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  • This article comes out of a longer project looking at digital commemorations of slave rebellion. In this excerpt from that work, the author considers the issues at stake in videogamic representations of colonial Saint Domingue and its denizens, particularly for their depiction of the prehistory of the Haitian Revolution. In two mainstream videogames, both part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the history of Saint Domingue, its legacy of slave resistance, and the Haitian Revolution are made into fodder for an interactive entertainment experience that intervenes in and reshapes history in a complex manner. There are several issues at stake, which the author focuses on exclusively in terms of the commodification of Saint Domingue. First, the games place the history of slave revolt into the hands of game players of diverse ancestry, allowing for a redistribution of ownership over narratives of emancipation and empowerment. Second, the games identify themselves as tampering with history, and their mélange of fictional characters and real personages seems to risk rewriting the history of Saint Domingue’s legacy of slave revolt and—by extension—of the Haitian Revolution itself. Given recent events in the United States, and increased attention to strategies of black resistance such as the Black Lives Matter movement, it seems all the more imperative that our depiction of slave revolts in popular culture be handled with care. And yet, the author finds a subversive maneuver visible in the games: the use of untranslated language, especially Haitian Kreyol, may work to preserve and limit the player’s mastery over these histories. This article provides a tour of this complex territory of digital Saint Domingue.

  • Profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and "gamify" slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others dramatically stage the slave's choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. This work questions whether the reduction of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin's Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodification of slavery's victims, or whether these interactive experiences offer an empowering commemoration of the history of slave resistance.

Dernière mise à jour depuis la base de données : 19/07/2025 13:00 (EDT)

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