The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters

Abstract While largely ignored by generations of critics, concerns about the Haitian Revolution saturated the early American print public sphere. 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. In unravelling how American literary history has silenced the centrality of Haiti in U.S. cultural development, The Haitian Revolution in the Early Republic of Letters recuperates lost textual objects while redressing a crucial blind spot in American literary history.