(Re)Framing Caribbean Periodical Archives

Abstract

(Re)Framing Caribbean Periodical Archives Candace Ward (bio) Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954. By Chelsea Stieber. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 380 pp. $89 (hardcover), $30 (paperback). Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time. By Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 216 pp. $120 (hardcover), $29.95 (paperback), $29.95 (PDF). From my perspective as an early Caribbeanist navigating the imperial and nationalistic boundaries that continue to shape Caribbean print studies, two recently published books illustrate the rewards and challenges of pushing against those limits. The first, Chelsea Stieber's Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954, digs deeply into the archive to reframe questions about Haitian print culture of the long nineteenth century and its implications for American (post)colonial studies more broadly. The second, Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann's Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time, looks at literary magazine production in the Caribbean (Martinique, Cuba, and Barbados, to be precise) during the 1940s. Whereas Stieber's study focuses on Haiti and Haitian print culture, Seligmann explores the pan-Caribbean impulses forged and resisted in a more narrowly defined historical moment and through a specific kind of print artifact, the literary magazine. Both books, encountered on their own, have much to offer scholars of American periodicals; read together, they invite participation in ongoing conversations about imperialism, nationalism, cultural sovereignty, and the inheritances of Enlightenment liberalism and literary aesthetics. One contribution both texts bring to this conversation is so obvious that it might be overlooked: the translation into English of French (and sometimes Kreyol) text in Haiti's Paper War and French and Spanish in Writing the Caribbean. For those of us not trained in Comparative Literature but who, nevertheless, feel the urgency of engaging with the Caribbean and, indeed, the wider Atlantic as "a heteroglossic space across which multiethnic crossings were possible" (Almeida, Reimagining the Transatlantic, 238) this is hugely beneficial. As Joselyn Almeida pointed out more than a decade ago, the "monolingual notion of the transatlantic" that encouraged [End Page 200] scholars to remain siloed in subfields of Anglophone, Francophone, or Hispanophone (post)colonial studies did not reflect the lived experience of those Caribbean subjects busy "writing the Caribbean" in the periodicals examined by Stieber and Seligmann ("London-Kingston-Caracas" para 3). As Stieber says of her method—of providing English translations in the body of the work, with original French texts in the endnotes—"though it may distract some," it allows for "substantive engagement with the original materials by both Anglophone and Francophone readers" (xi). Although Seligmann does not provide a formal "Note on Translation," she, too, translates passages into English from the original French and Spanish in the body of her study. Granting Anglophone readers access to their source material obviously widens the scholarly conversation for American periodical studies—and at the same time reminds us of the ironies implicit in such a gift, the suggestion of accommodating what might be understood as the persistence of imperialistic foundations that the books upend. To be clear, this is no complaint about the translational labor performed by Stieber and Seligmann. In fact, that labor allows me to make connections between their source material and Anglophone texts more familiar to me, broadening my engagement with them in powerful ways, which, I suspect, will be the experience of many other readers. Translation work aside but not forgotten, each book's exploration of particular historical moments and their consequences in print culture also enables and prompts readers to reassess the ways they think about Caribbean and American studies. Haiti's Paper War, for example, begins by challenging the way that most of us (at least in the North Atlantic) have received Haiti's history, its presence in the contemporary American imaginary manifesting as a celebration of the first Black republic in the New World, appearing full blown in 1804 when Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared an independent state. The Republic of Haiti, however, was not the assured or even desired end of the revolution carried out by the self-emancipated people of what had been France...