Spectres of Toussaint: Rereading Poe and Hugo through the Poethics of W. E. B. Du Bois

ABSTRACT: This article expands the critical field of Poe studies by situating his work within a world literary framework attentive to the symbolic displacement of global Blackness. Drawing on the concept of the “poethical”—the intersection of poetics and ethical imagination, developed here through the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and Black radical thought—the essay argues that Poe’s fiction is haunted by two key forces of the counter-sublime: the spectral figure of Tous-saint L’Ouverture and the figure of the insurgent Black feminine. These figures disrupt Poe’s textual landscape, provoking deep anxieties about Black resistance, revolutionary rupture, and the limits of white epistemology. While the theoretical lens of the poethical is relatively new and will be fully elaborated over the course of the analysis, the essay grounds its intervention in sustained close readings, illuminating how Poe’s racial imaginaries operate not merely as reflections of white antebellum fear, but as elements of a larger poethical field that reshapes the ethical and political stakes of nineteenth-century literary modernity.