Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance by Peter P. Reed (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance by Peter P. Reed
• Andrew M. Pisano

Peter P. Reed, 2022. Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theater. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. hc $99.99

Peter P. Reed's Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America contributes a much-needed, richly researched examination of how the Haitian Revolution influenced antebellum American imaginings of race and rebellion on both the stage and page. Reed's work carefully builds on the recent transatlantic theater scholarship of Matthew Clavin (2008), Lauren Clay (2013), Michael Dash (2005), Marlene Daut (2012), Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Matthew Drexler (2016), Laura L. Mielke (2019), and others to further probe the "deep ambivalence" (Reed 2022, 9) in how the "dangerous open secret" (10) of the Haitian revolt was represented on the American stage. With the influx of French refugee performers into eastern American cities and increasingly sensational reporting circulating through the American press, there is little wonder as to why, in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, race and revolution became imaginative fodder for American playwrights, performers, and writers. America, too, was embroiled in clashing currents of abolitionist rhetoric, pro-slave legislation, and threats of slave revolt, in some measure inspired by the Haitian Revolution. The 1811 German Coast Slave Revolt, for example, one of several American slave revolts noted by Reed, is evidence of the tumultuous climate in slave-holding states in the US following the events in Haiti. [End Page 286]

Reed carefully lays out these complex American contexts via a variety of primary texts such as paintings, etchings, pamphlets, essays, and other ephemera. A key painting for Reed is J.L. Boquet's Pillage du Cap Français en 1793. This painting adorns the cover of Reed's book and serves as an important entry point in the book's introduction indicating how the Haitian Revolution was portrayed as performative even in the first generation of artistic representation following the uprising. Reed's use of Boquet's painting and its almost carnivalesque imagery is especially valuable in laying a credible, critical foundation for his thesis. In addition, Reed thoughtfully uses secondary research from historians, theater scholars, and literary scholars to interrogate how a vexed notion of Haitian identify is refracted onto the American stage at a time when questions of abolition and perpetual bondage seemed hopelessly unsolvable without civil war among the states.

In what Reed terms "playing Haitian," actors performed "Haitianness" in a variety of ways, although a few commonalities persisted (2022, 10). Much of the stage play involved an "open-endedness" and "incompletion" in the performance which Reed argues are key traits in staging Haiti during this period. Indeed, the lynchpin for Reed's argument, effectively sustained throughout the book, is that "playing Haitian often has the qualities of rehearsal rather than finished performance" (11). Sometimes these performances were done in blackface, capitalizing on popular minstrelsy tropes, as examined in chapters one and four of the book; other times, though, as discussed in chapter three, theatricality and minstrelsy merged with the burlesque to showcase unstable themes of race, class, and gender roles in plays such as J.H. Amherst's Death of Christophe, King of Hayti (1821). In 1825, New York born black actor Ira Aldridge assumed the lead role in London productions of the play which Reeds focuses on as an intriguing look into the Black Atlantic world of theater. In Death of Christophe, as in other primary examples studied by Reed, there is no clear thesis for theater audiences; rather, the play concludes—like the events in Haiti and then on-going arguments over the politics of race in America—as messy, unresolved, and ambivalent. However, by the 1850s the Haitian Revolution figured into a less abjectly race-caricatured, exoticized imaginative form. American writers such as Herman Melville seized on the socio-political implications of the Haitian uprising as a means of interrogating America's inability to contend with its own reliance on slave labor and the still very real threat of slave revolt. [End Page 287]

Moving from the stage to the page, Reed's concluding...