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According to the standard interpretation of mid- to late twentieth-century historiography, Jean-Jacques Dessalines was literally Creole—born in the colony—yet performatively and ideologically African. The vexed narrative of the origins of the first leader of independent Haiti shapes our understanding of the Haitian Revolution as what Laurent Dubois calls “an African revolution,” whose African-born majority is only obliquely reflected in the historiography of revolutionary leadership. Analysis of sources and interpretations reveals that the few individuals from Dessalines’s lifetime who spoke of his background at all described him as African-born. Some accounts traced his origins to the “Gold Coast” (in its eighteenth-century French acceptation), and others alluded to his tribal scarification. Political tensions over Haitian elites and their relationships to the nonelite majority heralded the gradual transition from the African to the Creole narrative of Dessalines’s origins in the middle of the nineteenth century. The possibility that Dessalines was not Creole but African represents a critical link for renewed theorization of how the Middle Passage informed African revolutionary agency in colonial Saint Domingue. The oral traditions of Vodou provide a valuable source of alternative historiography for study of the African character of the Haitian Revolution.

Embodied simulation is then explored by Agarwal, who presents an analysis of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) providers' practices in their treatment of breast cancer survivors. According to the authors, cognitive artifacts are external artificial devices designed to serve a representative function, a simple example being a map, and more complex examples being literary oral formulae or mathematical proofs. Reilly argues that neuroscientific visualizations of mental functioning such as Ramón y Cajal's pen and ink renderings of pyramidal neurons and glial cells fall within the mimetic tradition and bring non-realist techniques to bear in visualization of brain and mind.

The Haitian Revolution has generated responses from commentators in fields ranging from philosophy to historiography to twentieth-century literary and artistic studies. But what about the written work produced at the time, by Haitians? This book is the first to present an account of a specifically Haitian literary tradition in the Revolutionary era. Beyond the Slave Narrative shows the emergence of two strands of textual innovation, both evolving from the new revolutionary consciousness: the remarkable political texts produced by Haitian revolutionary leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and popular Creole poetry from anonymous courtesans in Saint-Domingue's libertine culture. These textual forms, though they differ from each other, both demonstrate the increasing cultural autonomy and literary voice of non-white populations in the colony at the time of revolution. Unschooled generals and courtesans, long presented as voiceless, are at last revealed to be legitimate speakers and authors. These Haitian French and Creole texts have been neglected as a foundation of Afro-diasporic literature by former slaves in the Atlantic world for two reasons: because they do not fit the generic criteria of the slave narrative (which is rooted in the autobiographical experience of enslavement); and because they are mediated texts, relayed to the print-cultural Atlantic domain not by the speakers themselves, but by secretaries or refugee colonists. These texts challenge how we think about authorial voice, writing, print culture, and cultural autonomy in the context of the formerly enslaved, and demand that we reassess our historical understanding of the Haitian Independence and its relationship to an international world of contemporary readers.

Historian Joan Dayan, expressing the standard interpretation of mid- to late twentieth-century historiography, describes Jean-Jacques Dessalines as literally Creole--born in the colony--yet performatively and ideologically African. The existing sources referring to Dessalines' background, and the interpretations that have been placed upon them, demand more scrutiny. In Dessalines' lifetime the few individuals who spoke of his background at all described him as African-born, and this designation became the accepted historiographical account of his origins until the middle of the nineteenth century. Here, Jenson explores the African character of the Haitian Revolution. She also explores the ways in which the story of Dessalines has long been intertwined with larger debates about the social conflicts and complexities of early Haitian society.

Mimesis has been addressed frequently in terms of literary or visual representation, in which the work of art mirrors, or fails to mirror, life. Most often, mimesis has been critiqued as a simple attempt to bridge the distance between reality and its representations. In Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France, Deborah Jenson argues instead that mimesis not only denotes the representation of reality but is also a crucial concept for understanding the production of social meaning within specific historical contexts. Examining the idea of mimesis in the French Revolution and post-Revolutionary Romanticism, Jenson builds on recent work in trauma studies to develop her own notion of traumatic mimesis. Through innovative readings of museum catalogs, the writings of Benjamin Constant, the novels of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, and other works, Jenson demonstrates how mimesis functions as a form of symbolic wounding in French Romanticism.

‘For our culture, Proust is the arch-rememberer, just as the blind Homer is our first storyteller,’¹ writes Evelyne Ender. Marcel Proust’s status as iconic rememberer is particularly founded not in authenticity or automaticity or thoroughness of recall but, as Jonah Lehrer explains, in ‘the discovery of memory reconsolidation. For him, memories were like sentences: they were things you never stopped changing.’² What is it that catalyzed Marcel Proust’s singular attention to the complex referential prompting, sensory registry, affective coloring, and perverse temporal storage and retrieval of memory? Henri Bergson’s conception of voluntary memory has been viewed as one important source

In December 2009, the “Ghetto Biennale,” billed as asalon des refusésfor the 21stcentury, was held in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a country already rhetorically ghettoized within its planetary neighborhood by the label “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.” Within Haiti, the Cité Soleil ghetto is often treated as a war zone within a country that is not at war, or like a criminal version of a civil zone — an uncivil zone. In Cité, events like the post-Aristide United Nations Minustah campaign popularly named “Without Pity for the City” recently found an unexpected counterpart in the May 2010 military and police operations in Tivoli Gardens and elsewhere in Kingston, Jamaica. Tivoli Gardens, like Cité Soleil, raises many questions of the freedoms, unfreedoms, and quasi-or anti-states built on the margins of constitutional zones. This essay proposes that the power of forcibly excluded demographic elements to ultimately leverage influence beyond the boundaries of the state, as in the case of the varied communities affiliated with Christopher Dudus Coke, is proportional to the struggles of the state itself to refine its image and consolidate its power internationally. From Haiti, the earliest example of a self-emancipated Afro-diasporic postcolonial state, we can glean the devastating obstacles to the establishment of internationally recognized sovereignty. I chart here the trajectory through which Haiti's 1804 sovereignty was recast internationally as a paradox of sovereignbrigandage— an outlaw state – through legal challenges from the French in Santo Domingo to international commerce in Haitian ports. This 1804–1808 legal assault on Haiti issuing from theera de Franciain what is now the Dominican Republic can help us to understand Haiti's willingness to try to expel brigandage from its own sovereignty with little heed to the constitutional rights of citizens of its ghettos.

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore was a witness of the upheavals of the Revolutionary Caribbean in 1802. The colonial novella Sarah indirectly represents the Napoleonic reestablishment of slavery in Guadeloupe through a plot centered on confusion over who is or is not a slave, a confusion with profound historical and philosophical valences.