By Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall

Review of: Johnson, Sara E. Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s  Intellectual World. Williamsburg, VA/Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2023. 376 pp.

How can one write histories of enslaved people who were prevented from leaving their own records? In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot highlighted how archives distort our views of the past, whether on slavery or other topics, by centering elite white male perspectives. Trouillot added that modern historians often reinforce silences in the archives, by treating pronouncements from enslavers at face value and replicating their mindsets. Trouillot commented that non-Haitian scholars were producing more and more archivally based scholarship about slavery in Haiti – but that “its vocabulary and often its entire discursive framework recall frighteningly those of the eighteenth century. Papers and monographs take the tone of plantation records.”^[1]

Given what we have learned from Trouillot and others about silences in archives, what’s a contemporary historian to do? If our knowledge of the past is based on archives – but nearly all documentation on slavery was recorded by enslavers who espoused ideas of white superiority – how can historians write reliably and ethically about enslavement? Some historians, most frequently white men, have opted to focus on planters’ lives and ideas, insisting it is impossible to know what enslaved people thought because of the paucity of records. These scholars have written what they consider more “objective” histories about the male colonists who left us their writings, while dismissing speculation about enslaved people’s ideas as mere conjecture.^[2]

Scholars of color, especially Black women, have found it more problematic to write scholarship in this fashion. Saidiya Hartman, Marisa Fuentes, and others have been struck by the absences of enslaved voices in archives, especially those of women, and by the ways that archives reproduce enslavers’ perspectives. Rather than simply record (or gloss over) the casual sadism signaled in enslavers’ records, these scholars have treated archival documents creatively, looking beyond silences and reading along and against the grain to recover other perspectives.^[3]

With her spectacular new book Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World, Sara E. Johnson steps out as one of the most important voices in this field. Her book is groundbreaking in many regards. First, rather than write a traditional biography of a “great man,” Johnson uses the archives M. L. E. Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819) left us to construct a “communal biography” of those around him, even if what we know is incomplete. A jurist, scholar, proslavery spokesman, freemason, printer, bookseller, and public official, Moreau’s life took him between Martinique, colonial Haiti (Saint-Domingue), and metropolitan France, before fleeing the Haitian Revolution for a new life in the United States and later Italy. As Johnson puts it, “[Moreau] was a slaveholding intellectual of the Jeffersonian model, a man who thought and wrote about the much-discussed ideas of liberty and equality even as he bought and sold human beings alongside furnishings, books and maps.” She adds, “This book moves beyond the conundrum prevalent when studying men of his ilk: ‘yes, he was a slaveholder/bigot but he was a genius/founding father/skilled writer/man of his times.’ Moreau was these things because of, not despite, his investment in slavery” (2).

To help readers see beyond Moreau’s self-fashioning and recover the lives of the enslaved people around him, Johnson experiments with form, interlacing traditional chapters in third-person academic style with alphabetically arranged fragments (which she calls the “Encyclopédie noire”) and with speculative first-person writing from the points of view of those Moreau enslaved. By varying traditional and experimental prose, Johnson highlights what archives were designed to let us say with certainty and what we can only imagine. She also does this so readers will consider whether scholars reproducing enslavers’ thinking are offering accounts that are any less fictional. 

Even more innovatively, Johnson renders her argument in visual as well as textual form. With artist Luz Sandoval, Johnson co-created graphic representations of the individuals in Moreau’s life – and even of the sounds bombarding enslaved people on plantations. Her inclusion of these representation serves several goals: to undermine Moreau’s self-fashioning as a “benevolent statesman” (10) and intellectual, to highlight his dependence on labor provided him by people he enslaved, and to center the violence he minimized. 

Johnson’s thought-provoking introduction opens with a newspaper advertisement Moreau placed in 1783. In order to fund a voyage to Europe to complete a new scholarly project, Moreau was selling “various furniture, effects and books,” plus “a mulatto wigmaker… and an excellent cook” (1). To Johnson, this ad “captures the central concerns of this book,” Moreau’s dependence on — but disregard for — enslaved individuals. Johnson explains that Moreau’s multiple publications on colonial society have made him a must-cite source for scholars of Atlantic history. However, she underscores that these writings were “predicated upon his extraction of labor… from enslaved people and free people of color.” In addition to labor, “he preyed on Black knowledge” (4) to present himself as an expert on the enslaved. Johnson adds that “every beautiful book [Moreau] crafted contains an embedded story of hidden violence” (5). Thus, even as she pores through writings he left around the world, she resists mirroring his worldview: “Moreau acts as an unreliable center whose interpretations I question throughout” (4).

To provide a critical examination of an enslaver-intellectual who left much information about his own life but little about the enslaved people who made it possible, Johnson’s book has an experimental structure. Revising Audre Lorde’s famous formulation, Johnson explains that she uses “the master’s tools to dismantle his house and ideology” (6). Her research, she explains, rests on the same four pillars as Moreau’s: a “deep reliance on archival evidence”; “a commitment to multilingual research”; a “mobilization of visual evidence”; and “work that cuts across the European imperial borders of the slaveholding Americas” (6). Unlike him, however, she listens for the voices of the people whose labor he extracted, spotlighting the need for “informed speculation” about them. Furthermore, she maintains, we must narrate the history of slavery without replicating enslavers’ language or “the euphemisms that make palatable the horrors through which our present world was built” (7-8).^[4] Johnson’s study recenters Moreau’s life, not through traditional chapter-long case studies, but in eight experimental chapters, each worth discussing.

Chapter One is the first of three “Encyclopédie noire” sections of the book, offering fragments on people around Moreau. Johnson begins with Moreau’s remark that, when European whites first arrived in the colonies, they had difficulty distinguishing between one Black face and another. Yet despite his pretense of knowing Black people better than these novice enslavers, Moreau himself lumped people together into racialized categories rather than recognizing their individuality. Johnson explains that her entries in the “Encyclopédie noire” chapters turn types (such as “laundress” or “seductive mulatrêsse”) into “discernable individuals” (24). She includes painstakingly compiled information on Moreau’s mixed-race daughter Aménaïde (who he doted over, in contrast to his objectification of other women of color); Angélique, a wet nurse; and Arada women (one African ethnic group prevalent in colonial Haiti). 

In Johnson’s entry on Arada women, Moreau’s lasciviousness-masquerading-as-scholarly-objectivity is in full view. His oft-cited Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue was an exemplar of racist stereotyping in the guise of Buffonian-style scientific classification. It included declarations about women of color’s sexual and underwear preferences, as well as about Arada women’s independent-mindedness and their physiques. Rather than repeat Moreau’s information uncritically, Johnson reverses Moreau’s gaze. She observes that when Moreau generalized about Arada women’s “butt and hip size,” that said nothing about them, but “much about their observer. In this moment we catch Moreau looking…. One can imagine him making a series of mental diagrams of physical sketches of hips and butts, an anticipation of how measurements of head size were [later] mobilized as alleged evidence of personality traits such as intelligence…” (34). Another entry (“Domestique”) interrogates Moreau’s brief references to an unnamed enslaved person whom Moreau deemed so loyal that the man would have preferred to remain his property rather than be freed. Here, Johnson deploys a technique of asking questions to contest Moreau’s worldview. Even if all she has is Moreau’s word and not the man’s, she asks: “Can a modern-day audience believe that this man cared for [Moreau] so much that he would rather belong to Moreau than ‘owning himself’…? There is a delusional quality to such claims” (49).

Chapter Two moves in a different direction. Here, Johnson substitutes an alternate iconography for the self-portraits Moreau commissioned. She argues that he carefully curated his visual image for posterity, “intent upon projecting an image of philanthropic reputation, accomplishment, refinement, and power” (62). Johnson further contends that Moreau deployed illustration in his books to whitewash and exalt slavery. Graphically, she and Sandoval seek to destabilize his constructions.

Johnson observes that Moreau’s books showed enslaved people performing work idyllically. She describes laundresses depicted in “provocative, seminaked poses along a scenic riverbed… The physically demanding, labor-intensive work of bending, scrubbing, pounding and bleaching hand-washed items is idealized to such a degree that it is unrecognizable” (67). Johnson and Sandoval instead juxtapose portraits of Moreau against those of tortures done to enslaved people, using their own iconography as well as pictures created by contemporary artists such as Edouard Duval-Carrié. Arguing that we must depict enslaver-intellectuals like Moreau, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington not just through formal portraits that isolate them from those around them, Johnson calls for us to “visualize freedom’s parasitical reliance on unfreedom and leisure’s requirement of someone else’s labor” (79).

Chapter Three extends Johnson’s argument about Moreau’s self-fashioning to examine his attention to typography (including different fonts) in his works. She argues that his work as a printer was “not neutral”; he used it “to enable the acquisition of people and to buttress proslavery ideological claims and imperial ambitions” (87). Chapter Four offers more “Encyclopédie noire” fragments, including one for an unnamed “Little Girl” (petite fille) whom Moreau freed and about whom Johnson can find only two sentences documenting her existence. This chapter also highlights Moreau’s exploitation of an enslaved Black albino teenager (Marguerite Rebecca) as a research subject, including prurient information about her pubic hair. 

In addition, Chapter Four considers Moreau’s tale of two enslaved Black women given humiliating punishment after arguing with a white woman. What it would mean, Johnson asks, if we tried to imagine slavery from their eyes, rather than letting colonists shape how we see them? Here, Johnson’s approach is especially suggestive, given that so many studies of enslavers have been written through their gazes. One can imagine how Johnson’s idea of “wondering” about the perspectives of enslaved people could transform how historians tell such stories.^[5]   

Chapter Five examines links between natural history, translation, and enslavement. The chapter includes well-sourced information about Moreau’s pet monkeys—about whom we have more documentation than “the anonymous domestic laborers who cared” for them (155). Johnson makes several arguments in this chapter. One is that Moreau’s own study of Indigenous languages reminds us that “any history of the Americas cannot be told through European languages alone” (155). Another is that a will to dominate was present in his natural history and linguistics research as in other parts of his life.

 Chapters Six and Seven are among the book’s most innovative. Chapter Six examines the oft-cited Kikongo language dictionary published by Moreau’s brother-in-law and friend Louis Narcisse Baudry des Lozière. Certainly, Johnson argues, this text reminds us that Kikongo was an “American” language, spoken by many enslaved people in Saint-Domingue who knew neither French nor Kreyòl. But rather than look to this text just for translations, Johnson examines the Dictionnaire as a whole, asking what the phrases included tell us about “the quotidian violence and sexual coercion structuring Moreau’s and Baudry’s world” (188). How, she asks, did Baudry pick phrases to translate into Kikongo such as “my, aren’t you ugly!”, “your mother gave birth to a pig”, “the sugar is very good”, “sweep the room”, “get undressed” or “do your testicles hurt?” 

Johnson describes the Dictionnaire as a window into enslaver mentalités – but also as a manual instructing newly arrived colonists how to punish, with phrases such as “if you don’t work I will beat you.” In Johnson’s view, “there is a sadistic element to the text,” a “pathology… that normalized such antisocial and inhumane behavior” (205). Johnson challenges Baudry’s contention that speaking to newly arrived enslaved people in their own language was a way for enslavers to show their benevolence. Instead, she explains, the dictionary was meant to maximize labor extraction, through shouting rather than dialogue.

Chapter Seven exemplifies the book’s use of both visual and textual argumentation. At first, the reader does not know what to make of the chapter title (see fig. 1). But over the course of the chapter, one realizes that the title is rendered just as an enslaved woman would have encountered the letters burned onto her chest to brand her as Baudry’s property – upside down. Invoking in her footnotes Évelyne Trouillot’s novel The Infamous Rosalie, which imagines the stories of several Arada women enslaved and brought to Saint-Domingue, Johnson speaks of enslaved people’s “scarred bodies [as] witness to their humiliation and commodification” (224).

Fig. 1: Chapter title for Chapter Seven: “B.DRY LOZ” [upside down]: Illustrative Storytelling”

Chapter Seven also includes a stunning visual depiction of a “Listening Puzzle” (fig. 2). Here, Johnson and Sandoval depict the unintelligibility for enslaved people of being yelled at in a language they did not speak – or in some attempt at Kikongo. Here, Johnson states, “Illustrative storytelling… is one method of imagining the experiences of people desperate to figure things out in a world where so many new and ongoing experiences would not have made sense: masters who thought they were fluent in Kikongo shouting gibberish, people burning unintelligible symbols into one’s skin” (215). 

Fig. 2: “Listening Puzzle,” Encyclopédie noire, p. 217

Johnson also spotlights advertisements seeking the recapture of a woman named Rosette, said to have run away “for the hundredth time” (228). Johnson seeks to imagine what Rosette might have been thinking, using the first-person Iin one prose experiment and the more neutral-seeming she in another. Even if she cannot be sure about Rosette’s mindset, Johnson argues that “informed speculation can disrupt [a] legacy of dominance…. The process of surfacing these possibilities, the practice of wondering, is itself a method of inquiry that serves as a compass to ground a type of scholarship that demands accountability to those we study” (231). Johnson wants to be clear, however, that she is not contrasting “facts” we have from Moreau or other enslavers, with “fiction” she is creating about enslaved persons. On the contrary, she draws “a parallel between my quite obvious conjecture and Moreau’s and Baudry’s. They, too, were involved in ‘critical fabulation,’ in ‘speculation,’ in ‘fiction writing.’ Their work is replete with outright lies” (232).

Chapter Eight offers some final “Encyclopédie noire” fragments. Shifting to her own “I,” Johnson reflects on the biographical genre and her own relationship to Moreau. She starts with a quote from him (“We do not say here how much this Work has cost us,” 235), lamenting the difficult process of doing his research. This sentence resonates with Johnson but in a different way; she confesses that spending more than a decade working on “such a repugnant man” was difficult (237). “Many times I have been tempted to leave [this project] unfinished,” she writes. But she adds that her experimental model enabled her to “process the past differently” (238). Where being able to read the eighteenth century only through enslavers’ records has poisoned our minds, Johnson concludes, communal biography can be an “antidote to that poison” (246). Johnson adds that anyone uncomfortable with a biographer acknowledging their subjectivity or seeking alternate voices needs to recognize the “mark of privilege” (248) that makes it more comfortable for them to see the eighteenth century through enslavers’ worldviews.

Overall, Encyclopédie noire is a remarkable book, a must-read for anyone interested in the eighteenth century, in slavery, in biography, in intellectual history, in archives – or in history-writing in general. For a book that is so profoundly researched and theorized, it is also an outstanding read. Johnson combines the sensibilities of a historian with training in comparative literature, as she considers genre, language, composition, context, and visual and textual materials. What would it mean, she challenges us to consider, to flip our mindsets from those of the enslavers who left us records, to the subjects of their writing? Even if our information is incomplete and we need creative methods, Johnson argues compellingly, it is better than merely replicating the white-supremacist stories that enslavers like Moreau left us.

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Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall is Professor of History at California State University – San Marcos and a specialist in French and Haitian history. In addition to her newest book Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games, she is the author of The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism, and Haitian History: New Perspectives.

Title Image: Recueil de vues des lieux principaux de la colonie françoise de Saint-Domingue. gravées par les soins de M. Ponce. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Endnotes:

^[1]Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 105-6.

^[2]Rather than cite here an exhaustive list of authors, I am describing a broad tendency in the discipline as Trouillot did, where for decades largely white male historians wrote celebratory (or at least neutral) scholarship on men of letters who were also enslavers, whether in the US or in Caribbean colonies. 

^[3]See for instance Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe XII, no. 2 (2008), 1-14, and Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Johnson also cites work by Christina Sharpe, Ada Ferrer, and other scholars in this vein, as well as those in Haitian Studies such as Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Marlene Daut, Grégory Pierrot, and Marion C. Rohrleitner who have recognized “the role that fiction plays in representing the voices of the enslaved” (257-58).

^[4]Johnson’s argument here parallels that in P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al, “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help” community-sourced document, accessed January 3, 2024, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A4TEdDgYslX-hlKezLodMIM71My3KTN0zxRv0IQTOQs/mobilebasic.

^[5]For instance, in Paul Cheney’s award-winning Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017), how might it have looked if the author considered perspectives like that of the enslaved woman “gifted” by a father to his son, instead of describing this transaction as an “ersatz family contrived by fatherly pimping,” which provided the son with “a sexual outlet… and protection from a more serious moral evil: the mulatto prostitutes of Saint-Domingue” (99); see analysis of this passage in Robert D. Taber, “Archives of the Revolution: Toward New Narratives of Haiti and the Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 75, no. 3 (2018), 546. See also Jonathan Schorsch’s Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), which describes enslaved people “caught up in their owners’ family affairs” and “masters… caught up in the lives, culture, and characters of their underlings” (263, 264), rather than considering how this forced intimacy was experienced by enslaved people; and Trevor Burnard’s Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2004), where the author acknowledges Thistlewood’s sadism – but qualifies him as an “occasional rapist” (xii) and concludes that his relationship with his principal “mistress” was consensual (using evidence Thistlewood recorded of their “vigorous sex life” as a “manifestation of the bond between them,” especially with Thistlewood having recorded being violent toward her only once [238]).