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The Colonial System Unveiled BY BARON DE VASTEY, TRANS. AND ED. CHRIS BONGIE Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2014. x + 329 pp. ISBN 9781781380314 cloth.
It took two hundred years for The Colonial System Unveiled, an essay written by Baron de Vastey, King Henry I of Haiti's foremost publicist, to be translated into English. This may suggest how unsettling this author and text have long been- and, for the most part, remain-to readers and critics in the West. For Chris Bongie, this lack of scrutiny also has much to do with a certain unease with the realities of independent Haiti. The liberatory promises of the revolution gave way to institutional and cultural endeavors scholars have often found discouraging. Bongie proposes to look at what he calls the "post/revolutionary" period "not (simply) in terms of a rupture or 'fall' from grace, but (also) as a frustratingly yet productively ambiguous continuation of the revolutionary project" (3). This double perspective allows Bongie to retain previous analyses of Vastey as scribe of the Haitian state, but also complicate them by looking at him as a full-fledged author. In the...