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Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. By Sibylle Fischer. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 364pp. Hardcover, $89.95 ISBN: 978-0822332527; Paperback: $24.95, ISBN 978-0822332909).
In Modernity Disavowed, Sibylle Fischer questions the significance of the Haitian Revolution, an issue that numerous scholars have earlier addressed. But unlike those earlier historians, Fischer uses literary analysis to reframe the Revolution's role in shaping history and culture over the last two hundred years. Fischer is primarily concerned with the silencing of what should have been a seminal event in modernity, noting that most works examining the role of liberty and equality fail to even address the Haitian Revolution, the only revolution that centered on racial equality. Moreover, the tendency towards the study of the nation and national sovereignty in the nineteenth century further relegated the Haitian Revolution to the margins of history. The silencing then, of the Haitian Revolution, is part of an assumption of the universality of a European model of modernity. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, Fischer argues that disavowal is a statement of recognition, and the silencing of the Haitian Revolution is a testament to its importance.
Fischer's work is divided into three parts: Cuba, Santo Domingo/The Dominican Republic, and Saint-Domingue/Haiti. That structure allows her to examine the Revolution in the context of the Caribbean, both during the Revolution and after. And although a work of literary analysis, Fischer grounds the study in a thorough investigation of the history and historiography of the region. Through investigation of the José Antonio Aponte conspiracy in Cuba in 1812, she demonstrates that regardless of how the Haitian Revolution would be reinterpreted in future years, Cuban elites living with the very real...