1In this vital contribution to hemispheric American Studies, Duncan Faherty makes a case for “redressing a crucial blind spot in American literary history,” namely, the years 1800-1820, “an era so often imagined as a fallow period of cultural production” (3). “From its earliest formations,” Faherty asserts, “American literary history has declared the first two decades of the nineteenth century devoid of cultural merit; more bluntly, this era remains pigeonholed as a textual wasteland” (7). The “scant attention” paid to this interstitial period in all ten editions of the flagship Norton Anthology of American Literature is telling evidence of its marginalization (10). Reiterating “the longstanding trope of leaping over the first two decades of the nineteenth century” (97), the editorial teams in charge of the Norton since its inception in 1979 “have curated early American literature as if it went dormant in 1801,” only to be reawakened à la Rip van Winkle some twenty years later (10). The burden of Faherty’s project is to investigate the reasons for, and ramifications of, this “canonical interregnum” (16).
2Over and beyond the many formal and philological difficulties posed by the literature of the era, the explanation for this curated neglect, Faherty argues, “springs in part from Haiti’s centrality in this period’s cultural imagination” (8), its widespread status as “the overt bellwether against which the prospects for national futurity were imagined and interrogated” (3). The aim of Incipient Fevers is to highlight the “interanimating” (4) relation between these two emergent nations: to restore “the nascent Haitian Republic’s influence on early American national development” by “disinterring […] once popular texts and their neglected narrative patterns” (2-3); and thereby to address and redress the ways in which “traditional literary historiography has silenced certain contexts around race, citizenship, representation, and freedom from orienting the field” (3). The early nineteenth-century “Haitian obsession” puts into question core assumptions about the “progressive” nature of American political and literary history, and that is why it has been actively relegated to the shadows by “scholars [who] have long occluded how early Americans understood their nation as entwined with Haiti” (4). Correcting this historiographical mispractice allows for the telling of a story about the early republic and the early republic of letters, that is anchored in “conservative strains of cultural production” which “unsettle the foundational conjunction of canonization with liberalism” and reveal “how white supremacy resonates within that liberalism” (12).
3The canonical story about the emergence and evolution of early American literature is grounded in “notions of inclusion and progressive enfranchisement [that] nurture a belief in a whiggish liberal modernity”; whatever “narratives and eras […] trouble the nationalist paradigm” will perforce require “excommunicating” (3). The “era of ungood feelings” extending across the first two decades of the nineteenth century offers a prime example of what cannot be “accommodated within the confines of a progressive canonicity” (7): “many of the texts published during this early-nineteenth-century interregnum present a constitutive challenge to a liberal canon formed around a progressive conception of national development” (7) because they give voice to “registers of conservative thought” that call for exclusion and disenfranchisement in the face of revolutionary change (12). This conservatism finds its most typical expression in the era’s obsessive “representations of Haiti as an American antithesis,” which “expose the xenophobia and white supremacy within the early American Republic that extends to the literary canon designed to manufacture a national tradition” (8).
4In his lively and informative introduction, Faherty elaborates on this disavowed “centrality of depictions of Haiti within the formation of early American aesthetic practices” (4), showing the ways in which certain “constraining rubrics” of American literary history—especially “shopworn patterns of periodization” (9)—have obstructed our ability to track “the primacy of Haiti within American culture across the first two decades of the nineteenth century” (6). This introduction should be compulsory reading for undergrads and graduate students in American literature classes. Here, and throughout the book, he puts forward fresh arguments that build attentively and innovatively on existing scholarship devoted to showing how “the haunting legacies of the Haitian Revolution suffused the American imagination” (148), notably Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael Drexler’s co-edited collection of essays The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States (2016), to which Faherty was himself a contributor. This introduction concludes with extremely able summaries of the book’s five body chapters and its lengthy Coda (16-22), effectively anticipating how each of the six main texts under consideration will support his ground-breaking analysis of the ways in which “our scholarly and pedagogical praxis continually marginalizes this urgent preoccupation with Haiti” that characterizes works from 1800-1820 (2).
5The first chapter focuses on the “wanton and complex circulation history” of “The Story of Makandal” (25), a highly influential recounting of the rise and fall of Makandal, the mid-eighteenth-century maroon herbalist and diviner who for so long “has epitomized prerevolutionary resistance in Saint-Domingue” (Garrigus 6). Originally published in French in the “September 1787 edition of the Mecure [sic] de France” (28), this “true history” quickly found its way into English and across the Atlantic, where it exercised an outsized influence on how early American readers processed the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s. The chapter builds on the vital work that Faherty and Ed White did for their 2016 “Just Teach One” digital edition of this text, where it was published under the title “Account of a remarkable Conspiracy formed by a Negro in the Island of St. Domingo.” Faherty expertly tracks “the text’s unrestrained circulation across borders and decades” (29), which extended from “the late 1780s and continu[ed] until the 1840s” (26), though it is worth noting that after its extensive circulation in the 1790s, the story seems not to have had much play in the two decades that are of interest to Faherty. Attending carefully to the text’s “recursive surfacing” over a long period of time “short-circuits the linear trajectory of progressive conceptions of American literary history,” allowing us more fully to “engage with the critical legacies of enduring repetitions and habitual erasures in circum-Atlantic textual production” (26). In other words, when it comes to Saint-Domingue/Haiti, the same oppressive story, in a variety of ostensibly different contexts, has to be told over and over again, namely, a story that acknowledges the possibility of slave resistance while insisting on its ultimate impossibility. If the rise-and-fall version of the story of Makandal could function as a “revenant memory for periodical editors” over a wide span of time (36), this is because it served so well as a proxy through which anxieties about slave revolt in general, and the Haitian Revolution in particular, could be expressed and yet ultimately dismissed, supplying “an archive of possibility for instructing readers about failed resistance and the durability of racial capitalism” (37). This all-too-familiar pattern of recognition and refusal, of course, finds expression in a broad range of widely circulating Romantic-era transatlantic texts, such as William Earle’s Obi (26), but the particular force of Faherty’s analysis lies in his conceptual linkage of this logic of repeated disavowal to “seriality,” conceived of as both a material “mode of publication” and an “aesthetic practice” that dominated the era’s print public sphere (16), and thus played a critical if neglected role “in forging structures of feeling around events in Haiti” (17).
6The anonymous status of “The Story of Makandal” contrasts with the novels examined in the following two chapters, which are focused in traditional literary-historical fashion on the work of recognizable albeit little known authors: Martha Meredith Read’s Monima; or, The Beggar Girl (1802), set in Philadelphia, and Isaac Mitchell’s more geographically wide-ranging The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa (1804/1811). Both of these novels give expression to “the worries and fears of a Federalist intelligentsia that was becoming increasingly pessimistic about the future” in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1800 (58). Responding to the supposed “legitimation crisis” created by the “Jeffersonian ascendency” (60), Read and Mitchell’s novels “transmogrify the seduction and gothic genres into a sustained campaign to restore a semblance of Federalist authority” (59). These nostalgia-driven, “northeastern” fantasies of restoration relied upon conjuring up, and away, two threats to the domestic realm that were both associated with Haiti: on the one (transatlantic) hand, they “blurred the boundaries between the French and Haitian Revolutions to register the global dangers of Jacobinism” (59), and on the other (hemispheric) hand, they “collapse[d] any spatial distinction between the U.S. south and Caribbean plantations,” “blurring the boundaries between Monticello and Cape François” (6) in repeated attempts at preserving the emerging American Republic from “the ghostly indecipherability of foreign connections” (18) and delinking “the horrors of enslaved labor” from its history (108).
7As is evident in his attention to the serial versioning of “The Story of Makandal,” comparative analysis is central to Faherty’s methodology throughout Incipient Fevers. The emphasis on recognizable authors in Chapters 2 and 3 facilitates familiar, one might even say canonical, forms of textual comparison that have far less purchase when analyzing “the anonymous and fluid norms of periodical culture in the long eighteenth century” (36): in the case of Read, for instance, comparisons between her work and that of Charles Brockden Brown; comparisons between the two novels attributed to her, Monima and Margaretta; and comparisons between her fictional and non-fictional work. The evident similarities in plot between Read’s Monima and Brown’s Ormond (1799), both of which tell the story of a “fallen patriarch” and his daughter forced into a life of exile in Philadelphia, generate a fruitful comparison of their varying deployment of sentimental and gothic modes and their differing investments in “the preservation of patriarchal authority” (68). The existence of two novels by the same author naturally provokes comparative analysis of their similarities and differences (especially in relation to their respective representations of Saint-Domingue/Haiti): where Monima “more straightforwardly reveals Federalist fears about the intersections of Jeffersonianism and the damaging social upheavals of foreign revolutions,” the later Margaretta; or The Intricacies of the Heart (1807) appears somewhat more “sanguine about the Republic’s futurity,” concluding “with some glimmer of hope for a restabilized American ethnoscape, one finally walled off from the disruptions of excessive mobility” (65). Finally, the fact that Monima, when it was first published in installments in The Ladies’ Monitor, was advertised as the work of “the Authoress of the Second Vindication of the Rights of Women,” invites a comparative study of Read’s novel in relation to this non-fictional text in which she “reconfigured” Wollstonecraft‘s 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, transforming the latter’s “radical praxis into a nostalgic formation aimed at preserving Federalist ideologies” (79). Notwithstanding the useful and plausible forms of comparative analysis that are made possible by the unifying idea of an “author,” a reliance on this idea is not without its dangers, as witness the late-breaking (2024) archival discovery that these three texts (Monima, Margaretta, and the “Second Vindication”), which were originally published anonymously and only attributed to Read in the twentieth century by critics such as Cathy Davidson and Joseph Fichtelberg, were almost certainly authored by Mary Endress Ralston, the wife of Isaac Ralston (founder of The Ladies’ Monitor in 1801), who came from a decidedly different social and ethnic milieu than the privileged wife of Federalist politician John Read—a fact that severely problematizes the efforts of critics such as Faherty to “square” these texts “with the imprint of the reputed author’s Federalism” (Baker 364).
8The author-centric approach of the following chapter, “Maple Sugar, Caribbean Cane, and the Futures Past of Laborless American Development,” is far more securely grounded. Building on Matt Sturges’s analysis of “maple sugar georgics” as a literary mode through which, in the 1790s, the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and William Cooper (father of James Fenimore Cooper) “imagined a progressive form of agricultural and economic resistance to the injustices of slavery” (Sturges 355), Faherty fleshes out the circum-Atlantic context (“muted” by Sturges) of this fascination with maple sugaring, analyzing it as in no small part a response to “the economic fallout of the Haitian Revolution” (19). Maple tapping came, momentarily, to seem like a solution to the problem of the United States’s foreign dependencies, promoting a “vision of essentially laborless resource extraction” (88), which could serve as “a countereconomy to the questionable morality of Caribbean cane harvesting” (91). In the first half of the chapter, Faherty masterfully demonstrates how these optimistic projections about maple sugar, notwithstanding the abolitionist veneer that sometimes attached to them, were generated by the need to “disaggregate” the post-revolutionary Republic “from the centrality of enslavement as the driving force of its development” (113). In the second half, Faherty proceeds to read these “fantasies of erasure” (93) in Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum, “the most popular American gothic novel of the nineteenth century” (19), demonstrating the differing ways in which the 1804 serialized version of the novel and the expanded two-volume edition from 1811 invest in “the georgic possibilities of maple sugaring to reify a vision of economic nationalism defined by white settler freedom as the key to the future of the United States” (98). While we need not linger over the details of this careful comparative account, what is vital to register is the continued hold this “willful hope for laborless harvesting” (108) has over us today, in our own era of ungood feelings, and Faherty hammers that point home in a very effective epilogue to this chapter where he explores how Kara Walker’s 2014 installation at the Domino Sugar Refinery, A Subtlety, served as an eloquent reminder of the perduring appeal and utter emptiness of “isolationist fantasies about nation formation” and “the kinds of generative white settler self-sufficiency that Cooper and Mitchell sought to ferment” (112-13).
9The chapters devoted to Read and Mitchell are followed by another pair of chapters that take the lack of an identifiable author as their starting point. In the case of the three-volume novel Zelica, the Creole (Chapter 4), published in London in 1820 and attributed simply to “An American,” the text’s anonymity serves as an argumentative point of departure, for one of the main burdens of Faherty’s account of Zelica is to “liberate” it from “its habitual confinement as intimately codependent with Secret History” (126), the 1808 novel now firmly ascribed to Leonora Sansay, and which was drawn on extensively by whoever authored Zelica. Rather than focus on “the authorship issue, a rabbit hole without end” (19), Faherty repeatedly warns against “artificially coupling” these two novels (117) and thereby, in deferring to the alluring coherence afforded by the author-function, losing sight of how they “divulge contradictory conceptions of revolutionary contagion” (19). The same avoidance of the authorial rabbit hole, minus the polemics, characterizes his account in Chapter 5 of The Black Vampyre (1819), that “strange and largely neglected early American text” laid claim to by the firmly pseudonymous Uriah Derick D’Arcy (147), and which Faherty and his co-editor Ed White reanimated in 2019 in a magnificently curated version for the Just Teach One series. Although he accepts the common identification of D’Arcy with Richard Varick Dey, and matter-of-factly refers to Dey as the author at many points, Faherty makes no claims that hinge on this attribution, taking it as given that the author’s real identity “remains uncertain” (150), and that what matters, as with Zelica, is to engage with the “textual object in and of itself” (117).
10The most memorable aspects of Chapter 4 are doubtless, first, Faherty’s full-throated attack on the “line of thinking [that] regrettably pigeonholes Zelica as primarily of interest as an extension of Secret History,” and second, his sceptical reflections on what might account for the “rapid canonization” of Sansay’s novel (116). In relation to this second point, one might have thought that the hyper-visibility of Sansay’s Secret History over the past two decades would have been a hopeful sign for Faherty that the “interstitial” period of 1800-1820 and its intimate entanglement with all things Haitian was finally gaining some of the recognition that he is so passionately arguing for in this book, but its status as “one of the most rapidly canonized texts in American literary history” (119) instead provokes no small ambivalence toward this “singular exception” to the canonical rules (126). As he notes, Secret History terminates with a fantasy of “reintegration,” with its main protagonists—the (white) American sisters Mary and Clara—“returning to the United States after divorcing themselves from foreign connections” (5): this comforting conclusion supports a border-defining national rather than border-defying circum-Atlantic narrative, and from Faherty’s perspective it is all too likely that “the circularity of the text’s geographical imagination provides one explanation as to why the text has so easily been accommodated into the canon” (6).
11In relation to the first point about the efforts of many (unnamed) critics “to shoehorn Zelica into the much smaller footprint of Secret History,” what “the conflation of the 1820 and 1808 texts” ignores is “the vastly different tenor and terroir of their narrative concerns” (116). Faherty’s comparative analysis of these two texts thus focuses on the many ways in which they diverge from one another, such as the later novel’s interest in “embedding [its] Caribbean tale within an Anglo-American orientalist imaginary” (131). Identifying these specific differences between Sansay’s Secret History and the anonymous Zelica allows us to track the broader “changes in the function of Haiti in the early American imagination which occurred in the twelve years separating their publications” (125). On the one hand, in “treating the island of Haiti as sequestered from other Caribbean spaces” (122), the 1820 text registers the diminution at this point in history of the political threat posed by an independent Black state: this threat has become merely “site-specific” and no longer presents itself in the “pandemic” form of “imminent gothic horrors pouring out of an erupting Haiti” (122). In this respect, Zelica can be aligned with an ongoing “evolution in operant circum-Atlantic conceptions of the Caribbean” in the wake of Haitian independence (as charted by Christopher Taylor in Empire of Neglect), which, in “loosening the cultural and political ties between metropole and colonial periphery in favor of a more nakedly defined set of economic relations” helped promote “a starker distinction between colony and colonizer” (122). On the other hand, the 1820 novel’s “more complex figuration of Blackness” (127)—which in large part derives from “the greatest thematic difference between Zelica and Sansay’s Secret History,” namely, the light-skinned Zelica’s “hybridity, and its centrality within the novel” (135)—renders the threat posed by Haiti more extreme than in 1808, but does so “on a different, more personalized scale” (136). Whereas in the 1808 text “whiteness never becomes destabilized,” Zelica’s “nuanced mutability”—her capacity to traverse “the supposed solidity of the color line”—anticipates the possibility that “she might cross over the supposedly fast boundaries of nationalities” (135). It is this disturbing possibility that is held forth and deferred at the end of the novel, which anxiously contemplates its fever-ravaged “titular protagonist’s possible, and indecipherable, entry into the United States” as she sails north in the wake of the victorious Haitian army’s entry into Cape François (5)—a concluding moment that Faherty reads as exemplifying the novel’s productive “destabilization of racial, ethnic, and national taxonomies” (125).
12The Sansay-generated upswing in Zelica’s canonical fortunes, signalled by its recent (2023) inclusion in the Early American Reprints series, has been matched by the resurgence of The Black Vampyre in the years following upon White and Faherty’s digital edition of it, albeit for the most part in the ever mushrooming field of vampire studies where it is fast becoming an obligatory point of reference on account of its transatlantic engagement in the summer of 1819 with John Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” published only months before and initially advertised in Britain and the United States as the work of Lord Byron. In his parodic response to “the ‘White Vampyre’” (D’Arcy 14), the author of The Black Vampyre “most vividly alters the traditional vampire tale, or Polidori’s version of the vampire tale, by reterritorializing the origins of vampirism” from (the borderlands of) Europe to (the heartland of) Africa, replacing the aristocratic vampire with an enslaved African transported across the Atlantic to St. Domingo and thereby linking “real world brutalities to superstitious gothic sensations” (154). As Faherty notes, “at first glance, The Black Vampyre appears as an absurd reworking of the British original, yet on a deeper consideration, it aggressively domesticates the European source by reanimating the sensationalism about vampires into concerns about Black radicalism” (151). Positioning New York as “a microcosm of national anxieties” (20), Faherty deftly contextualizes the novella in relation to two different but related concerns that were being addressed in the pages of New York’s periodical press in the months leading up to the publication of The Black Vampyre. First, he zooms in on a series of newspaper reports in May of a suppressed insurrection in Georgia, led by an enslaved man named Coco who reportedly “had been ‘an active brigand in the insurrection and massacre at St. Domingo in the year ’93’” (145), a piece of information that likely served as a trigger for “New Yorkers’ never actually dormant concerns about Haiti liberation” (145). Second, zooming out to “the glacial unfolding of gradual emancipation” in New York from 1799 to 1827 (146), he shows how the “widespread fears about diasporic African revolutionary internationalism” (147) generated by specific incidents such as Coco’s failed insurrection were part and parcel of the “apprehensions about integrating formerly enslaved people” (143) that shaped the decades-long political process in New York of coming up with ways to implement the abolition of slavery without impinging on “the unspoken notion that Americanness equaled whiteness” (146).
13Against the contemporary backdrop of the economic collapse known as the Panic of 1819, the novella recounts “a legend of St. Domingo” that gives parodic expression to “the joint threats to white stability of miscegenation and radical Black collectivity” (154). These two threats provide the main focus for Faherty’s compelling analysis of “the text’s interest in exposing the brutal racialized hierarchies of the plantocracy” and its “larger investments in thinking about the exploitative nature of Black Atlantic trade” (156). In having the white (albeit French) Saint-Domingue plantation mistress Euphemia marry and sire a child with the mysterious African Prince (a vampire first encountered in the form of an enslaved survivor of the Middle Passage who was brutalized by Euphemia’s first husband), the novella “flaunts existing cultural taboos around miscegenation” and “may be one of the earliest publicly printed U.S. accounts that represents a sexual relationship between a Black man and a white woman” (159). Even more transgressively, as it reaches its climax, the text offers up an eloquent oration, delivered by the Prince to a mixed audience of slaves and vampires gathered together in a subterraneous cavern, that concludes with the rousing vision of a revolutionary future in which the oppressed collective, “we,” shall have been “disenthralled by the irresistible genius of UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION!!!” (D’Arcy 36). This is a powerful speech, so much so that, its knowingly over-the-top rhetoric notwithstanding, Faherty can read it “straight,” asserting, for instance, that “rather than viewing St. Domingo as the crucible of unfreedom, as the space of social death or bare labor, the Black Vampyre theorizes the space as the site of production for an earthshattering counternarrative” (158).
14To be sure, the text no sooner offers up the possibility of this “earthshattering counternarrative” than it puts a violent end to it with the arrival of colonial forces who rout the “infernal fraternity” (D’Arcy 38), and put the vampires among them to the stake. This reassuring conclusion is itself troubled, however, in the novella’s final paragraph, which brings the story forward in time, revealing the existence in Essex Country, New Jersey, of a “Mr. Anthony Gibbons,” a “lineal descendant” of the white plantation mistress and the African Prince’s mulatto/vampire child—a twist that transforms the novel, in Faherty’s words, “from an exotic gothic tale set in an extra-national space into a foreboding sensationalist domestic tale of terror” (168). In this respect, The Black Vampyre supplies the perfect ending to Faherty’s book, providing a satisfyingly literal example of how “the legacies of Haiti lingered like an undead revenant haunting the supposedly paternalistic practices of enslavement in the United States” (168-69). In other respects, though, this astoundingly volatile text cannot readily sustain the sort of “straight” readings that Faherty imposes on the Prince’s rousing speech or the terror-inducing revelation of Anthony Gibbons’s existence. Such readings are only possible if one ignores the text’s many “comic,” “nonsensical,” or just plain indigestible elements, which testify (in a charitable reading, at least) to an unsettling burlesque poetics that does not merely play into but plays with the desire for ideological closure. The Black Vampyre is most certainly, as Faherty effectively demonstrates, a text that repeatedly seems to be leading us to the very brink of a truly subversive American engagement with the spectre of Haiti and black enslavement, but it is also one that time and again leaves us hanging in the midst of what may or may not be productively indecipherable (or, in an uncharitable reading, indefensibly self-indulgent and juvenile) white noise.
15In the substantial Coda to Incipient Fevers, Faherty offers up a better ending than the burlesque uncertainties of The Black Vampyre can possibly offer revisionist literary history, moving his story forward to the 1820s, when an “alternative imagination of Haiti […] as a beacon of freedom began to compete for attention with the figurations of Haiti as a space of infectious danger” (173). Whereas “our canonical figurations of the late 1820s have long depicted this period as defined by an increased attention to nationally grounded plots and themes, routinely representing this era as marked by the rise of writers such as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper” (182), a literary history attuned to “Haiti’s centrality” in the preceding two decades will necessarily look elsewhere for a continuation, and contestation, of the simultaneously domestic and extra-national concerns that generated novels like Monima and The Asylum. Naturally enough, Faherty turns to the nascent “African American-centered print public sphere,” where “a different interpretative trajectory concerning the meaning of Haiti began to emerge” in the late 1820s, complicating “the racialized panic that circulated (often unchallenged) for so long in the early American Republic of letters” (173). The specific points of reference here—the first African American owned and operated newspaper, Freedom’s Journal (1827-29), launched in March 1827 by Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm; and “Theresa—A Haytien Tale” (1828), anonymously published in four installments in that paper, and generally acknowledged as the first African American work of fiction—are very familiar, but Faherty’s analysis feels vital and fresh because of how it resonates with the book’s overarching focus on the neglected early American Haitian archive. Faherty neatly situates Freedom’s Journal, and its repeated emphasis on Haiti and other “extra-national spaces of Black life” (179), in relation to the formal end of slavery in New York in July 1827 and its immediate aftermath, noting how Cornish and Russwurm “anticipated Saidiya Hartman’s argument in Scenes of Subjection concerning how quickly emancipation discourses morphed into new liberal forms of domination” (178). Turning to “Theresa,” whose rapid canonical ascent since its recovery in 2006 mirrors that of Sansay’s Secret History, Faherty ably demonstrates how the text “actively reacts to the white archive of American Haitian texts that this book has examined” (181), “unsettling the constrained representation of Haiti implanted in the American imagination” (186), and countering “Haiti’s function as a white fantasy space of depravity, sexual licentiousness and endlessly extractable wealth in favor of framing it as a longstanding site of Black possibility” (185). Inspired by the memory of the Haitian Revolution, the author of “Theresa” “flips the white supremacist script” (187) and imagines what liberation beyond mere emancipation might feel like, sacrificing historical veracity in a pivotal narrative that, again anticipating Hartman, “embraces the aesthetics of critical fabulation to forge potential connections between African Americans and Black Haitians” (186).
16If, as Faherty notes, the “burgeoning circulation of these counter figurations” of Haiti that are to be found in the “African American-centered print public sphere” in the late 1820s “effectively draws to a close the canonical interregnum examined in this book” (173), the contemporary urgency of his intervention derives from our awareness that the white supremacist script followed (or, at best, as with The Black Vampyre, burlesqued) in the corpus of texts under study in Incipient Fevers is as relevant now, over two hundred years later, as it was then, especially when it comes to the place of Haiti in the U.S. cultural imaginary. Faherty spins out this presentist dimension of his argument in the opening pages of the Coda, where he analyzes an Instagram photo taken at a 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Boston showing the social media influencer @Noushiex3 holding “a hand-lettered sign above her head declaring that ‘Haiti did it in 1804; this is just Round 2 We Got You!’” (171). Collapsing “the geographical and temporal distances between the time of the now and Haiti in 1804” and thereby registering “these seemingly disconnected moments as intermingled, serialized iterations of a contiguous struggle for fundamental change” (172), @Noushiex3’s image predictably generated affirmative responses in some quarters, from those amenable to “the other idea of Haiti, the one that opens an archive of political possibility” (189), alongside denunciations from a range of “alt-right social media users” beholden to “a long American aversion to the idea of Haiti as a space of freedom” (172-73). The latter’s vitriolic attempts on social media to “obliterate any possible solidarities between the U.S. and Haiti” echo the sort of partisan writing that flourished in “the early American print public sphere” (172-73), and serve to remind us “how an age-old white supremacist vision of Haiti as the antithesis of U.S. democracy continues to infect the American imagination” (22). As the ongoing Trumpian attacks on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio demonstrate, this centuries-long infection is widespread and, indeed, can hardly be contained by simply identifying it with the “alt right,” as if these fears and anxieties about Haiti, and more broadly “the nationalist project of anti-Blackness” (8), were somehow limited to a “minority” of the citizens of the American Republic rather than being, as Faherty suggests throughout this pathbreaking book, a constitutive feature of it.
17One negative aspect of this otherwise admirable book that has to be mentioned, if not detailed, is the shockingly poor copy-editing that is evident throughout (a problem that reflects as much or even more on the publisher as the author). Occasionally, the slew of typos coincides with actual errors of fact, as when the free colored leaders “Vincent Ogé, Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, and Julian Raymong [sic]” are said to have been members of “the Colonial Assembly in Cape Francois [sic]” that was formed “just several months” after the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August 1789 (90). Unpacking the multiple errors in a single statement such as this—by re-placing, say, Ogé and Raimond on the right side of the Atlantic in the months following upon the Declaration, or correcting the fantastical reference to a Colonial Assembly in Cape François that welcomed free people of color as members—would be a needless diversion at this point. However, in closing, it is worth paying some concerted attention to a more significant misrepresentation of Haitian history that can, I believe, be read as symptomatic of the conceptual limits of American Studies, even in its most alert and politically radical forms, when it comes to the idea of Haiti.
18As part of his contextual set-up for Mitchell’s 1804 serial publication of The Asylum, Faherty states that “on New Year’s Day 1804, Dessalines gathered a congregation of officers to sign the Haitian Declaration of Independence and form the second independent Republic in the Americas” (100, my italics). References to the republican origins of independent Haiti are frequent in this book, and central to Faherty’s conception of the interanimating relation between “the two Republics and the political orders that their founders had fought for” (53): for instance, we are told in the introduction that “the formation of an independent Haitian Republic […] called into question the obscuring work that ‘all men are created equal’ enacted and which American literary history has for so long copiously resisted confronting” (5); that “new narrative forms and techniques” were generated in the United States as a conservative “counterformation to the more expansive definition of freedom that the Haitian Republic made a tangible political possibility” (13); and that “given how the Haitian Republic produced a new political reality, these reactionary techniques were forced to respond to the actualities of Black freedom in ways that earlier texts had not” (13).
19The problem with such claims, of course, is that in 1804 there was no Haitian Republic but, rather, an anticolonial, antislavery State led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, which by the end of the year had been transformed into an Empire. The Haitian Republic would only be established after the assassination of Dessalines in October 1806 by members of the largely francophone elite who had a substantial investment in curbing “Dessalineanism,” the radical attack on Enlightenment liberalism that, as Chelsea Stieber has brilliantly demonstrated in Haiti’s Paper War, “dominated late-revolutionary Haiti and the first years of independence” (13), and that continued to find expression in the other Haitian State which emerged in the aftermath of October 1806, led by Dessalines’s self-styled successor, Henri Christophe, who in 1811 would be declared King of (the northern half of) Haiti. For thirteen of the twenty years that form Faherty’s “canonical interregnum” Haiti was thus divided into a Republic to the south, led by Alexandre Pétion (and after his death in 1818 by Jean-Pierre Boyer), and the rival Christophean State (and subsequently Kingdom) to the north, but, symptomatically, Faherty never acknowledges the non-republican origins of Haiti, and says nary a word about the existence of these two Haitis, or their reunification in 1820 under Boyer after the suicide of Christophe (whose absence from Faherty’s book is rather remarkable, given the transatlantic media’s fascination with the idea of a Haitian monarchy; the only references to Christophe are to his role as a character in Zelica).
20What we have here, in other words, in this confounding of “the republicanism of 1806 with the radical anticolonial gesture of 1804,” is a classic example of what Stieber has termed the “blind spot created by the myth of the inevitable Republic,” an unthinking “teleological” conflation of two different times and forms of governance that fails to account for the “foundational tensions” between republicanism and Dessalineanism that shaped postrevolutionary Haiti and that would reverberate “throughout Haiti’s long nineteenth century” (3). Now, it might be argued that, post-1804, for at least some and perhaps many U.S. writers and readers, the idea of an independent Haiti was, as it were, always-already filtered through a republican lens, provoking—regardless of historical reality—a cathected projection of the emergent Haitian State as a ghostly and ghastly double of the American Republic. However, that is not a concessionary move that can be made within the framework of an argument such as Faherty’s that takes Haiti’s republican identity as an historical point of departure for an understanding of how “Haiti haunts U.S. cultural production” (4). We must ask why the Haitian Revolution and the independence of Haiti is framed in this particular way, and I would suggest that the answer might have to do with a lingering American exceptionalism that haunts the book’s explicitly anti-exceptionalist approach.
21Faherty notes at one point that “Haiti’s emergence […] undercut American exceptionality by exposing the limitations [of] American democracy’s foundational myths” (13). While that is doubtless the case, understanding this emergence in republican terms allows for a surreptitious recuperation of foundational myths about American originality, salvaging the very thing that Faherty’s argument seems to be contesting: if “Haiti’s emergence” is inseparable from its identity as “the Haitian Republic,” and if that republican form of governance can make a “more expansive definition of freedom […] a tangible political possibility” (13), then improvements can be made to the original project by learning from others who have followed America in their choice of political models. Here is a whiggish narrative if ever there were one, based on “a progressive conception of national development” through which it might be imagined that the U.S. Republic is moving toward a better version of what it originally was, helped along by the “establishment of a second republic in the hemisphere” that back then generated, and even now generates, aggressively phobic (or benignly liberal) acts of white supremacist disavowal which “we” are surely destined to overcome on the admittedly rocky journey toward an ever more perfect, once and always republican, union (13).
22Nothing could be easier than to treat Faherty’s erroneous characterization of what happened on New Year’s Day 1804 as a mere “slip-up.” Read as a symptom, by contrast, and in the light of everything that we have learned from Faherty’s outstanding book about the many ways in which “the hauntology of Haiti” operated, and continues to operate, “as a habitus, a structuring structure” for cultural production in the early, and late, American Republic (3-4), Faherty’s eminently correctible error signals just how difficult it is for “us” to detach ourselves from an habitual (mis)recognition of Haiti as “the second independent republic in the Americas.” That even the most progressive takes on U.S.-Haiti relations, while avoiding the error, can remain subject to the habit, is evident in the fact that a recent, excellent book on Haiti and the birth of Black internationalism concludes with the assertion that, in order to confront its own complicity in undermining Haitian sovereignty and “do the hard work of repair,” the United States, and indeed “all the world’s nations,” must “collectively decide to stop fearing the ascendance of a truly sovereign Black republic” (Alexander 257, 258). This common insistence on the republican identity of a redeemed, and redemptive, Haiti might well be construed as telling evidence of how even the most astute practitioners of American Studies can remain tethered to the foundational myths they so compellingly question, becoming secret sharers of the projected fantasies they expose—in the case of Haiti, fantasies that confine it, out of fear or longing or a combination thereof, within a republican framework of understanding that has, in reality, precious little to tell us about the “actualities of Black freedom” as they were, and are, practiced and imagined in the world’s first anticolonial, antislavery state.