From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti

The foundational intellectual history of Haitian political thought from independence through the mid-twentieth century, organized around a rigorous distinction between race (consciousness of shared African descent, a centripetal force in national defense) and colour (phenotypic distinctions between Black and mulatto, a centrifugal force repeatedly fracturing Haitian politics). Nicholls traces 150 years of competing legends about 1804 — the mulatto legend, the Black legend, noirisme, the Griots synthesis — showing how the interpretation of Dessalines, Christophe, and Toussaint was always a weapon in contemporary political struggles and how Price-Mars's ethnological humanism was transformed into the racial essentialism that made Duvalierism possible.