Concerns about Haiti suffused the early American print public sphere from the outbreak of the revolution in 1791 until well after its conclusion in 1804. The gothic, sentimental, and sensationalist undertones of openly speculative periodical accounts were accelerated within the genre of fiction, where the specter of Haiti was a commonplace trope. Haiti was not an enigma occasionally deployed by American writers, but rather the overt bellwether against which the
prospects for national futurity were imagined and interrogated. Ideological representations of Haiti infected the imaginations of early American readers in ways that have yet to be accounted for in
American literary history.Unfortunately, scholars have long occluded how early Americans understood their nation as entwined with Haiti. Faherty aims to counter this tacit disavowal by registering just how obsessed early American readers were with the seismic force of the Haitian Revolution and its capacity to produce aftershocks in the American domestic sphere. In unraveling how American literary history has silenced certain historical contexts around race, citizenship,
belonging, and freedom, The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters: Incipient Fevers recuperates lost textual objects while redressing a crucial blind spot in American literary history. For
myriad writers in the early Republic, Haiti was both unambiguously familiar and categorically incompatible. Synchronously held fast and rejected, Haiti was the ever-present index of the United States: a distorted reflection of the Republic's past, a troubling echo of its present, and a nightmarish harbinger of divisive futures.
Concerns about Haiti suffused the early American print public sphere from the outbreak of the revolution in 1791 until well after its conclusion in 1804. The gothic, sentimental, and sensationalist undertones of openly speculative periodical accounts were accelerated within the genre of fiction, where the specter of Haiti was a commonplace trope. Haiti was not an enigma occasionally deployed by American writers, but rather the overt bellwether against which the
prospects for national futurity were imagined and interrogated. Ideological representations of Haiti infected the imaginations of early American readers in ways that have yet to be accounted for in
American literary history.Unfortunately, scholars have long occluded how early Americans understood their nation as entwined with Haiti. Faherty aims to counter this tacit disavowal by registering just how obsessed early American readers were with the seismic force of the Haitian Revolution and its capacity to produce aftershocks in the American domestic sphere. In unraveling how American literary history has silenced certain historical contexts around race, citizenship,
belonging, and freedom, The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters: Incipient Fevers recuperates lost textual objects while redressing a crucial blind spot in American literary history. For
myriad writers in the early Republic, Haiti was both unambiguously familiar and categorically incompatible. Synchronously held fast and rejected, Haiti was the ever-present index of the United States: a distorted reflection of the Republic's past, a troubling echo of its present, and a nightmarish harbinger of divisive futures.
Duncan Faherty is Associate Professor of English & American Studies
at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At the Graduate
Center he is also a core faculty member of the Committee on
Globalization and Social Change. Along with Ed White (Tulane), he
is the co-founder and co-director of the Just Teach One digital
textual recovery project. He is the author of Remodeling the
Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858,
and his work has also appeared in American Literature, American
Quarterly, Early American Literature, and Reviews in American
History.
This ground-breaking book recovers the crucial role of Haiti in
shaping American culture during the first two decades of the
nineteenth century. Faherty overturns what we thought we knew about
this supposedly barren period. By showing how and why Haiti was
erased from the white American imagination, Faherty uncovers a rich
and dramatic literary history in which Haiti inspired different
visions of what freedom and resistance might look like in the
modern world.
*Andy Doolen, University of Kentucky*
Incipient Fevers argues that "the seismic force of the Haitian
Revolution" shaped early U.S. literary culture at the dawn of the
nineteenth century. This revolution has long taken a back seat to
the U.S. and French Revolutions, and Faherty compellingly
demonstrates that its suppression in U.S. historiography and
literary history led to the creation of an imagined "canonical
interregnum" roughly between 1800 and 1820...Much like Cathy
Davidson's pivotal Revolution and the Word reshaped the field over
two decades ago, this book has the potential to radically transform
early and nineteenth-century U.S. literary studies by expanding the
horizon of the literature that we study and how we write about and
teach it.
*John Funchion, University of Miami*
Incipient Fevers is an original and eye-opening account of the
foundational significance of the Haitian Revolution to literary
production in the early United States and, indeed, to the larger
overall history of American literature. In this superb study,
Duncan Faherty demonstrates not only that the print public sphere
of the early U.S. was saturated with accounts of and references to
the Haitian Revolution,...The doppelgänger nature of the Haitian
Revolution thus served as what Faherty aptly terms a "hauntology"
of the U.S. print public sphere in the early years of the
nineteenth century and beyond. The U.S. remained (and remains)
haunted by the presence of a more radical revolution-one that it
must continually invoke and contain in order to imagine itself as
at once free and white.
*Elizabeth Dillon, Distinguished Professor of English, Northeastern
University, USA*
Faherty's thinking and writing are replete with clarity and
elegance, rendering just how much the materiality of aesthetics
intersects with political and social formation. The introduction,
in particular, makes a striking, readable, inspiring best case for
beholding Haiti's presence in U.S. national literary imagining.
*Kevin Quashie, Brown University*
In this vital contribution to hemispheric American Studies, Duncan
Faherty makes a case for redressing a crucial blind spot in
American literary history, namely, the years 1800-1820, an era so
often imagined as a fallow period of cultural
production....Outstanding.
*Chris Bongie, Transatlantica*
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