Alter-Rights: Haiti and the singularization of universal human rights, 18042004

To rethink human rights when they have become little more than hollow ideology in the hands not only of nation-states but of the UN as well requires a radical change in perspective. This article will thus look back to one of the key moments in the history of human emancipation the Haitian Revolution to ask whether it might hold, in its unfulfilled potential, implications for overcoming the contemporary impasse of human rights discourse. Unlike the earlier French and US revolutions, which extended putatively universal rights only to limited categories of citizens (typically white, adult, male property-holders) Haiti was alone in the early-modern world in its implementation of an unqualified, immediate ban on human slavery. For all its daring originality, however, the Haitian intervention never lived up to its historical promise. Both internal political divisions and the international pressure of contemporary slave-holding states such as France and the United States consistently undermined the Haitian initiative throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the second part of this article, analysis of this historical process will lead me to consider the ways in which the works of Edwidge Danticat and Peter Hallward stand as contemporary interventions that remain faithful to this unfulfilled legacy of 1804.