The aporias of citizenship in the context and after the haitian Revolution (1791-1987): Popular struggles, emancipation and recognition

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the concept of citizenship in its deployment during the Haitian revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods (1791-1987). The issue of citizenship is linked to three other concepts, namely Emancipation, Recognition and Popular Struggles. They are constantly wrought by the revolutionary logic as deployed in the Haitian context. The Haitian Revolution was a political and philosophical proposal of emancipation and equality reproduced throughout the post-colonial period in the form of permanent resistance to various forms of coloniality. The citizen has become the new figure of resistance and a symbol of universality and equality of rights. In fidelity to this proposal, popular struggles, privileged expressions of political emancipation played a fundamental role in the decolonization of political relations. They were and still are the main conditions for establishing both a policy of equality and a "balanced" form of legally equal citizenship. In other words, citizenship is, in the Haitian context, and as it is in many other contexts, an endless construction. Because of the permanent refusal of recognition of categories (peasant, famers, urban lower classes) produced as excluded, citizenship is based on the permanent struggles of practices developed by a core principle: the plebeian principle, defined as an oppositional principle, which deploys political subjectivity as a condition of emancipation. In doing so, what results is a re-conceptualization of the issue of law and rights. The universal and radical dimension of the figure of equal citizen carried by the Haitian Revolution confronted an internal and external system of oppositions. However, the institutionalization of the rule of law and the equitable sharing of the in-common has been revealed problematic. The nature of the Haitian State, qualified here as Co-ownership State, obstructs any form of social citizenship that would involve equal sharing of the Haitian “sensible”. Hence, the difficulty of thinking citizenship in Haiti today where the dominant thought is that of humanitarianism and Care. If the citizen should be thought as a politically autonomous subject, humanitarian thinking involves a form of political heteronomy that constantly questions the possibility of that autonomy. Then the possibility of the subject as such but also of the subject as event.

This thesis focuses on the concept of citizenship in its deployment during the Haitian revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods (1791-1987). The issue of citizenship is linked to three other concepts, namely Emancipation, Recognition and Popular Struggles. They are constantly wrought by the revolutionary logic as deployed in the Haitian context. The Haitian Revolution was a political and philosophical proposal of emancipation and equality reproduced throughout the post-colonial period in the form of permanent resistance to various forms of coloniality. The citizen has become the new figure of resistance and a symbol of universality and equality of rights. In fidelity to this proposal, popular struggles, privileged expressions of political emancipation played a fundamental role in the decolonization of political relations. They were and still are the main conditions for establishing both a policy of equality and a "balanced" form of legally equal citizenship. In other words, citizenship is, in the Haitian context, and as it is in many other contexts, an endless construction. Because of the permanent refusal of recognition of categories (peasant, famers, urban lower classes) produced as excluded, citizenship is based on the permanent struggles of practices developed by a core principle: the plebeian principle, defined as an oppositional principle, which deploys political subjectivity as a condition of emancipation. In doing so, what results is a re-conceptualization of the issue of law and rights. The universal and radical dimension of the figure of equal citizen carried by the Haitian Revolution confronted an internal and external system of oppositions. However, the institutionalization of the rule of law and the equitable sharing of the in-common has been revealed problematic. The nature of the Haitian State, qualified here as Co-ownership State, obstructs any form of social citizenship that would involve equal sharing of the Haitian “sensible”. Hence, the difficulty of thinking citizenship in Haiti today where the dominant thought is that of humanitarianism and Care. If the citizen should be thought as a politically autonomous subject, humanitarian thinking involves a form of political heteronomy that constantly questions the possibility of that autonomy. Then the possibility of the subject as such but also of the subject as event.