Silencing the Present? Decolonization, Nationalization, and Natural Right(s) in Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859)
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Jonas Ross Kjærgård
Abstract
Émeric Bergeaud wrote Stella (1859), his novelistic account of the Haitian revolution (1791–1804), at a most turbulent moment in Haitian history. Faustin Soulouque rose to power in the late 1840 s and soon began to pursue his political opponents with violent means. Coming from a “Boyerist” background, Bergeaud fled the country in 1848 and settled in St. Thomas where he worked on his novel while his health deteriorated. Despite his precarious life in exile, Bergeaud remained silent about Soulouque in his decisively political novel Stella. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Madeleine Dobie, and others have shown, the history of slavery has often been silenced in literature and public debate, but what does it mean for Bergeaud to silence the present and focus on the past? I argue that Stella in fact makes a significant intervention in the debates about mid-19th-century Haiti. Instead of confronting Soulouque directly, however, Bergeaud addresses a pair of structural problems of which I consider Soulouque and his policy emblematic expressions: decolonization and nationalization. Most existing readings have emphasized Bergeaud’s reflections on history, but in this contextualized analysis, I show that Bergeaud looks not only to the past but also and importantly to nature and natural right(s) philosophy in his novelistic search for a way forward for Haiti.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Contributions
- Silencing the Present? Decolonization, Nationalization, and Natural Right(s) in Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859)
- Interfiguralitätsstrategien: Fontanes realistische Melusine als transfiktionales Phänomen
- Kafka Shared Between Blanchot and Sartre
- German-Italian Literary Connections in the Late Middle Ages: Boccaccio’s The Decameron in Light of Some Late Medieval German Narrative Precedents
- Reviews
- Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma eds. Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. 282 pp.Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro eds.World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 269 pp.
- Daniel Göcht: Mimesis – Subjektivität – Realismus. Eine kritisch-systematische Rekonstruktion der materialistischen Theorie der Kunst in Georg Lukács’ Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag (Lukács-Studien, Bd. 2), 2017. 331 S.
- Ulisse Dogà: „Von der Armut am Geiste.“ Die Geschichtsphilosophie des jungen Lukács. Bielefeld: Aisthesis (Lukács-Studien, Bd. 3), 2019. 376 S.
- Éva Knapp und Gábor Tüskés: Litterae Hungariae. Transformationsprozesse im europäischen Kontext (16.–18. Jahrhundert). Münster: readbox unipress, 2018. 592 S.
- Dorothea Flothow, Markus Oppolzer und Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Hgg.: The Essay. Forms and Transformations. Heidelberg: Winter, 2017. 337 S.
- Andrej Platonov: Frühe Schriften zur Proletarisierung 1919–1927. Übers. Maria Rajer. Hgg. Konstantin Kaminskij und Roman Widder. Wien: Turia+Kant, 2019. 244 S.
- Christoph Schaub: Proletarische Welten. Internationalistische Weltliteratur in der Weimarer Republik. Berlin und Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2019. 256 S.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Contributions
- Silencing the Present? Decolonization, Nationalization, and Natural Right(s) in Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859)
- Interfiguralitätsstrategien: Fontanes realistische Melusine als transfiktionales Phänomen
- Kafka Shared Between Blanchot and Sartre
- German-Italian Literary Connections in the Late Middle Ages: Boccaccio’s The Decameron in Light of Some Late Medieval German Narrative Precedents
- Reviews
- Sharae Deckard and Rashmi Varma eds. Marxism, Postcolonial Theory and the Future of Critique: Critical Engagements with Benita Parry. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. 282 pp.Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro eds.World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 269 pp.
- Daniel Göcht: Mimesis – Subjektivität – Realismus. Eine kritisch-systematische Rekonstruktion der materialistischen Theorie der Kunst in Georg Lukács’ Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag (Lukács-Studien, Bd. 2), 2017. 331 S.
- Ulisse Dogà: „Von der Armut am Geiste.“ Die Geschichtsphilosophie des jungen Lukács. Bielefeld: Aisthesis (Lukács-Studien, Bd. 3), 2019. 376 S.
- Éva Knapp und Gábor Tüskés: Litterae Hungariae. Transformationsprozesse im europäischen Kontext (16.–18. Jahrhundert). Münster: readbox unipress, 2018. 592 S.
- Dorothea Flothow, Markus Oppolzer und Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Hgg.: The Essay. Forms and Transformations. Heidelberg: Winter, 2017. 337 S.
- Andrej Platonov: Frühe Schriften zur Proletarisierung 1919–1927. Übers. Maria Rajer. Hgg. Konstantin Kaminskij und Roman Widder. Wien: Turia+Kant, 2019. 244 S.
- Christoph Schaub: Proletarische Welten. Internationalistische Weltliteratur in der Weimarer Republik. Berlin und Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2019. 256 S.
