The Narrations of the Destruction of Saint-Domingue in the Late 18th Century and their Reinterpretations after the Bicentennial of the Haitian Revolution

This article combines postcolonial and literary approaches in an analysis of literary texts about the Haitian Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Its first part discusses the methodological challenges related to the topic in post-colonial and literary studies, the ideologically ambivalent colonial texts making explicit the colonial legacy of the postcolonial while not lending themselves to an easy reading along established postcolonial tropes. Literary studies have ignored these texts for a long time but might benefit from a study of the ways the literary genre is used in these texts often not coherent aesthetically. The post-2004 scholarship in Haitian Studies has also offered stimulating and valid interdisciplinary approaches in this respect. In response to this, the second part of this article presents an exemplary analysis of the manuscript Mon Odyssée, a transatlantic testimony by a Saint-Domingue refugee to the United States that gives not only an interesting example of the configurations of the literary genre and their implication but also of the problematic and precarious representation of the black agents of the Revolution