Abstract:
An undeniable paradox existed in eighteenth-century France between the escalating discourse of freedom and the continued practice of slavery in its Caribbean colonies. Even in the years after the French Revolution, in which the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity had become axiomatic, there remained a glaring lack of reconciliation between these principles and the continued enslavement of Africans in the sugar fields of Haiti; as such, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), in bringing about total manumission and bestowing citizenship across racial boundaries, can be understood as the first democratic revolution in Western history. This lecture examines one of the most famous paintings of the Haitian Revolution, Anne-Louis Girodet’s Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies (1797), within the paradigm of the Hegelian master-bondsman dialectic, exploring how the ontological conundrum of European self-identification vis-à-vis racial subjugation was articulated in French paintings of the Revolution. Itself inspired by the Haitian revolt, Hegel’s ontology allows for an interpretation of Girodet’s portrait as a failed portrayal of a liberated slave consciousness; by not only preserving the racist episteme of ancien regime depictions of Blacks, but by also evoking Black “liberatedness” solely through White signifiers, the image betrays a dialectic dependence on White cultural entities for the very understanding of Black freedom, both physical and metaphysical.
The full essay can be downloaded here -> Thadeus Dowad_ Haitian Liberation