Universalism After the Post-colonial Turn

Neither Haitian nor Revolutionary

To highlight the significance of this alternative interpretation of the Haitian Revolution, it is worth drawing out what precisely gets lost when its universalism is read as a response to exclusion and as a realization of French revolutionary ideals that anticipates contemporary human rights. Recent reappraisals of the Haitian Revolution tend to begin with an account of the limits of Jacobin universalism, particularly in the form of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. While the rights of man suggested application to all, they were immediately circumscribed by nationality, religion, race, and gender. In situating the Haitian Revolution within this context of truncated universals, scholars have highlighted the ways in which slavery was an extreme form of exclusion left unchallenged by the French Revolution. According to Susan Buck-Morss, colonial slavery entailed a politics of exclusion that required “conceptual barriers of difference” such as the racialization of the slave, the creation of a separate legal sphere, and the erection of hard political boundaries between the colonies and the nation. ⁶ Slavery on this account involved the denial of formal rights and political participation to a group that is marked as inferior to those included in the realm of citizenship. ⁷ The conceptual barriers that constituted colonial slavery excised black slaves from both political and human community by locating them in the category of property.

When framed against this problem of exclusion and in the context of the Jacobins’ truncated universals, the Haitian Revolution’s universalism is conceived as a radical project of inclusion that is made possible by realizing and extending the rights of man. For instance as Nick Nesbitt argues, “the revolution was the first to implement, as early as 1791, not the freedom of a certain class or race, nor the civil rights of a ‘constitutional state,’ but the program of universal emancipation that we today call human rights.” ⁸ Laurent Dubois echoes this sentiment when he writes, “By creating a society in which all people, of all color, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution … laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere.” ⁹

Central to this account of the Haitian Revolution is a story of how universal ideals travel from metropole to colony, become appropriated by unlikely actors, and are, in the process, expanded and realized. Despite the planters’ efforts to censor any information about the revolution in France, pamphlets and other materials were circulating throughout the colonies. Dubois notes that the first slave insurgents to be caught by French soldiers carried pamphlets outlining the rights of man. ¹⁰ In appropriating the ideals of the French Revolution, the enslaved forced a confrontation between universals and the practice of colonial slavery. Thus while French revolutionaries fashioned their revolution as a struggle against slavery in its feudal guise, Haitian revolutionaries brought Jacobin ideals to bear on colonial slavery and enabled the realization of these universals. ¹¹ For this reason, Buck-Morss concludes that the Haitian revolutionaries “surpassed the metropole in actively realizing the Enlightenment goal of human liberty” and Nesbitt concurs, arguing that the Haitian Revolution “exceeded [the French Revolution] in its commitment to human rights.” ¹²

A number of historians have challenged this interpretation of the Haitian Revolution arguing that emancipation was a historically contingent event, which had little to do with the new universals of revolutionary France. ¹³ Instead, according to one alternative, Haitian actors made strategic appeals to legal entitlements of the old regime. ¹⁴ Yet, despite these historiographical interventions, the interpretation of the Haitian Revolution as a realization of the rights of man remains a powerful narrative that has generated an important debate about the role of struggles against slavery in the genealogy of human rights. ¹⁵ In Lynn Hunt’s account, the rights of man declared in 1789 have an “inner logic” in which their abstract and metaphysical nature allows for subaltern actors to claim them as their own and force their expansion. ¹⁶ The Haitian Revolution is, on her view, an instance of this seizure from below that helps to propel the expansive logic of rights. ¹⁷ While resisting the teleology and anachronism that plagues efforts to link eighteenth-century rights claims to contemporary human rights, Robin Blackburn similarly argues that the abolition movement and the Haitian Revolution, in particular, enabled a radicalization of the rights of man, which left a political legacy that could then be appropriated by future claimants of human rights. ¹⁸

At stake in this debate is not only a question of whether the history of human rights is characterized by continuity, but also one about how to conceptualize the role of subaltern action in this history. On the one hand, by situating Haitian Revolution as a key episode in the making of human rights, black and enslaved subjects are centered as authors of these universal ideals. On the other hand, as Samuel Moyn has argued, the picture of subaltern action on offer in Blackburn and Hunt’s accounts is one where their agency is limited to “realizing the concept’s already built-in potential.” ¹⁹ Urging attentiveness to historical contingency, Moyn recommends that historians reconstruct the broader discursive contexts in which political actors strategically select and reinvent ideals from a complex and competing set of possibilities. ²⁰ In his view then, moments of subaltern action—anti-slavery and the Haitian Revolution or twentieth-century anti-colonialism—are moments of deep discontinuity in this history of human rights. The contemporary prominence of human rights cannot be explained vis-à-vis a history of subaltern appropriation and expansion, but is instead the product of a highly contingent rise in the late twentieth century. ²¹

To be clear, many proponents of linking the Haitian Revolution to human rights have also pointed to the need to understand the revolution’s distinctive uptake of Jacobin universalism by noting the alternative ideals available to the enslaved. For instance, Blackburn notes that alongside Jacobinism, “African values and concepts animated the liberation wars,” citing as an example the common Kréyol saying tou moun se moun (everyone is a person). ²² Nesbitt argues that in this context of diverse traditions, metropolitan discourses of liberty and rights were “creolized” in the colonies. Yet, these moments do not emerge as sites for examining how universals like the rights of man might be transformed in the Haitian context. ²³ It remains unclear whether the linguistic transformation of the French liberté to the Creole libete or the conception of humanity on offer in Kréyol epistemologies produces a substantive transformation of the rights of man. Creolization thus becomes merely derivative rather than an instance of innovation.

This diminution of creolization stems from two recurring features of realization narratives. First, French revolutionary ideals overdetermine the practices of the enslaved and thus make it difficult to discern the ways in which new ideals are inaugurated through revolutionary action. For instance, Nesbitt writes that the “Declaration of the Rights of Man created the condition of possibility, the ontological ground” of the revolution. ²⁴ At the same time, he insists on the “singularity” of the Haitian Revolution and argues that the “extension of universalism was not the unfolding embodiment of a metaphysical essence.” ²⁵ But, if the rights of man constitute the conditions of possibility and the realization of these same rights also marks the political horizon of the revolution, the actions of the slaves appear to be already circumscribed by the political discourse of the metropole.

This is significant because Nesbitt begins with an Arendtian account of revolutionary action as “freedom of active creation,” a capacity to create that which “was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination.” ²⁶ When the Haitian Revolution is emplotted as a narrative of realization, this revolutionary capacity to begin anew and introduce innovations in political ideas and practices cannot be captured. The framework of realization entails the diminution of revolutionary action to the realm of extension and application. Paradoxically then, in reinserting the subaltern at the center of the history of modernity, this interpretation risks reducing their contributions to what Frantz Fanon described as “the minor term of a dialectical progression.” ²⁷

A second and related concern with narratives of realization is that they presuppose that the political problem to be overcome is the injustice of exclusion. Realization is appealing because it points to a strategy of overcoming an initial truncation that excluded colonial subjects and the enslaved from the rights of man. By locating the Haitian Revolution between the rights of man and contemporary human rights, the revolution thus becomes one episode in a story driven by a logic of inclusion. This is most visible in Hunt’s treatment of the Haitian Revolution within the history of human rights. According to Hunt, “rights questions [have] a tendency to cascade.” ²⁸ Challenging exclusion in one domain, say that of religious minorities, laid the groundwork for women, free people of color, and eventually slaves to also resist their exclusion. Drawing on Dubois’s account of the Haitian Revolution, she argues that the pervious invocations of rights by other excluded subjects made the consideration of the slave system “that much more inevitable.” ²⁹

But to see colonial slavery primarily through the idiom of exclusion is to consign it to a generic account of injustice. As the invocation of “cascades of rights” suggests, exclusion characterizes a range of injustices based for example, on gender and religious difference. In each of these cases, the problem is unjustly drawn boundaries that delimit “an essentially just public sphere.” ³⁰ As such, exclusion does not tell us anything distinctive about the institution of colonial slavery, except to highlight the radical forms of exclusion from both the political and human community that enslavement entailed. Moreover, it suggests that once the excluded can claim political and human rights—once inclusion has been achieved, the primary injustice is solved.

The preoccupation with the exclusion/inclusion dichotomy also limits the analysis of what we take to be the Haitian Revolution’s shortcomings. For instance, Buck-Morss, who associates colonial slavery with the assertion of “conceptual barriers of difference,” argues that the formation of a “Black Empire” at the moment of Haiti’s independence in 1804 failed to take up the challenge of creating a new model for arranging society and instead reproduced the masculinist and nationalist structures of the European nation-state. ³¹ A year into its independence, Haiti had abandoned a revolutionary universalism for “a narrow racialist nationalism.” ³² In Buck-Morss’ account, the universalism of the Haitian Revolution is limited to the 1801 Constitution in which Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave–turned revolutionary leader, laid the foundations of an inclusive political community and declared all inhabitants “free and French.” Importantly, the qualifier “French” in Toussaint’s constitution is not understood as anti-universal, while the turn to blackness in the 1804 constitution is seen to have reinscribed the racial exclusion the Haitian Revolution had initially transcended.

There is an irony here: the moment that Saint-Domingue became Haiti—when the first black nation-state in the western hemisphere is founded—stands outside of what constitutes the Haitian Revolution’s universalism. More generally, narratives that privilege the problem of exclusion and the realization of existing ideals recognize the universalism of the Haitian Revolution when it is neither truly revolutionary nor distinctively Haitian. It is not truly revolutionary because it is denied the possibility of innovation and it is not distinctively Haitian because the specificities of colonial slavery are underexamined.

The Specificity of the Haitian Revolution

Instead of interpreting the Haitian Revolution through the lens of the truncated universal of human rights, I propose a reading that preserves the specificity of the Haitian Revolution. To insist on specificity is not to deny the ways in which the French Revolution shaped the material and ideological conditions in which Haitians challenged colonial slavery. ³³ In his classic text, C.L.R James called attention to this connection by naming the Haitian revolutionaries “black Jacobins” and arguing that “it is impossible to understand the San Domingo Revolution unless it is studied in close relationship with the Revolution in France.” ³⁴ Acknowledging this relationship, however, should not lead us to reduce the Haitian Revolution to a chapter of its French counterpart. ³⁵ As Aimé Césaire once pointed out, “It is absolutely necessary that we understand that there is no ‘French Revolution’ in the French colonies. There is in each colony a specific revolution, born on the occasion of the French Revolution, connected to it, but unfolding according to its own laws and with its own objectives.” ³⁶ Césaire would highlight this specific revolution by highlighting the “colonial problem” in his book-length treatment of Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Where narratives of realization characterize the Haitian Revolution in terms of exclusion, the colonial problem is better characterized as domination. In both the history of political thought and in contemporary theory, the figure of the slave is viewed as a paradigmatic subject of domination. While the contemporary revival of republicanism narrowly associates domination with the arbitrary power of a master, in the context of colonial slavery, it also takes a broader form of constricting the world-making capacity of enslaved and colonial subjects. ³⁷ On this view, power is not only exercised arbitrarily but it is also concentrated in the hands of the few such that the efforts of the dominated and enslaved to direct their actions were frustrated or displaced. ³⁸ This concentration of power entailed the “narrow[ing] [of] the worlds of meaningful activity in which slaves could be involved at all.” ³⁹ In the context of colonial slavery, we can identify three sites of domination understood in this broader sense: the master–slave relationship of the plantation economy, the racial hierarchy that constitutes chattel slavery, but also exceeds it, and finally the relationship between the geo-political entities of metropole and colony.

The arbitrary and concentrated character of power structured the master–slave relationship. In James’s account, the plantation is characterized by terror and torture. ⁴⁰ The whip and other forms of punishment were constant and produced in the slaves the docility necessary to labor on the plantations. ⁴¹ According to James, “the slaves received the whip with more certainty and regularity than they received their food. It was the incentive to work and the guardian of discipline.” ⁴² Even on plantations where the masters “did not indulge in [the] refinements of cruelty,” the slaves remained always fearful because their fortunes depended on the masters’ whims. ⁴³

Beyond this regime of arbitrary punishment, it is also crucial to note the ways in which the concentrated power of masters delimited the range of world-making activities that the enslaved could participate in. From the forced separation of families to the prohibitions on collective gathering, religious rituals, and literacy, slaves were prevented from constituting spaces of private and political life on their own terms. ⁴⁴ To note these restrictions is not to suggest that they were fully successful. Indeed, the history of slavery is replete with examples of slaves resisting these forms of domination. Yet, despite this agency, efforts to constrain the world-making activity of the slaves capture the ways in which the plantation economy was designed to produce what Orlando Patterson describes as social death. ⁴⁵

Importantly, this form of domination did not involve a complete expulsion from the political community in the ways that the emphasis on slavery as an instance of exclusion suggests. For instance, although the categories of property and person designated slave and citizen, respectively, the slave often stood at the nexus of both. Being a slave did not simply imply an existence as property in which personhood was denied. Instead, the slave was categorized at certain moments as person and at other instances as property. ⁴⁶ It was this doubling of inclusion and exclusion that made possible domination. As a person, the slave could be endowed with will and was subjected to punishment, as outlined in the Code Noir that governed slavery in the French empire since the late seventeenth century. The Code detailed a number of crimes for which slaves could be punished and determined the severity of punishments to be meted out. However, while slaves could be held criminally responsible as persons, as property they did not have legal standing in courts. Article 31 of the Code stated that slaves could not be “a party either in court or in a civil matter, either as a litigant or as a defendant or as civil party in a criminal matter.” This meant that even though the Code Noir prohibited masters from mutilating and killing their slaves (Articles 42 and 43), masters were rarely prosecuted or punished if they did so. ⁴⁷ Because a guilty verdict against a master that depended on the testimony of slaves would have undermined their subordinate status as property and threatened the stability of the colony, cases were mostly dismissed. ⁴⁸

Domination within rather than exclusion from also captures the experiences of the free population of color. Although emancipated, free people of color were believed to carry the “imprints of slavery.” As a subordinated caste, they were barred from political office and certain professional positions and trades, as well as denied basic rights such as freedom of assembly. ⁴⁹ Despite this exclusion, however, they were incorporated in the defense of the colony and plantation economy. The gens de couleur were conscripted in segregated militia units commanded by white officers. In addition, they were required to serve in local law-enforcing units specifically charged with capturing runaway slaves. ⁵⁰ While the stability and preservation of the colony depended on free people of color, they were marked as inferior and subject to arbitrary interferences of whites and the colonial state. For the gens de couleur, freedom was precarious as “the opprobrium of their [racial] origins undermined their emancipation.” ⁵¹

Alongside chattel slavery and racial hierarchy, the imperial relationship between colony and metropole constitutes the third site of domination. In characterizing the specificity of Haitian Revolution through the language of the colonial problem, Césaire and other twentieth-century critics like James and Eric Williams were particularly concerned with this dimension of domination. These writers described colonialism as a metaphorical form of enslavement in which colonized subjects were conscripted to the empire. The colony was thus constitutive of modernity in the metropole, generating a complex set of political, social, and economic entanglements. For instance, the sugar plantations in Haiti and the constant infusion of new slaves to the island contributed to the wealth of port cities such as Bordeaux, Nantes, and Marseille, while towns such as Orleans emerged around sugar refining factories and subsidiary industries. ⁵² The French bourgeoisie and its demands for liberty thus found their material conditions in this plantation economy. Yet, if the colony was constitutive of metropolitan modernity in these ways, it was also experienced as a site of political and legal exception.

These sites of domination—the plantation, race, and imperialism—constituted the political grounds from which the revolution emerged and as we shall see, they were also the terrain on which alternative visions of the universal were formulated. But in order to capture the emergence of an alternative universal, we have to reconsider the relationship between political ideals and practices. As I have noted in the previous section, the association of the Haitian Revolution with the universalism of human rights depends on casting this relationship as one of realization where the truncated ideals of the French Revolution are expanded by the revolutionary practices of enslaved and colonial subjects. In this sense, the Haitian Revolution engages in a “politics of fulfillment” where practices bring principles into fruition. ⁵³

Alternatively, when political action is viewed as carried out in response to a specific set of political conundrums, the relationship between practices and principles can be reversed such that practices inaugurate ideals. One of the striking features of the Haitian Revolution is that unlike its American and French counterparts, its declarations were announced after the fact. Take for instance the timing of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804. In the Haitian case, the declaration confirms and seeks to legitimate what has already been achieved, but in the American case it precedes the War of Independence. Thus, while the revolution culminated in the abolition of slavery and the independence of Haiti, these aims were not announced beforehand and they were not even fully anticipated by the actors themselves. Instead, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued, the “Haitian Revolution thought itself out politically and philosophically as it was taking place. Its project, increasingly radicalized throughout thirteen years of combat, was revealed in successive spurts.” ⁵⁴

Trouillot’s formulation highlights the historically contingent process by which the revolution ended up overcoming slavery and colonialism and suggests that principles are “thought out” alongside action. Anti-slavery and anti-colonial ideals did not precede the revolution but emerged from the process of political, military, and ideological contestation. On this view, ideals are “internal to and coterminous with” political action. ⁵⁵ In confronting and responding to the conditions of their domination, the enslaved improvised and elaborated a set of principles. For instance, the first set of demands articulated by slaves were limited to three days free from plantation work to cultivate their own gardens and a prohibition on the whip. ⁵⁶ While quite far from the abolition of slavery, these early demands already suggested how the injustices of the plantation economy were the grounds on which the enslaved elaborated their visions of alternatives. In seeking an end to the whip, they gestured towards limiting the arbitrary power to which they were subject. In demanding leisure time, they sought to expand their ability to fashion lives outside of the plantation economy.

This emphasis on ideals that are introduced into the world through political action recalls Hannah Arendt’s attention to action’s capacity to create something which “was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination.” ⁵⁷ Revolutions are especially associated with this capacity for innovation. While Arendt failed to consider the Haitian Revolution, she linked the beginning of something new with revolutions, arguing that more than any other event, revolutions “confronts us . . . with the problem of beginning.” ⁵⁸ Far from executing readymade formulas or realizing existing blueprints, part of the power of revolutionary action was to inaugurate the unprecedented. ⁵⁹

Recasting the relationship between practices and principles such that this capacity to inaugurate is retained opens the possibility for a politics of transfiguration, which “signifies a radical and qualitative break with some aspects of the present.” ⁶⁰ As we saw, in narratives of realization associated with the politics of fulfillment, emancipation takes the form of “realizing the implicit but frustrated potential of the present.” Transfiguration, by contrast, inaugurates a radical reconstruction or reconstitution of political and social forms and thus inaugurates alternatives ideals. In this way, the politics of transfiguration “is viewed to be, not the culmination, but the radical negation of the present.” ⁶¹

Another Universalism

The Haitian Revolution’s transfigurative politics inaugurated an alternative universal premised on the ideal of autonomy and emerging out the specific sites of colonial domination. Well before the revolution culminated in the first black sovereign state, the ideal of autonomy was being articulated among slaves who enacted what freedom might mean in the context of colonial slavery. For instance, by absconding from plantations to cultivate abandoned lands on the basis of small-scale proprietorship, former slaves refashioned themselves as an independent peasant class. In these actions, they enacted a vision of freedom predicated on the ownership of land and cultivation for subsistence while rejecting a plantation economy in which their labor was directed toward the production of cash crops. ⁶² As Carolyn Fick has noted, a “personal claim to the land upon which one labored and from which to derive and express one’s individuality was, for the black laborers, a necessary and an essential element in their vision of freedom.” ⁶³ The emerging peasantry thus rejected efforts to equate freedom with a limited form of free/remunerated labor on the same plantations they had worked as slaves. And when access to landownership was restricted and work on large plantations required, they sought to expand the meaning of free labor by demanding shorter workdays and workweeks, equal pay for men and women along with land to cultivate independently. ⁶⁴ These early projects of freedom were thus articulated as claims of individual autonomy insofar as former slaves sought to direct their labor and reorganize their lives on their own terms.

If in redefining their relationship to the land and labor, former slaves inaugurated an ideal of individual autonomy, the Haitian Revolution also came to redefine the relationship between the colony and metropole through the demand for collective autonomy. Individual and collective autonomy were independent and interrelated. On the one hand, they responded to two different sites of colonial domination with individual autonomy emerging out of the experience of plantation slavery and collective autonomy connected to the imperial subjugation of the colony. In this way, the two ideals can be understood as addressing analytically separate problems of domination. On the other hand, however, insofar as the imperial context impinged on and limited the capacity to secure individual autonomy, addressing the relationship between colony and metropole became paramount. In this historical context, securing some form of collective autonomy for the former slaves was imagined as a necessary corollary and precondition for realizing individual autonomy.

In the course of the revolution, two different models of securing collective autonomy emerged. Initially, Toussaint’s 1801 constitution retained the connections with France, announcing that the inhabitants of the island were “free and French,” but it also declared that the island was to be governed by “particular laws,” suggesting that the island would have an important degree of legislative independence from the metropole. At the time, France had not ceded any power to legislate on behalf of the colony, and in writing a constitution and insisting on the need for particular laws, Toussaint made a claim to legislative autonomy without fully breaking ties with France. For Toussaint, emancipation thus required both an affirmation of the connection to France and a degree of autonomy from it. Though he linked freedom to French nationality, arguing that French republicanism was the best means of securing liberty, in a context of waning metropolitan commitment to emancipation particular laws were needed to guarantee liberty. ⁶⁵ While in 1794 France had formally abolished slavery and guaranteed equal rights to men of color, after the rise of Napoleon, the 1799 constitution contained neither a Declaration of Rights nor an explicit commitment to abolition. ⁶⁶ On the contrary, just a year after Toussaint’s constitution, slavery was reinstated in Guadeloupe. In this historical context, securing liberty for the former slaves thus required the legislative autonomy of the colony. Writing a century and a half after Toussaint’s constitution, Césaire would read the effort to combine the French connection with autonomy as a distinctive way to address the colonial problem through an incipient federal commonwealth that, while untimely, was a “brilliant intuition.” ⁶⁷ Confronting the colonial problem in his own time, Césaire would draw on Toussaint’s model in his proposals for the departmentalization of Martinique. ⁶⁸

In the early nineteenth century, this federal experiment was short lived. In 1802, Napoleon sent a large number of troops to Haiti with the goal of regaining control and reinstituting slavery. Out of the resulting war, Haiti emerged as the second post-colonial state in the Americas. After the metropole had proven itself unwilling to countenance Toussaint’s proposal for a federal commonwealth, Haitian revolutionaries were forced to find new ways of safeguarding their liberty. The collapse of Toussaint’s project was in this sense also an opportunity to articulate an alternative political form for collective autonomy. In claiming independence, Toussaint’s successor Jean-Jacques Dessalines now insisted that the collective autonomy of Haitians secured in the form of sovereignty was necessary to protect their hard-won emancipation. If Césaire later returned to Toussaint in the context of twentieth-century anti-colonialism, James celebrated Dessalines’s model, arguing that the Haitian revolutionaries “had seen at last that without independence they could not maintain their liberty.” ⁶⁹

The 1804 Declaration of Independence juxtaposed to the illusory rights of man the vision of an independent state that secured the liberty of its citizens. According to the Declaration, Haitians had been “defeated not by French armies, but by the pathetic eloquence of their agents’ proclamations.” ⁷⁰ From the 1789 Declaration to the general emancipation of 1794, these proclamations appeared retrospectively as deceptions that had left the freedom of slaves a chimera. If the rights of man were “the specter of liberty that France dangled before [its colonial subjects],” the Haitian revolutionaries pointed to another vision of freedom—one that sought to secure individual autonomy through the collective autonomy of sovereignty and that reimagined postcolonial sovereignty as a transnational empire of liberty.

The first post-independence constitution of 1805 imagined individual and collective autonomy as co-dependent and co-constituted ideals. The first article of the constitution announced the collective autonomy of Haitians by declaring that “the people inhabiting the island formerly called St. Domingo, hereby agree to form themselves into a free state sovereign and independent of any other power in the universe, under the name of empire of Hayti.” ⁷¹ In addition to signaling full independence, the appellation Empire was a demand for equality in a world of empires and in a context where French imperial expansion was heightened under Napoleon. ⁷² Under the banner of Empire, Dessalines insisted on the full autonomy of Haiti. For instance, when the British Empire sought to extend its sphere of influence over Haiti by building military bases on the island and bringing Haiti into its trade networks, Dessalines rejected any foreign military presence in the new nation and refused a trade agreement that would make Haiti dependent on the British. ⁷³ The Empire of Haiti demanded reciprocity and equality in its political and economic relations.

The autonomy of the Haitian state vis-à-vis the international order created a domestic space where “slavery is forever abolished” and the individual autonomy of Haitian citizens could be secured. The 1805 constitution gestured towards this aim by returning to the sites of colonial domination—land, labor, and race. The autonomy of each Haitian citizen was guaranteed in part by abolishing all titles, privileges, and advantages as well as by preventing whites from owning land. Article 12 declared “no white person, of whatever nationality shall set foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor nor, in the future, acquire property here.” ⁷⁴ If former planters were allowed to settle in Haiti and own property, Dessalines feared they “would possess too much influence over their former negroes,” which would result in a return to the racial hierarchies of slave society. To avoid this problem and prevent other white settlers from gaining a similar kind of influence, “the soil should be exclusively possessed by the natives (Blacks and Mulattoes).” ⁷⁵ By owning the land, former slaves would not have to work for white property owners and thus could transcend one site of domination.

Racial hierarchy was also the target in Article 14 of the constitution, which abolished “all distinctions of color” and declared “Haitians shall be known from now on by the generic denomination of blacks.” ⁷⁶ Prior to its independence, Haiti was governed by a taxonomy of race that identified more than a hundred categories of racial difference, which organized free and enslaved people of color hierarchically. By abolishing this hierarchy, the constitution hoped to overcome the racial distinctions that had facilitated colonial slavery. Moreover, by elevating blackness into the general category to which all Haitians belonged, the racial category once located at the bottom of the colonial hierarchy was resignified. ⁷⁷ It would be freed from its historical association with slavery and celebrated as the marker of citizenship.

In highlighting the effort to institutionalize individual and collective autonomy, I have called attention to precisely those elements of Haitian independence in 1804 that Buck-Morss finds to be anti-universal. The prohibitions against white property owners and the renaming of all citizens as black appear to be exclusionary, while the appeal to Empire suggests a mimicry of the imperial ambitions that characterized European states of the time. There are reasons to doubt this reading, however. Take for instance the exclusion of white property owners in Article 12 of the 1805 constitution. In the subsequent article, naturalized white women who were married to Haitians, as well as Germans, Poles, and their descendants are exempted from the prohibition on property ownership. ⁷⁸ The redescription of all Haitians as black requires rethinking in light of this exemption. It cannot be read as an exclusionary measure that reduced citizenship to a nativist or racialist entitlement. Blackness was reconceived as a political category that signaled “historical or potential resistance” to slavery and colonial domination. ⁷⁹ It was the contributions of Germans and Poles to the revolutionary war that allowed them to become Haitian citizens and therefore black.

This redefinition of blackness also made it possible to extend Haitian citizenship beyond its territorial confines. Revolutionary leaders acknowledged that ending slavery and creating the first black nation-state were not local events but would have reverberations throughout the Atlantic world. Even before independence and as the transatlantic slave trade continued, Toussaint planned to set free all Africans who landed in Haiti. Moreover, he outlined plans to sail to Africa in an effort to end the slave trade and extend freedom and French nationality to millions. ⁸⁰ Like Toussaint, Dessalines projected the universalism of the Haitian Revolution. Linking his victory over France in Haiti to the salvation of the entire Western Hemisphere, he proclaimed, “I have saved my country; I have avenged America.” ⁸¹ He indicated that this link would be realized by spreading the revolution against slavery and colonial rule throughout the Atlantic world. ⁸²

While Toussaint’s and Dessalines’s early aims of exporting the revolution through military expansion were not feasible, their successors sought to make Haiti a refuge for slaves and colonial subjects throughout the Americas. As Ada Ferrer notes, in the 1810s, Haitian vessels stopped slave ships, freeing the slaves and providing them rights of residency in Haiti. ⁸³ Moreover, Sybille Fischer documents how the 1816 constitution of the southern republic constitutionally guaranteed the right of asylum to “all Africans and Indians, and those of their blood” and promised naturalization after a year of residency. ⁸⁴ This constitutional clause established Haiti as “a free soil” territory where slaves and colonial subjects from across the region could be free and gain citizenship. ⁸⁵ With the reunification of the north and south in 1820, this asylum provision was extended to the entire country and led to an increase in the number of fugitive slaves requesting asylum. ⁸⁶

These provisions of asylum suggested that while the claim “all Haitians are black” could not be reversed to read “all blacks are Haitians,” the Haitian state opened up the possibility for all blacks in the region to become Haitian. ⁸⁷ Unlike the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which made an abstract claim that “all men are born free and equal in rights,” the early Haitian constitutions tied freedom to the territory of Haiti where slavery was concretely abolished. The asylum clause made this concrete freedom accessible to those that lived beyond its borders. The “territory without slavery [was] now expressly and legally available to outsiders, to slaves of foreign masters, subjects of foreign kings, and outcasts of other governments.” ⁸⁸ Of those who took advantage of asylum in Haiti were about six to thirteen thousand African Americans. Haitian citizenship was thus transnational and promised autonomy to those who were denied even the smallest modicum of liberty and independence throughout the Americas. ⁸⁹

The asylum provision not only made possible transnational citizenship but also afforded Haiti a way of expanding its anti-slavery and anti-colonial project beyond its territorial confines. Simón Bolívar and his generals were twice granted exile during their efforts to liberate Venezuela. Moreover, Alexandre Pétion, the president of the southern republic, provided ammunitions and soldiers to Bolívar on two conditions: that he emancipate all slaves in liberated territories and that all captive Africans taken from slave ships be turned over to Haiti where they would qualify for citizenship. ⁹⁰ These conditions allowed Pétion to continue the project of avenging America by spreading emancipation and independence beyond Haiti’s territorial boundaries and securing citizenship for the formerly enslaved who were denied membership elsewhere.

In light of these practices, the Empire of Haiti takes on new meaning. Far from a mimicry of European empires, the black Empire was an effort to imagine and institute a transnational vision of autonomy for the formerly enslaved. This transnational vision transformed Haiti into a site where slaves and colonial subjects from the Americas could gain freedom and citizenship. The transnationalism also entailed a project of progressively expanding the reach of anti-slavery and anti-colonialism to the rest of the region and beyond.

Empire designated not the empire of domination and exploitation that Haiti had escaped but rather an “empire of liberty.” ⁹¹ If in Thomas Jefferson’s prominent usage, the empire of liberty guaranteed the republican freedom of white settlers by expelling Native Americans and extending the enslavement of Africans, the Haitian empire of liberty aimed to secure the freedom of the dispossessed native and black populations of the New World. ⁹² It was an empire that imagined the transformation of slaves and colonial subjects into autonomous citizens by both granting membership to the dispossessed and by supporting anti-colonial struggles internationally. The Haitian Revolution thus pointed to a previously unimaginable and unprecedented world in which slavery and colonial rule would be transcended.

But to celebrate the revolution’s universalism on these terms should not lead us to romanticize the Haitian Revolution. Even as we acknowledge that its aspirations for collective and individual autonomy were unprecedented, we have to reckon with the ways in which these ideals remained unrealized. In the first place, the autonomy of state sovereignty was frustrated by both internal civil war and external impediments. Following independence, Haiti broke up into a kingdom in the north and a republic in the south. At the same time, the island remained surrounded by slave-owning and trading empires that refused to extend diplomatic recognition to Haiti while hoping to benefit from trade with the new nation. ⁹³ Economic dependence as well as the threat of invasion and recolonization remained a central preoccupation for much of Haiti’s history. ⁹⁴ If collective autonomy was undermined by these external conditions, individual autonomy was also thwarted. As historians have noted, post-revolutionary Haiti returned to the coercive plantation economy. Often described as militarized agriculture, the state restricted mobility and required peasants to work on plantations, eroding the vision of small-scale ownership that would have produced an autonomous peasant class. ⁹⁵

Rather than being co-constituted as the 1805 constitution suggested, individual and collective autonomy pulled in different directions. The militarized state apparatus required to protect the sovereignty of the fledgling nation and mobilized to revive the planation economy was hostile to Haitian society and the ideals of individual autonomy Haitian peasants practiced and demanded. ⁹⁶ This rift between state and nation was sutured through a patriarchal discourse that described heads of state as fathers and citizens as dependent children who required tutelage in order to cultivate the characteristics and habits of freemen. ⁹⁷ What is striking about these post-independence infringements on individual autonomy is that they are not instances of exclusion but reproductions of the domination that characterized colonial slavery. Indeed, the paradox of the Haitian Revolution is that it combined a radically inclusionary vision in the form of asylum and support for anti-colonial struggles in the Americas with a continuation of structures of domination. ⁹⁸

In the revolution’s aftermath, Haitian peasants sustained the ideal of autonomy and sought to overcome this paradox by resisting the coercive state apparatus, pursuing land ownership and participating in forms of rural self-governance. At certain moments, these practices of peasant republicanism would rise to the level of full-scale confrontation with the state, as was case in the populist 1844 Piquet Rebellion. ⁹⁹ But, for the most part, they constitute “the lower frequencies” of Haitian political life and contain an important legacy of the Haitian Revolution’s universalism. ¹⁰⁰ Peasants’ demands for land and for the rights to the products they made as well as their efforts to reorganize social and political life harken back to the first formulations of freedom as autonomy during the revolution. Like the Jeffersonian ward system, French sociétés révolutionnaires and soviets that represent, in Arendt’s formulation, the lost treasures of the revolutionary tradition, the peasant republicanism of Haiti constitutes the unrealized possibilities of the first and only successful revolution against colonial slavery. ¹⁰¹

Decentering Europe/Decolonizing Political Theory

I have argued that beginning from the injustice of domination under colonial slavery and understanding how the actions of Haitian revolutionaries inaugurated political ideals reveals another universalism, one that is connected to individual and collective autonomy. My interpretation of the revolution stands in contrast to recent works that have sought to recover the universalism of the Haitian Revolution through the language of human rights. In illustrating how Haitian revolutionaries realized human rights, historians and political theorists have highlighted the contribution of enslaved women and men to the making of modern universals, but this comes at the expense of engaging with their distinctive political struggles and the practices and ideals that emerged in response. Even as it calls attention to the contributions of the enslaved and the colonized, the effort to center black actors does not in this case lead into a more thoroughgoing rethinking of modern universals and risks inadvertently reifying a European normative core that merely has to be extended outwards.

At stake in reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution is thus the broader question of how we might decenter Europe and decolonize political theory. When this task is taken up through narratives of realization, we risk losing sight of the ways in which enslaved and colonized revolutionaries developed their new demands on the terrain of specific categories and sites of domination—land, labor, race, and empire. As Césaire insisted a century and a half after the Haitian Revolution, colonialism and enslavement were singular experiences, which generated questions that “cannot be treated as a part of a more important whole.” ¹⁰²

The insistence on specificity and singularity should not be read as a call for provincialism but instead as an effort to carve out space for political innovations and the articulation of alternative universalisms. ¹⁰³ In moving the Haitian Revolution out from the shadow of the French Revolution to highlight its specificity, I do not deny that the latter shaped and provided the conditions for the former. More broadly, the effort to decenter Europe is not one of discarding Europe or of fashioning universals that are wholly outside of European traditions. But if the pluralization of political theory’s sources, actors, and events is in fact going to decenter Europe, we also have to be attentive to the limits and inadequacies of European conceptual and normative vocabulary applied to struggles for colonial independence. ¹⁰⁴ In reflecting on non-Western politics or subaltern actors, political theorists must be open to the emergence of new ways of thinking and doing politics. ¹⁰⁵ Doing so, I have argued, requires a reconstruction of the specific constellation that constitutes the terrain of political action, an orientation to subaltern actors as innovative political agents rather than implementers of existing ideals, and an attunement to the historically contingent and politically contested process by which political practices and ideals emerge.

Such an approach can help us rethink even those instances of subaltern politics that have long appeared as paradigmatic cases of a politics of inclusion best narrated in terms of realization. Take as an example twentieth-century decolonization, which is often considered the culmination of a process in which anti-colonial nationalists around the world appropriated the language of national self-determination and the political form of the nation-state. ¹⁰⁶ Like the narratives which link the Haitian Revolution to the realization of human rights, this standard view of decolonization locates the origins of ideals and institutions in a metropolitan context and casts anti-colonial actors as agents challenging their exclusion by spreading and globalizing existing models. Obscured from view in this account are those moments of political, conceptual, and institutional innovation formed in the colonial milieu. Whether it is Césaire’s model of a transnational and federal France inspired in part by Toussaint’s 1801 constitution, ¹⁰⁷ non-statist alternatives that share affinities with Haiti’s peasant republicanism, ¹⁰⁸ or third world internationalisms that inherit the project of a transnational empire of liberty, ¹⁰⁹ the specific questions that emerged from the colonial problem inaugurated alternative visions of the universal. Rather than incorporating non-Western politics as local variations of more general European phenomena, a decolonial approach to political theory understands them as constitutive of distinctive political trajectories and generative of alternative ideals.