Rebels, christians, and revolutionaries: the role of the Haitian Revolution in the 19th century

Author(s)

Ligia Cristina Machado

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2022-09-13

Examining board members

Jefferson Cano; Lilia Moritz Schwarcz; Pedro Meira Monteiro; Márcia Abreu; Rodrigo Charafeddine Bulamah

• Advisor: Jefferson Cano

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, the Haitian Revolution surprised Europe and America for its unpredictability. White people on both sides of the Atlantic never imagined that enslaved black people would be able to unite against European nations to declare their own independence. When Haiti became independent, the cultivated elites of Europe and America had to explain to themselves what had happened; at that moment, the revolutionary spirit from black people began to spread among the narratives that aimed at building black protagonists. France, directly affected by the Haitian Revolution, was responsible for the creation of several literary works with this revolutionary spirit and, as was common in the period, their stories arrived by ferry in Brazil and the United States, countries where slavery was still very present. Both Brazil and the United States read and re-signified these stories, and an American author managed to overcome the paradigm of the revolutionary spirit with a new literary image: the resilient Christian. Uncle Tom’s Cabin quickly spread around the world as a new role model for blacks in the fight against slavery. In Brazil, most literary works that had tried to explain slave actions fed on one of these two models. This research tells the story of how the Haitian revolution integrated the imaginative universe of French authors who circulated and inspired Brazilians and North Americans to create new literary meanings for slavery that they saw internally in their nations (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 18/13697-3 - Miscegenation and African descent in the Atlantic context: abolitionist literature of the nineteenth century
• Grantee: Ligia Cristina Machado
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate