‘A Very Hell of Horrors’? The Haitian Revolution and the Early Transatlantic Haitian Gothic

This article explores the Gothicisation of the Haitian Revolution in the transatlantic discourse during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As it argues, the Gothic mode has to be understood as a reaction to the profound challenges that the Haitian Revolution posed to a transatlantic world built on the slave economy. Pro-slavery and pro-colonialist authors demonised this successful slave revolution and one of the first anti-colonial revolutions in modern history by resorting frequently to the ‘hegemonic Haitian Gothic.’ By contrast, early Haitian leaders and some British radicals appropriated this mode, turning it into the ideologically contrary ‘radical Haitian Gothic.

Figures of terror: The “zombie” and the Haitian Revolution

This article investigates the relation of the figure of the zombie to the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolution in the Atlantic World. While existing research often stresses the strong link between the zombie and the slave, this is not borne out by the contemporary discourse on the Haitian Revolution. Whereas horror and terror are associated with the zombie from its inception, it is only with the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) that US-American writers and directors invented the zombie of popular North Atlantic culture: a soulless slave without consciousness directed by a zombie master. As I argue, this amounts to a neo-colonialist act of symbolic re-enslavement of the self-emancipated Haitians. This time they are deprived not merely of their freedom as under the slave regime, but even of their consciousness

Grégory Pierrot, The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. viii + 263 pp. (Paper US$ 32.95)

Not applicable as this a book review article

Fermentation will be universal’: Intersections of Race and Class in Wedderburn’s Black Atlantic Discourse of Transatlantic Revolution

This chapter will engage with the figure of ultra-radical Black Atlantic abolitionist and insurrectionary preacher Robert Wedderburn (1762-1835/6?). Born free in Jamaica as the son of an enslaved woman Rosannah and a Scottish-Jamaican slaveholder, he eked out his existence on the margins of London society and was active in the city’s radical underground. As this chapter demonstrates, in carnivalesque, blasphemous and vernacular language, Wedderburn created an avant-garde Black Atlantic discourse that inextricably interweaved race and class: simultaneously calling for slave revolution in the Caribbean and proto-proletarian revolution in Britain

Chapter 10 “I have undertaken this vengeance”: Echoes of Race and Spectres of Slave Revolt in Frankenstein"

Not applicabl

Figures of Terror: The Haitian Revolution and the Zombie

This article investigates the relation of the figure of the zombie to the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolution in the Atlantic World. While existing research often stresses the strong link between the zombie and the slave, this is not borne out by the contemporary discourse on the Haitian Revolution. Whereas horror and terror are associated with the zombie from its inception, it is only with the US occupation of Haiti (1915-34) that US American writers and directors invented the zombie of popular North Atlantic culture: a soulless slave without consciousness directed by a zombie master. As I argue, this amounts to a neo-colonialist act of symbolic re-enslavement of the self-emancipated Haitians. This time they are deprived not merely of their freedom as under the slave regime, but even of their consciousness