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Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. SIBYLLE FlSCHER. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 364 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95)
Sibylle Fischer's Modernity Disavowed adds to a recent and long overdue trend that places Saint-Domingue at the center of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. It helps to correct the denigrating views of the Haitian Revolution that have characterized narratives - at least outside of Haiti - for so many years. But this work stands out because of the author's approach: in a field dominated by historians, Fischer turns to literary criticism. Consequently, she brings novel theoretical and methodological tools to bear on interpretations of this seminal event and its aftermath, and the outcome is a provocative study that calls into question fundamental assumptions about this period.
Fischer contends that the Haitian Revolution is crucial for understanding the limitations of key concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely modernity and its political manifestation, the nation-state. She traces how, in reaction to the foundation of the first free and racially equal republic, radical antislavery ideology was deliberately excised from visions of what constituted a modern nation. Whereas the Haitian Revolution politicized the issue of racial subordination, other countries and colonies - in Europe and the Americas - consigned slavery to the realm of moral and social action. In this way, the radicalism of...