Black Revolt in the White Mind: Violence, Race, and Slave Agency in the British Reception of the Haitian Revolution, 1791-1805.
Author(s): Teow, Jeremy
Source: Australasian Journal of American Studies . Jul 2018, Vol. 37 Issue 1, p87-102. 16p.

Abstract:

This article examines how a diverse set of British commentators wrestled with the shifting intersections between race, slave agency, and the violence of the Haitian Revolution between 1971 and 1805. In late 1791, the news of growing slave unrest in Saint-Domingue sent waves of anxiety across the Atlantic world. But while the ensuing violence immediately appalled contemporary observers, other preoccupations--geopolitical, commercial, and military concerns--initially dominated the Revolution's reception in Britain. Exploring a varied range of authors, newspapers, and texts, this article explores a gradual shift towards the racialization of slave violence over the following years. By the early 1800s, British representations had begun to regularly conceive of insurgent acts of violence as more than Jacobinism writ black, theorizing in different ways about their racial dimensions. At the same time, with the onset of the Napoleonic Wars, heroic depictions of the most prominent revolutionary leaders--namely Toussaint Louverture--could also be mobilized as racial exceptions against both popular sources of black violence and the brutality of the French army. Throughout the revolutionary decade, however, these British accounts of the slaves' insurrectionary violence were consistently marked by an underlying erasure of their agency.