Technologies of Spirit: Haitian Energy Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract: This essay situates early Haitian cultural production within transatlantic histories of science, technology, and nascent energy infrastructures now considered constitutive of modernity. We first examine the development of the steam engine in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and its importance in the French imperial imagination. As both a material tool of empire and a potent metaphor for “progress,” the steam engine underpinned metropolitan ideologies of white liberalism throughout the nineteenth-century. However, when we turn to Haitian culture, the metaphorical potential of steam power holds radically different meanings: through an analysis of Haitian epistemologies, we argue that colonial technologies of extraction are metamorphosed through religious labor, care work, and community building. These early Haitian appropriations of European steam technologies may point critics towards alternative understandings of energy production, decentering dominant ideologies of consumption, extraction, and environmental waste and instead foregrounding the notion of energy as a care practice with liberatory potential.