Reviewed by:

• Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race, and Popular Performance by Peter P. Reed
• John Saillant (bio)

Peter P. Reed’s Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America is essential reading for those interested in performance studies, black body studies, nineteenth-century American theatre, and the Anglo-American repercussions of the Haitian Revolution. Five chapters analyze a 1795 play about white Haitian refugees who fled the Revolution for the USA; an 1804 debate between two white students who adopted the voices of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines; an 1821 English play about the life of Haitian King Henry Christophe; American minstrel and British burlesque versions of Haitianness; and mid-century American abolitionists who made Louverture both a celebrity and a floating signifier that reflected their own various self-understandings. An introduction maps Reed’s scholarly debts and his theoretical framework, while a conclusion argues for Herman Melville’s 1855 Benito Cereno as an engagement with more than half a century of the theatre of the Haitian Revolution.

Performance and the embodiment of racial identity provide the structure of Reed’s argument. He offers many references to Haiti in nineteenth-century America that use the language of theatre or that are performances of theatre, and he treats actors, orators, and audiences of different races as they responded to Haiti in depth or in passing. Some of these are new archival finds while others are familiar. They also suggest that the language of theatre came easily to pen and tongue in a way it no longer does. Yet his crucial innovation is the argument that the Haitian Revolution held a special power that led Americans to perform it again and again for almost a century. These performances ran the gamut from abolitionist to proslavery, pro-Haiti to antiblack, and often they supplanted and displaced Haitians as the idea of the Haitian Revolution became an instrument to articulate an idea of America. The power to compel performance must be understood. It derived from the proximity in time and place of the Haitian Revolution to the American War of Independence, near enough to suggest an alternative and unsettling form of revolution for the early republic. And it derived, probably more so, from the performance of embodied race that was inevitably linked to colonial American and postrevolutionary slavery. A race-based slave system induces individuals to perform an embodied racial identity. In the United States, this spread beyond slavery and survived abolition. Reed’s invaluable contribution is to show that a North American style of embodied racial performance merged synergistically with the history of the Haitian Revolution to lead to Americans’ “playing Haitian.” When Americans acted as members [End Page 492] of a nation created in revolution and as raced bodies in a society defined by racial difference, they sometimes played Haitian. And, as Reed notes, Haitians themselves, once in the USA, performed the same role: such was the power of revolution and embodied race in one society.

The ethics of such performance are troubling. As Reed notes, Haitians themselves were often irrelevant to those who were playing Haitian. The point here is similar to Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s indictment of scholars in his 1995 masterwork, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Yet Reed argues that playing Haitian derived from complex motivations and sent a multiplicity of messages, sometimes contradictory ones. His inspiration here is, in part, Eric Lott’s 1993 classic of interracial dialectics, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Lott is a strong presence in Reed’s chapter on minstrelsy, yet the insight that racialized performance can arise from internal contradictions and can result in mixed messages informs the book at large. Moreover, Reed locates the sources of simultaneous anti-Haiti and pro-Haitian communiqués in the form of some of the plays themselves. Here he is in the tradition of William L. Andrews’s 1986 To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865, Henry Louis Gates, Jr;’s, 1988...

 校订者：

• 
  在 19 世纪的美国上演海地：革命、种族和大众表演 Peter P. Reed
•  John Saillant （生物）

彼得·里德 （Peter P. Reed） 的《在十九世纪美国上演海地》是那些对表演研究、黑人身体研究、十九世纪美国戏剧和海地革命的英美影响感兴趣的人来说的必读之作。五章分析了 1795 年的一部关于逃离革命前往美国的海地白人难民的戏剧;1804 年两名白人学生之间的辩论，他们采用了 Toussaint Louverture 和 Jean-Jacques Dessalines 的声音;一部 1821 年关于海地国王亨利·克里斯托夫 （Henry Christophe） 生平的英语戏剧;美国吟游诗人和英国滑稽剧版本的海地性;以及上世纪中叶的美国废奴主义者，他们使 Louverture 既是名人，又是反映他们自己各种自我理解的浮动能指。序言描绘了里德的学术债务和他的理论框架，而结论则认为赫尔曼·梅尔维尔 （Herman Melville） 1855 年的《贝尼托·塞雷诺》（Benito Cereno） 与半个多世纪以来海地革命戏剧的互动。

表演和种族身份的体现提供了里德论点的结构。他引用了许多 19 世纪美国的海地，这些引用使用戏剧语言或戏剧表演，他对待不同种族的演员、演说家和观众对海地的深入或顺便的反应。其中一些是新的档案发现，而另一些则是熟悉的。他们还表明，戏剧语言很容易以一种不再存在的方式出现在笔和舌头上。然而，他的关键创新是，海地革命拥有一种特殊的力量，导致美国人在近一个世纪的时间里一次又一次地发挥它。这些表演涵盖了从废奴主义到奴隶制、支持海地到反黑人的方方面面，随着海地革命的理念成为表达美国理念的工具，他们经常取代并取代海地人。必须了解强制执行的力量。它源于海地革命的时间和地点与美国独立战争的接近程度，这足以暗示早期共和国的另一种令人不安的革命形式。它可能更源于体现种族的表现，而这种表现不可避免地与美国殖民地和革命后的奴隶制有关。基于种族的奴隶制度诱使个人执行体现的种族身份。在美国，这种影响超越了奴隶制，并在废除奴隶制后幸存下来。里德的宝贵贡献在于表明，北美风格的体现种族表演与海地革命的历史协同融合，导致美国人“扮演海地人。“当美国人作为一个在革命中建立的国家的成员[完第492页]，在一个由种族差异定义的社会中充当种族团体时，他们有时会扮演海地人的角色。而且，正如里德所指出的，海地人自己一旦来到美国，就扮演着同样的角色：这就是革命的力量，也是一个社会中体现的种族力量。

这种表演的道德规范令人不安。正如 Reed 所指出的，海地人本身往往与那些玩海地人的人无关。这里的观点类似于米歇尔-罗尔夫·特鲁约（Michel-Rolph Trouillot）在他1995年的杰作《沉默的过去：权力与历史的生产》（Silencing the Past： Power and the Production of History）中对学者的控诉。然而，里德认为，扮演海地人源于复杂的动机，并发出了多种信息，有时是相互矛盾的信息。他的灵感部分来自埃里克·洛特 （Eric Lott） 1993 年的跨种族辩证法经典著作《爱与盗窃：黑脸吟游诗人与美国工人阶级》。洛特在里德关于吟游诗人的章节中占有重要地位，但种族化表演可能源于内部矛盾并可能导致混合信息的洞察力为整本书提供了信息。此外，里德以一些戏剧本身的形式找到了同时反海地和亲海地公报的来源。他遵循了威廉·安德鲁斯 （William L. Andrews） 1986 年出版的《讲述一个自由的故事：非裔美国人自传的第一个世纪，1760-1865 年》（To Tell a Free Story： The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography， 1760–1865， Henry Louis Gates， Jr）;s， 1988...