abstract: Written and set during the Haitian Revolution, Leonora Sansay’s epistolary novel Secret History (1808) is preoccupied with the Caribbean nighttime. Few scholars, however, have attended to the significance of sleep disturbances in the book or the specific meaning of the Caribbean nighttime during the Age of Revolution. This is an important oversight because the novel abounds with nighttime violence, barriers to good sleep, and nocturnal sensoria that suggest ruptures in the colonial Caribbean’s political and material hierarchies. Coupling interdisciplinary night studies with ecomaterialist approaches, I argue that Sansay’s nighttime is a distinct material and cultural domain that discomposes and renders contingent the bourgeois Euro-American subject at the turn of the nineteenth century. In particular, bedding materials, intoxicating night-blooming jasmine, and nocturnal land crabs reorient the American female protagonists’ relationships to materiality, time, and the senses. In doing so, these nocturnal ecologies facilitate modes of personhood that unsettle the autonomous subject who is constituted through marriage and property. Lastly, the crisis of sleep in the book signals distress over the notion of autonomous personhood, the category of the white human, and the radically arbitrary criteria by which some bodies garner political recognition while others do not.
Nathan Motulsky (2026) studied this question.