Resources
Listed below are a number of resources offering insights into the histories of Haiti’s revolutionary women and exploring the wider worlds of the women connected with this project. Please get in touch if you wish for your resource to be included in this list.
dLOC
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. It contains a rich variety of sources relating to the history of Haiti and indexes a number of related digital initiatives.
La Gazette Royale d’Hayti
This web resource and digital archive, created by Professor Marlene Daut, serves as a repository for all of the known issues of the two newspapers published during Henry Christophe’s rule of northern Haiti, as well as the six different versions of the Almanach Royal d’Hayti, issued by the royal press. The database contains searchable transcriptions of all of the publications.
Marronage in Saint-Domingue
Marronage in Saint-Domingue is an original project supported by the French Atlantic History Group (McGill University, Mellon Foundation) in collaboration with the Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines of the Université de Sherbrooke. It is an electronic interface meant to decompartementalise the archives of slavery in the French Atlantic world comprising of a comprehensive searchable database of advertisements for enslaved runaways during the colonial period in Saint-Domingue and elsewhere in the French Caribbean. Such advertisements remain the principal source of information about marronage in the colonial period. The sources collated within this database offer interesting insights in particular into female resistance and fugitivity.
Mémoire de Femmes
Created by Dr Jasmine Claude-Narcisse in partnership with Unicef as part of an initiative to explore the history of the feminist movement in Haiti, Mémoire de Femmes was originally published as a book in 1997. Given the book’s limited print run, Claude-Narcisse decided to reproduce the content as a website in order to widen access. The site contains an index and short biographical summaries of women from Haitian history, from the colonial period to the present. Though it recognises its undocumented omissions, and does not promise to serve as an exhaustive encyclopedia of women from Haiti’s history, it offers a well-researched intervention into an area of scholarship that is still under-examined and references a number of useful historical sources relating to a number of often-occluded revolutionary characters.
MUPANAH
The Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien (MUPANAH) is a public museum located in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, devoted to preserving the country’s patrimony through the conservation of objects of historical and cultural interest. The Facebook page contains information pertaining to a number of collection items, and the gallery contains photos of a number of items of interest, including of a dress that belonged to Mlle Eléonore Richeux de Laroche Asnière (purportedly a lady-in-waiting in the court of Henry and Marie-Louise Christophe) that was recently restored in Paris.
Nehri, Chef des Haytiens
This site contains a transcription of the play Néhri, Chef des Haytiens (uncovered by Tabitha Macintosh), published by Haitian playwright, polemicist, journalist and statesman Juste Chanlatte in 1819, along with an English translation by Grégory Pierrot. While the site serves as a digital archive for this long-occluded work, it also contains important biographical information about Chanlatte, information relating to the material history, journey and archivisation of the book itself and accounts documenting its reception in the nineteenth-century Atlantic presses.
Rendering Revolution
Curated by Siobhan Meï and Jonathan Michael Square, Rendering Revolution: Sartorial Approaches to Haitian History is a digital humanities project and educational tool that documents the significant role that fashion and clothing played in constructing visions of freedom during and after the Haitian Revolution. Combining colonial visual and textual archives with contemporary art and fiction, it presents a picture of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century sartorial culture, focusing on the confluence of European and West African fashions in Haiti.
While Rendering Revolution lives mainly on Facebook and Instagram, the project draws on shared expertise from a network of translators and collaborators and all posts are published in both English and Haitian Kreyòl. Through its extensive syllabus and curated social media content, it strives to amplify and re-assemble the often occluded revolutionary stories inscribed in material culture, most especially the stories of women.