'So Much the Worse for the Whites': Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution

by George Ciccariello-Maher

This article sets out from an analysis of the pioneering work of Susan Buck-Morss to rethink, not only Hegel and Haiti, but broader questions surrounding dialectics and the universal brought to light by the Haitian Revolution. Reading through the lens of C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, I seek to correct a series of ironic silences in her account, re-centering the importance of Toussaint’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and underlining the dialectical importance of identitarian struggles in forging the universal. Finally, I offer Frantz Fanon’s reformulation of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic—overlooked in Buck-Morss’ account—as a corrective that allows us to truly rethink progress toward the universal in decolonized dialectical terms.

Troping Toussaint, Reading Revolution

Troping Toussaint, Reading Revolution by TigersEye99

The Idea of 1804

Nesbitt Nick 2005 the Idea of 1804 by felix_fuhg

CLR James and the Black Jacobins

by Christian Høgsbjerg, International Socialism

Aimé Césaire, the late, great Martinican poet and activist, once noted that it was in Haiti that the “colonial problem” was first posed in all its complexity.¹ In 1492 the tropical Caribbean island was “discovered” for the Spanish Empire by Christopher Columbus, a discovery that resulted in the half a million strong existing indigenous Taino population being all but exterminated within a generation as a ruthless search for rivers of gold led only to rivers of blood. Columbus had described “Ayiti”, as the Taino had called it (“Land of mountains”), as a “paradise”, and promptly therefore renamed the island La Española—or Hispaniola—”coming from Spain”. But for the Taino, their hopes of finding paradise were irredeemably lost. In the words of the historian Laurent Dubois, Haiti was “the ground zero of European colonialism in the Americas”.² 

C.L.R. James: A Revolutionary Vision for the 20th Century

by Anna Grimshaw, Marxists Internet Archive

C.L.R. James died in May 1989. His death coincided with the explosion of popular forces across China and eastern Europe which shook some of the most oppressive political regimes in human history. These momentous events, calling into question the structure of the modern world order, throw into sharp relief the life and work of one of this century’s most outstanding figures. For James was pre-eminently a man of the twentieth century. His legacy reflects the scope and diversity of his life’s work, the unique conditions of particular times and places; and yet at its core lies a vision of humanity which is universal and integrated, progressive and profound.

Susan Buck-Morss: Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History

Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation through a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Historicizing the thought of Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination.

Click here to download this book in pdf.

Hegel and Haiti

by Susan Buck-Morss

By the eighteenth century, slavery had become the root metaphor of Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations. Freedom, its conceptual antithesis, was considered by Enlightenment thinkers as the highest and universal political value. Yet this political metaphor began to take root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery-the systematic, highly sophisticated capitalist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force in the colonies-was increasing quantitatively and intensifying qualitatively to the point that by the mid-eighteenth century it came to underwrite the entire economic system of the West, paradoxically facilitating the global spread of the very Enlightenment ideals that were in such fundamental contradiction to it.

Turning the Tide: The Problem of Popular Insurgency in Haitian Revolutionary Historiography

by Nick Nesbitt, Small Axe, 27 • October 2008 • p 14–31

This article explores the conceptual problem of popular insurgency in Haitian revolutionary historiography. Framed by fundamental questions of legitimate versus illegitimate insurgency, of the relationship between the elites and the people, and of the process of democratization and the rule of law, the article argues that the problem of popular insurgency is one way to link together analysis of past and present Haitian history and to focus on the role of the Haitian people in making that history.

The Black Jacobins

A review by Kenan Malik

The poet and statesman Aimé Césaire once wrote of Haiti that it was here that the colonial knot was first tied. It was also in Haiti, Césaire added, that the knot of colonialism began to unravel when ‘black men stood up in order to affirm, for the first time, their determination to create a new world, a free world.’

In 1791, almost exactly three hundred years after Columbus landed there, a mass insurrection broke out among Haiti’s slaves, upon whose labour France had transformed its colony into the richest island in the world. It was an insurrection that became a revolution, a revolution that today is almost forgotten, and yet was to shape history almost as deeply as the two eighteenth century revolutions with which we are far more familiar – those of 1776 and 1789.

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Reviewed by By Kenneth Maxwell

July/August 1996

Trouillot, a distinguished Haitian scholar who teaches at The Johns Hopkins University, has produced a sparkling interrogation of the past. He examines the suppression of the role of Africans in the Haitian Revolution to demonstrate how power silences certain voices from history. The background is the "war within the war." As Napoleonic France attempted to reestablish imperial control and eventually slavery, black creoles -- natives of the island or the Caribbean -- fought dissident groups composed of Bossales -- African-born ex-slaves mainly from the Congo.

Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment

Unlike the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution was the first in a modern state to implement human rights universally and unconditionally. Going well beyond the selective emancipation of white adult male property owners, the Haitian Revolution is of vital importance, Nick Nesbitt argues, in thinking today about the urgent problems of social justice, human rights, imperialism, torture, and, above all, human freedom.

The Haitian Revolution

by Toussaint L'Ouverture
Edited by Nick Nesbitt
Introduction by Jean-Bertrand Aristide

Haiti’s ousted premier on the leader of the world’s first black republic.

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

An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event

This chapter from Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) is online here.

Umzekelo omulhe wase Haiti: ngeminyaka engamakhulu anambini wokuzimela kwaseHaiti

Umbhali ngu: Peter Hallward (2004), Umtoliki ngu: Bulelwa Mafu (2010)

Kwiminyaka engamakhulu anambini eyadlulayo kule nyanga (ka Januari 2004), ikoloni yamaFransi yase Saint-Domingue kwisiqiti sase Hispaniola yabalilizwe elizimele lase Haiti. Zimbalwa iinguquko ngokwembali yehlabathi zathi zabaluleka, zadinga ukuzinikela okanye zanikeza ithemba elingaka. Futhi ezinguquko zaliyalityalwa ngabo babecinga ukuba imbali ifikelele esiphelweni njengo qhanqalazo lwe soshelizimu, nokuziphatha kwelilizwe, nokuziphatha kwamanye amazwe akhulayo.

Haitian inspiration: On the bicentenary of Haiti’s independence

by Peter Hallward in Radical Philosophy

Two hundred years ago this month (January 2004), the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola became the independent nation of Haiti. Few transformations in world history have been more momentous, few required more sacrifice or promised more hope. And few have been more thoroughly forgotten by those who would have us believe that this history has since come to a desirable end with the eclipse of struggles for socialism, national liberation and meaningful independence in the developing world.