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

Haiti and the Revolution Unseen invites scholars and artists of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) to know Haitians as Ginens (African Haitians) and Haiti as Ayiti Ginen (Africa Haiti). This form of knowing demands a decolonial understanding of the Haitian Revolution that privileges Africans and the immense political influence of their knowledge practices in Saint Domingue; and it also demands a reevaluation of stories of the Revolution as told by influential twentieth century Caribbean writers and supported by scholars who teach and write about Caribbean classics of the Revolution. These stories misremember and misrepresent the Revolution as a republican feat led by Caribbean born revolutionists. They write Africans out of the uprising and fail to engage resistant peoples on their own cultural terms, which results in artistic and critical engagements with the Revolution that are not only defeatist at conception, but they are fundamentally unable to nurture the reader’s decolonial imagination as intended.

Natalie M. Léger is…