The historically overlapping discourses of romanticism and aesthetics frequently draw criticism for being mere ideology. “Ideology” here refers to a restricted worldview that misrecognizes itself as universal and suggests why romanticism is crucial to debates about world literature. Insisting on aesthetics as universal, romanticism helps to initiate a Eurocentric conception of world literature. But this criticism ignores the often-conflicted character of romantic writing in which an aesthetic machinery exposes universalism as built on exploitation. To fully grasp the stakes of such breakdowns one must further consider romantic-era texts that are not European. An exemplary instance is Hérard Dumesle’s 1824 political travel narrative Voyage dans le Nord D’Hayti. Drawing on European models, it proves paradoxically revealing in its account of Eurocentric aesthetics. Endorsing and ironizing universalism, it opens onto alternative conceptions of world literature by marking the limits of translatability and refusing to belong to any one world.

Histories of colonial energy tend to emphasize the development of the steam engine, the rise of electric power, or the beginnings of industrial agriculture, through the rise of cash crops such as indigo, cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Chapter 1, “Powering the Soul: Queer Energies in Haitian Vodou,” argues that any history of colonial energy production must also recognize that nonhuman forms of power were dependent on the human energy of enslaved labor, particularly reproductive labor. Yet far from considering enslaved labor as the flexible, malleable unit of energy desired by capitalist production, this chapter instead argues that Vodou radically disrupted the logics of racial capital and coerced biological reproduction. Vodou personhood is antithetical to the calculus of racial capitalism, and its porosity, I argue, helped reconfigure the plantation’s structures of power to resist imperialist extraction. Through an archive that ranges from colonial treatises to Vodou practices and epistemologies, this chapter highlights the ways in which Haitians expanded the category of gender and reimagined the energies of labor and birthwork under conditions of biocapitalist violence.