This chapter recovers the performances of Saint Domingue’s refugees who fled the slave uprisings and acted out their relationship to Haiti on professional American stages. The Haitian Revolution’s refugees also appeared as stage characters in original plays such as John Murdock’s 1795 The Triumphs of Love, which reimagined refugees as refined but unfortunate figures, integrating them into American culture by differentiating them from comic but rebellious slaves.

This chapter examines two commencement ceremony performances that explored the political implications of Haitian independence, one by two white Dartmouth students in 1804, and the other two decades later by Bowdoin College’s first black graduate. In these acts, Americans dramatized Haiti’s founding fathers and its emerging democracy while incorporating Haiti into performances of pedagogy and credentialing central to the American national imaginary.

The conclusion examines Herman Melville’s 1855 Benito Cereno, a novella of shipboard slave revolt, which imagines the Haitian Revolution as a hidden source of fashion and style. Melville’s tale also gestures toward the dominant tropes that would emerge in the later nineteenth century—the stories of zombis, vodou, and cannibalism as well as the constant preoccupation with natural disaster, disease, political corruption, and abject poverty that would predominate by the early twentieth century. Those tropes emerged in response to and often continued to reanimate the early history of Haitian revolutionary performances.

This chapter examines the performances of Haitian revolution that could be marshalled from the pro-slavery ridicule of minstrelsy. Abolitionist political performances, ranging from petitions on Haitian recognition to oratorical celebrations of Toussaint Louverture, restaged Haiti’s revolution as a source for their own style of celebrity performance. In the process, abolitionists elevated the Haitian Revolution to iconic historical status while using it as underpinning for their own celebrated oratory.

This chapter examines the diverging ways that minstrelsy used Haiti as source material. Minstrelsy took direct and mocking aim at the aspirations of African Americans, even as its turn to Haiti implicitly acknowledged the transformative power of racial revolution. In popular transatlantic plays like M. M. Dowling’s Othello Travestie, minstrelsy used Haiti to reimagine the rising hopes and transgressive desires of the Black Atlantic. By the 1850s, minstrelsy used Haiti as an empty signifier, a marker of ludicrous and disruptive Blackness.

The Introduction examines the trope of revolution as theatre, which took shape during the 1790s as the “horrors of St. Domingo,” a spectacle of violence and play. Blending horror and pleasure, theatre brought the Haitian Revolution into the Atlantic consciousness and established formats and tropes that shaped representations of Haiti for the next half century.

This chapter turns to the black New York actor Ira Aldridge, who began building his transatlantic fame in 1825 with London performances in the popular play The Death of Christophe, King of Hayti. These performances helped construct complicated but popular notions of Haitian sovereignty and black celebrity. London’s illegitimate theatre remade figures of black power in its own image, undercutting Haiti’s legitimacy while using popular conceptions of Haiti to launch the first African American tragedian to international fame.