Kidnapped Narratives: The Lost Heir of Henry Christophe and the Imagined Communities of the African Diaspora
Kidnapped Narratives: The Lost Heir of Henry Christophe and the Imagined Communities of the African Diaspora
This chapter examines narratives of the kidnappings that haunted leaders of the Haitian Revolution as well as their families, with special emphasis on the families of Toussaint Louverture and Henry Christophe. It interprets these narratives as a paradigm for Haitian engagement with manuscript and print culture itself that repeatedly inscribes threats to speakers' basic autonomy and security, mapped over forced movement between metropolitan and colonial spaces. The chapter discusses the emblematic nature of kidnapping in the imagined communities of the African diaspora, arguing that the liminal and urgent depictions of kidnappings in the families of Louverture and Christophe vividly revisited the Middle Passage as a founding history of forced migration. Drawing on the work of Benedict Anderson, it explores how layers of African diasporan and Haitian revolutionary kidnappings intruded into the connection between novel and nation in the imagining of New World communities.
Keywords: Haitian Revolution, kidnappings, narratives, African diaspora, Toussaint Louverture, Henry Christophe, print culture, Middle Passage, forced migration, Benedict Anderson
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