Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution

The core text for understanding how the Haitian Revolution was processed — or refused — across the Atlantic world, arguing that the response was not silence but active disavowal: simultaneously acknowledging and denying, suppressed through the very acts that conjured it. Working across Cuba (the Aponte conspiracy and colonial press), the Dominican Republic (whose national identity was built around anti-Haitianism), and Haiti itself (the constitutions of 1801–1843 as political theory), Fischer shows that disavowal left traces everywhere — in newspapers that printed nothing about 1791 for fourteen years, in Bolivar's exclusion of Haiti from the Pan-American conference, in Hegel's silence at precisely the moment his master-slave dialectic should have named Saint-Domingue.