Book Event - Haiti and the Revolution Unseen: The Persistence of the Decolonial Imagination

With Haiti and the Revolution Unseen, Natalie Marie Léger alters the genealogy of the Haitian revolutionary subject in the archive of Caribbean cultural thought and shifts our attention to the revolutionists previously left out of the archive: Saint Domingue’s Africanized captives. She posits that canonical Caribbean writers of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), like C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, and Édouard Glissant, ignore the conditions of difference that inspired the captive populace’s dreams of freedom from French colonial rule. These authors replicate the forms of colonial power that they sought to vilify with their Haitian revolutionist texts because they excise the African Haitian revolutionist from the story of the Revolution. Despite the fact that two-thirds of the enslaved population were African born on the eve of the Revolution, canonized Caribbean literature of the Revolution writes the Haitian revolutionist as acculturated into the West. The absence of African Haitian…