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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Public Culture 122 then was an actually existing impossibility. His constitution may be regarded as a concrete or enacted utopia. By acting as if the impossible were possible, and as if the not yet present future had already arrived, his initiative hastened its arrival. It performed the impossible both to reshape the present and to address itself to a future that it anticipated in the quadruple sense of preceding, foreseeing, enacting, and calling forth. It is in this sense that Louverture may indeed be regarded as a precursor whose precedent and spirit remained present to future figures such as Schoelcher and Césaire. But just as Schoelcher’s legacy had to be liberated from the official republican commemoration of abolition, Louverture’s legacy had to be disentan- gled from mythic narratives that fixed him as the father of Haitian independence. Memories of Louverture, of course, never disappeared. His legendary stature only grew during the nineteenth century as the specter of the Haitian Revolution haunted French policy makers and inspired peoples of African descent.57 But the revolutionary and utopian specificity of Louverture’s constitutional initiative to create a postcolonial partnership has often been obscured. The momentous event of Haitian independence helped create the appearance of a necessary association among anticolonialism, political emancipation, and national independence. There had been a historic opportunity to create a novel political framework through which substantive freedom could be pursued by colonized peoples. But as with abolition in 1848, this emancipatory opening was foreclosed by a more limited, nationalist form of political liberty that was actu- ally instituted in Haiti. This political equation between colonial emancipation and national liberation was later reinforced by activists and scholars who regarded the Haitian Revolution through the optic of twentieth-century anticolonialism. Commentators thus continue to interpret Louverture’s refusal to declare national independence as a failure to do so. And his commitment to affiliate with France has often been criticized as poor judgment, false consciousness, or instrumental duplicity. Césaire’s postwar projects for decolonization without national indepen- dence, which were subject to these same accusations, may be fruitfully situated within Louverture’s lineage. But to claim that Césaire’s turn to federation was mediated by the legacy of Louverture is not to suggest that he simply imitated the Precursor directly. Rather, 57. This proliferation of discourse must be recalled as a counterpoint to Michel Rolph Trouillot’s influential argument about the later silence and unthinkability of the Haitian Revolution in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1997). See also Charles Forsdick, “Situating Haiti: On Some Early Nineteenth-Century Representations of Toussaint Louverture,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 10 (2007): 17 – 34.