Riprodurre la rivoluzione. Rappresentazioni narrative di Toussaint Louverture prima della guerra civile

The essay focuses on a recently rediscovered text, William J. Wilson’s “The Afric-American Picture Gallery” (1859). It examines how antebellum narrative representations of the Haitian Revolution placed it on a continuum with other forms of resistance in the United States in order to challenge prevailing racist ontologies postulating black docility. The analysis of the portraits of Toussaint L’Ouverture described in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1853) and Wilson’s “The Afric-American Picture Gallery” (1859) reveals how such descriptions promoted transnational emancipation projects and trained readers to question the politics of historical representation.