Current Research Projects
As of fall 2007, I am looking forward to the publication of my first book on the struggles with racial issues and slavery during the French Revolution, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Uprising (University of Chicago Press), a study of first-person accounts of the insurrections in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (renamed Haiti in 1804), and I'm already hard at work on a second volume on the Haitian uprising, tentatively titled "'You Are All Free': The Burning of Cap Français and the First Emancipation Proclamation." For the time being, my principal interest has shifted to the struggle against slavery on both sides of the Atlantic during the era of the French Revolution, and when "'You Are All Free'" is completed, I plan to write a book about the French debates on this issue during the revolutionary era.
I also continue to pursue interests connected to academic autobiography, autobiographical writing in French culture, and sometimes even the history of the press in France. Together with Julie Rak of the University of Alberta, I am editing a volume of translations of the French scholar Philippe Lejeune's essays on diaries and diary-writing. I have written some scholarly articles on my late father, Richard Popkin and my grandmother, Zelda Popkin (see the pages dedicated to them on this web site), and I am editing a volume of papers from the June 2006 conference, "The Legacies of Richard Popkin," held in honor of him at UCLA. In short, I'm keeping myself busy!
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Facing Racial Revolution: This project was inspired by my reading of American novelist Madison Smartt Bell's historical novel of the Haitian Revolution, All Souls' Rising (1994), and its sequels Master of the Crossroads (1999) and The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004). Bell has tried to imagine the thoughts and emotions of participants in the insurrections that challenged the colonial system and slavery in Saint-Domingue during the French Revolution and led to the creation of the independent Haitian Republic in 2004. Bell has drawn freely and creatively on some of the first-person accounts from the insurrection. I have compiled a volume of selections (in English translation) from these accounts, together with an interpretation that will put them in the context of traditions of captivity narratives and testimonial literature. The white authors of these texts were the first members of European civilization to confront head on the possibility of a complete overturning of the customary hierarchy of racial domination, and their writings are therefore of great interest for understanding the development of modern ideas about race, slavery, and domination. In personal terms, they were living out the issues that the philosopher Hegel explored so brilliantly in the famous chapter on the master-slave relationship in his Phenomenology, published shortly after the achievement of Haitian independence.
Facing Racial Revolution is being published in fall 2007 by the University of Chicago Press. For more information, see their web site, www.press.uchicago.edu
Work already published related to this project: "Facing Racial Revolution: Captivity Narratives and Identity in the Saint-Domingue Insurrection," Eighteenth-Century Studies 36 (2003), 511-33.
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"'You Are All Free': The Burning of Cap Français and the First Emancipation Proclamation": My next book project is a study of a dramatic turning point in the Haitian Revolution. On the morning of 20 June 1793, French sailors commanded by a republican general sent to island by the National Convention suddenly attacked Cap Français, the most important city in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. They were bent on capturing or killing the two civil commissioners sent by the French revolutionary government in 1792, with instructions to enforce equality between free people of color and whites and to end the slave uprising that had begun in August 1791. Nearly overwhelmed by this attack, the civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel took a drastic decision: they offered freedom to any slaves who would fight on their side. The commissioners were unable to save the city, which burned to the ground in the days that followed, but their action set in motion a series of events that culminated in the French National Convention's historic decree abolishing slavery throughout French territory on 4 February 1794. I plan to tell the dramatic story of this event, a journée as dramatic as any of those in the French Revolution, and its consequences, which included not only events in Saint-Domingue and France, but some fascinating and important episodes in the United States, where thousands of refugees from Cap Français fled after the destruction of the city. Who knew that the notorious French minister Edmond Genet played a crucial role in making the abolition of slavery possible, for example, or that mutinous French sailors took control of a 74-gun French warship in New York harbor for nearly a month, trying to force Genet to let them sail for home?
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"'Perish the Colonies': Colonial Issues and Revolutionary Politics, 1787-1802": Once my book on the events of 20 June 1793 is completed, I plan to turn to a study of the French revolutionary debates about the colonies and slavery. This issue, more than any other, forced the revolutionaries to confront the contradictions between the principle of natural rights, so clearly laid down in the Declaration of Rights in 1789, and widely held notions of the country's economic and strategic interests. Violent debates about slavery and the colonies punctuated the revolutionary era, beginning during the pre-revolution when abolitionists formed the first political club, the famous Society of the Friends of the Blacks, and came into conflict with pro-slavery colonists, and continuing into the Napoleonic era, when liberals denounced the restoration of slavery and Napoleon's supporters unleashed the first barrage of openly racist propaganda in French history in order to justify it. There has been increasing attention to these issues in recent scholarship, but I hope to provide a comprehensive overview of these debates, looking not only at the major political figures who participated in them--Mirabeau, Barnave, Brissot, Robespierre, Gregoire, the abbe Maury, Gouy d'Arsy, Moreau de Saint-Mery--but at such unexplored issues as the role of the press.
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The Legacies of Richard Popkin: This volume of scholarly papers, most of them delivered at a conference with the same title held at UCLA in June 2006, assesses my father's contributions to the many fields of inquiry he worked in over the course of his life. The contributors include leading American and foreign scholars interested in skepticism, Judaic studies, and the history of religious thought. Some of the contributors knew my father over many years; others knew him primarily through his work. More than the previous Festschrift volumes published in my father's honor, this collection will cover the full range of his interests and put his work in the context of scholarship in the fields he devoted himself to. My own contribution retraces my father's career through the letters he wrote to friends and family, and provides a hint of what can be found in his papers, which are now in the William Andrews Clark Library at UCLA.
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On Diary: In cooperation with the French scholar Philippe Lejeune, Julie Rak and I are co-editing a volume of his essays on the subject of diaries and diary-writing. In the 1970s and 1980s, Philippe Lejeune helped found the field of autobiography studies. Since then, he has become increasingly interested in the genre of the diary or personal journal. What defines a diary? What inspires people to write them? What is the relationship between unpublished and published diaries? How has the Internet changed the nature of diary-writing or journal-keeping? Lejeune explores these and many other questions. This collection of his essays will make his work in this field accessible to the English-language public. The volume will be published by the University of Hawai'i Press.
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Autobiographical Acts in Modern French Culture: Some day I hope to get back to this project, which I was working on before I developed my passion for the uprising in Saint-Domingue. From the appearance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions onward, the writing and publication of autobiographical literature has been one of the culturally sanctioned ways in which French citizens have been able to assert their own identities and negotiate their connections with the society around them. Through a series of case studies, this project will attempt to elucidate the stakes involved in French autobiographical acts over the past two centuries and how the implications of autobiography have changed in that time. Among the texts to be examined will be the nineteenth-century autobiographies of Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon and Sophie Ulliac Trémadeure, and twentieth-century memoirs including François Cavanna’s Les Ritals, Edgar Morin’s Autocritique, Annie Kriegel’s Ce que j’ai cru comprendre and others.