My speech focuses on the artwork prepared for the Polish Pavilion during 2015 Venice Biennale. Two Polish-American artists: C.T. Jaspers and Joanna Malinowska with curator Magdalena Moskalewicz realized a project that consisted of bringing a Polish 19th century opera entitled Halka to a “Polish” village in Haiti. In 1802 Napoleon send soldiers to crush the revolt of black slaves in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Among them – a Polish squad. The legend says that they refused to fight. In result they stayed in Haiti and their descendants (black people with blue eyes) are called Poles till today. They live in the small, mountain village called Cazale. Halka/Haiti. 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W project, inspired by Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo movie, have brought first Polish opera to Haitian Poles as a kind of gift. Analyzing the project and its contexts I address the issue of the relation between performance and repetition. The whole project can be interpreted as a kind of reenactment of Polish and Haitian history. But in fact in the archive we can find another version of events. Polish Napoleonic soldiers in majority were fighting against Haitians. Few of them – and none of the officers – changed sides. I ask what is performed in Cazale? What is enacted and reenacted when Polish opera signers in Polish traditional costumes sing Polish opera in the Haitian village, for the Haitian villagers and with their small input? The theoretical background is Rebecca Schneider’s conceptions of reenactment and repetition. At the end I address another issue: how the relation between the history, repetition and performance can be analyzed when it is seen in the colonial and post-colonial context? What is the relation between this artwork, the story held in the archives, the document it produces and the notions of blackness and whiteness it uses? How the document reenacted by the body changes itself depending on the skin color? I refer to the concepts of blackness provided by Fred Moten in his writings.

In his 1995 book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot has used the construction of both public memory and the academic M a t t s o n | 2 historiography of the Haitian Revolution to explore issues such as dominant narratives, historical silences, and the postmodernist recognition of many truths. These themes can in fact be seen quite often in the recent historiography of the Haitian Revolution due to its remarkable but for too long silenced impact on world history. Trouillot emphasizes the usefulness of the Haitian Revolution in examining the discipline of history itself, down to the insistence upon the rigors of research even in a postmodernist context. "The unearthing of silences," writes Trouillot, "and the historian's subsequent emphasis on the retrospective significance of hitherto neglected events, requires not only extra labor at the archives […] but also a project linked to an interpretation." 1 The historiography of the Haitian Revolution intersects with many issues of French colonialism; modernism, colonialism, postcolonialism, slavery, revolts, revolutions, racism, citizenship, republicanism and historical discourse are all topics which are well-represented in the scholarship. This essay will explore the English-language histories of the Haitian Revolution with a primary focus on the most recent works.

This article focuses on three moments in the intellectual elucidation of Haitian identity during the time that Haiti was occupied by the United States, from 1915 to 1934. It analyses the intellectual output of writers of Haitian Indigenism, which emerged during this period of crisis and its political developments. The article makes five main points: first, it presents the emergence of Haitian Indigenism; second, it turns to the first manifestation of Haitian intellectuals against the US occupation, considering the so-called 'writers at the margins of Indigenism; third, it presents the position of authors of the Revue Indigène, particularly of Jean Price-Mars; fourth, it analyses the Revue Les Griots, concentrating on how François Duvalier makes political use of the racial issue. Finally, through these investigations, the article establishes a dialogue with contemporary authors who discuss the construction of identity within post-colonial debate.

2004

Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World (1949), the only sustained literary rendering of the Haitian Revolution in the Spanish Caribbean, is known both for its fi ctional treatment of Haitian history from a slave's perspective and for the preface that claimed for that history the distinction of epitomizing marvelous realism in the Americas. This reading of the text's approach to one of the salient foundational narratives of Caribbean history looks at how, despite the "minute correspondence of dates and chronology" of the events narrated in The Kingdom of This World, the version of Haitian history offered by Carpentier is a fractured tale whose fi ssures may be read as subverting the adherence to the facts of Haitian history and its primary sources that the author claims for his text. It looks specifi cally as how the erasure of the leaders of the Revolution from the text, particularly that of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, reveals Carpentier's hopelessness concerning the Haitian land and its people.

small axe, 2017

This essay analyzes the long genealogy of Haitian indigenism as an alternative discourse to diaspora in discussing Caribbean identity. I focus on two moments when indigenous rhetoric becomes prominent: the 1920s cultural movement against the U.S. Occupation and the War of Independence itself. At both of these conjunctures, the rhetoric of indigeneity foregrounds issues of sovereignty, making specific territorial claims on the basis of filiation while demanding the expulsion of others as foreign. At the same time, the term indigène more frequently designates a position in relation to an imperial power than a set of concrete cultural attributes, advancing an argument that is more political than essentialist. While examining how this indigenous rhetoric envisions relations with the aboriginal Taino, I demonstrate the strengths, limitations, and contradictions of a discourse that sought to anchor Africans and their descendants in New World spaces.

Written for Dartmouth College MALS program and presented at the 2104 AGLSP Conference, this paper explores the modern Haitian diaspora and Haitian cultural difficulties with links tracing back to the Haitian Revolution and French colonialism.

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2022

Research in African Literatures, 2004

Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World (1949), the only sustained literary rendering of the Haitian Revolution in the Spanish Caribbean, is known both for its fi ctional treatment of Haitian history from a slave's perspective and for the preface that claimed for that history the distinction of epitomizing marvelous realism in the Americas. This reading of the text's approach to one of the salient foundational narratives of Caribbean history looks at how, despite the "minute correspondence of dates and chronology" of the events narrated in The Kingdom of This World, the version of Haitian history offered by Carpentier is a fractured tale whose fi ssures may be read as subverting the adherence to the facts of Haitian history and its primary sources that the author claims for his text. It looks specifi cally as how the erasure of the leaders of the Revolution from the text, particularly that of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, reveals Carpentier's hopelessness concerning the Haitian land and its people.