« The mathematics of settler colonialism: David W. Stinson, Jayasree Subramanian, Cathery Yeh, ‘Strengthening Equity and Social Justice Research in Mathematics Education Through Critical Interrogations of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism’, in M. A. Clements, B. Kaur, T. Lowrie, V. Mesa, & J. Prytz (eds), Fourth international handbook of mathematics education, Springer, 2024
Performative settler colonialists: Aoife Connolly, Performing the Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives of Settler Memory and Identity in Literature and On-Screen, Nomos, 2024 »

The settler romantic: Lisa Kasmer, ‘Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Frames of Personhood’, European Romantic Review, 35, 3, 2024, pp. 511-523

24Aug24

Abstract: Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), which recounts the culmination of the Haitian revolution against French colonialism (1791–1804), evokes a nostalgia for colonial order even though colonialism would remain in the Caribbean for decades. The epistolary novel’s narrator, an American visiting Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti), yearns for the “paradise” that she imagines has been destroyed by the revolution, aligning Sansay with Paul Gilroy’s notion of postcolonial melancholia. More insidiously, in Secret History, the longing for the reinstatement of the colonial system in Saint Domingue positions people of African descent outside “frames of recognition,” as Judith Butler in Frames of War conceptualizes the way in which biopolitical forces constitute personhood. I argue that for Sansay, the norms that constitute a living being as recognizable as a life are the ideologies of Romantic settler colonialism, as well as American exceptionalism. As such, within Secret History, Sansay reifies a stratified racial and national hierarchy while also actively denying the state violence that sustains it.


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