English

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Frames of Personhood

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), which recounts the culmination of the Haitian revolution against French colonialism (1791–1804), evokes a nostalgia for colonial order even though colonialism would remain in the Caribbean for decades. The epistolary novel’s narrator, an American visiting Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti), yearns for the “paradise” that she imagines has been destroyed by the revolution, aligning Sansay with Paul Gilroy’s notion of postcolonial melancholia. More insidiously, in Secret History, the longing for the reinstatement of the colonial system in Saint Domingue positions people of African descent outside “frames of recognition,” as Judith Butler in Frames of War conceptualizes the way in which biopolitical forces constitute personhood. I argue that for Sansay, the norms that constitute a living being as recognizable as a life are the ideologies of Romantic settler colonialism, as well as American exceptionalism. As such, within Secret History, Sansay reifies a stratified racial and national hierarchy while also actively denying the state violence that sustains it.

Publication Title

European Romantic Review

Publication Date

2024

Volume

35

Issue

3

First Page

511

Last Page

523

ISSN

1050-9585

DOI

10.1080/10509585.2024.2381347

Keywords

Leonora Sansay, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo, revolutions, nineteenth century, colonialism, Haitian revolution

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS