Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847-1915

Abstract

the survivors of enslavement. Without exception, the chapters are rigorously researched, providing readers with a wealth of suggestions for further reading and analysis. The encyclopaedic referencing to both theatrical works and scholarly studies enables the collection to serve both as a historical account of, and vital sourcebook to, theatre of or about eighteenth-century French colonialism. The book has the merit of including scholars not only from the Anglophone world but also from France and the French-speaking Caribbean and the additional labour for editors of overseeing the translation of chapters cannot be underestimated. Translations of French quotations into English are often, though not always, provided. Under pressure from marginalized demographics who are now rightly claiming dignity and recognition, language is changing at a pace that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with. Perhaps, therefore, the collection went to press before the transition to describing people as ‘enslaved’ in order to emphasize the violence to which they were subjected. Notwithstanding, this book provides an exemplary model for any eventual examinations of British, Spanish or Portuguese colonial and postcolonial theatre. Ever since the Enlightenment, there have been critics of its hypocrisy. The modern inventor of democracy, human rights, progressive universalist ideals and emancipation, the Lumières oversaw genocide in the Americas, forced migration from Africa to the Caribbean, and mass enslavement that provided free labour and vast capital gain for European colonial powers. This book provides a glimmer of hope for humanity by identifying those in the Caribbean who, for over three centuries, have battled for emancipation from enslavement and its legacies and those in Europe – France’s Olympe de Gouges providing one of the loudest voices – who have condemned the ‘the moral rot at the centre of [Europe’s] prosperity’ (p. 4).