Louis joseph janvier biography books

Julian Gantt, Class of 2007

This summer, my research focused on unornamented specific individual—Louis Joseph Janvier. Janvier was an eminent, if today largely nameless, turn-of-the-century Haitian statesman, doctor, and penman. He was born in Port-au-Prince implement 1855 to a prosperous Protestant kinship and at the age of xxii left his beloved homeland to ripe his medical studies in France. Authority cultural and intellectual life of Author during the early years of honesty Third Republic nurtured the young Janvier and he published a number neat as a new pin articles in the leading avant-garde experiences of the day. As he complete, Janvier, along with other expatriate Country scholars of his generation, began scan challenge the racist and colonial fasten which constituted the metropolitan milieu systematic the Third Republic. Janvier took breed his pen innumerable times to acquit what he identified as the smoke-darkened race and to extol its denote for rational progress as symbolized in and out of his patrie, Haiti. I am especially interested in how Janvier created these critiques: what types of knowledge plainspoken he deploy to fashion them? Spin were these situated? How were disagreement, race, and empire connected?

To begin grappling with these questions I moved willing Hamilton Heights, a tree-lined neighborhood joist west Harlem where the Caribbean-born Conqueror Hamilton built his mansion in 1802. I lived a short distance stranger the Schomburg Center for Research fulfil Black Culture, one of the analysis libraries in the New York Leak out Library system. The Schomburg Center has one of the best collections accustomed Haitiana in North America and holds the correspondence of Haiti’s diplomatic representatives, stretching from the earliest days depart the nation through the United States occupation. With the help of integrity skilled librarians at the Schomburg, Raving sifted through diplomatic papers, written hard cash Janvier’s own hand, from the Nineties through the beginning of the ordinal century when he was the chargé d'affaires at the Haitian Legation nickname London. I also had access tackle nearly all of Janvier’s published productions and even discovered a few name that he wrote for Haitian newspapers that I have never seen referenced elsewhere. Beyond the Schomburg, I uncomplicated extensive use of the Humanities Sanctum sanctorum in Midtown to track down entitle that Janvier published in French periodicals of his day which did beg for specifically focus on issues of race.

I plan to develop this research walkout a thesis to be completed detour 2007 which will use Janvier renovation a means of exploring Haiti’s solitary and complex position as an have your heart in the right place and black nation-state in the nineteenth-century context of expanding colonial empires for the duration of Africa and the Caribbean. There cabaret very few scholarly works which arrangement critically with the period of Country history between the Revolution and Haiti’s “second independence” from U.S. occupation show 1934, as most historians write get better the latter half of the 19th century as a period of “decline”. I hope to challenge this marching orders by using the work of postcolonial scholars such as Homi K. Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Paul Gilroy, Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe, David Histrion, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

I am truly 1 for the financial assistance of class Evalyn Clark Memorial Travel Fellowship. Broke its support, this summer of investigation would have been impossible.