Atlantic Revolutions

Thank you for your thoughtful engagement with the prompt about settler-colonialism and racial capitalism last
week. This has set the stage for us to delve into how art relates to both deep structures of violence and
legacies of oppression as well as movements for liberation and justice, starting with a recognition that the city
in which our university stands was founded on land theft, dispossession, and enslavement.
It is interesting to note that John Jay himself, a so-called Founding Father from the American Revolution, has
been celebrated as an advocate for abolishing slavery, when in fact his real approach was a piecemeal,
"gradual emancipation" of enslaved people (such that, for instance, children born to enslaved parents would be
legally obliged to serve their parents' "masters" until age 25). Jay was also an enthusiastic advocate of
westward expansion and war against Native people by the newly created United States of America.
This brings us to the topic for this week, namely the three Atlantic Revolutions: The United States, France, and
Haiti.
Under "Week 3" I have included a number of items for each of these revolutions as background, but I would
like you to focus especially on the dialectical interplay between the French and Haitian revolutions. Haiti, then
known as St. Dominique, was a French colony at the time of the French revolution. The Haitian population was
made up of hundreds of thousand enslaved Black people, a small minority of free Black people (though who
were not recognized as citizens), and a tiny group of white plantation owners. This was the social structure of
Haiti at the moment that a citizens revolution took place in France itself, acting as a partial catalyst for the
Haitian revolution, whose true origin lies in generations of slave revolts in that colony and throughout the
Americas.
Broad historical background on the French and Haitian revolutions is provided in the links, including brief arthistorical videos about French revolutionary art as well as a comprehensive documentary introduction to the
Haitian revolution.
For this weeks prompt, I would like for you to meditate on the following deliberately open-ended question:
What is revolution, and what does the term mean today? In thinking about this question, draw on the two
(short) readings by Rebecca Spang about the French Revolution, and then the Laurent Dubois about the
Haitian revolution. In conjunction with Dubois, make sure to watch the Haiti documentary as well. Finally,
embed at least one image from the videos and/or readings in your post