonaives, January 1, 1804
The Commander in Chief to the People of Haiti: Citizens: It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries; it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mocked the specter of liberty that France dangled before you. We must, with one […]
Dread and Dispossession: An interview with Colin Dayan
Colin Dayan, the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has written on the literature and literary histories of the United States, Haiti, and Jamaica; on law, ritual, and anthropology; on prisons, torture, and the nature of the person. Her first book was an introduction to and translation […]
Marie-Jeanne Lamartiniére
“Let those with the courage to die free men stay here with me,” said Dessalines. A cheer went up: We will all die for Liberty! The doctor noticed that Marie-Jeanne, Lamartinière’s wife, cried the affirmation as loud as any man. She was a tall and striking colored woman; he was rather astonished to see she […]
A brief account of the rule of Jean Jacques Dessalines
The rule of Dessalines was a sanguinary, but, on the whole, a salutary one. He began his government by a treacherous massacre of nearly all the French who remained in the island trusting to his false promises of protection. All other Europeans, however, except the French, were treated with respect. Dessalines encouraged the importation of […]
Aftershocks + Avengers: An interview with Laurent Dubois
Laurent Dubois is a Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University who is a specialist in the history and culture of France and the Caribbean. His publications include Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804, Soccer […]