Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America

Peter P. Reed is Associate Professor of Early American Literature at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Rogue Performances (2009) as well as essays on Black Atlantic performance, theatre culture, and Haiti's impact on American culture.

• Introduction: performing the Haitian revolution; 1. Rebels and refugees: sentimental suffering and antic revolt in the 1790s; 2. The lessons of Haiti: performance, pedagogy, and the politics of Haitian independence; 3. Virtuosity, illegitimacy, and Haitian royalty: Ira Aldridge and Christophe, King of Hayti; 4. Travesty and transformation: Haiti and blackface minstrelsy; 5. Abolitionist acts: Haitian respectability, oratory, and celebrity performance; Conclusion: the pleasures and perils of revolutionary reenactment.

''Staging Hait' is, without question, an important new book. Reed has given the field a host of new questions to consider by underscoring the limitations of our fixation on fiction as the primary index through which to read cultural formations, even as he moves to expand our operant sense of how performance, performativity, drama, and theatricality are made much richer when we understand the literal theater as one site amid a constellation of stages on which the drama of the Haitian Revolution played out for obsessed generations of nineteenth-century Americans.' Duncan Faherty, Early American Literature