For me, Julia Gaffield’s “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence: Digging for Lost Documents in the Archives of the Atlantic World” was a particularly fascinating and powerful read this week. Gaffield’s account documents the discovery, or rather, “re-discovery”, of the Haiti’s Declaration of Independence. Acknowledging the Declaration’s overwhelming significance to the Haitian people, Gaffield understands the document’s discovery as not only historically significant but culturally importantly to advance “the obvious hunger for an alternative narrative of Haiti, one that emphasized the global significance of its achievements during and after the revolution”. Acknowledging the document’s significance to Haitians across time – from 1804 to present day, Gaffield’s conscientious understanding of Haitians becomes more than morally significant.
Overwhelmingly key for Gaffield was her understanding of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence as a cultural product of the Haitian people, not the Haitian country. Gaffield aptly conjectures the Haitian Declaration of Independence, created at the dawn of globalization, and many other documents relating to countries involved in Atlantic Trade, would be found scattered amongst these involved countries. “The movement of people, goods, and ideas created an integrated Atlantic community”, thus delineated a community bound not by border lines and nationalities but networks via tangible and intangible goods. As a result, Gaffield’s account perhaps more importantly signals the significance of acknowledging communities existing beyond geographic classification.
Gaffield’s understanding of community beyond geography immediately reminded me of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Imagined Communities argues for the “imagined community”, individuals identifying with the same national identity regardless of geography. Originally a commentary on nationalism post-globalization, the concept of the “imagined community” evolved to facilitate broader discussions of communal solidarity – here, Haiti’s part in Atlantic Trade and these countries’ part in Haiti’s independence. This concept is literally illustrated in the map of the US linked to at the start of the post. The colors marking populations of ethnic-identification illustrates the spread of ethnic identification as having no correspondence to the state borderlines strewn across the map. While individuals of the same ethnic-identification are connected, they are not connected geographically via the states they live in but their own identification to an ethnic background linking them to a “community” of others throughout the US who share the same background. Yet, despite the increasingly-apparent porousness of these borders certainly doesn’t diminish the significance of communities within borderlines and geography, though, as this post hopefully highlights, those without physical distinction deserve just as much regard.