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Chapter One - “Monstrous Hybridity” in Colonial and Revolutionary Writing from Saint-Domingue

from Part One - From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy

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Summary

‘On trouve sur la Côte d'Or, comme sur les autres parties de la Guinée, une sorte d'homme qui s'appellent Mulâtres; race qui vient du Commerce des Européens avec les femmes du pays. Cette espèce bâtard forme un tas de brigands, qui n'ont aucun notion de fidélité & d'honneur; ni pour les Nègres, ni pour entr'eux … Cette race est composée de tout ce qu'il y a de mauvais dans les Européens et dans les Nègres. Elle en est comme le cloaque.’

—abbé Prévost, Histoire générale des voyages, ou, Nouvelle collection de toutes les relations de Voyages par Mer et par Terre (1748, Volume 13)

‘Il existe aux îles une caste particulière, mélange impur du blanc et du noir, et connu sous le nom de mulâtres. La nature, épouvantée d'horreur à la vue de ce monstre empreignit sur cet être en caractères ineffaçables, les traits de la férocité, joints à ceux de la perfidie la plus insigne. Jaloux du blanc qu'il ne saurait égaler, le mulâtre s'irrite à la vue du noir qui lui a donné le jour, vil rebut de la nature, il ne voit dans ces deux couleurs que la preuve incontestable de sa dégradation, et le reproche éternel de son existence, le Mulâtre en un mot possède les traits et les vices du blanc et du noir, sans en avoir aucune des vertus. Cette caste, contre nature, monument affreux de l'avilissement des blancs, disparaîtra si le gouvernement approuve les envois que je propose.’

—Drouin de Bercy, De Saint-Domingue: de ses guerres, de ses révolutions, de ses ressources et des moyens à prendre pour y rétablir la paix et l'industrie (1814)

The trope of “monstrous hybridity” was not actually born in representations of the Haitian Revolution, as shown by the abbé Antoine François Prévost's 1748 description of ‘mulattoes’ on the Gold Coast of Africa as a ‘bastard species’ of brigands ‘composed of everything that is awful in Europeans and Negroes’ (13: 304) The seeds for this trope were in fact first sown in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century travel writing, where ambivalent and often cruel descriptions of “racial mixing” were espoused by naturalist European travel writers and Catholic missionary priests who traveled to and lived in the French overseas colonies.

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Tropics of Haiti
Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865
, pp. 73 - 109
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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