The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society (Caribbean Studies Series)

This book redefines Haiti from the first “Black Republic” to the first bourgeois nation-state of the Americas, albeit one forged from a slave insurrection by an alliance of black and mulatto natives of Saint-Domingue who had been free, enslaved, or slaveholders. In a prototype of bourgeois political economy, the state proclaims universal liberty of the person within the nation and subjugates the labor of a class of working people to personal enrichment in an elite class that controls capital. It also withholds citizenship from native Africans. Mapping and theorizing the conjugated work of race and class in the politics of privilege in Haiti, this ethnography’s ultimate ambition as engaged scholarship is to contribute clarity on the instrumentality of race, color, and nation in postcolonial social stratification in the orbit of the West. The country was the first postcolonial Western place, where non-whites attained privileges hitherto reserved for whites. Today, throughout the West, elite subjects routinely hold powers that reproduce class privilege and concomitant social inequality, while becoming in elite discourses racial subjects whose “race” is presumptively a formation of oppressed people. How do we reveal who is doing what to whom beyond the race discourse? How do we speak to race and racism, when oppressors “of color” can experience racism while standing in solidarity coherently with “white” oppressors, and political resistance by the oppressed remains fragmented in racialism? As David Scott might say, this study seeks questions worth asking, when the answer worth having is a social justice beyond racial justice in the postcolonial bourgeois society. "When Philippe-Richard Marius arrived in Port-au-Prince to begin fieldwork for this monograph, to him and to legions of people worldwide, Haiti was axiomatically the first Black Republic. Descendants of Africans did in fact create the Haitian nation-state on January 1, 1804, as the outcome of a slave uprising that defeated white supremacy in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Haiti's Founding Founders, as colonial natives, were nonetheless to varying degrees Latinized subjects of the Atlantic. They envisioned freedom differently than the African-born former slaves, who sought to replicate African nonstate societies. Haiti's Founders indeed first defeated native Africans' armies before they defeated the French. Not surprisingly, problematic vestiges of colonialism carried over to the independent nation. Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the reproduction of privilege and inequality in contemporary Haiti. Through his ethnography, class emerges as the principal site of social organization among Haitians, notwithstanding the country's global prominence as a "Black Republic." It is class, and not color or race, that primarily produces distinctive Haitian socioeconomic formations. Marius interrogates Haitian Black nationalism without diminishing the colossal achievement of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue in destroying slavery in the colony, then the Napoleonic army sent to restore it. Providing clarity on the uses of race, color, and nation in sociopolitical and economic organization in Haiti and other postcolonial bourgeois societies, Marius produces a provocative characterization of the Haitian nation-state that rejects the Black Republic paradigm"-- Provided by publisher Front Matter Copyright Page Dedication Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations and Acronyms Preface: Positionality, Method, and the Haitian Vocabulary of Color Introduction: Privilege in Haiti and the Caribbean’s Modernity One Historical Context: Class, Race, and Nation Two Snapshot of a Western Place: Modern and Racialized, Unequal and Moral Three Noirisme and the Political Instrumentality of Blackness Four Class and Black-Nationalist Sociality Five Mulatto, Prejudice, and Other White Tidemarks of the Nation Six Unity in Colorism and Class Ideologies Seven Material Unity in Privilege Eight The Political Economy of Knowing White Conclusion Liberal Politics in a Failure of Hermeneutics—Yon Travay Jigantès End Matter References Index About the Author