2 - Before Malcolm X, Dessalines: Postcoloniality in a Colonial World

Summary

Nous avons osé être libres sans l'être, par nous-mêmes et pour nous-mêmes

(We dared to be free when we were not free, by ourselves and for ourselves)

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haitian Declaration of Independence, January, 1804

… que les puissances n'accordent jamais aux peuples qui, comme nous, sont les artisans de leur propre liberté

(… which powers never concede to people like us who are the authors of their own liberty)

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, acceptance of his nomination as emperor, August, 1804

Struggles against colonialism and slavery are not inevitably, but rather circumstantially, aligned, even within the same hemispheric region and historical period. Haiti's literature, from the 1804 independence onward, was postcolonial: it remained infused with anti-colonial fervor and was sometimes oriented toward future regional decolonizations. In the U.S., the Afro-diasporic population focused its political imagination on emancipation from slavery. The slave narrative, despite its dominant themes of human subjugation in a racialized context, is difficult to situate with regard to colonial or postcolonial dynamics. Although William Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin proposed in 1989 that the independence of the United States from Britain constituted an example of eighteenth-century postcolonialism, independence from Britain certainly did not entail a historical rupture with racial hierarchies and contingent practices of enslavement as they had developed in this New World space.