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Jan. 13th, 2019 12:21 pmC.L.R. James' The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution is well worth reading for a multitude of reasons, but I have to give a shout out above all things to the amazing bibliography. A representative quote, on R. Coupland's Wilberforce (London 1923) and The British Anti-Slavery Movement (London 1933): Both these books are typical for, among other vices, their smug sentimentality, characteristic of the final approach of Oxford scholarship to abolition. As the official view, they can be recommended for their thorough misunderstanding of the question. AND NOT A SINGLE PUNCH WAS PULLED THAT DAY. I took some pictures of other choice quotes and every time I look through them it fills me with joy to the bottom of my heart.
ANYWAY. The history of the Haitian revolution is incredibly fascinating on its own merits - I did know that was the only successful slave revolt of its era, but I didn't really have a great sense of the complex relationship between Haiti (or San Domingue, as it was then called) and France in that ten-year period between the French Revolution and the ascent of Napoleon, when slavery was all-too-briefly abolished and the question of independence vs faithful adherence to a then-revolutionary motherland still very much up in the air. The difficulty in trying to make political decisions based on the vacillations of an ongoing revolution taking place across an entire ocean, when any choice you make might already have been invalidated by something that happened three weeks ago that you have no way to know about -- I can't even imagine, and James does an extremely good job of conveying the sheer chaos of events, and the incredible achievement that the revolution was in spite of all attendant tragedies.
(James overall reads to me as both a generous and fair-minded writer; although Toussaint L'Ouverture is the central and most heroic figure of his narrative, he's careful to point out his mistakes, and equally careful to consider the merits of his enemies. For example, on Andre Rigaud, a rival of Toussaint's who overall sided with the white French: The waste, the waste of all this bravery, devotion and noble feeling on the corrupt and rapacious bourgeois who were still, in the eyes of the misguided Rigaud, the banner-bearers of liberty and equality.)
But James' text is also fascinating on a second level,having been written in a specific time with a specific project in mind. The book was first published in 1938, as the world teetered on the verge of World War II; the edition I read was published in 1963, and included an appendix on the Cuban Revolution. James' project is very explicitly radical, his primary intended audience those who are working towards the the decolonization of Africa and the West Indies, and as a result nearly every page forces you to think about history not as a series of disconnected events but as a long continuity of circumstances and collisions that have all impacted each other to create the world we live in today. As the first book I read this year, I suspect it's going to resonate through the rest of it.
In other news, now that![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shati and I have both read this book, we are desperate to find a copy of the 2012 French bioic starring Jimmy Jean-Louis, as yet unreleased in the US and available for purchase only for the princely sum of $99.99, so if anybody happens to have a lead on where to acquire it please do let us know!
ANYWAY. The history of the Haitian revolution is incredibly fascinating on its own merits - I did know that was the only successful slave revolt of its era, but I didn't really have a great sense of the complex relationship between Haiti (or San Domingue, as it was then called) and France in that ten-year period between the French Revolution and the ascent of Napoleon, when slavery was all-too-briefly abolished and the question of independence vs faithful adherence to a then-revolutionary motherland still very much up in the air. The difficulty in trying to make political decisions based on the vacillations of an ongoing revolution taking place across an entire ocean, when any choice you make might already have been invalidated by something that happened three weeks ago that you have no way to know about -- I can't even imagine, and James does an extremely good job of conveying the sheer chaos of events, and the incredible achievement that the revolution was in spite of all attendant tragedies.
(James overall reads to me as both a generous and fair-minded writer; although Toussaint L'Ouverture is the central and most heroic figure of his narrative, he's careful to point out his mistakes, and equally careful to consider the merits of his enemies. For example, on Andre Rigaud, a rival of Toussaint's who overall sided with the white French: The waste, the waste of all this bravery, devotion and noble feeling on the corrupt and rapacious bourgeois who were still, in the eyes of the misguided Rigaud, the banner-bearers of liberty and equality.)
But James' text is also fascinating on a second level,having been written in a specific time with a specific project in mind. The book was first published in 1938, as the world teetered on the verge of World War II; the edition I read was published in 1963, and included an appendix on the Cuban Revolution. James' project is very explicitly radical, his primary intended audience those who are working towards the the decolonization of Africa and the West Indies, and as a result nearly every page forces you to think about history not as a series of disconnected events but as a long continuity of circumstances and collisions that have all impacted each other to create the world we live in today. As the first book I read this year, I suspect it's going to resonate through the rest of it.
In other news, now that
shati and I have both read this book, we are desperate to find a copy of the 2012 French bioic starring Jimmy Jean-Louis, as yet unreleased in the US and available for purchase only for the princely sum of $99.99, so if anybody happens to have a lead on where to acquire it please do let us know!
