Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America
Revolution, Race and Popular Performance

Peter P. Reed reveals how nineteenth-century American theatre and performance reckoned with Haiti's courageous enactments of Black freedom.

Peter Reed (Author)

9781009113182, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 June 2025

227 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.336 kg

''Staging Hait' is, without question, an important new book. Reed has given the field a host of new questions to consider by underscoring the limitations of our fixation on fiction as the primary index through which to read cultural formations, even as he moves to expand our operant sense of how performance, performativity, drama, and theatricality are made much richer when we understand the literal theater as one site amid a constellation of stages on which the drama of the Haitian Revolution played out for obsessed generations of nineteenth-century Americans.' Duncan Faherty, Early American Literature

American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In this study, Peter P. Reed reveals how Americans embodied and re-enacted their connections to Haiti through a wide array of performance forms. In the wake of Haiti's slave revolts in the 1790s, generations of actors, theatre professionals, spectators, and commentators looked to Haiti as a source of both inspiring freedom and vexing disorder. French colonial refugees, university students, Black theatre stars, blackface minstrels, abolitionists, and even writers such as Herman Melville all reinvented and restaged Haiti in distinctive ways. Reed demonstrates how Haiti's example of Black freedom and national independence helped redefine American popular culture, as actors and audiences repeatedly invoked and suppressed Haiti's revolutionary narratives, characters, and themes. Ultimately, Haiti shaped generations of performances, transforming America's understandings of race, power, freedom, and violence in ways that still reverberate today.

Introduction: performing the Haitian revolution
1. Rebels and refugees: sentimental suffering and antic revolt in the 1790s
2. The lessons of Haiti: performance, pedagogy, and the politics of Haitian independence
3. Virtuosity, illegitimacy, and Haitian royalty: Ira Aldridge and Christophe, King of Hayti
4. Travesty and transformation: Haiti and blackface minstrelsy
5. Abolitionist acts: Haitian respectability, oratory, and celebrity performance
Conclusion: the pleasures and perils of revolutionary reenactment.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Theatre studies [AN]