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This book begins where so many others conclude: 1804. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the challenges that Atlantic world powers posed to Haitian sovereignty and legitimacy during the Age of Revolution, but there existed an equally important internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between those who envisioned a military authoritarian empire and those who wished to establish a liberal republic. This book argues that the post-independence civil war context is central to understanding Haiti’s long postcolonial nineteenth century: the foundational political, intellectual, and regional tensions that constitute Haiti’s fundamental plurality. Considerable work has been dedicated to unearthing the uneven and unequal production of historical narratives about Haiti in the wake of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s groundbreaking Silencing the Past, but many more narratives—namely, those produced from within Haitian historiography and literary history—remain to be questioned and deconstructed. This book unearths and continually probes the conceptually generative possibilities of Haiti’s post-revolutionary divisions, something the current historiographic framework on Haiti’s long postcolonial nineteenth century fails to fully apprehend. Through close readings of original print sources (pamphlets, newspapers, literary magazines, geographies, histories, poems, and novels), it sheds light on the internal realities, tensions, and pluralities that shaped the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath to reveal the process of contestation, mutual definition, and continual (re)inscription of Haiti’s meaning throughout its long nineteenth century.

Literary Bioethics reads four novels as thought experiments through which to grapple with questions of value regarding animal lives, old lives, disabled lives, and engineered lives. Drawing from literary and cultural theory, disability studies, age studies, animal studies, and bioethics, it considers the value of these different kinds of lives as presented in fiction. The study treats “bioethics” broadly; rather than treating practical issues of medical ethics, it takes “bioethical questions” to mean 1) questions about the value and conditions for flourishing of different kinds of human and nonhuman lives, and 2) questions about what those in power ought to be permitted to do with those lives as we gain unprecedented levels of technological prowess. Exploring how the literary texts engage ideologies such as human exceptionalism, ableism, ageism, and a curative imaginary—a proto-transhumanism that cannot tolerate imperfection—the study demonstrates the power of reading literature bioethically.

Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. To fathom forms of freedom and bondage today—from unlawful detention to sex trafficking, the refugee crisis, genocide—this project reads a vast range of contemporary literature, showing how the literary forms used to tell these stories derive from the antebellum genre of the slave narrative. Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of globalism, the book forwards alternative conceptions of human rights, showing that the revival and proliferation of slave narratives offer a chance not just to rethink the legacy of slavery itself, but also to assess its ongoing relation to race and the human. Taking form seriously in discussions of minority literature, the book examines key genres associated with the slave narrative: sentimentalism, the gothic, satire, ventriloquism, and the bildungsroman. By offering a theory of form and how it travels, the book argues for the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, exploring the full complexity of an ethical globalism. Traversing multiple genres and disciplines, the book speaks to African diaspora and African American studies, transnational and world literatures, American studies, postcolonial and global studies, and human rights. Showing how slavery provides the occasion not just for revisiting the Atlantic past but for renarrating the global present, Runaway Genres creates a new map of contemporary black diaspora literature.