"I wait for me": Visualizing the Absence of the Haitian Revolution in Cinematic Text

Abstract

In this thesis I explore the memory of the Haitian Revolution in film. I expose the colonialist traditions of selective memory, the ones that determine which histories deserve the attention of professional historians, philosophers, novelists, artists and filmmakers. In addition to their capacity to comfort and entertain, films also serve to inform, shape and influence public consciousness. Central to the thesis, therefore, is an analysis of contemporary filmic representations and denials of Haiti and the Haitian Revolution. I employ a research design that examines the relationship between depictions of Haiti and the countryâ s colonial experience, as well as the revolution that reshaped that experience. I address two main questions related to the revolution and its connection to the age of modernity. The first concerns an examination of how Haiti has contributed to the production of modernity while the second investigates what it means to remove Haiti from this production of modernity. I aim to unsettle the hegemonic understanding of modernity as the sole creation of the West. The thrust of my argument is that the Haitian Revolution created the space where a re-articulation of the human could be possible. I submit that the relegation of Haiti in the cinematic world should be seen as an active response by the apologists of European universalism to the ways in which the revolution undermined claims to Western superiority. Such relegation is a process through which modern Euro-American societies reproduce and sustain their own understanding of the human, an understanding that dates back to the colonial era. I argue, therefore, that the struggle for memory with respect to the Haitian Revolution requires an anticolonial conception of humanness that explicitly repudiates slavery and colonization. For the filmmaker, this entails a cinematic practice that challenges the forces of imperialism and its consequences for postcolonial subjects while providing a revised visual conception of what it means to be human.