ABSTRACT
The nation of Haiti was born on January 1, 1804, after nearly thirteen years of revolutionary war against French, English, and Spanish colonists, militias, and armies. This chapter focuses a discussion of freedom and race in Haiti on property and ownership, the historical site of contention between conflicting visions of place-making, race-making and history-making. Historical memory in rural Haitian space describes a self-conscious tradition of Black social memory, which decenters the racialization, dehistoricization, and dispossession of rural populations through property ownership, and which is used by agriculturalists to reframe personal and state sovereignty. By the 1820s, Haiti’s first leaders, statesmen, and state visions in the governments of Dessalines, Alexandre Pétion, and Henry Christophe were succeeded by the “ultra-conservative” and colorist government of Jean-Pierre Boyer. Having continued his predecessor’s campaign against Henry Christophe in the Northern Kingdom of Hayti, Boyer also invaded the neighboring Spanish colony and united the island.
