The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas

Description

The Fear of French Negroes is an interdisciplinary study that explores how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1845). Using visual culture, popular music and dance, periodical literature, historical memoirs, and state papers, Sara E. Johnson examines the migration of people, ideas, and practices across imperial boundaries. Building on previous scholarship on black internationalism, she traces expressions of both aesthetic and experiential transcolonial black politics across the Caribbean world, including Hispaniola, Louisiana and the Gulf South, Jamaica, and Cuba. Johnson examines the lives and work of figures as diverse as armed black soldiers and privateers, female performers, and newspaper editors to argue for the existence of "competing inter-Americanisms" as she uncovers the struggle for unity amidst the realities of class, territorial, and linguistic diversity. These stories move beyond a consideration of the well-documented anxiety insurgent blacks occasioned in slaveholding systems to refocus attention on the wide variety of strategic alliances they generated in their quests for freedom, equality and profit. Cover Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Preface: The Fear of “French Negroes” Introduction: Mobile Culture, Mobilized Politics 1. Canine Warfare in the Circum-Caribbean Cuban Bloodhounds and Transcolonial Terror Networks A Discursive Battle of Wills Culture and Public Memory 2. “Une et indivisible?” The Struggle for Freedom in Hispaniola “L’île d’Haiti forme le territoire de la République”: The Early Years of Antislavery Border Politics The Meaning of Freedom Haitian Generals: Ogou Iconography on Both Sides of the Border Guangua pangnol pi fort pasé ouanga haitien 3. “Negroes of the Most Desperate Character”: Privateering and Slavery in the Gulf of Mexico Race, Privateering, and the Gulf South in the 1810s To Fight Ably and Valiantly against One’s Own Race The Cultural Afterlives of Impossible Patriots 4. French Set Girls and Transcolonial Performance The French Set Girls Reconsidering the Migration of “French” Cultural Capital Embodied Wisdom and Attunement Circum-Caribbean Repercussions of Saint-Domingue Legacies 5. “Sentinels on the Watch-Tower of Freedom”: The Black Press of the 1830s and 1840s Periodical Campaigns: Promoting an African Diasporic Literacy Project Class, Migration, and Transcolonial Labor Relations Caribbean Federation: Advancing National Interests through a Regionalist Lens Epilogue Notes Works Consulted and Discography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y