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
• John Saillant (bio)

Peter P. Reed. Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race, and Popular Performance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp xii + 216. $99.99 hardback.

Peter P. Reed’s Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America is essential reading for those interested in performance studies, black body studies, nineteenth-century American theatre, and the Anglo-American repercussions of the Haitian Revolution. Five chapters analyze a 1795 play about white Haitian refugees who fled the Revolution for the USA; an 1804 debate between two white students who adopted the voices of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines; an 1821 English play about the life of Haitian King Henry Christophe; American minstrel and British burlesque versions of Haitianness; and mid-century American abolitionists who made Louverture both a celebrity and a floating signifier that reflected their own various self-understandings. An introduction maps Reed’s scholarly debts and his theoretical framework, while a conclusion argues for Herman Melville’s 1855 Benito Cereno as an engagement with more than half a century of the theatre of the Haitian Revolution.

Performance and the embodiment of racial identity provide the structure of Reed’s argument. He offers many references to Haiti in nineteenth-century America that use the language of theatre or that are performances of theatre, and he treats actors, orators, and audiences of different races as they responded to Haiti in depth or in passing. Some of these are new archival finds while others are familiar. They also suggest that the language of theatre came easily to pen and tongue in a way it no longer does. Yet his crucial innovation is the argument that the Haitian Revolution held a special power that led Americans to perform it again and again for almost a century. These performances ran the gamut from abolitionist to proslavery, pro-Haiti to antiblack, and often they supplanted and displaced Haitians as the idea of the Haitian Revolution became an instrument to articulate an idea of America. The power to compel performance must be understood. It derived from the proximity in time and place of the Haitian Revolution to the American War of Independence, near enough to suggest an alternative and unsettling form of revolution for the early republic. And it derived, probably more so, from the performance of embodied race that was inevitably linked to colonial American and postrevolutionary slavery. A race-based slave system induces individuals to perform an embodied racial identity. In the United States, this spread beyond slavery and survived abolition. Reed’s invaluable contribution is to show that a North American style of embodied racial performance merged synergistically with the history of the Haitian Revolution to lead to Americans’ “playing Haitian.” When Americans acted as members [End Page 492] of a nation created in revolution and as raced bodies in a society defined by racial difference, they sometimes played Haitian. And, as Reed notes, Haitians themselves, once in the USA, performed the same role: such was the power of revolution and embodied race in one society.

The ethics of such performance are troubling. As Reed notes, Haitians themselves were often irrelevant to those who were playing Haitian. The point here is similar to Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s indictment of scholars in his 1995 masterwork, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Yet Reed argues that playing Haitian derived from complex motivations and sent a multiplicity of messages, sometimes contradictory ones. His inspiration here is, in part, Eric Lott’s 1993 classic of interracial dialectics, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Lott is a strong presence in Reed’s chapter on minstrelsy, yet the insight that racialized performance can arise from internal contradictions and can result in mixed messages informs the book at large. Moreover, Reed locates the sources of simultaneous anti-Haiti and pro-Haitian communiqués in the form of some of the plays themselves. Here he is in the tradition of William L. Andrews’s 1986 To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865, Henry Louis Gates, Jr;’s, 1988...