“It Cancels the Slave Ship!”: Africa, Slavery, and the Haitian Revolution in Langston Hughes’s <i>Emperor of Haiti</i> and Aimé Césaire’s <i>The Tragedy of King Christophe</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Langston Hughes and Aimé Césaire knew each other only slightly but shared a dedication to telling stories of a noble and uplifting black past. They also shared a fascination with the Haitian Revolution and its early-nineteenth-century aftermath. Both wrote plays about the first decades of Haiti’s independence: Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti (1936) is set during the rise and rule of Jean-Jacques Dessalines; Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963) recounts the rule of his successor Henri Christophe. These plays enfold Haiti’s story of armed resistance to slavery and oppression into a larger story of a noble African past. But both writers are keenly aware of the dangers of “musealization,” the process by which memorials to the past render it, paradoxically, prone to being forgotten and neglected. Significantly, then, these authors tell the story of Haiti’s journey from slavery to independence and then to despotism through the comparatively ephemeral mode of drama. In Diana Taylor’s terms, Hughes and Césaire bring the narratives of slavery and revolution out of the inert archive and reanimate them through living, ever-evolving performances of the repertoire. Hughes and Césaire thereby strive to endow Dessalines and Christophe, larger-than-life figures from the black past, with the permanence and authority of the archive. But they also leave narratives of slavery and revolt open to what Hortense Spillers calls new “modes of improvisation and rearrangement” – to continual reanimation, reinterpretation, and reinvention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".