Coda

Abstract The Coda charts how early-nineteenth-century African American intellectuals repurposed the Haitian Revolution as precursor for domestic Black freedom. The Coda examines the first African American newspaper, the Freedom’s Journal (1827), which routinely featured information about Haiti, including in its publication of “Theresa—a Haytien Tale,” perhaps the earliest extant piece of African American fiction. Linking a reading of “Theresa” to the wider print public sphere, the Coda gestures toward how African American print networks reconfigured operant meanings of Haiti in the late 1820s. As a measure of the afterlives of these contending interpretations of the meaning of Haitian freedom, the Coda scrutinizes reactions to how Haiti was referenced by demonstrators at contemporary Black Lives Matter protests. These allusions sparked a racialized panic among the contemporary alt-right, underscoring how an incipient white supremacist vision of Haiti as representing the antithesis of American democracy continues to infect the national imagination.