Victor Schoelcher, ‘L’imagination Jaune,’ and the Francophone Genealogy of the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
Victor Schoelcher, ‘L’imagination Jaune,’ and the Francophone Genealogy of the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
This chapter exposes more fully the relationship of David Nicholls’s thought to nineteenth-century ‘racisms’ by connecting the genealogy of the ‘mulatto legend of history’ to the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher’s claims about the ‘yellow imagination’ of “mulatto” writers in nineteenth century Haiti. If the vocabulary of Nicholls’s argument came from John Beard and James Redpath, the ideological construct of that argument, particularly the idea that such a history was legendary, can be traced directly to Schoelcher’s idea about the ‘imagination jaune’ of Boyer-era Haiti’s historians and writers, including Beaubrun Ardouin and Pierre Faubert. The author suggests that the ‘racisms’ expressed in Schoelcher’s writings remain precisely that which has prevented readers from being able to consider nineteenth-century Haitian historiography and literature outside of colonial epistemologies.
Keywords: Schoelcher, Abolition, France, Isambert, Ardouin, Faubert, Slavery, Colored Historian, Mulatto Legend
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