1: “The Black Atlantic”: Reconceptualizing the “South” as an Afro-Franco-Creole Space

Jean-Baptiste Belley, a native of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), shouted these words in 1793 after the French National convention in Paris voted to abolish slavery throughout the French empire. Born in West Africa in the 1740s, Belley survived the Middle Passage and slavery in Saint-Domingue. In 1791, when enslaved insurgents rose up in the northern plain of the colony, Belley and two French commissioners joined their ranks to successfully abolish slavery in Haiti. After the National Convention, Belly served four years in the French parliament defending the project of emancipation and denouncing the racism that refused to accept the equality and citizenship of Blacks in the French colonies. But Belley’s story, like that of Toussaint Louverture, ultimately ended tragically, for he was imprisoned by Napoleon Bonaparte’s government and died there in 1805.