Liberal Revolution and Its Subaltern Other

• In Event: Insurgencies and Assemblies: Towards a Politics of the Street

Abstract

This is a story of two intertwined revolutions. The Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer was overthrown in 1843 by members of his own elite class. These mixed-race Haitian landowners saw themselves as liberal reformers in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville. They formed a learned society called the Society of the Rights of Man and Citizen, locating themselves firmly within the French revolutionary tradition. Their insurgency was well-publicized and carefully justified, following squarely in the tradition of the enlightened revolutions of the eighteenth century. They issued a manifesto explaining their principles and founded a newspaper, Le Manifeste [Manifesto], to serve as a mouthpiece of political discussion. After overthrowing an increasingly dictatorial regime, their priorities were legal reform, ending favoritism and other corrupt administrative practices, and promoting freedom of the press. They set about writing a new constitution, which was built around a creative and unprecedented conception of citizenship. The liberal revolutionaries conceived their country as a post-Westphalian beacon of liberty, radically open to people of color across the Caribbean, the Americas, and Africa.

This new political order was almost immediately overthrown by another revolution, however. That second insurgency was an improvised, grassroots rebellion of black, rural peasants that called themselves The Army of Sufferers in recognition of their poor, destitute condition. One measure of their impoverishment is the name given to them by others, the Piquets, because they fought using long pointed sticks called piquets or pikes. The Army of Sufferers made few claims and gave no elaborate justifications. Their movement was actively excluded from the press in some cases, and covered in a highly pejorative and cursory manner in others. What we know about them is fragmentary and ineffable, barely traced in the archives through highly biased news accounts and panicked diplomatic correspondence.

I argue that this revolution within a revolution was a unique moment of what Gayatri Spivak refers to as subaltern speech. A careful, genealogical interpretation of this movement reveals the antecedent presence of a silenced subaltern population during much of Haitian postcolonial history. The Army of Sufferers succeeded in throwing off that veil of silence for a brief moment. They appeared furtively in public consciousness, though in a scarcely legible fashion. This episode teaches us important things about modes of insurgency, the weapons of the weak, and the dynamics of subaltern silence. It reveals a great irony about seemingly progressive political movements: exciting new forms of visibility and power for the Liberal Revolutionaries produced invisibility and subordination for others. Rural blacks, the underclass of the postcolonial order, were pushed into constantly shifting forms of obscurity from the nation’s independence in 1804 until 1843. In 1844 they briefly rearticulated the terms of subalternity once again, surfacing in a new political movement, only to be rendered newly obscure through new means. The most striking lesson of this episode is to show us that the revolutionary project of freedom can have a seldom-recognized productive force to create new forms of subaltern silence.

Author

• Kevin Olson, University of California, Irvine