Tree of Liberty
Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World

Doris L. Garraway (Edited by), A.James Arnold (Contributions by), Chris Bongie (Contributions by), Paul Breslin (Contributions by), Ada Ferrer (Contributions by), Doris L. Garraway (Contributions by), Deborah Jenson (Contributions by), Jean Jonassaint (Contributions by), Valerie Kaussen (Contributions by), Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo (Contributions by)

9780813926865

Paperback / softback, published 11 April 2008

296 pages, 2 b&w illustrations
22.9 x 15.9 x 1.6 cm, 0.392 kg

An interesting and engaging collection. Tree of Liberty unites in a single volume the most recent, cutting-edge scholarship.... The book will no doubt become an important resource for anybody who teaches and studies issues relating to the Haitian Revolution, anticolonial struggles and post-colonialism, racial politics in the Americas, and francophone literatures. - Sibylle Fischer, New York University, author of Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution

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.