Involving the Universe in Ruins
Involving the Universe in Ruins
Sansay’s Haitian Anabiography
This chapter considers how the minoritarian conceptions of the body and the person, taken from both Anglo-European elite and the Afro-American culture, resonated with white women in North America. It reviews Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo and Zelica: The Creole. Both of them focus on Anglo-European women traveling through St. Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, chronicling their transformation through the intervention of Afro-American cultural forms, including fetishes. The chapter indicates Sansay’s interest in modes of agency that departed from those then available to women in the United States. The transformation also suggests that white middle-class women, in addition to claiming the genre of the novel for their own ends, also looked to Afro-American cultural production in claiming their own agency.
Keywords: minoritarian, Afro-American culture, Leonora Sansay, Secret History; or The Horrors of St. Domingo, Zelica, Haitian Revolution, agency, cultural production
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