Jean-Jacques Dessalines the Avenger and Mediato

This work, using a structurationist approach, phenomenological structuralism, argues that unlike the traditional leaderships of Haiti what makes Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines unique is the fact that after avenging the Taino natives and Africans of the island against the French, Spanish, and British, he attempted to mediate between two diametrically opposing forms of system and social integration, the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism of the mulatto elites and creole petit-bourgeois blacks who adopted the worldview of their former colonial masters; and the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism of the African majority who synthesized their ethos with that of the Taino natives. While the former two social classes, mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois blacks, sought to integrate Haiti into the global capitalist world-system of the European powers of the nineteenth century, Dessalines attempted to constitute the Haitian nation within the enframing ideology of the two distinct forms of social and system integration of the social actors on the island. Using a structurationist, structural Marxist, understanding of practical consciousness constitution, the work explores the origins and basis for Dessalines’s social, political, and economic policies. The death of Dessalines, I conclude, would undermine the Revolutionary impetus of the Haitian Revolution, and converted Haiti into the so-called poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Keywords: Ideological domination, phenomenological structuralism, embourgeoisement, black Underclass, Grandon, Mulatto Elites, Haitian Revolution, Bois Caiman, Affranchis NT, Tribe, Munda, Manki, Bhuinhar, Khuntkattidar.