The Haitian Revolution, Popular Sovereignty, and the Postcolonial State

• In Event: Popular Politics and the Legacies of Empire

Abstract

The founding of the Haitian Republic as an independent state in 1805 has both been celebrated as well as questioned.  The founding of Haiti is on the one hand celebrated for establishing the first black republic, yet also met with questions as to why Haitians would have turned to Western forms such as the state as the outcome of their revolutionary efforts. Following and expanding upon Adom Getachew’s critique (2016), we argue against interpretations of the Haitian turn to the state as “Western” and with it strictly a European form.  This paper begins by challenging the dichotomy of Western/non-West as it applies to cases such as Haiti and more generally the Americas and Caribbean.  Situating Haiti within a hemispheric and transnational lens, this paper endeavors to excavate the Haitian Founding’s creolization of the state form as a response to slavery, colonialism, and empire.  In particular, we focus on competing conceptions of sovereignty, both state and popular sovereignty, expressed within central texts of its founding periods (from the Constitution of 1801 to the Imperial Constitution of 1805), as they relate to tensions between presidential and elite constituent activism and popular activism and constituent power by poor, slave and former slave masses.

Authors

• Angelica Maria Bernal, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Samantha Davis