The Black Jacobins

The Black Jacobins
Author: C.L.R. James
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2023-08-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0593687337

A powerful and impassioned historical account of the largest successful revolt by enslaved people in history: the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1803 “One of the seminal texts about the history of slavery and abolition.... Provocative and empowering.” —The New York Times Book Review The Black Jacobins, by Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James, was the first major analysis of the uprising that began in the wake of the storming of the Bastille in France and became the model for liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of plantation owners toward enslaved people was horrifyingly severe. And it is the story of a charismatic and barely literate enslaved person named Toussaint L’Ouverture, who successfully led the Black people of San Domingo against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces—and in the process helped form the first independent post-colonial nation in the Caribbean. With a new introduction (2023) by Professor David Scott.


Confronting Black Jacobins

Confronting Black Jacobins
Author: Gerald Horne
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2015-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1583675620

The Haitian Revolution, the product of the first successful slave revolt, was truly world-historic in its impact. When Haiti declared independence in 1804, the leading powers—France, Great Britain, and Spain—suffered an ignominious defeat and the New World was remade. The island revolution also had a profound impact on Haiti’s mainland neighbor, the United States. Inspiring the enslaved and partisans of emancipation while striking terror throughout the Southern slaveocracy, it propelled the fledgling nation one step closer to civil war. Gerald Horne’s path breaking new work explores the complex and often fraught relationship between the United States and the island of Hispaniola. Giving particular attention to the responses of African Americans, Horne surveys the reaction in the United States to the revolutionary process in the nation that became Haiti, the splitting of the island in 1844, which led to the formation of the Dominican Republic, and the failed attempt by the United States to annex both in the 1870s. Drawing upon a rich collection of archival and other primary source materials, Horne deftly weaves together a disparate array of voices—world leaders and diplomats, slaveholders, white abolitionists, and the freedom fighters he terms Black Jacobins. Horne at once illuminates the tangled conflicts of the colonial powers, the commercial interests and imperial ambitions of U.S. elites, and the brutality and tenacity of the American slaveholding class, while never losing sight of the freedom struggles of Africans both on the island and on the mainland, which sought the fulfillment of the emancipatory promise of 18th century republicanism.


Making The Black Jacobins

Making The Black Jacobins
Author: Rachel Douglas
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2019-09-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478005300

C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins remains one of the great works of the twentieth century and the cornerstone of Haitian revolutionary studies. In Making The Black Jacobins, Rachel Douglas traces the genesis, transformation, and afterlives of James's landmark work across the decades from the 1930s on. Examining the 1938 and 1963 editions of The Black Jacobins, the 1967 play of the same name, and James's 1936 play, Toussaint Louverture—as well as manuscripts, notes, interviews, and other texts—Douglas shows how James continuously rewrote and revised his history of the Haitian Revolution as his politics and engagement with Marxism evolved. She also points to the vital significance theater played in James's work and how it influenced his views of history. Douglas shows The Black Jacobins to be a palimpsest, its successive layers of rewriting renewing its call to new generations.


The Black Jacobins Reader

The Black Jacobins Reader
Author: Charles Forsdick
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2017-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822373947

Containing a wealth of new scholarship and rare primary documents, The Black Jacobins Reader provides a comprehensive analysis of C. L. R. James's classic history of the Haitian Revolution. In addition to considering the book's literary qualities and its role in James's emergence as a writer and thinker, the contributors discuss its production, context, and enduring importance in relation to debates about decolonization, globalization, postcolonialism, and the emergence of neocolonial modernity. The Reader also includes the reflections of activists and novelists on the book's influence and a transcript of James's 1970 interview with Studs Terkel. Contributors. Mumia Abu-Jamal, David Austin, Madison Smartt Bell, Anthony Bogues, John H. Bracey Jr., Rachel Douglas, Laurent Dubois, Claudius K. Fergus, Carolyn E. Fick, Charles Forsdick, Dan Georgakas, Robert A. Hill, Christian Høgsbjerg, Selma James, Pierre Naville, Nick Nesbitt, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Matthew Quest, David M. Rudder, Bill Schwarz, David Scott, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Matthew J. Smith, Studs Terkel


The Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution
Author: Toussaint L'Ouverture
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1788736575

Toussaint L’Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, in which slaves rebelled against their masters and established the first black republic. In this collection of his writings and speeches, former Haitian politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide demonstrates L’Ouverture’s profound contribution to the struggle for equality.


Toussaint Louverture

Toussaint Louverture
Author: Charles Forsdick
Publisher: Revolutionary Lives
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780745335148

"The leader of the only successful slave revolt in history, Toussaint Louverture is seen by many to be one of the greatest anti-imperialist fighters who ever lived. Born into slavery on a Caribbean plantation, he helped lead an army of former enslaved Africans to victory against the professional armies of France, Spain and Britain in the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Louverture's fascinating life is explored here through the prism of his radical politics. His revolutionary legacy has inspired millions in the two centuries since his death. This book provides the perfect starting point for anyone interested in the roots of modern-day resistance movements and black political radicalism today."--Back cover.


Toussaint Louverture

Toussaint Louverture
Author: Philippe Girard
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2016-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465094147

The definitive biography of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, leader of the only successful slave revolt in world history Toussaint Louverture's life was one of hardship, triumph, and contradiction. Born into bondage in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), the richest colony in the Western Hemisphere, he witnessed first-hand the torture of the enslaved population. Yet he managed to secure his freedom and establish himself as a small-scale planter. He even purchased slaves of his own. In Toussaint Louverture, Philippe Girard reveals the dramatic story of how Louverture transformed himself from lowly freedman to revolutionary hero. In 1791, the unassuming Louverture masterminded the only successful slave revolt in history. By 1801, he was general and governor of Saint-Domingue, and an international statesman who forged treaties with Britain, France, Spain, and the United States-empires that feared the effect his example would have on their slave regimes. Louveture's ascendency was short-lived, however. In 1802, he was exiled to France, dying soon after as one of the most famous men in the world, variously feared and celebrated as the "Black Napoleon." As Girard shows, in life Louverture was not an idealist, but an ambitious pragmatist. He strove not only for abolition and independence, but to build Saint-Domingue's economic might and elevate his own social standing. He helped free Saint-Domingue's slaves yet immediately restricted their rights in the interests of protecting the island's sugar production. He warded off French invasions but embraced the cultural model of the French gentility. In death, Louverture quickly passed into legend, his memory inspiring abolitionist, black nationalist, and anti-colonialist movements well into the 20th century. Deeply researched and bracingly original, Toussaint Louverture is the definitive biography of one of the most influential people of his era, or any other.


C.L.R. James

C.L.R. James
Author: Paul Buhle
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-10-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1786634538

A new edition of C.L.R. James’s authorized biography C.L.R. James was a man of prodigious and varied accomplishments. He was a protean twentieth-century Marxist intellectual, widely recognized as a pioneering scholar of slave revolt; a leading voice of Pan-Africanism; a peripatetic revolutionary and scholar active in US and UK radical movements; a novelist, playwright, and critic; and one of the premier writers on cricket and sports. This intellectual portrait was written by James’s longtime interlocutor and comrade Paul Buhle, and initially published in 1988. With a new final chapter, updated bibliography, a new foreword by historian Robin D.G. Kelley and a new afterword by Paul Buhle and the philosopher Lawrence Ware, this long-awaited revised edition of a classic biography will be a key resource in the James revival.


Black Spartacus

Black Spartacus
Author: Sudhir Hazareesingh
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374722161

Winner of the 2021 Wolfson History Prize “Black Spartacus is a tour de force: by far the most complete, authoritative and persuasive biography of Toussaint that we are likely to have for a long time . . . An extraordinarily gripping read.” —David A. Bell, The Guardian A new interpretation of the life of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture Among the defining figures of the Age of Revolution, Toussaint Louverture is the most enigmatic. Though the Haitian revolutionary’s image has multiplied across the globe—appearing on banknotes and in bronze, on T-shirts and in film—the only definitive portrait executed in his lifetime has been lost. Well versed in the work of everyone from Machiavelli to Rousseau, he was nonetheless dismissed by Thomas Jefferson as a “cannibal.” A Caribbean acolyte of the European Enlightenment, Toussaint nurtured a class of black Catholic clergymen who became one of the pillars of his rule, while his supporters also believed he communicated with vodou spirits. And for a leader who once summed up his modus operandi with the phrase “Say little but do as much as possible,” he was a prolific and indefatigable correspondent, famous for exhausting the five secretaries he maintained, simultaneously, at the height of his power in the 1790s. Employing groundbreaking archival research and a keen interpretive lens, Sudhir Hazareesingh restores Toussaint to his full complexity in Black Spartacus. At a time when his subject has, variously, been reduced to little more than a one-dimensional icon of liberation or criticized for his personal failings—his white mistresses, his early ownership of slaves, his authoritarianism —Hazareesingh proposes a new conception of Toussaint’s understanding of himself and his role in the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century. Black Spartacus is a work of both biography and intellectual history, rich with insights into Toussaint’s fundamental hybridity—his ability to unite European, African, and Caribbean traditions in the service of his revolutionary aims. Hazareesingh offers a new and resonant interpretation of Toussaint’s racial politics, showing how he used Enlightenment ideas to argue for the equal dignity of all human beings while simultaneously insisting on his own world-historical importance and the universal pertinence of blackness—a message which chimed particularly powerfully among African Americans. Ultimately, Black Spartacus offers a vigorous argument in favor of “getting back to Toussaint”—a call to take Haiti’s founding father seriously on his own terms, and to honor his role in shaping the postcolonial world to come. Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize | Finalist for the PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named a best book of the year by the The Economist | Times Literary Supplement | New Statesman