---
layout: article
section: articles
title:
  "long": "Haiti @ the Digital Crossroads: Archiving Black Sovereignty"
  "short": "Haiti @ the Digital Crossroads"
doi: "10.7916/archipelagos-53xt-3v66"
author:
  - name: Marlene L. Daut
    shortname: Daut
    bio: >
      Marlene L. Daut specializes in early Caribbean, nineteenth-century African American, and early modern French colonial literary and historical studies. Her first book, *Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789--1865* (Liverpool University Press, 2015) was part of the Liverpool Studies in International Slavery. Her second book, *Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) was part of the series in the New Urban Atlantic. She is now working on a collaborative project with Grégory Pierrot and Marion Rohrleitner titled *An Anthology of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions (Age of Slavery*), which is under contract with the University of Virginia Press. Daut is the cocreator and coeditor of H-Net Commons's digital platform [H-Haiti](https://networks.h-net.org/h-haiti). She also curates a website on early Haitian print culture at [*La Gazette Royale d'Hayti*](http://lagazetteroyale.com/) and has developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900 at <http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com>.
date: July 9 2019
issue: 3
order: 5
abstract: >
  In the spirit of Papa Legba (a Haitian <em>lwa</em> who is the arbiter of the crossroads between the human and nonhuman worlds), this essay examines the challenges and opportunities presented when using a digital humanities approach to archiving early Haitian sovereignty, a critical but often forgotten part of the story of the making of the modern world-system. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd have written about "archival work, as a form of counter-memory" that is "essential to the critical articulation of minority discourse." However, because archives, like other kinds of texts, reflect the worldview of their creators, the archivist working to articulate "minority discourse" must be careful not to reproduce patterns of domination or cultural exploitation. For Haiti, this means that we must work against the idea that the abundant historical resources now made readily (and often freely) available by various digitization projects, represent a "new frontier" for research, an idea that encourages the notion that the country is "open for business" on a variety of levels. Instead, by using the metaphor of the crossroads, this essay demonstrates how a multimodal approach---involving content, context, collaboration, and access---can allow for alternative ways of (humanely) archiving black sovereignty.
language: en
---

_Dedicated to the memory of Denise Groce (1958--2018)_

## Introduction

There are two major poles in contemporary discourse about Haiti: what
Robert Lawless has called "Haiti's bad press," on the one hand, and the
resonant, opposing concept of "new narratives," called for by scholars
such as Gina Athena Ulysse, Kaiama L. Glover, and Laurent Dubois, on the
other.[^1] Those of us in the field of Haitian studies immediately
understand the meaning of "bad press" for Haiti when we see it,
especially when it contains what Joel Dreyfuss has aptly called "the
phrase."[^2] It is much less clear, however, how we might go about
generating "new narratives" in order to combat what Ulysse has referred
to as the persistence of "Haiti's image problem."[^3] In other words,
how do we ensure that the new or alternative narratives we encourage,
craft, and center to oppose bad press will in fact not generate
similarly, or perhaps newly, hostile and harmful images of Haiti?

The British Museum's April 2018 exhibit _A Revolutionary Legacy: Haiti
and Toussaint Louverture_ provides a concrete example of how attempts to
create new narratives about Haiti could end up unwittingly reinforcing
some of the same old narratives commonly found in Haiti's bad press. The
long awaited and heavily advertised exhibit included portraits of
Toussaint by Jacob Lawrence and Lubaina Himid, among others, and
excerpts of writings about the famous revolutionary leader by C. L. R.
James. There was also audio of Ulysse's highly celebrated one-woman
show, _Because When God Is Too Busy_. Charles Forsdick, in a blog post
dedicated to the exhibit, described it as seeking to showcase Toussaint
as one of the world's most important historical figures: "Louverture's
increasing visibility as a global revolutionary figure suggests that he
is achieving a transcultural iconic status rivalled only by Che Guevara.
Yet this presents clear challenges: does it imply the final stage in
what some see as Louverture's conscription to forms of neo-colonial
modernity; or does it contain the residual potential for reignition, in
the present, of the Haitian revolutionary's struggle for universal
emancipation, not least in Haiti itself?"[^4]

Yet in focusing on representations of Toussaint largely produced outside
Haiti, the exhibit, as Tabitha McIntosh observed, placed undue attention
to the _idea_ of Toussaint in the "European imagination." Primary real
estate in the exhibit room was given over, for instance, not to the way
Toussaint represented himself in his extremely influential memoirs but
to the British poet William Blake.[^5] Along with the erasure of
Toussaint as one of the authors of Haitian revolutionary discourse
itself, nineteenth-century Haitian writers who wrote about the
revolutionary leader---namely, Baron de Vastey, Thomas Madiou, Beaubrun
Ardouin, and, most importantly, Joseph Saint-Rémy---were not included in
the exhibit either. The reliance on foreign contextualization for an
exhibit supposedly devoted to rethinking how the world might better
understand contemporary Haiti through the legacy of Toussaint left
McIntosch wondering, "Is the display about the revolutionary legacy of
Haiti, or Haiti in the American twentieth-century imagination, or
Louverture as a revolutionary trope for global black nationalism?"[^6]

Questions about the aim of the exhibit only continue to accumulate when
we consider the unfortunate way much of the history of Haiti after the
Revolution was both occluded and erased from the very parts of the
display meant to provide historical context. King Henry Christophe, for
instance, along with nearly every Haitian ruler from the years between
1825 and 1915, was not included in the timeline of Haitian history
presented at the museum. The timeline, a photo of which is included
below (see fig. 1), leaps from Haiti's independence from France in 1804,
with Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to the year 1825, which is the moment when
then Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer signed a treaty agreeing to pay
an indemnity to France's King Charles X, to the US occupation of the
country in 1915.

{% include image.html
    img="issue03/daut-a.jpg"
    title="Close up of museum timeline showing the gap."
    caption="Figure 1. Photo courtesy of Tabitha McIntosh"
%}

This kind of elision, and indeed suppression, has the effect of framing
Haitian history almost entirely around its relationship to Europe and
the United States. What matters on this timeline is a break from
colonial rule, a treaty with France, and occupation by the United
States. The image of Haiti presented, therefore, despite the exhibit's
lofty aims, is the portrait of a country overdetermined by its past
colonial relationship to France and its future/current neocolonial
subjugation in the US and European world-systems. Indeed, the rest of
the timeline narrates Haiti as a place of authoritarianism and military
dictatorship that was simultaneously dominated by the Western powers
(see fig. 2).

{% include image.html
    img="issue03/daut-b.jpg"
    title="Long view of the timeline."
    caption="Figure 2. Photo courtesy of Tabitha McIntosh"
%}

The problem with forgetting Haiti's long nineteenth century is that this
time period was, in many respects, the last time Haiti saw generally
good press. By good press I do not mean analyses that refrain from
criticism; I mean press that acknowledges a priori that Haiti has a
right to exist as a sovereign and independent state.

There is a Haitian proverb that states, _Se vye chodye ki kwit bon
manje_, or, "It is the old pot that makes the best food."

Although nineteenth-century French, British, and US authors often
indirectly promoted and sometimes even directly argued for the
recognition of Haitian sovereignty after the Revolution,[^7] this
nineteenth-century Haiti---the one not isolated by the Western world---has
remained relatively understudied by the vast majority of North Atlantic
scholars, researchers, and students. Until very recently much of the
scholarship on Haiti produced in US universities has traditionally
concerned itself with US and Western European reactions to and readings
of the Haitian Revolution and especially with what Mimi Sheller has
called the "Haytian fear."[^8] Overburdened attention to Atlantic world
anxieties about the meaning and consequences of the Haitian Revolution
for the colonial powers (England, Spain, Portugal, France, the United States, and the
Netherlands) has come most often at the expense of analyzing
nineteenth-century Haitian interpretations of the history of the
Atlantic world, Haitians' own reactions and responses to US and European
policies of nonrecognition of their sovereignty, and the contributions
of Haitian historians to the field of Haitian revolutionary
historiography itself. For example, even though the _Revue de la Société
Haïtienne d'Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie_, which was founded
in Port-au-Prince in 1925, is without a doubt the richest source of
Haitian-produced historiography about both the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the more than thirteen hundred articles the journal contains
are rarely cited by US scholars.[^9]

Without delving into Haitian-produced sources about Haiti, we understand
comparatively little about what happened in between the Revolution and
the occupation and are therefore incapable at present of fully thinking
about the kind of Haiti where Haitians appear as people, individuals,
with political dreams and desires all their own. In the words of Robin
D. G. Kelley, today's Haiti remains in need of new narratives precisely
because much of the contemporary discourse fails to represent the
Haitian people as "subjects and agents, as complex human beings with
desires, imaginations, fears, frustrations, and ideas about justice,
democracy, family, community, the land, and what it means to live a good
life."[^10]

My goal in this essay, therefore, is to return to the histories,
legacies, and interpretations of nineteenth-century Haiti written by
Haitian authors, politicians, and journalists. In so doing, I claim less
that scholars should now to try to reproduce Haiti's good press of the
nineteenth century than to merely document what we can all learn about
Haitian sovereignty from consulting it. In order for scholars in the
North Atlantic to go beyond simply _mentioning_ Haiti as a pit stop on
the way to extra-national interests and imperatives, we must, as Chelsea
Stieber has recently urged, investigate the multiple aspects of the way
nineteenth-century Haitian authors and politicians represented
themselves to the world after their storied revolution.[^11] While it is
true that the mere fact of consulting nineteenth-century Haitian
archives---as equally as reading contemporary Haitian scholars---will not
necessarily prevent us from contributing to bad press,[^12] what turning
to nineteenth-century Haitian historians and other writers from
sovereign Haiti firmly demonstrates is that the annals of Haiti's
history do not contain empty pages waiting to be filled by artists and
scholars from abroad.

In the following sections of this essay, first evoking the image of the
Haitian crossroads, guarded by Papa Legba, and then concentrating on the
concepts of access, content, and context, I examine several recent
online projects on Saint-Domingue and Haiti. In so doing, I consider how
digital scholarship is currently contributing to our ability to tell
more capacious and nuanced stories from, of, and about a sovereign
Haiti. I subsequently suggest that using multimodal archival methods to
document the Haitian past can help us to better understand the political
processes that drove Haitians to create and sustain an independent
nation-state in the nineteenth century.

In the final section of this essay, devoted to thinking about the
concept of digital collaboration as _konbit_, I turn directly to Haiti's
voluminous nineteenth-century print culture and specifically, the two
official newspapers from the administration of Henry Christophe
(1807--20), the _Gazette Officielle_ and _Gazette Royale d'Hayti_. By
rooting my interpretation of early Haiti's newspapers in Haitian
intellectual history, I suggest that postrevolutionary Haitian political
and historical writing provides vital clues for understanding how
sovereignty in Haiti unfolded (and eventually fell apart) after the
Revolution.

Ultimately, in thinking about how to use digital archival methods to
develop a Haitian-informed digital praxis---centered on access, content,
context, and collaboration---I hope to put forward alternative ways of
approaching the Haitian past as a living history, one that has the
ability to, in Karen Salt's words, "highlight...black politics alongside
and within the structures of power that attempt to deny the presence and
political agency of black bodies."[^13]

## _Kalfou_

For practitioners of Vodou, the _lwa_ Papa Legba (Attibon Legba) is the
god of the _kalfou_, or "crossroads" who acts as an arbiter between the
human beings of the living world and the gods of the spirit world. Legba is also traditionally known as the
"opener of gates" and therefore of opportunities. Vodou songs routinely
implore, "Papa Legba, louvri barrye pou mwen"---open the gate for me. In
the first history of the Haitiian Revolution written entirely in Haitian Kreyòl,
_Ti dife boule sou istwa Ayiti_, Michel-Rolph Trouillot gave chapter 5
the iconic words of Papa Legba as a title, "Louvri barye."[^14] This
simultaneously secular and sacred evocation of Vodou practice was used
by Trouillot to describe the process by which the French state came to
officially abolish slavery in colonial Saint-Domingue in 1793/94.
Trouillot asks of Léger-Félicité Sonthonax's 1793 decree abolishing
slavery, "Why did he liberate the slaves? What could have brought him to
such a decision?"[^15] For Trouillot, walking through the history of how
the enslaved Africans of Haiti, and specifically Toussaint Louverture,
had set the conditions for Sonthonax's revolutionary decision was about
opening the gates to an entire world of thought, one that would show how
the Haitian past has informed, shaped, and created the Haitian present.
In the introduction Trouillot explains, "In order for us to understand
\[the early states of Haiti and\] our own society, we must come to
understand what kind of life faded into the bush.... In order for us to
understand the disease from which we are suffering, we must know what
kind of diseases course through our blood."[^16]

Thinking about digital historical study as a process of entering Legba's
crossroads, the place where the living and the dead, the past and the
present must meet, is important not simply because it provides language
that draws on Haitian intellectual history (rather than European or US
intellectual traditions) but also because, as Papa Legba's _vèvè_
pictured below demonstrates (see fig. 3), these crossroads are not
entirely straightforward. Not every path can be taken without a great
leap, and the lines and circles are isolated yet connected, drawn
together yet existing apart. The center of the crossroads is not the
most important place to arrive at either, or rather it might not be the
final destination. If "there is no center,"[^17] this is because every
place is the center for someone or something, an idea rooted in Haitian
historians' conceptions of what I have elsewhere referred to as "[the
Haitian
Atlantic](https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/ba15390b4fd1e7d29a79c367f2799f1f/transnational-african-american-text-network/draft.html)."[^18]

{% include image.html
    img="issue03/daut-c.jpg"
    title="Vèvè of Papa Legba"
    caption="Figure 3. *Vèvè of Papa Legba*"
%}

If Legba opens the gates so that the living can have access to the dead,
this is not solely for the purposes of remembrance, and it is certainly
not for co-optation of their voices. Rather, it is so we might engage
the dead in conversation. In _The Reaper's Garden_, Vincent Brown
examined "how the dead affected the history of the living."[^19] Now,
drawing on nineteenth-century Haitian sources, I ask different but
related questions: How do we talk to the dead rather than solely about
them? Can digital humanities methods both literally and metaphorically
facilitate conversations between the living and the dead and in so doing
aid scholars in defining new methods for doing what is very old
work---archiving?

In a sense, all historians are talking to the dead when they use
archival sources to study the pre-twentieth century.[^20] But it is not
always clear what questions we should pose to or about the fragments of
these real lives resting in the archives. As Arlette Farge has written,
"The archives \[are\] not lacking, but they created a void and emptiness
that no amount of academic study can fill. Today, to use the archives is
to translate this incompleteness into a question, and this begins by
combing through them."[^21] Alessandra Benedicty, evoking the works of
Ann Stoler, has similarly sought to bring attention to the
"relationship, the codependency even, between on the one hand, the
ideas, texts, and objects that we put into our archives; and, on the
other hand, the questions that we ask." Benedicty continues, "What is
important...is that we pose questions that are worth asking; and to do
so we must put into our archive, objects, books, and ideas, that help us
not so much to resolve the uncertainties that lead to the formulation of
our questions, but rather that we construct our archives to help us
better invite questions that interrogate the urgencies of our present
human condition."[^22]

In _Une lecture décoloniale de l'histoire des haïtiens_, Jean Casimir
uses the concept of the "counter-plantation," derived from the readings
of Baron de Vastey, Beaubrun Ardouin, Thomas Madiou, and Anténor Firmon,
precisely to ask questions about "how Haitians have survived, subsisted,
and lived in the midst of political structures that exclude all
participation on their part."[^23] His thesis, in effect, is that the
majority of the Haitian people, whose sovereignty has become the victim
of a world order based on capitalism, have created their own vision of
the world in negotiation with dominant governments, including their own.
Similarly, what I hope that attending to the myriad forms of
documentation left behind by nineteenth-century Haitians, and especially
to that found in early-nineteenth-century Haitian newspapers under the
government of Henry Christophe, will allow me to do is both to put
"better objects"---Haitian-produced objects---into my archive and to ask
"better questions," namely, how did the early sovereign period of
postindependence affect Haiti's long march toward sovereignty against
the Atlantic World powers?

## Access

We have arguably never found ourselves in a better position to think
about Haiti's development and contribution to the history of Atlantic
sovereignty, broadly speaking. In 1983, David Geggus published
"Unexploited Sources for the History of the Haitian Revolution," an
article which focused on describing the "vast quantity of neglected
manuscript material \[in Spain, Great Britain, the Caribbean, and the
United States\] that concerns" what he calls "this unique and profound
event."[^24] Archival recovery work of the stripe that Geggus promoted
so long ago is as equally critical to preserving, learning from, and
contributing to the history of Haitian independence as it has been for
Haitian revolutionary studies. Nineteenth-century Haitian print culture
is extensive, encompassing not just traditional historical writing and
the customary political documents found in any state but also novels,
poetry, plays, music, artwork, and journalism.[^25]

Delving into the archives of this robust culture of print is crucial
work for understanding Haitian history, but it is also fraught work.
"Archival work," Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd have written, "\[is\]
a form of counter-memory that is essential to the critical articulation
of minority discourse."[^26] However, because archives, like the texts
found within them, reflect the worldview of both their creators and the
institutions that house them, those who write about archives or use them
as sources must be careful not to reproduce patterns of domination or
cultural exploitation (to use with much irony a variation of a term from
Geggus's essay title). For Haiti, this means that we must work against
the idea that the abundant historical resources now made readily (and
often freely) available by various digitization projects (including
HATHI Trust, Gale's Slavery and Anti-Slavery Database, Gallica, and
archive.org) indicate that Haiti represents "history's new frontier" for
research.[^27] Seeing Haiti as a "frontier" not only calls forth the
terrible legacy of the conquest of the Americas but encourages the
notion that the country is "open for business." An open-for-business
model of Haitian digital archives is problematic not least because it
reflects the economics of disaster capitalism that have so plagued Haiti
in the twentieth century and especially since the 2010 earthquake.
Despite Haiti's history of colonialism and (recent) foreign occupation,
Bloomberg TV, drawing on the words of Haitian president Michel Martelly,
aired a special on 12 January 2015 encouraging foreign businesses to
consider the country to be monetarily open to them: [_Haiti: Open for
Business?_](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-01-13/haiti-open-for-business)[^28]
Nadève Ménard reminded us, nevertheless, at a meeting of the 2015
Haitian Studies Association conference in Montréal, that Haiti has
always been open for business where the world powers are concerned.[^29]

Thinking about how to approach the vast archival and intellectual
terrain with respect for the peoples and cultures of Haiti has led me to
question how the vocabulary we are using to describe this moment in
Haitian studies (where the digital collides with renewed interest in
Haitian history in the North Atlantic) might be framed differently so as
to generate productive ideas about Haiti rather than merely rehashing
old ones or proffering similarly damaging new ones in their place.
Thinking about archiving as a crossroads, where institutions, scholars,
the public, and the spirits of Haiti must meet on uneven, and sometimes
conflictual, terrain is only a starting point.

Because most of the archival material used in scholarship about the
Revolution and early-nineteenth-century Haiti is not actually housed in
Haitian institutions, scholars interested in the revolutionary period
and the period immediately after independence find themselves traveling
all over the world, including to Jamaica, Puerto Rico, England, France,
Germany, Spain, and Denmark, as well as to the United States and Canada. While
many documents from Haiti can be found in archives located abroad, most
of the archives in England, France, and the United States overwhelmingly
contain sources about Haiti that were very often written by natives of
those respective countries. I have not mentioned Haiti itself as a
destination for traditional archival work, although, of course, it is.
Aside from what we would traditionally think of as the archive, that is,
written documents, Michel-Rolph Trouillot noted that the archive was as
equally in the "buildings, dead bodies, censuses, \[and\] monuments" as
it was in "diaries and political boundaries."[^30] Such an idea is
rooted deeply in nineteenth-century Haitian intellectual history. Hérard
Dumesle, for instance, wrote in his 1824 _Voyage dans le nord d'Hayti;_
_ou, Révélations des lieux et des monuments historiques_, "Persuaded
that nothing in nature is mute if we know how to read it, I interrogated
monuments and places."[^31] Throughout the body of the work, Dumesle
describes how he traveled to various sites in Haiti, including the
Citadel and the Palace at Sans Souci, allowing these buildings, these
"monuments," as equally as the very land itself, to provide him with
sources for telling the story of Haitian history: "Stones, mountains,
and valleys, oh how your echoes resound!"[^32]

While Dumesle had looked for the ruins to speak, and Baron de Vastey had
turned to ashes, bones, and the bodies of survivors, today's historians
increasingly rely on more traditional archival sources: written
documents.[^33] In "Unexploited Sources," Geggus had warned researchers
that there were no written documents about the Haitian Revolution or
even colonial Saint-Domingue in Haiti. "Paradoxically, but
understandably enough," he wrote, "Haiti itself seems to possess no
primary sources concerning its revolution that destroyed so much.
According to its director, the Archives Nationales in Port-au-Prince
contains no documents from the colonial period."[^34] Julia Gaffield,
noting that she herself traveled to Jamaica, the Netherlands, and
Denmark, along with England, Spain, France, and various places in the
United States, has also observed that because the "collections \[in
Haiti\] relate mostly to the latter half of the nineteenth century and
twentieth century," her research on the "early years of Haitian
independence could not be based exclusively on research in Haiti."[^35]

Such imbalance in the location of the archive led to Gaffield's
unearthing of the first printed copy of the Haitian Declaration of
Independence in the United Kingdom's National Archives, rather than in
those of Haiti. Just after it was proclaimed, the _Acte de
l'indépendance_ circulated around the Atlantic world, both instantiating
black Atlantic humanism and influencing the meaning and shape of
political sovereignty after colonialism.[^36] Given Haiti's important
stature after the Revolution, it is not surprising that a document of
this significance would be found in the archives of one of Haiti's
greatest trading partners in the nineteenth century.[^37] The writers
who most ardently advocated for the recognition of Haitian sovereignty
in the first years after independence were, in fact, in large part from
Great Britain. But how exactly did the only two known government-printed
copies of the act end up _solely_ in the archives of the UK?[^38] Why
are there no copies of such documents in Haiti (can a history of fire
and natural disaster really explain it all)? And should the UK return
these documents to the country that originally created them?

After Gaffield located the declaration, Patrick Tardieu, head of Haiti's
oldest library, the Bibliothèque Haitienne des Pères du Saint Esprit,
pleaded to the UK National Archives to support a Haitian-led archival
mission. "I once again appeal to the authorities of the country,"
Tardieu wrote in the Haitian newspaper _Le Nouvelliste_. "A cultural
mission imposes itself on the banks of the Thames; Her Majesty's
Ambassador has he not made a formal invitation to the Haitian government
in 2011? Are there other previously unrecognized documents in the
archives of London? Only an official mission will tell."[^39]

For Haitians, access to the archives is bound by not only the questions
of patrimony, ownership, and governance, to which Tardieu's statement
above alludes, but the much more material difficulty of finances. While
it seems unlikely that the UK will allow either of the Haitian
government's printed copies of the Haitian Declaration of Independence
to be returned to Haiti, digital archiving does offer a distinct
possibility for us to think differently about how to bring home these
documents.[^40] Gaffield, for instance, has already made the document
publicly available on her website, and it is also now on the website of
the UK National Archives, available for anyone to copy, save, or
download.[^41] In this sense, digitization, while not to be confused
with democratization, is helping both to bring greater attention to the
existence of this document and to provide the possibility of greater
access to it, as well as to knowledge of its vital history.

Through the painstaking efforts of digital archivists, archival
repositories are aiming toward and achieving increasing decolonization.
It is now no longer only the most well-funded academics and institutions
who can access, consult, and learn from these rare archival materials.
Still, in order to realize the full promise of digital archiving to not
only change narratives of Haiti but to include nineteenth-century Haiti
and provide access to the archives to Haitians themselves, we must do
much more than simply make historical documents available on the web.
Specialists must also work together with archivists and librarians in
Haiti and beyond to better catalog the holdings, for one thing, and to
ask better questions about how to categorize them, for another.

One of the reasons that the location of the first copy of the
government-issued version of the _Acte de l'indépendance_ that Gaffield
eventually located in the UK archives was not previously unearthed is
because it was in a box of documents that were categorized as pertaining
to Jamaica. Similarly, Gaffield describes the second copy that she
located during a subsequent trip to the UK National Archives as having
"been removed from the Admiralty records and re-cataloged as a map so
that it would not have to be folded in the bound volume." She concludes,
therefore, "This second discovery emphasized one of the key explanations
for why all the previous efforts to find an official copy of the Haitian
Declaration of Independence had failed. Both extant versions are located
in unexpected archival locations."[^42]

The ongoing digitization of the Archives Nationales in Port-au-Prince,
principally in collaboration with the Digital Library of the Caribbean
(DLOC), has similarly allowed the scholars, archivists, and librarians
working on the project to determine that it really is not true that
there are no documents from the colonial period in Haiti. For example,
one document digitized by DLOC is titled "[La désignation des postes
pour l'armée de St.
Domingue](http://dloc.com/CA00510270/00001?search=revolution)"; another
is a piece of Toussaint's
[correspondence](http://dloc.com/CA00510263/00001?search=toussaint).[^43] In addition, the Haitian Library of
the Pères du Saint-Esprit has also now been partially digitized; it
offers a great deal of material from the colonial period, including the
only known extant copy of Saint-Domingue's almanac of 1764 (a crucial
record of people living in the French colony).[^44] The library has also
digitized several additional letters written by Toussaint and the only
known existing copy of volume 7 of Moreau de Saint-Mery's works on the
constitutions of the French-claimed islands.[^45] These projects
highlight how digitization with respect to the Haitian archive must both
promote increasing access to Haitian-produced sources in the country
itself and work on finding guides that can improve accessibility for
everyone.[^46]

Chelsea Stieber's project, the RSHHGG Lab, undertaken in collaboration
with the US Library of Congress (LOC) and the Société Haïtienne
d'Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie (SHHGG), concretely
demonstrates how digital-finding guides rather than digitization alone
can improve access while recognizing and respecting the innately uneven
power relations involved in projects that originate outside Haiti. While
Stieber was in residence at the LOC, she observed that this US library
contains one of the only complete collections of the society's important
journal, _Revue de la Société Haïtienne d'Histoire, de Géographie et de
Géologie_, which is the longest-running periodical in Haiti. The
_RSHHGG_ is also the greatest repository of historical research produced
on Haiti, from Haiti, and yet its contents are rarely used by scholars
outside the country. Stieber's idea was to make the hundreds of articles
in this journal more accessible to North Atlantic scholars. To that end,
she proposed a digital indexing project, which librarians from the LOC
eagerly encouraged and supported. The project, which is already online
(<http://rshhgglab.com/search/>), is designed as a laboratory because it
allows users to begin to search the contents of more than thirteen
hundred articles and help to index them. It is not, however, a
digitization project, per se. At the request of the Société, the journal
will not be fully digitized at this time. The creators, contributors,
and collaborators of the lab, while undoubtedly helping Haitian
scholarship to digitally travel, recognized that their Haitian partners
wished them not to encourage the "Columbusing" of Haitian-produced
scholarship, or in the words of Brenda Stiles, the discovery of
"something that is not new."[^47] Thus we might say that the RSHHGG Lab
has provided a model for a digital project that has the capacity to
ensure that Haitian scholars are neither silenced nor exploited in this
moment of resurgent interest in Haitian history.

## Content

Although many digitization projects are now being accomplished through
large grant sponsorship, one way to improve access to the content of
libraries and archives that do not have such funding is to think more
about what individuals can do to help digitally archive research
materials. Scholars of Haiti, over the course of their research, before
this era of mass digitization even, amassed great amounts of content.
The Alfred Nemours Collection of Haitian history is a good example of an
archive linked to specific scholar's library.

Nemours (1883--1955) was a Haitian writer---primarily a military
historian---who had been a general in the Haitian army and who also
occupied a number of different official posts for the Haitian state in
the early twentieth century. He was quite prolific, publishing several
books, among them his notable _Histoire militaire de la guerre
d'indépendance de Saint-Domingue_ in 1925. Nemours collected numerous
original documents from various archives, too. Once he passed away, this
collection of historical documents, articles, and books, as well as his
personal library, was acquired from Nemours's widow by the University of
Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.[^48] The collection was allowed to leave
France, despite strict laws about French patrimony, because the French
government did not think these materials actually pertained to
France.[^49] In other words, the government of France did not think that
the history of Haiti concerned their country. Yet in the Nemours
Collection are not only multiple signed documents by Napoléon Bonaparte
and Generals Leclerc and Rochambeau (whom Bonaparte had sent to the
colony in 1802 in order to reinstate slavery) but multiple original
documents pertaining to Toussaint's captivity, imprisonment, death, and
autopsy, as well as crucial documents relating to the family history of
the Louvertures in France after the former revolutionary general's
death. Numerous documents related to early-nineteenth-century Haiti also
populate this collection, particularly newspapers, treaties, and
paintings of the kingdom of Hayti and King Christophe himself, along
with sketches and portraits of Toussaint, Boyer, Pétion, and Soulouque
(see figs. 4--6). The UPR library is interested in the digitization of
these materials, but there is a serious lack of funding, exacerbated by
the recent hurricane and untold destruction unleashed by US government
neglect in its wake.

One wonders, though: If digitization is not going to be an institutional
priority, could scholars with organization and coordination from the UPR
librarians help to scan the Nemours Collection on their own, using what
we might refer to as historian archivists, a more finely honed
variation, perhaps, of the "citizen historian" model?

{% include image.html
    img="issue03/daut-d.jpg"
    title="Letter from General Donatien Rochambeau to General
Jean-Jacques Dessalines."
    caption="Figure 4. Letter from General Donatien Rochambeau to General
Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Josefina del Toro Fulladosa Collection, Alfred
Nemours Collection, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus."
%}

{% include image.html
    img="issue03/daut-e.jpg"
    title="Engraving by Barincou of Boyer in full dress uniform
for a royal reception, 17 April 1825."
    caption="Figure 5. Engraving by Barincou of Boyer in full dress uniform
for a royal reception, 17 April 1825. Josefina del Toro Fulladosa
Collection, Alfred Nemours Collection, University of Puerto Rico, Río
Piedras Campus."
%}

{% include image.html
    img="issue03/daut-f.jpg"
    title="Proclamation from 4 June 1812 signed by Alexandre
Pétion."
    caption="Figure 6. Proclamation from 4 June 1812 signed by Alexandre
Pétion. Josefina del Toro Fulladosa Collection, Alfred Nemours
Collection, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus." %}

The "citizen historian" model of digital history projects has been
criticized for what some see in the end as having resulted in little
more than crowdsourcing. In the words of Mia Ridge of Open University,
actual citizen history versus crowdsourcing requires "build\[ing\] a
critical mass of discussion and usage" while "expos\[ing\] people to
historical materials that are potentially interesting." However, Ridge
is careful to stress that formally trained historians are crucial to the
success of such public history projects, and that their expertise should
therefore not be hidden away. She calls for "crowdsourcing and citizen
history project organisers to be more careful with the terminology they
use": "Signing up to a project and doing a bit of transcription work
does not make that person a historian, but this can become the end
result. Projects need to be clear about what it is they are offering and
asking, and what exactly is required to become a citizen historian
rather than, perhaps, a citizen transcriber."[^50] Without a doubt,
neither trained archivists nor traditional historians can be replaced in
digital historical scholarship. But transcription and crowdsourcing do
each have their role in encouraging conversation around digital
humanities projects and promoting the decolonization to which public
history aims. The Smithsonian's Digital Volunteers movement, for
example, has been highly successful at recruiting members of the general
public (11,980 and counting, at the time of the writing of this essay)
to "help...make historical documents and biodiversity data more
accessible."[^51] Volunteer transcribers are working to "decipher
everything from handwritten specimen tags to the personal letters of
iconic artists to early U.S. currency."[^52] Digitizing an extensive
collection, like that of Nemours's, could be undertaken, as with the
Smithsonian's project, in collaboration with trained archivists and
historians. Historians who archive their own findings, in fact, have
already been engaged in precisely this kind of work.

A contemporary historian archivist who is amassing a great amount of
material and who has made it largely available to the public is John
Garrigus. [Garrigus's personal
library](https://www.zotero.org/garrigus/items), which is available
through Zotero, contains copies of both primary and secondary sources
(where copyright laws allow), making it a rich and invaluable resource
for researchers of colonial Saint-Domingue and revolutionary Haiti.[^53]
Making archival documents available online in this way, as well as the
more contemporary items in our personal libraries, can contribute
significantly toward the possibility that others can also achieve a
similar level of content for their own projects, even if they do not
have the funds to travel around the world to collect it.

Julia Gaffield's born-digital [_Dessalines
Reader_](http://haitidoi.com/category/dessalines-reader/) is another
prime example of the possibilities that "sharing" by historian
archivists can open up, both in terms of publishing and promoting
greater equality in terms of access to content. In the introduction to
the first installment, Gaffield explains her motivation for publishing
this reader online: "Recently, I proposed \[to a publisher\] a volume of
the texts attributed to Dessalines but the publisher concluded that
there was not a market for this material, especially in light of the
question of authorship. This response has renewed my conviction," she
writes, "that there is a need for broader access to Dessalines's texts
in order to facilitate a larger conversation about his contributions
(both positive and negative) to the Age of Revolutions."[^54] The
_Dessalines Reader_ contains dozens of handwritten documents signed by
Dessalines, but because these letters had to be culled from libraries
and archives around the world, without Gaffield's intervention they
would likely have remained largely unavailable not simply to researchers
but to the general Haitian public. One of the greatest impacts that
historian archivists can have is to use the internet to "digitally
repatriate" documents that no longer live where they were born.[^55]

## Context

Working together with archivists to provide access to important content
is only a small part of a larger journey that requires that we put
nineteenth-century Haitian documents in context through digital
curation. The "Digital Humanities Manifesto" (version 2.0) introduces
the importance of curation in the following way:

> Whereas the modern university segregated scholarship from curation,
> demoting the latter to a secondary, supportive role, and sending
> curators into exile within museums, archives, and libraries, the
> Digital Humanities revolution promotes a fundamental reshaping of the
> research and teaching landscape. It recasts the scholar as curator and
> the curator as scholar, and, in so doing, sets out both to
> reinvigorate scholarly practice by means of an expanded set of
> possibilities and demands, and to renew the scholarly mission of
> museums, libraries, and archives.[^56]

An important element of digital archiving is our ability not only to
share our content with the general public but to provide the kind of
context that we would not get from simply visiting the archive. These
physical boxes in archival repositories that we consult in the course of
research at various libraries do not have implicit meaning and cannot
fully be interpreted outside specific contexts. Digital archiving
projects, unlike digital databases, put obscure documents into
specialized contexts through curation.

One of the things that distinguishes a digital archiving project from a
digital database is the ability for curation, which provides context not
only for the project but for the documents themselves. Preexisting
knowledge of the context is required to truly profit from the vast
collection of documents contained in [Gale's Slavery and
Anti-Slavery](https://www.gale.com/primary-sources/slavery-and-anti-slavery)
online databases, for instance.[^57] One must know beforehand what one
is searching for; otherwise, the materials will appear as just a random
and likely overwhelming selection of documents about slavery and
abolition. Moreover, this database is not free to access; it requires a
very expensive library subscription of each separate part of the
database, four parts in total. Digital archiving projects, on the
contrary, teach the reader/user the significance and importance of a
defined set of documents, while also promoting decolonization of
knowledge and, in many respects, defetishization of the archive as
precious relic that only a few people have the right to behold.

Confronting how we contextualize the archive from the perspective of
decolonization rather than democratization allows us to acknowledge both
the opportunities and limitations of what is contained in archives and
to reveal our own privilege in being able to access and interpret the
documents. [_A Colony in Crisis_](https://colonyincrisis.lib.umd.edu/)
provides a salient example of not only how researchers at any stage of
their career can become historian archivists but also how we can ensure
that the context we create around an archive recognizes the legacy of
colonial privilege in which the documents were created and in which
scholars now operate.

The _Colony in Crisis_ project is an online reader about the
Saint-Domingue grain crisis of 1789 that has published translations in
English and Kreyòl of "key primary sources" in French held by the
University of Maryland Library's Special Collections Department. The
project makes public these pamphlets published in the late
eighteenth-century "dealing with the grain shortage faced by the colony
of Saint-Domingue in 1789." Editors Kelsey Corlett Rivera, Abby
Broughton, and Nathan Dize note that "alongside the French original,
each translation is presented with a brief historical introduction to
situate the reader in the time period and help understand how this
particular pamphlet fits into the episode."[^58] The editors have also
annotated and otherwise contextualized these materials so that the
reader might understand how this historical moment was unfolding.

[Issue
3.0](https://colonyincrisis.lib.umd.edu/category/translations/issue-3-0/)
of the project can help us to suspect the kind of "knowledge" that these
particular pamphlets reveal about the crisis. The pamphlet called
"Response from the Deputies and Manufacturers...," dated 13 September
1789, for example, refutes the idea that there was a "famine" or
"shortage" of food in the colony at all, and the pamphlet's authors
sought even to contest the number of deaths by starvation of enslaved
Africans reported to France, implying that these figures had been
exaggerated.[^59] Two governing statements can help us understand how it
is the fact of the archive's coloniality that produces its inherent
incoherence. Katherine Clay Bassard has urged us not to forget that
"given the violence enacted against black women's histories, bodies, and
texts, the archives will remain incomplete and inadequate sources for an
empirically complete counter-narrative of black women's literary
production," whereas Barbara Bush avers, "History has been written for
men, by men, and thus records only what men wish to see."[^60] In turn,
colonial documents, as we see with _Colony in Crisis_, often tell us
only what was useful for colonial and metropolitan officials to know,
including information that the government of France did not want to make
known and thus hoped to suppress. It is recognition of this very dynamic
that led Haiti's Baron de Vastey to open his _Essai sur les causes de la
révolution et des guerres civiles d'Hayti_ (1819) by stating, "Haiti
lacks a general history written by someone native to the country; the
majority of historians who have tried it have been Europeans who
concerned themselves primarily with the part of our history that
involves them; and when they were led, by the subject at hand, to speak
of the natives, they did so with that spirit of prejudice and bias that
they never seem to be able to abandon...."[^61]

Beyond the suspicions that the question of race itself raises about our
possibilities to know outside the colonial epistemologies that inform
the creation of and the preservation of documents in the archive,
through examining the pamphlets themselves we can see a related problem:
the way various colonial officials concerned themselves with black
lives---the so-called crisis---solely in order to preserve black
enslavement. Colonial officials, in other words, wanted to preserve
black human life only to serve their own monetary ends; but who says
that enslaved peoples wanted to be alive anyway?

In his 1814 _Le système colonial dévoilé_, channeling the testimony of
the ancestors, Baron de Vastey writes,

> Is it any wonder if we resorted toward suicide, to poisoning? And if
> our women extinguished in their hearts all the sweet feelings of
> motherhood, when with cruel pity they caused the deaths of the dear,
> sad fruits of their lovers? In fact, how do you support life when it
> has reached the final limits of degradation and misery? When you must
> die a thousand times in one life by undergoing the most cruel
> tortures, when you are reduced to this deplorable situation, without
> any hope of escaping from it; to want to go on living, would that not
> be the utmost symbol of cowardice? Oh, why give life to such
> unfortunate beings, whose entire existence would condemn them to lead
> a pithy existence of torture and opprobrium in a long tissue of death
> without end; to extinguish such an odious life, was that such a great
> crime? it was compassion, humanity!!![^62]

That living a human life was the irreducible goal of early modern and
eighteenth-century people cannot be taken for granted, as Monique
Allewaert has argued.[^63] To that end, in 1790 Jacques Pierre Brissot
de Warville (secretary of the Société des Amis des Noirs) concluded a
long diatribe on the abuses that the Code Noir allowed to be perpetrated
against enslaved Africans by stating, "We are still afraid of being
human."[^64]

If it is imperative that we suspect the kind of "knowledge" and
assumptions about humanity---and who is a human---offered to us by the
colonial archive, what kind of hermeneutic should we offer in its place?
One approach is to perhaps let our encounters with the history of the
Haitian people be shaped by the interpretations and systems of knowledge
of Haitian historians and writers themselves rather than by Haiti's
"visitors," as Louis Joseph Janvier would later call them.[^65] The
methodology employed by early Haitian historians, in fact, provides a
precious hermeneutic for approaching Haiti's colonial history with
attention to the hopes, desires, and fears of the Haitians themselves
rather than that of their European interlocutors

In his 1855 _Histoire des Caciques_, Émile Nau wrote that Haitians, as
occupiers of the land once inhabited by the Caciques, had a duty to tell
the island's indigenous history because the Caciques population could no
longer do so. "The fact of inhabiting today the country where they once
lived," he wrote, "requires us, more than anyone else, to inquire into
our predecessors."[^66] Nau was careful, however, to acknowledge that
the history he was setting down would be only a fragmentary one, filled
with voids, gaps, and a multitude of unanswered questions and profound
silences. The Haitian historian described his methodology as a
combination of folk history and traditional historical excavation of
prior sources:

> It is impossible to go back even a day before the discovery, without
> giving into vagaries and conjecture. I have only gathered together in
> one set of works related to Haiti the fragments of this history,
> sparse in the works of historians and the accounts of voyagers who
> embraced the discovery of the entire continent of America. I gave, or
> at least I tried to give, a little more consistency to the facts and
> actions of the aborigines, and to recount, during a short moment of
> their existence, according to fables handed down and traces of
> traditions, their character, their mores, and their life.[^67]

Attention to the history of the indigenous population of Ayiti/Kiskeya
would ensure that all of Haiti's "annals would be conserved and
transmitted by its proper citizens" and would underscore the importance
of "preventing \[Haiti's\] history from being forgotten."[^68]

Combating erasure of Haiti's long history---one that also included the
pre-Columbian era---by consulting alternative archives, including talking
to the dead (which is what we are doing when we implore Papa Legba to
open the gates and also what we are doing when we consult archives),
textures the way I confront contextualizing the documents I uncover in
the course of archival research. Adopting a Haitian epistemology drawn
from Haitian sources and Haitian culture reminds us to suspect the
knowledge that comes from the colonial archive and to keep
metaphorically moving between the two worlds (that of the living and
that of the dead) in order to listen to our historical sources and ask
them what they want us to do and what they want us to say. That the
creators of our "sources" are no longer living does not absolve us of
responsibility to them. It is possible that we have just as much a
responsibility to collaborate with our dead subjects as we do with those
who are still living. And what early Haitian historians consistently
urge is that we never forget the violent history of colonialism and the
tortures meted out upon the future people of Haiti. Vastey wrote, to
that end, "Oh, you young Haitians who have had the good fortune to have
been born under the reign of laws and of liberty! You, who do not
remember these times of horror and barbary; read this writing; never
forget the misfortunes of your fathers, and teach yourselves to always
defy and hate your enemies."[^69] A framework of sovereign defiance
against the colonial drive for oblivion can help us recognize that all
scholarly work necessarily entails collaboration, with both those who
came before us and those who will come after.

## Collaboration

In Jacques Roumain's 1944 novel _Gouverneurs de la rosée_, which was
translated into English and published as _Masters of the Dew_ in 1947 by
Mercer Cook and Langston Hughes, the main character, Manuel, tries to
convince the people of his small rural town to work together to end the
drought. He tells them,

> We're poor, that's true. We're out of luck, that's true. We're
> miserable, that's true. But do you know why, brother? Because of our
> ignorance. We don't know yet what a force we are, what a single
> force---all the peasants, all the Negroes of plain and hill, all united.
> Some day, when we get wise to that, we'll rise up from one end of the
> country to the other. Then we'll call a General Assembly of the
> Masters of the Dew, a great big _coumbite_ of farmers, and we'll clear
> out poverty and plant a new life.[^70]

The kind of collaboration described in Roumain's novel has been
traditionally undervalued in US American academy, and that
undervaluation is reflected in today's humanities departments. This is
not only in terms of preferring single-author scholarship---over
translations, edited collections, and digital work, all of which is
necessarily collaborative---but in terms of preferring to exalt what
Frances Smith Foster has called "the lone fugitive,...the singular
sojourner, or the inspired visionary."[^71] Working collaboratively
should be a hallmark of digital Haitian studies, though, precisely
because collaboration is a way of being that is deeply tied to Haitian
culture and what Ulysse has termed anew _rasanblaj_, or gathering
together.[^72]

_Men anpil, chay pa lou_. This Haitian proverb roughly means, "With many
hands, the burden is not heavy." We say in English, "Many hands lighten
the load." One of the most important Haitian digital humanities
projects, the trilingual site [_An Island
Luminous_](http://islandluminous.fiu.edu/contributors1.htm), describes
the process by which it came into being exactly as "truly a grand
konbit." Contributors to the site include a variety of US- and
Haitian-based librarians and archivists, scholars and activists, as well
as graduate students. The site, which "combines rare books, manuscripts,
and photos scanned by archives and libraries in Haiti and the United
States," also contains "commentary by over one hundred (100) authors
from universities around the world."[^73] This project has provided a
distinct and concrete example of how gathering together across multiple
kinds of boundaries can promote global interest in Haitian history.

A great deal of my own success with digital archiving has been
accomplished through collaboration, or the _konbit_, too, the same kind
of collective work that drives the narrative of Roumain's novel. In the
course of my [research](https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137479693)
on the history of early-nineteenth-century Haiti's northern government,
I attempted to gather as many issues as possible of both versions of
Henry's Christophe's official state newspaper, the *Gazette Officielle
de l'Etat d'Hayti* (1807--11) and the _Gazette Royale d'Hayti_ (1813--20),
as well as a complete set of the six different versions of its yearly
almanac, _L'Almanach Royal d'Hayti_.[^74] However, I soon learned that
no single library contains a complete collection of any of these
publications and that the various issues that remain extant are
scattered in dozens of archives across Europe, North America, and the
Caribbean. Nevertheless, I spent three years searching the web and
various library catalogs in order to collect the ninety-five issues and
six almanacs currently featured on the site [_La Gazette Royale
d'Hayti_](http://lagazetteroyale.com/).[^75] I knew these documents,
precious sources of information about the early years of Haitian
statehood, would be of great interest to historians, anthropologists,
archaeologists, and literary scholars who are studying early Haiti's
political and literary actors or the Palace of Haiti at Sans-Souci,
which has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site and which stood
as the ultimate symbol of black sovereignty in the nineteenth-century
Atlantic world. Rather than keeping the dozens of issues I had managed
to collect confined to brief mentions in my own publications, I came to
believe that making the originals of these texts publicly available and
more accessible through transcription (and eventually through
translation) was the key to combating the kind of colonial rhetoric that
usually surges through public discourses about Haiti. One of the most
important axioms of this project is that Haiti's early history is not an
open book whose pages will remain empty until they are filled in by
scholars from abroad. As is demonstrated by the newspapers and almanacs,
as well as the myriad writings of nineteenth-century Haitian
intellectuals, Haitians have been making and writing their own
history---intellectual, literary, political---from the inception of the
country until now.

Moreover, these newspapers and almanacs have the capacity to completely
change our understanding of early-nineteenth-century Haiti's history.
What we can learn by reading through this archive has both local and
global significance. We observe at once, for example, the real-time
reaction of the Haitian kingdom to Napoléon's excommunication from the
Catholic Church and the government of the north's astonishment at both
his escape from the island of Elba and the reestablishment of his
authority, as well as their satisfaction with his presumed role in the
subsequent abolition of the slave trade in France.[^76] Also recorded
are details of the New England abolitionist Prince Saunders's
establishment of a school in northwest Haiti in the city of Port-de-Paix
and his arrival to the kingdom with doses of the Small Pox vaccine.[^77]
The pages of these newspapers are populated with precious descriptions
of the different phases of the construction of the palace at Sans Souci,
including a memorable etching to Christophe on one of the outside
columns, "To the First Monarch Crowned in the New World."[^78]
Painstakingly precise descriptions of lavish festivities, bombastic
speeches, trade statistics, and the glorious attire of the royal guard,
military, and the king himself are sure to incite a great deal of
interest, along with descriptions of two _arcs de triomphes_ on the road
leading to the palace. The _Gazette_ also importantly records the
Kingdom of Hayti's singular construction of the only antislavery state
in the Atlantic world. To that end, on 10 October 1817, the _Gazette_
reported the Haitian military's capture of a slave ship carrying captive
Africans and the government's subsequent release of 145 "unfortunate
brothers, victims of greed and the odious traffic in human flesh."[^79]
It is perhaps the issue dated 10 September 1819, however, that has the
capacity to change our understanding of the events that led up to
downfall of the Kingdom of Hayti.

One of the final newspapers in the _Gazette_ collection reveals that
King Henry's son, Prince Victor Henry, had recently returned from a
fairly extensive tour of northern Haiti. The piece talks about how
beloved the prince is throughout the kingdom, and the writer very much
seems to be setting the tone for Victor Henry to assume the throne. The
writer tells us that "satisfaction was the same everywhere the prince
traveled; Haitians all being of one heart and mind, in their desire to
give the prince testaments of their love." Christophe is barely
mentioned in this issue, and his absence from the tour of the kingdom,
which he had done in previous years, seems a bit conspicuous. The
article in question finishes by declaring that the prince is a "worthy
inheritor of the name and the throne of Henry."[^80] Because Christophe
had undertaken these tours in previous years, one wonders if his health
was already suffering, leading him to position his son in such a way as
to immediately assume the throne upon the king's perhaps anticipated
demise.

There is a backstory of collaboration that enabled these newspapers and
the vastly complex stories they tell---and the questions they raise---about
early Haitian sovereignty to be brought to the public. Seven issues
of the *Gazette Royale* were generously provided to me by historian
Julia Gaffield, who shared the images she took with her personal camera
at the National Library of Denmark in Copenhagen and the UK National
Archives; a single issue of the *Gazette Officielle* housed at the
Institution Saint-Louis de Gonzague in Port-au-Prince was happily shared
with me by Paul Clammer; while Tabitha McIntosh alerted me to two issues
of the _Gazette Royale_ held by the Bibliothèque du Port-Royal in Paris,
as well as to fifteen additional issues available at the Library of the
American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Finally, a series of
enthusiastic archivists, librarians, and specialists in document
conservation at various institutions, but especially David Gary and Aura Díaz López, have
also enabled this project to succeed in far more ways than I could
enumerate here.

Once I had the issues, the question became once again not only what to
do with them beyond my own scholarship but how to bring about further
collaboration in relation to them and, more particularly, collaboration
with the Haitian people who I felt needed to be able access them above
all. One of the most important original goals of this project was to
ensure that these vital publications from the earliest years of Haitian
statehood would become immediately accessible to people in Haiti. Users
will not fail to note that although all these documents have original
provenance in Haiti, [only a single
issue](https://lagazetteroyale.com/19-novembre-1814/) of
the *Gazette Officielle*, as far as we know at this time, can be found
in archives there today.[^81] Minimally, this situation required that we
commit to our chief goals---preservation and institutionalization---in a way
that eliminates paywalls and provides open access for Haitians.

Transcription (and eventually translation) seemed key to this because
full text lessens the bandwidth of the presentation as it allows the
documents to be read without downloading them and allows for greater
searchability. Because OCR technology cannot be reliably employed for
accurate document transcription (especially where diacritics are
involved), my research assistant, the late Denice Groce, transcribed
without the use of this technology the first drafts of fifty of the
fifty-one issues of the *Gazette Officielle* featured on the website, as
well as eight issues of the *Gazette Royale*. I transcribed the lone
issue of the *Gazette Officielle *from Port-au-Prince, along with the
remaining thirty-six issues of the *Gazette Royale*.

Collaboration in service of access, translation, and transcription to
promote international availability, as well as lowering the barriers of
current provenance through the development of a website, are crucial
elements in this attempt to create a decolonial archive. "Decolonizing
the university," Achille Mbembe has written, "starts with the
de-privatization and rehabilitation of the public space---the
rearrangement of spatial relations....It starts with a redefinition of
what is public, i.e., what pertains to the realm of the common and as
such, does not belong to anyone in particular because it must be equally
shared between equals."[^82] Though Mbembe was talking quite literally
about the buildings on a university campus, his comments function quite
well when thinking about the provenance of sources and ownership of
historical documents. In a very material way, I think we must operate
with a form of "_lakou_ consciousness" that moves us away from a logic
of individuality (private property) and toward the feeling of
togetherness (the commons) that living collectively requires, that is,
being a part of a public.[^83] Sustainability over profitability, and
decolonization over democratization, requires that institutions and
researchers alike work together to remove the many barriers that exist
to accessing historical resources. These include not simply problems of
language, which translation often appears able to solve, but the much
more heady and material problem of financing.

While digital archiving holds much promise to create more equity with respect to the public's ability to access historical documents, the notion that the digital humanities is a super hero capable of redressing the violent pasts of slavery and colonialism remains problematic. Digital projects involving archives are still susceptible to and indeed operating within the same unequal and oppressive processes of colonial extraction and finance capitalism that created the conditions proponents of digital decolonization seek to rectify in the first place. That is to say, it is colonialism that is responsible for so much of Haitian patrimony existing in foreign archives, libraries, and museums, and digital archiving, including digital repatriation, can neither redress this wrong nor provide a form of reparations for it. In fact, putting documents on the internet haphazardly, as if we were all the digital cowboys of the world wide web, could end up mirroring colonial extraction on a wider scale, particularly, if it is done without collaboration. But historians who digitally archive might help us to avoid recreating, through the process of expensive (and thus often inaccessible) scholarly publications, the very systems of domination, exploitation, and ownership that we rail against when writing about the machines of slavery and colonialism.

## Conclusion

An anecdote by David Nicholls from his influential monograph _From
Dessalines to Duvalier_ (1979) frames my final comments. In his preface
to the first edition of the book, Nicholls quite ironically thanked
Hénock Trouillot, director at the time of the Archives Nationales in
Port-au-Prince and a formidable scholar in his own right, "for his
unintended kindness in refusing to allow \[Nicholls\] access to the
archives." "If he had," Nicholls writes, "I would probably have been
faced with such daunting practical problems that this book might never
have been finished."[^84] Trouillot placed an immediate obstacle of
access in Nicholls's way. Maybe Nicholls didn't have the right passcode
(_Papa Legba,_ _louvri barrye pou mwen_), but he had to make his own
peace with this lack of access and move forward with the publication of
his book anyway. I think that we, too, must remain unafraid of opacity,
those moments when the archive refuses to speak to us, to make sense to
us, or even to let us in.[^85] The fact remains that for a
variety of complicated reasons, most Haitian archives are not open to
the general public.

We must also learn what it is to know in fractions (it is very unlikely,
for instance, that we will ever even come close to having a full run of
_La Gazette Royale_/_Officielle_). Understanding, interpreting, and
posing questions about those fragments we do manage to obtain will be
entirely contingent not only on what the archive holds but also on what
it does not. Like Nau, then, we have to open our minds to partially
knowing, and perhaps to recognizing our inability to know everything.
Most importantly, we must respect the fact that we do not necessarily
have a right to this knowledge.

Part of digitally archiving from the perspective of decolonization,
therefore, is not only making our work available and accessible to
others but also letting go of control---perhaps through collaboration---and
letting go of perfection by allowing work to go out into the world in
medias res. In so doing, we can take advantage of the ability the
internet offers us not only to publish quickly but to revise our work
constantly, to seek immediate feedback and even to change the content
(and our conclusions) when necessary.

If I began this essay by expressing a sense of trouble about the way we
talk about Haiti, I remain troubled. Archiving the sovereignty of
nineteenth-century Haiti is always going to be fraught, principally
because what we are archiving lies in ruins. Haiti remains, in many
ways, under both figurative and literal military occupation. The
memories of lost sovereignty hurt and are conjured up again and again
when we study the history of early Haiti. "And the museums," Aimé
Césaire reminds us, "it would have been better not to have needed
them....No, in the scales of knowledge all the museums in the world will
never weigh so much as one spark of human sympathy."[^86] One way to
work through this pain is to take it to the crossroads where the living
and the dead, the colonial and the decolonial, have no choice but to
interrogate one another. Drawing on the words of George Lamming from
_The Pleasures of Exile_, it seems imperative, now more than ever, for
us all to recognize that we are "direct descendant\[s\] of Prospero
worshipping in the same temple of endeavour, using his legacy of
language---not to curse our meeting---but to push it further, reminding the
descendants of both sides that what's done is done, and can only be seen
as a soil from which other gifts, or the same gift endowed with
different meanings, may grow towards a future which is colonized by our
acts in this moment, but which must always remain open."[^87]

---

[^1]:
    Robert Lawless, _Haiti's Bad Press_ (Rochester, NY: Schenkman,
    1992). For theorization of the concept of "new narratives," see "New
    Narratives of Haiti," a 2013 special edition of the journal
    _Transitions_ (no. 111), guest edited by Laurent Dubois and Kaiama
    L. Glover. See also Gina Athena Ulysse, _Why Haiti Needs New
    Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle_ (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
    University Press, 2015).

[^2]:
    I have consciously chosen not to include "the phrase" itself to
    avoid even unwittingly reproducing bad press for Haiti. See Joel
    Dreyfuss, "A Cage of Words," _Haitian Times_, November 1999;
    reprinted at _Bob Corbett Listserv_,
    <http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/haiti-archive/msg01471.html>.

[^3]: Ulysse, _Why Haiti Needs New Narratives_, 30.
[^4]:
    Charles Forsdick, "Visualising Toussaint Louverture," _British
    Museum Blog_, 12 March 2018,
    <https://blog.britishmuseum.org/visualising-toussaint-louverture/>.

[^5]:
    See Tabitha McIntosh, "A Revolutionary Legacy: Haiti and Toussaint
    Louverture, Room 3, British Museum, 22 February--22 April 2018,"
    _H-Haiti_,
    <https://networks.h-net.org/node/116721/discussions/1686456/revolutionary-legacy-haiti-and-toussaint-louverture-room-3>.
    For Toussaint's memoirs, see _Mémoires du général Toussaint
    Louverture_, ed. Daniel Desormeaux (Paris: Classiques Garnier,
    2011).

[^6]: McIntosh, "A Revolutionary Legacy."
[^7]:
    Marlene L. Daut, "The 'Alpha and Omega' of Haitian Literature:
    Baron de Vastey and the US Audience of Haitian Political Writing,
    1807--1825," in Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael J. Drexler,
    eds., _The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States:
    Histories, Textualities, Geographies_ (Philadelphia: University of
    Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 287--313.

[^8]:
    Mimi Sheller, "'The Haytian Fear': Racial Projects and Competing
    Reactions to the First Black Republic," _Politics and Society_ 6
    (1999): 286.

[^9]:
    See Chelsea Stieber, "Why the Lab?," RSHHGG Lab,
    <http://rshhgglab.com/why-a-lab/>. Other notable works dealing with
    the nineteenth century and published by Haitians are Michel-Rolph
    Trouillot, _Haiti: State Against Nation; The Origins and Legacy of
    Duvalierism_ (New York: Monthly Review, 1990); Patrick
    Bellegarde-Smith, _Haiti: The Breached Citadel_ (Boulder, CO:
    Westview, 1990); and Alex Dupuy, _Haiti in the World Economy: Class,
    Race, and Underdevelopment since 1700_ (Boulder, CO: Westview,
    1989). More recently, see Michel Hector and Laënnec Hurbon, eds.,
    _Génèse de l'État haïtien (1804--1859)_ (La Rochelle: Éditions de la
    Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2009); and Jean Casimir, _Une
    lecture décoloniale de l'histoire des Haïtiens: Du Traité de Ryswick
    à l'occupation américaine_ (Port-au-Prince: L'Imprimeur SA*,* 2018).
    See also, from non-Haitian writers, Julia Gaffield, _Haitian
    Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution_
    (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Laurent
    Dubois, _Haiti: The Aftershocks of History_ (New York: Henry Holt,
    2012); Kate Ramsey, _The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in
    Haiti_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Matthew J.
    Smith, _Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after
    Emancipation_. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
    2014).

[^10]:
    Robin D. G. Kelley, foreword to Ulysse, _Why Haiti Needs New
    Narratives_, xiii--xiv.

[^11]:
    See Chelsea Stieber, "Beyond Mentions: New Approaches to
    Comparative Studies of Haiti," _Early American Literature_ 53, no. 3
    (2018): 974.

[^12]:
    Ibid., 971; see also Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "The Odd and the
    Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean, and the World," _Cimarrón_ 2, no. 3
    (1990): 7.

[^13]:
    Karen Salt, "The Language of Politics in the Literary Archive of
    Black Sovereignty," *J19* 3, no. 2 (2015): 394.

[^14]:
    Michel-Rolph Trouillot, _Ti dife boule sou istwa Ayiti_, ed.
    Lionnel Trouillot (Port-au-Prince: Edisyon KIK, 2012). Originally
    published in 1977 as _Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti_ (Brooklyn, NY:
    Kóleksion Lakensièl); all quotes are from the 2012 edition.

[^15]:
    "Poukisa li lebere esklav yo? Kouman l fè te kapab pran desizyon
    sila a?"; Trouillot, _Ti dife boule_, 51.

[^16]:
    "Pou n komprann sosyete sa a, sosyete pa nou an, fò nou rive
    konnen ki kalite lavi ki disparèt nan raje \[...\] Pou nou resi konn
    ki maladi n soufri, fò nou rive konnen ki maladi k pase nan san n";
    ibid., 8.

[^17]:
    See George Lang, "_No hay centro_: Postmodernism and Comparative
    New World Criticism," _Canadian Review of Comparative Literature /
    Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée_ 20, nos. 1--2 (1993):
    105--24.

[^18]:
    See Marlene L. Daut, _The Haitian Atlantic: A Literary
    Geography_,
    <http://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/ba15390b4fd1e7d29a79c367f2799f1f/transnational-african-american-text-network/draft.html>.

[^19]:
    Vincent Brown, _The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World
    of Atlantic Slavery_. (Harvard University Press, 2010), 6.

[^20]:
    See Marc Bloch, _The Historian's Craft_ (New York: Vintage,
    1953), 47.

[^21]:
    Arlette Farge, _The Allure of the Archive_ (New Haven, CT: Yale
    University Press, 2015), 55.

[^22]:
    Alessandra Benedicty, "Questions We Are Asking: Hegel, Agamben,
    Dayan, Trouillot, Mbembe, and Haitian Studies," _Journal of Haitian
    Studies_ 19, no. 1 (2013): 7.

[^23]:
    "Je cherche à appréhender comment les Haïtiens arrivent à
    exister, à subsister et à vivre au sein de structures politiques qui
    excluent toute participation de leur part"; Casimir, _Une lecture
    décoloniale de l'histoire des Haïtiens_, 38.

[^24]:
    David Geggus, "Unexploited Sources for the History of the Haitian
    Revolution," _Latin American Research Review_ 18, no. 1 (1983): 95.

[^25]:
    For a resumé of the vastness and plurality of Haitian
    intellectual production, see Jacquelin Dolce, Gérard Dorval, and
    Jean Miotel Casthely, _Le romantisme en Haïti: La vie
    intellectuelle, 1804--1915_ (Port-au-Prince: Editions Fardin, 1983).

[^26]:
    Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, "Introduction: Toward a Theory
    of Minority Discourse," *Cultural Critique*, no. 6 (Spring 1987):
    5--12.

[^27]:
    Philippe R. Girard, "The Haitian Revolution, History's New
    Frontier: State of the Scholarship and Archival Sources," _Journal
    of Slave and Post-Slave Studies_ 34, no. 3 (2013): 485--507.

[^28]:
    _Haiti: Open for Business?_, Bloomberg TV, 26:09 min.,
    www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-01-13/haiti-open-for-business.

[^29]:
    "Haiti is not newly open for business, it has always been open
    for business." Nadève Ménard, Annual Meeting of the Haitian Studies
    Association, 23 October 2015; quoted by Marlene L. Daut,
    @FictionsofHaiti,
    [twitter.com/FictionsofHaiti/status/657671004089663488](https://twitter.com/FictionsofHaiti/status/657671004089663488).

[^30]:
    Michel-Rolph Trouillot, _Silencing the Past: Power and the
    Production of History_ (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 29.

[^31]:
    "Persuadé que rien n'est muet dans la nature pour qui sait la
    consulter, j'interrogeai les lieux et les monumens"; Hérard Dumesle,
    _Voyage dans le nord d'Hayti;_ _ou, Révélations des lieux et des
    monuments historiques_ (Aux Cayes: De L'imprimerie du Gouvernment,
    1824), 74.

[^32]: "Rochers, monts et vallons, que vos échos gémissent!"; ibid., 29.
[^33]:
    Ibid., 73; see Marlene Daut, _Baron de Vastey and the Origins of
    Black Atlantic Humanism_ (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan,
    2017).

[^34]: Geggus, "Unexploited Sources," 98.
[^35]:
    Julia Gaffield, "Haiti's Declaration of Independence: Digging for
    Lost Documents in the Archives of the Atlantic World," _Appendix_, 5
    February 2014,
    [theappendix.net/issues/2014/1/haitis-declaration-of-independence-digging-for-lost-documents-in-the-archives-of-the-atlantic-world](http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/1/haitis-declaration-of-independence-digging-for-lost-documents-in-the-archives-of-the-atlantic-world).

[^36]:
    Deborah Jenson, "Dessalines's American Proclamations of the
    Haitian Independence," _Journal of Haitian Studies_ 15, nos. 1--2
    (2009): 77--83.

[^37]: See Gaffield, _Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World_.
[^38]:
    Later, Gaffield located a second government-printed copy of
    the act in the UK National Archives. See Gaffield, "Haiti's
    Declaration of Independence."

[^39]:
    Patrick Tardieu, "Les femmes et l'effort de guerre: Ordonnance de
    Dessalines du 20 janvier 1804," _Le Nouvelliste_ 12 September 2013;
    translation quoted in Gaffield, "Haiti's Declaration of
    Independence."

[^40]:
    See Laura Wagner, "*Nou toujou la!* The Digital (After-)Life of
    Radio Haïti-Inter," _sx archipelagos_ 2
    [smallaxe.net/sxarchipelagos/issue02/nou-toujou-la.html](http://archipelagosjournal.org/issue02/nou-toujou-la.html).

[^41]:
    Julia Gaffield, "1 January 1804 (printed pamphlet)," _Dessalines
    Reader_, Haiti and the Atlantic World, 28 October 2015,
    <https://haitidoi.com/2015/10/28/dessalines-reader-1-january-1804-printed-pamphlet/>;
    "Haitian Declaration of Independence," UK National Archives, CO
    137/111/1,
    [discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C12756259](http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C12756259).

[^42]: Gaffield, "Haiti's Declaration of Independence."
[^43]:
    "La désignation des postes pour l'armée de St. Domingue,"
    <http://dloc.com/CA00510270/00001?search=revolution>;
    "Correspondance du général en chef au général Toussaint 5 prairial,"
    <http://dloc.com/CA00510263/00001?search=toussaint>. DLOC is
    administered by Florida International University, in partnership
    with the University of the Virgin Islands and the University of
    Florida. DLOC's technical infrastructure is provided by the
    University of Florida.

[^44]:
    See the Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Pères du Saint-Esprit (est.
    1873), <http://www.dloc.com/ibhpse>. See also, on the Archives
    Nationales d'Haïti (est. 1860), "Archives Nationales d'Haiti
    (National Archives of Haiti) and the DLOC Project: A New Step toward
    Regional Cooperation and Integration,"
    <http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00083680/00001/pdf>; on the Bibliothèque
    Nationale d'Haïti (est. 1939), "Bibliothèque Nationale
    d'Haiti---May/June 2011," Smithsonian Libraries, _Unbound_ (blog), 17
    August 2011,
    [https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2011/08/17/bibliotheque-nationale-dhaiti-mayjune-2011/](https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2011/08/17/bibliotheque-nationale-dhaiti-mayjune-2011/);
    on the Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Frères de l'Instruction
    Chrétienne (est. 1912), <http://www.dloc.com/ibhfic>; and on
    the Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien (MUPANAH) (est. 1983),
    <https://www.facebook.com/Mupanah>.

[^45]:
    See "Welcome at la Bibliotheque Haitienne des Peres du
    Saint-Esprit," <http://web1.dloc.com/UF00095578/00001/8j>.

[^46]:
    As Laura Wagner, of "The Radio Haiti" digitization project at
    Duke University, has stressed, the ability for Haitians living in
    Haiti to access digital archives cannot be taken for granted,
    particularly because the majority of digital projects on Haiti come
    from the United States. Laura Wagner, "Viv Radyo Ayiti! Vive Radio
    Haïti! Radio Haiti Lives!," Duke University Libraries, _The Devil's
    Tale_ (blog), 30 March 2018,
    <https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2018/03/30/viv-radyo-ayiti-vive-radio-haiti-radio-haiti-lives/>.

[^47]:
    Brenda Stiles, "'Columbusing': The Art of Discovering Something
    That Is Not New," NPR, 6 July 2014,
    <https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/07/06/328466757/columbusing-the-art-of-discovering-something-that-is-not-new>.

[^48]:
    Jane Toth and William A. Trembley, "The Alfred Nemours Collection
    of Haitian History: A Catalogue," *Caribbean Studies* 2, no. 3
    (1962): 61. See also Humberto García Muñiz et al., "La Collección
    Alfred Nemours de Historia Haitiana, Une Fuente Olvidada, en el
    Bicentenario de la independcia de Haití," _Caribbean Studies_ 32,
    no. 2 (2004): 181--241,
    https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=39232206.

[^49]:
    García Muñiz et al., "La Collección Alfred Nemours de Historia
    Haitiana."

[^50]:
    Mia Ridge, quoted in Matt Phillpott, "Citizen History and Its
    Discontents: Postscript," _Digital History Seminar_, Institute of
    Historical Research, 1 December 2014, updated 3 August 2015,
    <https://ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2014/12/citizen-history-and-its-discontents-postscript/>.

[^51]:
    Smithsonian Institution, "Smithsonian Digital Volunteers:
    Transcription Center," <https://transcription.si.edu/>.

[^52]:
    Helen Thompson, "The Smithsonian Wants You! (to Help Transcribe
    Its Collections)," 12 August 2014,
    <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smithsonian-wants-you-help-transcribe-its-collections-180952333/#LSv6eyti8Ywhcwsh.99>.

[^53]:
    John D. Garrigus Library,
    <https://www.zotero.org/garrigus/items>.

[^54]:
    Julia Gaffield, introduction to _Dessalines Reader_, Haiti and
    the Atlantic World, <https://haitidoi.com/dessalines-reader/>.

[^55]:
    Paul Resta et al., "Digital Repatriation: Virtual Museum
    Partnerships with Indigenous Peoples," proceedings of the 2002
    International Conference on Computers in Education,
    <https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/12b2/e4bf7892aa39950c26d4fb5bf575c04433a9.pdf>

[^56]:
    Humanities Blast, "The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0,"
    <http://www.humanitiesblast.com/manifesto/Manifesto_V2.pdf>.

[^57]:
    Gale, _Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive_,
    <https://www.gale.com/primary-sources/slavery-and-anti-slavery>.

[^58]:
    "Welcome to _A Colony in Crisis_," _A Colony in Crisis: The
    Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789_,
    <https://colonyincrisis.lib.umd.edu/>.

[^59]:
    "Response from the Deputies of Manufacturers and Commerce of
    France: To the Motions of MM. de Cocherel & de Reynaud, Deputies
    from the Isle of Saint-Domingue to the National Assembly, September
    13, 1789," _A Colony in Crisis_, issue 3.0,
    <https://colonyincrisis.lib.umd.edu/1789/09/13/response-from-the-deputies-of-manufacturers-and-commerce-of-france-to-the-motions-of-mm-de-cocherel-de-reynaud-deputies-from-the-isle-of-saint-domingue-to-the-national-assembly-september-13/>.

[^60]:
    Katherine Clay Bassard, _Spiritual Interrogations: Culture,
    Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing_
    (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 5; Barbara Bush,
    "Defiance or Submission? The Role of the Slave Woman in Slave
    Resistance in the British Caribbean," _Immigrants and Minorities_ 1,
    no. 1 (1982): 16.

[^61]:
    "Hayti manque d'une histoire générale écrite par un indigène du
    pays; la plupart des historiens qui en ont donné quelque fragments
    étaient des européens; ils ne se sont occupés principalement de la
    partie historique qui les concernent, et quand ils ont été entraîné,
    par le sujet, à parler des indigenes, ils l'ont fait avec cet esprit
    de préjugé et de partialité qu'ils ne peuvent abandoner...."; Baron de
    Vastey, _Essai sur les causes de la revolution et des guerres
    civiles d'Hayti, faisant suite au "Réflexions politiques sur quelques
    ouvrages et journaux français, concernant Hayti"_ (Sans-Souci, Haiti:
    L'Imprimerie Royale, 1819), 1.

[^62]:
    "Est-il étonnant si nous étions enclins aux suicides, aux
    empoisonnemens; et si nos femmes éteignaient dans leur cœurs les
    doux sentimens de la maternité, en faisant périr par une cruelle
    pité les chers et tristes fruits de leurs amours? En effet, comment
    supporter la vie quant elle est parvenue au dernier période de la
    degradation et de la misère? Quant il faut mourir mille fois pour
    une...? Eh pourquoi donner le jour à des infortunes, dont la vie
    entière était d'être condamné à trainer leur frêle existence dans
    l'opprobre et les tourmens, dans un long tissu de peine sans fin;
    éteindre une vie aussi odieuse était-ce donc un si grand crime?
    c'était compassion, humanité!!!"; Baron de Vastey, _Le système
    colonial dévoilé_ (Cap-Henry: P. Roux Imprimerie du Roi, 1814),
    71--72.

[^63]:
    Monique Allewaert, _Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and
    Colonialism in the American Tropics_ (Minneapolis: University of
    Minnesota Press, 2013), 109--10.

[^64]:
    _Réflexions sur le Code noir, et dénonciation d'un crime affreux
    commis à Saint-Domingue_, 6 August 1790, _A Colony in Crisis_,
    <https://colonyincrisis.lib.umd.edu/1790/08/15/reflections-on-the-code-noir-and-denunciation-of-an-atrocious-crime-committed-in-saint-domingue-addressed-to-the-national-assembly-by-the-society-of-the-friends-of-blacks-paris-august-1790/>.

[^65]:
    Louis Joseph Janvier, _La République d'Haïti et ses visiteurs
    (1840--1882): Réponse à M. Victor Cochinat (de la Petite presse) et à
    quelques autres écrivains_ (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1883).

[^66]:
    "Mais le fait d'habiter aujourd'hui le pays où ils vécurent, nous
    oblige, nous plus que personne, à nous enquérir de nos
    prédécesseurs"; Émile Nau, _Histoire des Caciques_ (Port-au-Prince:
    T. Bouchereau, 1855), iv.

[^67]:
    "Il est impossible de remonter d'un jour au delà de la
    découverte, à moins de se jeter dans le vague et l'arbitraire des
    conjectures. J'ai seulement réuni en un corps d'ouvrage relatif à
    Haïti les fragmens de cette histoire, épars dans les historiens et
    les récits de voyage, qui embrassent la découverte entiere de
    l'Amérique. J'ai donné, ou du moins j'ai essayé de donner plus de
    consistance aux faits et gestes des aborigenès, et de reproduire,
    durant un court moment de leur existence, d'après des faibles
    données et des traditions incomplètes, leur caractère, leurs mœurs
    et leur vie"; ibid., v.

[^68]: "Sauver son histoire de l'oubli"; ibid., ii.
[^69]:
    "O vous jeunes haytiens qui avez le bonheur de naître sous le
    règne des lois et de la liberté! Vous qui ne connaissez pas ces
    temps d'horreurs et de barbaries; lisez ces écrits; n'oubliez jamais
    les infortunes de vos pères, et apprenez à vous défier et à haïr vos
    tyrants!"; Vastey, _Le système_, 90.

[^70]:
    Jacques Roumain, _Masters of the Dew_, trans. Langston Hughes and
    Mercer Cook (Oxford: Heinemann, 1947), 75.

[^71]:
    Frances Smith Foster, "Creative Collaboration: As African
    American as Sweet Potato Pie," in Harold Bloom, ed., _African American Poets_, vol. 1 (New York: Infobase, 2009), 87.

[^72]:
    Gina Athena Ulysse, "Seven Keywords for this Rasanblaj,"
    _Anthropology Now_ 8, no. 3 (2016): 122.

[^73]:
    "Contributors," _An Island Luminous_,
    <http://islandluminous.fiu.edu/contributors1.htm>; "Mission," _An
    Island Luminous_, <http://islandluminous.fiu.edu/mission1.htm>.

[^74]:
    See Marlene L. Daut, _Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black
    Atlantic Humanism_ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

[^75]:
    "Explore Haiti's Early Print Culture," _La Gazette Royale
    d'Hayti_, <http://lagazetteroyale.com/>.

[^76]:
    _La Gazette Royale_, 23 November 1809,
    <http://lagazetteroyale.com/23-novembre-1809/>; _La Gazette
    Royale_, 2 June 1815,
    <http://lagazetteroyale.com/2-juin-1815/>; _La Gazette
    Royale_, 13 June 1815,
    <http://lagazetteroyale.com/13-juin-1815/>.

[^77]:
    _La Gazette Royale_, 23 November 1809,
    <http://lagazetteroyale.com/8-fevrier-1816/>.

[^78]:
    _La Gazette Royale_, 27 January 1814,
    <http://lagazetteroyale.com/27-janvier-1814/>; "Au Premier
    Monarque couronné du Nouveau-Monde," _La Gazette Royale_, 19 July
    1815, <http://lagazetteroyale.com/19-juin-1815/>.

[^79]:
    _La Gazette Royale_, 24 August 1816,
    <http://lagazetteroyale.com/24-aout-1816/>; _La Gazette
    Royale_, 21 August 1816,
    <http://lagazetteroyale.com/21-aout-1816/>; "infortunés
    frères, victimes de la cupidité et de l'odieux trafic de chair
    humaine," _La Gazette Royale_, 10 October 1817,
    <http://lagazetteroyale.com/10-octobre-1817/>.

[^80]:
    "La satisfaction a été égale, comme dans tous les lieux où le
    Prince a passé, tous les haytiens n'avaient qu'un cœur, qu'une âme,
    pour donner à l'envi au Prince des témoignages d'amour"; "un digne
    héritier du nom et du trône d'Henry"; _La Gazette Royale_, 10
    September 1819,
    <https://lagazetteroyale.com/28-decembre-1818-version-2/>.

[^81]:
    _La Gazette Officielle_, 21 January 1808,
    <https://lagazetteroyale.com/28-decembre-1818-version-2/>.

[^82]:
    Achille Mbembe, "Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the
    Archive," 2015,
    <https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf>, 5.

[^83]:
    Myriam J. A. Chancy, "_Lakou_ Consciousness: Empathy, or the
    Other Side(s) of the Fence," academic convocation, Scripps College,
    30 August 2016; see Marlene Daut, "_Lakou_ Consciousness: Myriam J.
    A. Chancy Gives Academic Convocation at Scripps College," _H-Haiti_,
    12 September 2016,
    <https://networks.h-net.org/node/116721/discussions/143483/lakou-consciousness-myriam-ja-chancy-gives-academic-convocation>.

[^84]:
    David Nicholls, _From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and
    National Independence in Haiti_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University
    Press, 1979), xliii.

[^85]:
    On opacity, see "One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in
    Conversation with Manthia Diawara," trans. Christopher Winks, _Nka_,
    no. 28 (Spring 2011): 14--15.

[^86]:
    Aimé Césaire, _Discourse on Colonialism_, trans. Joan Pinkham
    (New York: Monthly Review, 1972), 71, 72.

[^87]:
    George Lamming, _The Pleasures of Exile_ (Ann Arbor: University
    of Michigan Press, 1991), 15.