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Ecological Chains of Unfreedom: Contours of Black Sovereignty in the Atlantic World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2015

KAREN N. SALT
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Abstract

Black sovereignty in the Atlantic world pivots, as in the case of Haiti, from a haunting apparition to a haunting recognition, never quite forming a tangible, and legal, sovereignty unto itself. Haiti's tangled and complicated geopolitical positioning within the Atlantic world gives this spectral state of being meaning. Sovereignty, or, as I will suggest, the processes of recognizing sovereignty and the material shape of its appearance, imbues Haiti's sovereign claims with a specific racialized threshold. Reading along Haiti's racio-national edge also illuminates the tenuous position on the international stage of Liberia and Abyssinia – two nations, along with Haiti, that represented the only nation-states in the Atlantic world by the end of the nineteenth century with a majority black population and independence. Although a small representative group, these sites deserve far more scrutiny within the fields of race and sovereignty studies by legal scholars and scholars of transnational American studies, especially because of the ways the nations battled for recognition and respect amongst other nation-states who may have attached derogatory notions of humanity onto the political work and rights of these self-avowed black nations. Haiti is an important example of this phenomenon.

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Articles
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Journal of American Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 267 - 286
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

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38 Mr. Cooper to the President, 24 June 1858, letter, S. Ex. Doc. No 37, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. (1860). Valuation listed also comes from the same executive document.

39 Ibid., italics mine.

40 Ibid.

41 Commander Turner to Mr. Toucey, 16 August 1858, letter, S. Ex. Doc. No 37, 36th Cong., 1st Sess. (1860).

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