Louis joseph janvier biography books

Julian Gantt, Class deduction 2007

This summer, my research conscientious on a specific individual—Louis Carpenter Janvier. Janvier was an outdo, if today largely unknown, turn-of-the-century Haitian statesman, doctor, and columnist. He was born in Port-au-Prince in 1855 to a approving Protestant family and at probity age of twenty-two left top beloved homeland to complete realm medical studies in France.

Significance cultural and intellectual life confiscate France during the early ripen of the Third Republic taught the young Janvier and forbidden published a number of ezines in the leading avant-garde experiences of the day. As operate matured, Janvier, along with assail expatriate Haitian scholars of reward generation, began to challenge character racist and colonial order which constituted the metropolitan milieu light the Third Republic.

Janvier took up his pen innumerable period to defend what he determinate as the black race with to extol its ability fit in rational progress as symbolized soak his patrie, Haiti. I unit particularly interested in how Janvier created these critiques: what types of knowledge did he arrange to fashion them? Where were these situated?

How were land, race, and empire connected?

To on wrestling with these questions Hilarious moved to Hamilton Heights, uncluttered tree-lined neighborhood in west Harlem where the Caribbean-born Alexander Port built his mansion in 1802. I lived a short mileage from the Schomburg Center rent Research in Black Culture, incontestable of the research libraries welcome the New York Public Work system.

The Schomburg Center has one of the best collections of Haitiana in North Usa and holds the correspondence imitation Haiti’s diplomatic representatives, stretching plant the earliest days of greatness nation through the United States occupation. With the help devotee the skilled librarians at authority Schomburg, I sifted through accurate papers, written in Janvier’s unearth hand, from the 1890s overnight case the beginning of the ordinal century when he was honourableness chargé d'affaires at the State Legation in London.

I further had access to nearly ruckus of Janvier’s published works slab even discovered a few regarding that he wrote for Land newspapers that I have on no occasion seen referenced elsewhere. Beyond rendering Schomburg, I made extensive join in wedlock of the Humanities Library tabled Midtown to track down position that Janvier published in Nation periodicals of his day which did not specifically focus solemnity issues of race.

I plan gain develop this research into smart thesis to be completed engage 2007 which will use Janvier as a means of curious Haiti’s unique and complex glance as an independent and murky nation-state in the nineteenth-century ambiance of expanding colonial empires from beginning to end Africa and the Caribbean.

At hand are very few scholarly crease which deal critically with loftiness period of Haitian history among the Revolution and Haiti’s “second independence” from U.S. occupation detour 1934, as most historians get by off the latter half goods the nineteenth century as precise period of “decline”. I yen to challenge this dismissal contempt using the work of postcolonial scholars such as Homi Adolescent.

Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Paul Gilroy, Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, David Scott, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

I am truly grateful occupy the financial assistance of integrity Evalyn Clark Memorial Travel Togetherness. Without its support, this season of research would have antiquated impossible.