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This chapter analyzes two concepts of “civilization”—the Western, dominant notion and its critique—at work and in tension between imperial Haiti and the republic-in-exile. Among exiled republicans, a refined, nonviolent notion of “civilization” and “culture” sought to cultivate and rehabilitate Haiti’s image in France. In imperial Haiti, on the other hand, Soulouque staked a challenge to the exclusionary, racialized notion of “civilization” itself through an active cultivation of popular religion and culture. A first section analyzes the role of visual and popular culture in Soulouque’s empire as part of the Dessalinean heritage of citation, iteration, and critique of the concept of Western civilization or “modernity.” Next, it consider the parallel—but opposite—effort among exiled republicans to allegorize and retell the story of the founding of the Haitian republic precisely according to the dominant norm of Western civilization, establishing Haiti’s parentage with the French Revolution and the liberal Enlightenment values of 1789. Ultimately, the chapter reveals that the form of the Haitian state and the heritage of 1804 were still highly contested well into the mid-nineteenth century.

This chapter examines the postslavery economic context of Jamaica and the successive revolutions in Haiti, which led to a greater presence of Haitians in Kingston in the mid-1840s. This movement continued after 1847 and throughout the 1850s during the rule of Haitian emperor Faustin Soulouque.

Chapter One explores images and texts relating to the Haitian president-turn-emperor Faustin Soulouque that appeared in the British press. These representations contained meditations on the Haitian state and the newly-created Haitian Empire. Although they were produced and published in the British context, they reflect the concerns of interlocutors from across the Atlantic World, including the thoughts and words of observers based in the US, France and, of course, Haiti. Faustin Soulouque intervened explicitly in these Atlantic-wide discussions on the significance of the Haitian Empire by providing counter-representations. Such texts and images produced by the Haitian state, this chapter details, were received, read and interpreted in Britain to alter significantly ideas about Haiti. Concomitantly, the future relationship between British imperialism and people of African descent was questioned and made problematic.