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

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

STAGING HAITI IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA: REVOLUTION, RACE AND POPULAR PERFORMANCE. By Peter P. Reed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022; pp. 231.

Peter P. Reed's new and prodigious volume, Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race, and Popular Performance, offers a comprehensive [End Page 411] overview of the impact of the Haitian Revolution, particularly its manifestations in nineteenth-century US performance by generations of French colonial refugees, abolitionists, writers, students, and Black celebrities in distinctive ways. Through insightful analysis of performances, supported by extensive historically visual and printed archives, Reed traces the evolution of "staging Haiti" from the 1790s Haitian Revolution in the 1790s to the 1860s US Civil War. Throughout this nearly century-long transatlantic engagement, Reed dissects how Haiti redefined US popular culture, reshaping the country's fundamental views on race, power, identity, and freedom through the interaction between actor-audience. Remarkable in its breadth and depth, Staging Haiti also fills a significant gap in theatre and performance studies, which has not attended fully to the island nation's cultural and political influences.

Reed divides his book into six chronological chapters. Each contains several sections providing complementary analysis to its given topic. The book is structured around a central dialectic: white Americans' mixed feelings toward slave insurrection—fear and loathing of its horror and aftermaths, but curiosity and even obsession with it. Reed reveals these central dialectical ambiguities, as he understands them, through detailing "the horrors of Saint Domingue" in the introduction (14). In the way of Brechtian "historification," by which Reed traces the origins of those mixed feelings through the original Haitian revolution, he unravels to readers the deep-seated paradox toward enslavement in their own culture. More of an emotional analysis, it adds factual and historical explanation to Reed's larger argument as it demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution influenced racial and political debates in the United States. The many illustrations in the book from literature, theatre, and public speeches, among other performance forms, attest to Americans' fascination with the Haitian Revolution.

Chapter 1 delves into the initial theatre of the Haitian Revolution with John Murdock's 1795 play The Triumph of Love, or Happy Reconciliation. Although the play itself "foregrounded the experiences of the largely white [characters]" (179), Reed focuses his analysis on the script's Black characters and how they misbehave in ways inspired by French Revolutionary ideals. Reed traces ambivalences between refugees' (ex-colonizers') sentimentality toward the "Lost Cause" and slaves' comic rebelliousness and between the white populations' fear of Black revolution. Such tensions, Reed argues, reflect broader shifts in Americans' cultural perceptions of race and national belonging in the late eighteenth century.

While eyeing individual narratives of theatrical performances in the first chapter, in chapter 2 Reed turns to two college commencement performances in the early nineteenth century to underscore the intricate relationship between US culture, the politics of performance, and Haiti. Graduation performances, as a part of the pedagogical process, verified students' academic accomplishment. Both college performances represent Haiti as a rich site for social-political debates over enslavement and race, despite the United States' polarization around its own racial dynamics in that era. Across the two performances, Reed focuses on differences in portrayal and reception of Haiti's revolution and independence caused by the racial identities of the performers. The chapter reveals a duality embedded within these educational performances; while such performances could be a public platform for self-expression and social debates, they also served to credential power and identity.

In chapters 3 and 4, Reed analyzes reenactments of the Haitian revolution and independence movement within a broader Atlantic context, framing Haiti as a mediating force through which different cultures and institutions come into focus. Reed's argument is epitomized by Ira Aldridge, an African American actor who began his career performing as Haitian royalty in New York in 1820s. In addition to his virtuosity, Reed attributes Aldridge's success and celebrity to "Atlantic transit." Reed understands this term not only through its geographic registers but also as indicating a cultural shift to a more racially tolerant environment...