Sovereignty After Slavery: An Archaeology of Liberty and Authority in Post-Revolutionary Haiti

The Archaeology of slavery has long privileged the analysis of the everyday lives and cultural histories of enslaved Africans living on plantation sites in the New World. Notwithstanding both the political and intellectual importance of this approach to our understanding of the emergence of the colonial world and its contemporary legacies, recent scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic has examined the new political entities that arose across the Black Atlantic World in dynamic tension with broader Atlantic political and economic forces. Such work has highlighted how the contours of political authority in emerging Black Atlantic states were materialized at multiple scales of analysis, and in complex relationship with the economic and social forces unleashed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In this paper, drawing from recent archaeological research on the Kingdom of Haiti, a short lived experiment in political sovereignty founded in the years following the Haitian Revolution, I will explore the potential for an archaeology of sovereignty in the Black Atlantic World. Emphasizing the political, economic and symbolic importance of both architectural spaces and artifacts recovered from the palace of Sans-Souci, royal residence of King Henry Christophe, this presentation reveals the complex ways sovereign states were articulated into the broader economic and political currents of the Atlantic World, troubling classic narratives of political sovereignty and independence in the Age of Revolutions.

J. Cameron Monroe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Archaeological Research Center at UC Santa Cruz.  He earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley (1995), M.A. from UCLA (1999), and PhD from UCLA (2003), all degrees in Anthropology. His research broadly examines political, economic, and cultural transformation in West Africa and the Diaspora in the era of the slave trade.  He has conducted long-term research in the Republic of Bénin in West Africa (the Abomey Plateau Archaeological Project), and in 2015, he initiated a comparative project on the materiality of power and political sovereignty in post-revolutionary Haiti (The Milot Archaeological Project).