Haiti’s Fragmented Modernity: Elite Capture, Neo-Bovarysm, and the Limits of Black Sovereignty (1804-2004)

Westenley Alcenat, Scripps College

This paper asks why Haiti—the site of the only successful slave revolution to destroy a plantation complex and found a Black postcolonial state—did not ultimately become the leading avant garde or organizational center of the international socialist and workers’ movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the wake of independence, Haiti witnessed the emergence of a smallholder peasantry and a “counter-plantation” agrarian order that decisively refused the classic plantation labor regime, thereby realizing in practice a radical break with racial slavery and coerced export agriculture. Yet this apparent prefiguration of a Leninist “dictatorship of the oppressed” did not translate into a national trajectory toward socialist transformation, nor did Haiti come to occupy a vanguard position within global socialist imaginaries. I argue that postrevolutionary Haiti occupied a structurally “suspended” position between internal neo-colonial domination and external neo-financial suzerainty, in which a neo-Bovarian bloc of late imperial–capitalist hybrid actors—urban color elites, comprador merchants, cosmopolitan intermediaries, and financial brokers—articulated the limits of Haitian sovereignty, peasant reproduction, and proletarian formation. This configuration blocked both the consolidation of a socialist transition and Haiti’s elevation to a central reference point in the history of the workers’ movement. The paper intervenes in debates on transition, racial capitalism, and postcolonial state formation by recentering Haiti as a crucial, rather than marginal, case for rethinking the relationship between slave emancipation, peasantization, and the historical sociology of socialism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 6. Critical Perspectives on Colonial Projects across the Globe