American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In this study, Peter P. Reed reveals how Americans embodied and re-enacted their connections to Haiti through a wide array of performance forms. In the wake of Haiti's slave revolts in the 1790s, generations of actors, theatre professionals, spectators, and commentators looked to Haiti as a source of both inspiring freedom and vexing disorder. French colonial refugees, university students, Black theatre stars, blackface minstrels, abolitionists, and even writers such as Herman Melville all reinvented and restaged Haiti in distinctive ways. Reed demonstrates how Haiti's example of Black freedom and national independence helped redefine American popular culture, as actors and audiences repeatedly invoked and suppressed Haiti's revolutionary narratives, characters, and themes. Ultimately, Haiti shaped generations of performances, transforming America's understandings of race, power, freedom, and violence in ways that still reverberate today.

''Staging Hait' is, without question, an important new book. Reed has given the field a host of new questions to consider by underscoring the limitations of our fixation on fiction as the primary index through which to read cultural formations, even as he moves to expand our operant sense of how performance, performativity, drama, and theatricality are made much richer when we understand the literal theater as one site amid a constellation of stages on which the drama of the Haitian Revolution played out for obsessed generations of nineteenth-century Americans.’

Duncan Faherty Source: Early American Literature