The French Revolution, “confronted with the colonial question,” had to “confront itself,” and “the principles from which it had sprung,” Aimé Césaire writes. It hesitated, wavered, and ended up engulfing itself. But it also learned, thanks to the determination of Toussaint Louverture and his slave army, that freedom is not a force you can stop…
Tag: Haiti
The tragedy of post-colonial self-determination
In her challenging book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019), political scientist Adom Getachew discusses self-determination in the Anglophone Black Atlantic, with special emphasis on post-colonial independence as well as Caribbean and African federations. It would be interesting to compare the political thought of intellectuals and statesmen such as George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley,…
The tragedy of Haiti in history, drama, and performance
Last week, as I read in The New York Times the four-day series “The Ransom – The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers” and I continued work on Aimé Césaire’s superb drama The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963, 1970) for my book-length project The Tragedy of Revolution, I took the train to Chicago and…
“The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers” (ΝΥ Times)
“In 1791, enslaved Haitians did the seemingly impossible. They ousted their French masters and founded a nation. But France made generations of Haitians pay for their freedom — in cash.”
Crystal Eddins: “The First Ayitian Revolution”
“And given that the island was essentially a black space from the mid-1500s forward, we can think of this historical trajectory not in terms of the maroons fighting back against empires, but as empires attempting to repress – and in some cases to co-opt – those who had already liberated themselves.”
Jeremy Popkin: “Vive la révolution!”
“Must radical political change generate uncontainable violence? The French Revolution is both a cautionary and inspiring tale.”
“Haiti on Brink of Revolution to Overthrow US-Backed Regime”
“Revolutionaries destroyed police headquarters, attacked residences of government officials, and burned a jail and courts to the ground in different parts of Haiti on Friday. Insurgents are fighting to overthrow the corrupt right-wing regime of Jovenel Moise, who is backed by the US.”
Mohammed Elnaiem: “Did Kongolese Catholicism Lead to Slave Revolutions?”
“The legacy of Kimpa Vita, a Kongolese woman Catholic mystic, was felt from the U.S. to Haiti.”
Jamil Khader: “Liberal Politics and the Challenge of White Supremacy: Anti-anti-Eurocentrism and the Question of Identity Politics”
‘Liberal and leftist commentators thus need to draw the ultimate radical conclusion from this anti-anti-Eurocentric position: The struggle for racial justice must be grounded in a dialectical materialist understanding of “the gap” between the particular and the universal which, according to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, not only destabilizes identity from within, but also serves…
Richard Seymour: “Was the Haitian revolution a ‘bourgeois revolution’?”
“I suspect that the Haitian revolution is not simply incommensurable with the category of ‘bourgeois revolution’ but that, in its singularity, it represents a question for the telos to which that category belongs.”