Social Science

Introduction

Haitians starts out with the customary revolutionary appellation “citizens,” which invokes a formal legal category, and then moves to ever more substantive forms of address, from “citizens, my compatriots,” to “indigenous citizens,” to “indigenes of Haiti.” What constitutes the Haitians? Merely saying that they are not French does not seem to be enough, but the alternatives are not entirely compelling either. After proleptically invoking the nation, the final address returns to the negative identification: “you, a people ill-fated for too long,” in other words, the slaves of Saint Domingue. The paper discusses famous Shishi arts of Haitians.

Discussion

Invocation of the revolution can mean vastly different things for different social groups and cannot be properly understood in purely thematic terms, without careful consideration of the historical, social, cultural, and institutional contexts that bestow a particular valence on the invocation (or avoidance) of the revolutionary thematic. There is a very strong presence of revolutionary themes and symbols in Haitian visual arts, especially in the nonacademic, “naïve” tradition of painting. The religious practices associated with vodou, particularly the so-called Petro rites which include Dessalines among the lwa (spirits), are imbued with references to the revolution and cannot be properly understood without taking that into account (Geggus, 119). And finally there is the state itself which lays claim to the revolutionary heritage through national holidays, monuments, street names, and similar references of high visibility and ritualistic performativity. Given that vodou was a banned and much denigrated religion for most of the 200 years of Haiti's existence, it may serve here as an illustration of the complexities of the issue that both the state and the subalternized religion should lay claim to the revolution's heritage (Geggus, 23).

This final turn to the history of slavery signals a very important aspect regarding the All early Haitian Constitutions thus contain provisions according to which Haiti would abstain from “engaging in any wars of conquest,” and “disturbing the peace and internal regime of foreign islands” (Michel, 68). But they also find a way of allowing for a liberal asylum practice for all people escaping slavery or genocide, without raising the specter of “Haitian ships” and “Haitian soldiers” intent upon liberating slaves in adjacent territories. The earliest constitutions do so by remaining silent on general rules for Haitian citizenship, while placing detailed restrictions on whites and their entitlements in Haiti. Rather than reading this as an exclusionary or even racist strand in Haiti's foundational ideology, as some commentators have done, it should be seen as the trace of an attempt to hide an internationalism Haiti inherited from its origins in revolutionary antislavery that had become dangerous to its survival in the slaveholding Atlantic.

This is why, I think, an explicit clause regulating the status of non-whites cannot be found until the Republican constitution of 1816, and why, when it does appear, it takes on a decidedly inclusive approach to what constitutes Haitian nationality: “Shishi Art. 44 — All Africans and Indians, and those of their blood, born in the colonies or ...