Haiti

Haiti is a country in the Caribbean that occupies one third of the island of Hispaniola. When Christopher Columbus set foot in Haiti in 1492, the island was inhabited by the Tainos Indians, who were put into slavery by the Spanish conquistadors. Within 30 years, the Indian population was decimated by the harshness of their new conditions and the diseases brought by the colonizers. To continue expanding their empire, the colonizers turned to West Africa as a new source of people to enslave. Struggle between colonial rivals to control the gold mines in Hispaniola ultimately led the Spanish to agree, in 1698, to a treaty granting the French control over the western part of the colony. Under French colonial rule, the western part, renamed Saint-Domingue, was transformed into a complex plantation system based on a sophisticated capitalist enslavement of Africans, who composed the majority of the population. The wealth of the colony attracted bitter struggles and wars between colonial challengers such as the British, the Dutch, and the Spanish, and after brief periods of conquest by each of these powers, the French again prevailed. During the 1700s, the century of philosophical enlightenment and revolution, Saint-Domingue was the richest colony of France, the major source of power and wealth that underwrote every sphere of French society. The contradictions inherent to the colonial and slavery systems in Saint-Domingue and the circulation of ideas of freedom and equality fostered by the Enlightenment (and culminating in1789 in the French Revolution and the General Proclamation of the Rights of Man) generated the ultimate conditions for a general slave revolt. It started in 1791 and climaxed in the revolution that overthrew the plantation system and, after a 13-year war of independence, transformed the colony into a new country renamed Haiti (the original name of the island prior to colonization).

The epistemological status of Haiti and its social formation in the social sciences, specifically in history [Page 1135]and anthropology, is as problematic as Haiti's positioning in the latter disciplines. The Haitian revolution (1791–1803), against three centuries of slavery and colonialism, took place during the Enlightenment project; and this along with the emergence of Haiti in the modern world at the onset of the 19th century (1804) challenged the dominant paradigm of racial differences and hierarchies well ingrained in Western modern thoughts and narratives. For the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the precursors of modern history and anthropology, humans were internally differentiated on the basis of biology and culture, which provided the basis for a hierarchy of races and cultures, of which Westerns Europeans constituted the finest achievement of civilization. The revolution that transformed Saint-Domingue into Haiti was at the time deemed an inconceivable embarrassment, for it did not fit the project of men as defined in Western thought, even though liberty and equality were the ideals pursued by the Western thinkers of the time and concretized by the revolutionaries in the Caribbean. Indeed, the emergence of a Black republic was an impossible contradiction. The dominant Western narratives conceptualized and characterized Haiti as a “state of exception” in that for Europeans and Americans in the 19th century, the very existence of a former slave/Black-African-run republic tapped deeply into the contradictions that lay behind the Rights of Man proclamation, namely, a universalism on one hand and an evolutionism on the other. And from this latter perspective, it was necessary to discredit Haiti in order for Euro-Americans to enunciate their notion of civilization. This act, by its very nature, served to centralize the exception, which explains why Haiti figured so centrally in the entire narrative of the present. Haiti's exceptionalism was intrinsic to Euro-America's conception of itself, just as the power of Euro-America to normalize itself became intrinsic to the imagination of Haiti.

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