Garraway on Haitian Revolution

Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World by Doris L. Garraway is supposed to be an adequate treatment on the importance of the Haitian Revolution. Professor Garraway is an excellent writer, having published a major work on The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2005). We expect great things from her latest book, that will soon be available to order in May, 2008.

Book Description
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.

ContributorsA. 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 –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Quote of the Day

“In overthrowing me, you have cut only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring again from the roots for they are numerous and deep.”
— Toussaint L’Ouverture, 1802