Tropics of Resistance in Sansay's _Secret History_

This paper designates the early nineteenth century as a pivotal moment in the U.S. revolutionary imaginary, wherein U.S. authors and thinkers transpose the potential for revolution onto the Americas of the South and West.... [ view full abstract ]

This paper designates the early nineteenth century as a pivotal moment in the U.S. revolutionary imaginary, wherein U.S. authors and thinkers transpose the potential for revolution onto the Americas of the South and West. Following general trajectories of U.S. expansion, I argue, the U.S. literary imagination looks to Latin America as a possible continuation of revolutionary potential starting with the perceived curtailing of resistance by the Federalist policies of the 1780s. Rather than a total or linear trajectory, however, this transference enacts, expands and exposes the contradictions of American Revolution. Here, I look at several key but relatively overlooked moments in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) as emblematic of this broader phenomenon.

Published in Philadelphia in 1808, Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo has enjoyed an archival and critical recovery over the past ten years. Major readings have examined its representation of the Haitian Revolution from a U.S. perspective, depiction of race and gender relations in a hemispheric context, articulation of U.S. fears of slave revolt and repository of multiple genres. In this paper I examine the scenes in which the two sister-protagonists of the novel travel to Cuba and encounter, successively, Maroons in the town of Cobre (the site of a slave revolt) and a mass of land crabs migrating to shore to lay eggs. Presented at the novel’s end, after the sisters have left St. Domingue, these scenes offer a departure from the narrative that, in its depiction of liminal, category-defying multitudes, offer a gripping juxtaposition to their Philadelphia-bred expectations.